“Let’s start with everyone.”
“People who wish harm to Crystal Waters?”
“Yes.”
“Pull out the phone book, Vlodek. List everyone who has lost a job, add those who are just barely getting by, along with those who resent wealthy people because they think they never lift a finger.Add in anyone else who feels envy, and for good measure, stir in those people with mental problems and those who hear voices from outer space. Are you understanding this?”
“Sure, we’re still with every name in the phone book. Let’s narrow it down to people who are familiar with Crystal Waters and who need money.”
He paused and then said softly, “Like you?”
It stopped me because he was right. We were looking for people like me.
“People other than me,” I said. “Like caretakers, contractors, service workers, landscapers, anyone who had access to Crystal Waters recently, anybody who could have gotten close enough to the Farraday house to plant a bomb.”
“I wouldn’t know how to begin such a list,” he said.
“My point exactly. That’s why you need the police.”
“It’s premature.”
“What about the guards? Are any of them recent hires?”
“I’ll check with Stanley.”
“What about the Members? How many of them need money?”
“I would imagine all of them, given the recent fluctuations in the financial markets. But fifty thousand? Somebody who will risk planting a bomb to extort fifty thousand dollars? I think those Members who are in dire need of cash require a hell of a lot more than fifty thousand. I think you can eliminate the Members from your list, Vlodek.”
Maybe he didn’t mean it to, but it came across arrogant. “Fifty thousand is a lot of money to most people.”
“Of course it is, but don’t let us forget that our letter writer never followed up to collect.”
“All the more reason to look for an amateur, someone who got cold feet and couldn’t follow through with another letter.”
“It’s not a Member, Vlodek.”
“Then you’re back to the phone book, and for that you need the police.”
“The letter either was written by someone harmless or was meant to confuse the Farraday investigation.”
“So you’ll do nothing?”
“I will be very deliberate regarding the next step, Vlodek. Please, send me a report.”
I gave it up because there was nothing else to say. I hung up and went into the crumbling tube I call home, past the table saw, the plastic chairs, and the buckets of roof patch that so far hadn’t done much to keep out the rain. I went up the flaking, rusted metal stairs to the second floor, sat at the ancient card table, and turned on the six-year-old computer that was all that was left of my business. I supposed the Bohemian was right about everything being a matter of perspective. Fifty thousand was chump change to the Members of Gateville, but it would be enough to transform a lot of what was wrong in my life.
I typed a full-page summary of Leo’s findings about the envelope and the letter and ended it with my recommendation, in capital letters, that the Bohemian take the note to the police immediately, so that they could begin compiling a list of suspects from everyone who had recent contact with Gateville. I printed my report, called a same-day messenger service, and told the girl who answered that I wanted something delivered and signed for that morning. I started to yell when she told me they might not get to it until that afternoon, but then apologized. She sounded nice, like someone to whom fifty thousand dollars would have mattered.
I shut off my computer and stared at the dark glass screen. It was a document job, I told my reflection. I’d done what I was supposed to do.
Four
I live in a limestone turret because my grandfather was a bootlegger. There are other reasons-a courtroom scandal, a tanked business, a vaporized marriage-but it remains that, were it not for my grandfather, dead decades before I was born, I might still be tiptoeing around the fragrant puddles on the upper floors of the Rivertown Health Center.
My grandfather would have insisted he be called a brewmeister, because that’s how he apprenticed in Bohemia, but there were no brewmeisters in America in the twenties. Prohibition had made them all outlaws. Bootleggers.
As bootleggers went in those days, he was small time. He worked out of a dozen garages in Rivertown, brewing pilsner the right way for the Czechs and the other Slavs who lived on Chicago’s west side. Family lore had it that some weeks he made money, other weeks he lost. It depended on how often his operations got trashed by the police or his bigger competitors. He had more bad weeks than good, though, and died broke, of a heart attack, in 1930. But not without marking me. I would get his first name, Vlodek, and I would get the beginnings of his castle.
In the spring of 1929, six months before the stock market crashed, the illicit, big vat brewers and whiskey runners in Chicago started killing each other in a vicious series of gang wars. The police weren’t particularly distressed, viewing the wars as a kind of weeding, but they had to make a show of trying to stop it. For months, with the outfits and the cops so occupied, no one had time to raid my grandfather, and he enjoyed a season of unrivaled prosperity. He must have thought it was going to rain money forever. Because, flush for the first time, he did what anyone with too much money and a lunatic sense of grandeur would do: He began building a castle on the bank of the Willahock River in Rivertown. He had grand plans and bought a pile of limestone big enough for twenty rooms, four-foot-thick walls, and a five-story turret at each corner.
But within weeks of the delivery of his small mountain of limestone, the gangs reached an accommodation, and they and the cops slipped back into their old, comfortable routines of preying on tiny rivals like my grandfather instead of each other. And the money quit raining. My grandfather got only one turret and a small wood storage shed built before he died, broke, a year later.
My grandmother tried to sell the turret, the shed behind it, and the pile of limestone, but the Great Depression was in full fire by then, and the demand for limestone, let alone single turrets and medieval dreams, was nonexistent. The turret and the heap of blocks sat neglected until the end of World War II, when the city fathers of Rivertown, as slimy a bunch of lizards as had ever scuttled down a dark alley, raised up their heads and sniffed the coming of postwar prosperity. They would need a proper city hall from which to dispense building permits and accept donations and appreciations. And so it went. They condemned my grandmother’s pile of stone and the two acres on which it sat and built a four-story limestone city hall of magnificent executive offices and tiny public rooms, all set on terraced stonework leading down to the Willahock River.
They hadn’t wanted the rat-infested turret a hundred yards away, with its skinny windows, nor its rickety storage shed, and they sat empty for another six decades as ownership passed from my grandmother to my uncle and then to his widow, my aunt. Each tried to sell it, but always, the fees for clearing an old title clouded with murky, vague city liens were more than the property was worth. My aunt, in a last act of maternal protection, left the property not to her own four children but to me, her least favorite nephew.
In my right mind, I would have viewed the inheritance the way the owner of white carpeting sees the arrival of a St. Bernard suffering intestinal distress. But I was broke, exiting a ruined business and a failed marriage, and I needed a place to live. Of such is born delusion. I figured I could fix up the turret, clear the title, and sell it for a tidy profit, to get a grubstake for a new life.
I was full of new optimism, that day after Halloween, as I walked across the grass from the turret to city hall to get an occupancy permit. It had been less than a month since I’d met with Amanda’s lawyers and the Bohemian to dissolve my marriage, but it was a new day, a sunny day, bright and warm.