“You’ve got to get over here,” Leo said, when I fumbled the ringing thing on.
“Why?” I whispered, rolling over. Surely I’d been dreaming.
It had been no dream. Jenny was sitting up in bed, watching me, impervious to the cold on so much of her skin.
I took the phone from my ear, but not her from my eyes. I was not at all impervious to the cold on so much of her skin.
The phone display said it was four thirty. We’d only been asleep for two hours.
“I’m always amazed at what can happen in Rivertown,” Leo said.
“I’m certainly thinking that way, too,” I said, agreeably.
“I was coming home from Endora’s,” Leo chattered on, “and, well, jeez, you’re not going to believe it. You’ve got to get over here.”
There were heavy diesel noises in his background. “There’s construction at this time of night?”
“A backhoe and a bulldozer, hoeing and dozing like it was the middle of the day.” The diesels had gotten louder; he’d gotten closer to them. He shouted something unintelligible, and then the connection went away. He’d hung up.
I’ve always trusted Leo’s instincts, but there, in my bed, in the middle of the night, embers still smoldering in the fireplace across the room, and so much closer… Jenny and I hadn’t so much sought to banish the memory of what had happened at the excavation and the bridge as we’d lunged to claim what we’d let slip away the previous July.
“That was Leo?” Jenny, ever the newswoman, asked. “You’ve never told me the whole story about Leo.”
“You never told me how tattooed Russians fit on his block,” I countered, warming even more beneath the covers.
“Why would Leo call in the middle of the night?” she asked. The cold had finally touched her consciousness. She reached to pull the blanket up.
“Oh, don’t,” I said, a man of immediate need.
She grinned and let the blanket drop, knowing the cold would only improve the view. “Tell me why Leo called.”
“Something’s going on by the excavation.”
“What?”
“Bulldozing.”
Her face froze, remembering what she recorded. “Oh, no,” she said, scrambling out from beneath the covers.
I remembered Robert Wozanga. I scrambled, too.
“You can’t take your camera,” I said needlessly, opening the timbered door. The camera wasn’t in her hand anyway. “No one from city hall can ever think you might have been filming at the excavation.”
“Understood,” she said.
We had to park beyond the cross street. Rivertown police cruisers had blocked off both ends of Leo’s block. Their lights flashed blue across the furious faces of two hundred people, rousted from their sleep by the noise of the diesels and the glare from the enormous construction lights.
They’d worked fast. The backhoe had already demolished the vacant bungalow and its foundation, dumping the debris into the new hole and on top of the splintered forms that lay ruined in the excavation next door. The bulldozer hovered attentively behind it, pushing in dirt from the mounds piled at the back of the lot.
Dozens of the neighbors shouted from behind the cordon of cops, demanding to know why things had to be smashed in the middle of the night. I doubted the rank-and-file cops had been allowed to know.
The original plan must have been to wait until first light for the demolition and filling. Little scrutiny would be attracted that early, and their first shallow burial would have lasted well until then.
That was before Jenny’s anonymous phone call about another man, at the bridge. There wasn’t time to scrape more gravel, dig more clay. People would be headed off to work soon.
Worse, no one knew who’d made the call, or what the anonymous woman knew. No one knew if she’d called the sheriff.
Things couldn’t wait until dawn now. The plan was moved up.
“Where is city hall?” one of the bravest of the neighbors shouted. Nothing in Rivertown was allowed without the approval of city hall.
Nothing indeed, I thought. It was brazen, quite lizardly. It was perfect.
Jenny moved forward, mercifully without her camera. I stayed at the back of the crowd, resisting the thought that I should break into song and dance. Rest at last, Mr. Wozanga.
Leo found me a moment later. In the bright of the lights from the construction lamps, his hat, traffic jacket, and pants were a blur of muddy greens and oranges, except for the purple pom that now looked black and appropriately funereal on the top of his knitted hat.
“Why are you grinning so broadly?” he asked.
“I’m merely reveling in the spectacle that is Rivertown.”
“You and the press arrived together,” he said, struggling to produce as much of a leer as his clownish outfit would allow.
“The press is everywhere.”
“If it satisfies you, then I find it deserved, and delightful. What’s going on here?”
“I told you: I just arrived.”
Four large haulers rumbled up, loaded with extra dirt, and everyone in the street had to back away to let them in.
“Obfuscate if you must,” he shouted above the new engine noises. He pointed to a man stomping through the crowd. “He’s the general contractor. He’s going crazy.”
I put on one of my dumb faces. I have several. “Trying to find the person in charge here?”
He tilted his pommed head back in mock concentration. “Let’s see. Mr. Tebbins, the building inspector, is dead. His boss, Mr. Robinson, is dead. That leaves…”
“Yes? Yes?” I taunted, laughing at his antics, sure, but more in final relief that he was there at all, prancing, clowning, the old Leo, close enough to being as good as new.
“Our newest building and zoning commissioner, soon to be our mayor!” he pronounced, raising his arms like a boxer victorious in the ring. People nearby looked and, despite the chaos, smiled. They loved Leo; they were his neighbors.
“Interestingly, she’s not here, enraged at what’s obviously a violation of Rivertown working-hour statutes and instructing our inert police force to stop these goings-on.”
“I still don’t get it,” he said, suddenly serious. “Why a demolition?”
“This isn’t a demolition,” I said. “This is a burial.”
Sixty
Jenny was in a dark mood as we drove back to the turret. She didn’t speak until I pulled up in front.
“Can I use your car? I want to check what I’ve got on professional equipment.” I assumed she was talking about what she’d recorded earlier at the excavation but figured, too, that she wanted to get far away from Rivertown.
“Of course,” I said. “I’ll run in and get your camera.”
I started to get out but sat back when she didn’t move to come around to the driver’s seat.
“Did I get a man killed tonight, Dek? Should I have known not to call the Rivertown police from the bridge?”
“You mean to protect the man who abducted you and took you to that bridge to kill you and dump you in the river, for what he thought you knew? You think you should have protected that man, Jenny, so he could try to kill you again?”
“I should have known to call the sheriff, not the Rivertown cops.”
“That was my instinct, too, until I realized they’d simply have passed it on to Rivertown. That’s why we’re lucky you called anonymously. Rivertown’s city hall will do anything to hush this up, including bringing in dirt movers in the middle of the night. They’d kill you, Jenny, for what you know about what’s been going on.”
“You’re sure of the voices at the excavation?”
“J. J. Derbil and brother Elvis, dumping Mr. Red.”
“And it was J. J. and Elvis who went to the bridge tonight, not the cops?”
“You’d never be able to prove it, because no one will ever get permission to dig at that excavation site again.”
“I’ll see you later,” she said.
“I’ll get your camera,” I said.
She managed a small smile as she patted the pocket of her coat. “I kept it low so no one would see.”