“How recently?”
He gave me a date that was two days after the fire.
Paying up the taxes made sense if the property was about to be sold. Arson without the promise of an insurance payout made sense if the motive for the fire was to kill.
But that both had occurred within two days of each other was too coincidental.
I thanked him and hung up.
I switched on my computer, searched through the Internet for any business news on the Sherman Stamping Works. Other than the news of the fire, there was none. In the world of business, the stamping works was dead.
Noodling, I clicked into one of the newer satellite photo sites, and brought up the aerial view of Rivertown. I saw Thompson Avenue, the Willahock River, city hall, and the turret. Saw, too, the railroad tracks that ran like a spine down the center of Rivertown, broken only by the spur onto the railroad siding alongside the long building with the blackened mound of bricks at one end.
And saw motive.
I called back the man at the county. “Was it a lawyer who paid the back taxes on the stamping works?”
“Yes.”
“Was it Harry Ruffino?”
He put me on hold for a minute to check. When he came back, he said, “I’m impressed, Dek.”
“It wasn’t me,” I said. “It was Gentleman Jack.”
Neither Harry nor the Queen of France picked up his line, and after three rings I got sent to his voicemail. “I’ve tripped over the game you’re running, Harry. My guess is that Petak doesn’t know about the game. My guess is that Wildcat Ernie did. You stink on this, Harry. Try to get to me before I get to the cops.”
It was unethical, bluffing a client. But my mind kept seeing Albert Petak twitching at the Rivertown jail, scanning the corners for rats.
I spent the next hour trying to cut wood trim for one of the turret’s slit windows. Carpentry normally calms me, because there’s a sureness to it, a logical route to a certain conclusion. But that afternoon, I kept making bad cuts because my mind was too tensed for the phone to ring. Finally, I gave up on the wood and went upstairs to the second floor, to what will be an office, which is across the hall from what will be a proper kitchen. All I need is money, and the stomach to keep encountering people like Harry Ruffino.
I sat at my card-table desk and called Harry’s office. Again I got routed to the tape. “Harry, I’m going to get rough. Call me.”
I got Harry’s home address and phone number from an Internet service that offers thorough privacy-invasion for a modest monthly fee. He lived in one of the better burbs northwest of Chicago. I aimed the Jeep there and arrived in a half-hour. A black fastback Mustang with its door ajar was parked in the driveway of Harry’s two-story colonial. I stopped a couple of doors back and cut the engine.
It took no time at all to deduce that the Mustang belonged to the Queen of France, because she was banging on Harry’s front door. Even from two hundred feet away, I could see the flush on the back of her neck, though it was not quite as red as her hair.
Her fist wore out after a couple more minutes and she marched back to the Mustang. The way she peeled out of there led me to believe her neck was going to stay red for some time.
I tried Harry’s office number again, gave his machine another yell. “Harry, I’m coming for you.” Next, I called his home phone. “I’m outside your house. I’m going to bang on your doors until I crash my way inside.” Then I pulled into his drive and revved the tin engine of the Jeep loud enough to rattle its failing muffler and, I hoped, his windows.
My cellular and automotive tantrums didn’t work. Harry didn’t call, and he didn’t come outside. So I got out, walked up to the house, and picked up where the Queen left off. I banged on his front door, and on the huge front window. Then I went around back and pounded on the kitchen door long enough to satisfy myself he wasn’t home. On my way back to the Jeep, I noticed a dark brick lying in the flower bed at the side of the house. It looked to be a clinker from the stamping factory. I wondered if Harry had picked it up as part of his guise in getting to know Wildcat Ernie.
To let Albert squirm much longer at the Rivertown jail, perhaps cowering from the sounds of little feet scratching near his head, was unconscionable. But so was short-circuiting Harry’s chance to go to the cops. I decided I’d give him the afternoon to get back to me.
I called Leo Brumsky and suggested lunch. He has been my friend since grammar school. He makes me laugh.
“I’ll even pay,” I added.
“You must be agitated.”
“I’m packing large. I got a five-hundred-dollar fee.”
Leo made that much in a morning as a provenance specialist for the nation’s largest auction houses. That morning, as he always did whenever I earned anything, he expressed amazement. “You rob a bank? If you did, I want to stay home and watch you being arrested on television.”
I told him I’d meet him at Kutz’s.
Fifteen minutes later, Leo’s Porsche, top down, rolled onto the few remaining bits of gravel in front of Kutz’s, filling the air with the intertwining of modern, muscular German exhaust and the soft echoes of forty-year-old Brazilian bossa nova. I recognized the murmurings of Elis Regina and Tom Jobim. It was one of Leo’s favorite albums.
“Behold the diminishment of the sun,” he shouted, as he popped his five-foot-six, 140-pound frame out of the Porsche. Then, thrusting his hands out, V-fingered like Richard Nixon, he twirled slowly so I could admire the outrageous double-XLs flapping on him like bed sheets hung in a breeze. Leo’s girlfriend selects his suits, normally Armani. But for casual, he shops alone, with the flair of the truly colorblind.
I laughed a much-needed laugh. The brightness of his overlarge duds — a neon-yellow shirt billowing above orange trousers — did indeed diminish the sun. In fact, except for the dark fur of his eyebrows — caterpillars cavorting in mirth — they almost made his bald head, always as pale as a skinned, newly boiled potato, invisible too.
We walked across the parking lot to join the cabbies, cops, and construction workers lined up in front of the flaking wood trailer. Kutz’s Wienie Wagon has been resting on flat tires, under the viaduct, since Young Kutz’s old man opened the place during World War II.
When the person ahead of us stepped away, making us next up, Leo inhaled suddenly. “Damn,” he muttered.
“You jerks going to order?” Young Kutz’s unshaven face snarled from the order window. Young Kutz is on the wrong side of eighty, but he’d wasted not a minute of all those years developing people skills.
Leo ignored the greeting and tapped the glass at the side of the order window. “For real, Mr. Kutz?”
“You going to order?”
“Indeed, Mr. Kutz; indeed,” Leo said.
“You’re not,” I said, but I knew they were wasted words. Like Leo, I’d noticed the fresh sign taped behind the opaque residue of old grease fires. On a sheet of white paper, Kutz had drawn the outline of a paper boat. Inside the boat, he’d drawn several red squiggly circles, then scribbled over everything with a yellow highlighter. He’d titled his art, at the top, “New Menu Item.”
Leo grinned. “At least I won’t be wasting my own money.”
He ordered his usual five hot dogs and the big-swallow soft drink. But instead of the invariable tub of Kutz’s gelatinous cheese fries, he tapped the glass in front of Kutz’s art and ordered the New Menu Item. I shook my head, in wisdom and disappointment, added another hot dog and a small diet cola to the list, and peeled off a twenty from Harry Ruffino’s fee. Our food was ready in thirty seconds because Young Kutz never strives for freshness, and I carried the flimsy plastic tray, following Leo, around to the pigeon-strafed picnic tables behind the trailer.