I pulled a metro map out of the glove box and circled the locations of the companies on my list. They were scattered all around Chicago and its suburbs. The closest, something called The Tillotson Partners, was less than a mile away.
I drove south through the old factory district. Cement mixers, flatbed trucks loaded with lumber, construction vans, and pickups clogged both sides of the dirt-crusted old street, reducing it to one lane. Huge, bright banners hung on half of the old factories and warehouses, advertising residential lofts starting at four hundred thousand dollars per unit. ONLY A FEW LEFT, many read, and I didn’t doubt it. Chicago was full of people ready to plop down big scratch to look like they were starving artists. It wasn’t for me, and not just because I didn’t have the four hundred thousand dollars. The closest I’d ever gotten to art was a paint-by-number canvas of an owl an aunt had thrown away out of sheer embarrassment. Even as a child, I’d had difficulty operating inside the lines.
The rehabbers had not yet gotten around to the ancient, sootstained building that housed The Tillotson Partners. There was noelevator, and my footsteps echoed loudly on the linoleum steps, nicked and scuffed dull from decades of commerce.
The gray-haired lady behind the scarred wood desk on the third floor told me they made signs. Interior and exterior. Road signs, street signs, and washroom signs. That’s all they’d ever done since 1956, she said: make signs. She’d never heard of Crystal Waters, but she thought it quite possible they’d made the lettering on the brick wall and the fancy, filigreed iron posts and name signs for Chanticleer Circle. She did not know if the company kept old payroll records. The woman who did the payroll wasn’t in; she only came in twice a month. I left my card and asked that the bookkeeper call me. As I went down the stairs, I wondered how the developers of Gateville had chosen the name, Chanticleer Circle, for the project’s only street-and, for that matter, why they had bothered to erect signs at all. When there’s only one street, and it’s a circle, there’s not much potential for confusion about where one is.
In the Jeep, I checked the Bohemian’s master list. Safe Haven Properties had paid Tillotson forty-eight hundred dollars back in March of 1970, a month before the guardhouse explosion. That was at the end of the project, when the paving was done and the grounds had been smoothed over and landscaped. Still, Tillotson had had access, and nobody would have questioned them digging holes. I put a question mark next to Tillotson and pulled away.
If even the signage installer was a potential, the hours until the next afternoon, at four, were going to be the most futile of my life.
I hit two more places-a plasterer and a roofer, neither with records or recollections-before my stomach reminded me I’d been up for hours and had never had breakfast. I pulled into a true Chicago-style hot dog stand, authentic right down to the flies and the red-and-yellow-striped awning, and scanned the menu painted on the flaking plywood for quick, morning food that would be easy on a nervous gut, like scrambled eggs and wholewheat toast. They didn’t have that, so I ordered a hot dog, French fries, onion rings, and a diet Coke to neutralize the calories, and ate off the fender of the Jeep, standing up.
The hot dog had two peppers, plump, fresh green ones. For as long as I could remember, Kutz offered only one, a shriveled, brown little thing that regular customers, when they forgot to tell him to hold it, threw into the bushes so they wouldn’t have to look at it. I’d always suspected Kutz offered only the one tiny pepper because he knew his customers would toss the grizzled thing anyway, and, rodent lover that he was, he didn’t want to cripple the tender stomachs of the rats that foraged in the hard dirt of his dining area with too many peppers.
I finished greasing my palate, got in the Jeep and spent the rest of the morning and all of the afternoon working my way west, paralleling the Eisenhower Expressway. I stopped at an outfit that made planters, geese, and ducks out of cement and, after them, a drain-tile manufacturer, a curb installer, and an asphalt seal coater. None had people who remembered the Gateville job; none had payroll records from back then. But all had had access inside the gates, and none could be ruled out. As with the companies that morning, there was no point in leaving the list of parolees.
Nobody knew anything; not anymore.
I got to the first plumber on the list just as he was closing up. He was outside his storefront, a block from the expressway, fumbling with a metal accordion security fence. He was about sixty, with a three-day beard stubble, gin on his breath, and a case of the shakes. We talked on the sidewalk as his trembling fingers struggled to snap the padlock. He’d installed the underground sprinkling system at Gateville with three other fellows but hadn’t seen them in decades. He made a quick show of looking at my list of parolees, but his eyes kept straying to his watch. He was late for a tavern. He finally got the padlock snapped, told me he had to leave, and took off down the sidewalk as fast as he could aim his wobbling legs.
I scratched him off the list. If that man had just pulled five hundred thousand dollars out of a Dumpster behind Ann Sather’s, he’d never have opened his storefront again. He would have stayed home, curled around a bottle, and drunk his way through as much of the money as possible before the reaper punched his ticket.
It was five thirty. I got in line outbound on the Eisenhower and called the Bohemian to report I had nothing to report.
“No likely suspects?”
“Most of them were likely suspects. All had access to the grounds. All could have done a little extra digging and dropped devices into the dirt. The only one I can scratch is the plumber.”
The Bohemian sounded tired. “Are we wasting our time?”
“Yes, along with wasting your money. But if we’re getting you closer to calling the Feds tomorrow, it’s progress. Have you heard from Stanley?”
“He visited two of his names before he had to get home. He got nowhere, as well.”
“I’ll start up again first thing in the morning, but it’s going to be the same, so use this evening to convince yourself this thing is too big for us.”
“That’s what I told Stanley,” he said.
Fourteen
The first of the two landscapers was a mile and a half north of the turret, on a side street off LaGrange Road. It was just getting light when I pulled into the gravel lot Friday morning. I parked between a flatbed truck loaded with balled shrubs and a rusty black Chevy Nova that had been old twenty years before.
The owner was behind the wood trailer office, making marks on a clipboard as two Mexicans loaded evergreens onto another flatbed truck. He was in his early forties.
“Sure, I remember Crystal Waters. I was a kid, but I worked on the job with my dad and the crew. There were workers everywhere. It was a big deal for my dad, getting hired to work on a major site like that one.”
“Do you still have records from that job, employee lists?”
He looked at me, reappraising the story I’d given him. I’d said there were sewer leaks at Crystal Waters and I was looking for anyone who might know about changes to the original blueprints. That didn’t explain wanting employee rosters, and he’d caught it. “Employee lists?”
“We think there were deviations from the sewer plans thatmight have caused you to change your own ground work. We’re hoping some of your old employees would remember.”
He didn’t believe me. I wouldn’t have, either.
“We don’t keep payroll records that long.”
The dim bulb that’s loose-wired in my head flickered weakly as I realized my mistake. Landscapers don’t always keep names. Some of them hire workers for cash, undocumented people up for the summer.