I took my hot dog and the small diet drink, and pushed the rest across to Leo. Nodding at the New Menu Item, I said, “Surely it’s obvious where Kutz gets the ingredients.”
“Barbecue cheese onion rings.” He smacked his considerable lips.
“Ketchup crustings from the counter bottles. Mold-spotted, soft onions...”
“Recycling’s fashionable.” He made a pincer of his thumb and forefinger and plunged it into the substance coagulating in the little paper tub. A second later, his hand twitched; his fingers had caught something. He pulled it, quivering and slow-dripping the yellow goo that Kutz insists is cheese from the tub.
With a sly glance to make sure I was watching, he tilted his head back, a bird to a worm, and opened his pincer. But the lumpy yellow strand did not drop. It clung, trembling, to the tip of his forefinger. He made snapping motions with his middle finger and thumb, once, twice, and then it fell into the yaw between his grinning lips. He moved his jaws quickly, chewing, then swallowed. And it was done.
He laughed at the horror on my face, and reached for his first hot dog. “Now, tell me what’s got you upset.”
“Remember that shyster I hired to get the turret rezoned to residential?”
“Harry Ruffino.” He picked up the second of his five tube steaks. Leo has weighed one-forty since high school, a weight gain of zero. He attributes that to speed-eating the corrosive bacteria found in Kutz’s hot dogs.
“Harry’s representing the alleged torch behind the Sherman Stamping Works. He hired me to talk to the guy.”
“You mean look into the fire,” he said around the hot dog.
“No. He just wanted me to talk to the guy, a scrapper named Petak, to see if I could shake anything loose for Ruffino’s defense.”
“And?”
“I struck out. Petak’s acting more concerned with the rats in the jail than with saving his own skin.”
“No one likes rats.”
“No one likes jail. Yet all he asked me to do was bring him a pack of smokes.”
“First things first, with us addicts.” He grinned, making a show of plunging his pincer into the cheese again.
“I went looking for the eyewitness who placed Petak at the factory. He was a guy named Wildcat Ernie.”
Leo caught my use of the past tense. He looked up as his fingers came out of the tub squeezing another oozing New Menu Item.
“I found him dead at the Health Center,” I said.
His fingers paused halfway to his mouth. “Murdered?”
“Alcohol poisoning. He drank himself to death with Gentleman Jack.”
The yellow-camouflaged bit of ancient onion fell back to the tray. “Gentleman Jack is good whiskey,” he said, watching my eyes.
“Too good for folks at the Health Center. Ernie had three bottles, but only needed two to send himself on his way. I’m thinking somebody gave Ernie those bottles.”
“Knowing he’d drink himself to death?”
“Absolutely.”
“Who?”
I shrugged, didn’t answer.
Leo, ever practical, said, “Does that free your man Petak?”
“No. The cops took the precaution of videotaping Ernie giving his statement. Harry says Ernie’s death worsens things, because Harry can no longer take him apart on the stand.”
“Ouch.” He slid across the tray of submerged New Menu Items in sympathy.
I pushed it back. “I don’t think Harry ever intended to attack Ernie’s identification.”
“Whoa.”
“Immediately after the fire, the back taxes on the stamping works got paid up.”
“By whom?”
“Harry.”
“Jeez.”
“I’m thinking Harry hired Wildcat Ernie to set the fire, to scare the owners into giving him a cheap option to buy the factory.”
“Why would he want that place?”
I took out the aerial photo I’d printed off the Internet, and put my thumb in the right place. “In case Rivertown ever comes around.”
Leo saw it right away. “Clever Harry. What do you do now?”
“He’s dodging me. I left him phone messages, threatening to go to the cops.”
He looked down, remembering the bit of New Menu Item that had fallen. It lay motionless — in rigor or in repose — a yellow squiggle atop a crust of more yellow. He picked it up and dropped it in his mouth. “No way he’ll ever confess to setting up his client, Petak.”
In a quite literal sense, Leo was right.
There were no messages on my cell phone, nor on the answering machine back at the turret. I spent the afternoon sweeping up sawdust and cleaning varnishing brushes. And listening for the phone. But Harry didn’t call.
At five-thirty, Brockhouse from the Rivertown police knocked on my door.
“Evening, Mr. Elstrom.”
“Like to come in?”
“I have, for some time.”
He stepped inside. Like most first-timers, he needed a short tour of the round room. It’s not the furnishings that grab them; there are only two plastic lawn chairs and a table saw. It’s the walls. My grandfather built the turret of good craggy limestone that seems to change color, almost continuously, in the light that drifts in through the slit windows. A wrought-iron staircase curves up, through the beamed ceiling, to the four floors above.
“They talk about this place over at city hall,” Brockhouse said from across the room.
“Because they rezoned it as a municipal structure, so the town can use its image everywhere?”
He smiled. “Rivertown will change, Mr. Elstrom.”
We sat on the plastic chairs.
“Any word on Wildcat Ernie?” I asked.
“Autopsy results won’t be available for a few days. But like you and me, the medical examiner is thinking it’s going to be alcohol poisoning.” He shifted in his chair. “I understand you’re feeling some frustration with Mr. Ruffino.”
“How did you come to that conclusion?”
“You left strongly worded messages for him today.”
I tasted oil at the back of my throat. “What’s happened?”
“Tell me about your calls to Harry Ruffino.”
“I think Albert Petak is innocent. I want to make sure Ruffino thinks that, too.”
“That Albert Petak was set up? By whom?”
“Wildcat Ernie is the obvious candidate.”
“He’s conveniently dead. Anybody else?”
“I’m not sure.” I was, but the ethics of my client relationship with Harry Ruffino still stuck to me as thickly as the cheese on Kutz’s New Menu Item.
“You also drove to Mr. Ruffino’s home today. His neighbors told us you appeared quite distressed.”
“Cut the crap. What’s happened?”
“Harry Ruffino is dead.”
My mind stutter-skipped over possibilities. Nobody I knew had motive and means to kill Harry. “How?” was all I could manage.
Brockhouse said nothing.
“I never saw Harry today,” I said.
“You were at his house. Angry.”
“I never went inside. He wasn’t around.”
“You were mad. You threatened him. The neighbors saw you banging on his doors and windows.”
“Then the neighbors saw that I didn’t go in. And they saw his secretary, too. She was also banging on his door, just as upset.”
“She got worried when he didn’t show up for work. Why the anger, Mr. Elstrom?”
“I told you: concerns about Petak’s case. How’d Harry die?”
He leaned back in the plastic chair and gave me an eighth of a grin. “In bed, probably of a heart attack.”
“You come here implying that I had something to do with Harry’s death, then tell me he died in bed, of a heart attack?”
I put my hands on the white plastic, like I was about to get up. “Unless you’re going to free Albert Petak, I’ve got to find him an honest lawyer.”