His yellow Porsche roadster was parked out at the curb, meaning not only that he was home but that likely he’d already been out. And that might mean, if the fates had properly aligned, that he’d been to the Polish bakery.
I walked up the cement stairs. One of the front windows was open a crack, and the sound of people stage-whispering lustful things came through the screen. I pushed the doorbell button twice, trying to time it between the moans coming from Ma Brumsky’s softly erotic cable television program.
‘Yah?’ the old woman’s voice shouted above the fast breathing.
‘It’s Dek, Mrs Brumsky,’ I yelled.
‘Who?’
‘Dek Elstrom!’ I screamed. Leo’s mother has known me ever since her son brought me home, like a stray cat, in seventh grade.
She thumped the floor with her cane, almost in time with the thumping coming from the television. Leo’s office is in the basement. ‘Leo, the UPS man is here,’ she yelled above the TV voices.
A moment later, the sound of footfalls came through the window screen, the front door opened and an assault of bright colors appeared behind the screen door. Today’s rayon Hawaiian shirt was a medley of chartreuse palm fronds and yellow parrots. It was shiny and huge and hung in folds down his scrawny chest, sagging the parrots into something more closely resembling snakes.
‘You working for UPS now?’ Leo grinned.
‘You’ve been to the bakery?’
‘Nothing wrong with your sniffer.’ He opened the door and stuck his head out. ‘And it’s warm enough for the stoop,’ he said, and disappeared back into the dark of the bungalow.
He came out a moment later with a long white waxed bag and two cups of coffee in scratched porcelain mugs. The mugs had been scratched even before Ma Brumsky swiped them from the lunch counter at Walgreen’s. When we were twelve, Leo had told me, proudly, that all of his mother’s plates, cups and silverware came from Walgreen’s. I told him I’d figured that out already, since everything had ‘Walgreen’s’ etched on its handles or imprinted into its porcelain. I didn’t mention what he had yet to figure out, that Ma had swiped it all on lunch breaks when she worked downtown, before he was born. Nobody wants to think of his mother staggering away from a drug store lunch counter with a purse full of dirty dinnerware.
Leo knelt so I could take a mug, and then sat down. He slid an end of the raspberry coffee cake out of the bag, pulled a steak knife from the front pocket of blue knit pants that coordinated not at all with the blinding chartreuse rayon, and cut me a slice.
‘This coffee cake cost more than your shirt,’ I said, eyeing the half-sleeve that drooped almost to his wrist. It wasn’t even good chartreuse. It reminded me of stomach contents, perhaps de-carbed.
‘I should hope so,’ he said. ‘I wouldn’t put a shirt like this in my mouth.’
For a minute, we ate coffee cake and looked at the row of brown bungalows across the street, every one identical to his, like we’d done a thousand times since we were kids.
‘I drove by your place yesterday afternoon,’ he said, carving me another slice. ‘The Jeep was gone, and the turret was locked up as it should have been, since you’re supposed to be in San Francisco, indulging fancies with the luscious Jennifer Gale.’
‘I’m working on a job,’ I said.
‘Must be important, if you dusted off Jenny.’
‘Wendell Phelps.’
Leo raised his eyebrows. Most of the time, the dark fur above his brown eyes languishes in boredom. But when he laughs, or his enormous intellect charges at something, his eyebrows come alive and cavort like crazed caterpillars across the pale skin of his forehead. The caterpillars danced with abandon now, frenzied with curiosity.
‘Yes, I finally spoke to the great man, face to face.’ I cut myself a third piece of coffee cake. Chicago is known for its wind; one must maintain ballast.
‘He called you?’
‘Amanda was the one who called.’
‘You cancelled Jenny for Amanda?’ He liked Amanda and he’d liked us together just as much as he now liked the prospect of Jenny and me together.
‘Postponed, not cancelled.’
‘I haven’t seen Amanda in the papers lately, with that commodities trader, Rudolph,’ he said.
‘She didn’t seem to want to talk about him, other than to say he’s in Russia, investigating opportunities.’
‘Did you mention Jenny?’
‘I didn’t need to. Amanda had seen the photo of us at that network correspondents’ dinner.’
‘The one where you’re wearing that cheap, too-small rented tux?’ He laughed.
‘I should have tried it on at the rental place. Anyway, Amanda and I are strictly business now.’
‘Where did you meet her? Someplace dimly lit?’ The eyebrows waited, poised high on his forehead.
‘Petterino’s, and then the Goodman for a play.’
‘Just like old times.’
‘Wendell thinks somebody is trying to kill him.’
‘Jeez.’
‘Amanda is hoping her father is simply stressed, imagining things.’
‘But you don’t.’ He didn’t ask it; he said it. Since we were kids, Leo could see into my head like he was looking through glass.
I told him about Grant Carson’s hit-and-run and Benno Barberi’s fatal heart attack. ‘You’ve heard of these guys?’ I asked.
‘I recognize the names. Movers and shakers, for sure, though I’m not solid on what they moved and shook.’
‘Then there’s Jim Whitman.’ I eyed the coffee cake, thinking it wouldn’t take running but a few laps to justify an incredibly tiny small fourth piece.
‘I knew Jim.’
‘Actually, he’s why I’m here.’ I removed a three-inch width, fully intending to get back to the health center soon.
‘No doubt,’ he said, watching me heft the wide new slice.
‘How well did you know Whitman?’ I asked through the pastry.
‘I helped value some of the paintings he was going to leave to museums.’ Leo’s eyebrows began to move, restless with a new thought. ‘His death wasn’t understandable?’
‘He went out for the evening, came back, sat at his desk at home and up-ended a bottle of painkillers. It was understandable to the medical examiner, given Whitman’s terminal condition.’
‘But?’ Leo at his most terse is Leo at his most probing.
‘His daughter doesn’t buy it. His suicide nullified an insurance payout to her, money intended to provide for his beloved grandchildren.’
‘I remember Jim mentioning his grandchildren. He was very proud of them. And, for a man facing death, he seemed very businesslike, very much in control.’
‘Suicide that nulls provision for his adored grandchildren doesn’t sound businesslike.’
‘How much?’
‘Two million to her.’
‘No. I meant how much did Whitman’s daughter offer you to prove her father’s death was no suicide?’ His lips started to tremble with the beginnings of a smile.
‘I told her I already have a client.’
The grin widened into a smile that split his lips.
‘Damn it, Leo.’
He smiled broadly, exposing eight hundred big white teeth. ‘How much?’
‘A hundred thousand.’
‘All wrapped up around a case involving Amanda.’ He raised his scratched Walgreen’s mug, satisfied.
‘I love quandaries and ethical dilemmas,’ he said.
THIRTEEN
Debbie Goring was leaning against the back fender of her Taurus, smoking, when I got there at eleven. She looked to be wearing the same blue jeans, but her T-shirt that day was orange and had a Harley Davidson logo on the front. She took a slow look at the silver tape curling off the Jeep’s top and side curtains like a spinster’s hairdo gone wild in an electric storm, flicked the cigarette butt into the street and said she’d drive. I took no offense.