“Don’t tell me where you’re taking my friend.”
“I wouldn’t dream of it. He’ll be admitted as John Smith. All communication will be done through me.”
He hung up before I could thank him.
I called Endora. “I have good news and some temporarily not so good news. I have him with me, but he’s suffered a mild concussion. It’s resulted in a bit of amnesia.”
“We’ll leave now.”
“Absolutely not. Leo wanted you out of town because he got into something bad. I don’t know what that is yet. He’ll be at a clinic, safe, getting his health back. You stay out of Chicago until I know what’s going on.”
“Which clinic?”
“Someone I trust made the arrangements. I told him I don’t want to know where Leo is.”
She paused, then, “It’s like up at Eustace?”
“Have you heard anything about how Arnie Pine died?”
“I forbade my mother to call her friend.”
I’d told her I’d call her later.
I held out my peacoat, still damp, and Cubs cap. Leo put them on without asking why and followed me docilely out to the Jeep. I walked with my sport jacket open, his revolver tucked inside the waistband of my khakis. I didn’t like packing the gun, a murder weapon with his and my fingerprints on it, but I liked the idea of being defenseless against some friend of the dead man’s even less.
The spring coil company was in an old factory building that took up most of a city block. The street-level dock door opened as soon as I drove up. I pulled in next to a beat-up panel van with the company’s logo on it. A man in a quilted down jacket with a reassuring bulge under his left armpit stood by the driver’s door. A woman who might have been a nurse got out of the van as soon as the dock door closed. She came over and led Leo to the sliding door at the side of the van. She came back with my peacoat, the Cubs hat, and what I took for a reassuring smile. She and the driver got in the van and backed out of the adjacent bay.
I sat in the Jeep for fifteen minutes, watching shipping department people move large wood pallets of thick wire, until a small Latina, no more than twenty-five, came up to the passenger’s side. She put on the peacoat over her hot pink ski jacket, tucked her long hair up inside the Cubs hat, and gave me the whitest smile I’d ever seen. The transformation was good enough. She slouched down in the passenger seat like she was asleep, the dock door opened, and we drove away.
She directed me through the old factory district. At the westbound entrance to the expressway, she told me to park between two cars in front of a crowded strip of stores. She tugged off the peacoat, dropped the Cubs hat, and slipped out. Even in hot pink, she disappeared into one of the stores in an instant.
The Bohemian, that knower of all things, had done me well. Leo was in sharp, professional hands. Protected, for now.
Only for now.
Twenty-two
I parked in the Rivertown city hall lot and went inside. Robinson was alone in his office. He wore a white shirt, a dark suit and tie, and a nervous face.
“Tebbins’s funeral?” I asked.
He leaned back in his desk chair and tugged at his tie like it was a noose. “Awful; just awful.”
“Heard anything about the police investigation?”
“Drifter is all anyone’s saying.”
“You believe that?”
“Sure. What else…?” His face changed. “No, no way in hell his murder was about Snark, or Leo, right?”
“I don’t know.”
“Shit. Why else would you be here?” He motioned me to the chair next to his desk. “Coffee? I just made the coffee. I make very decent coffee.” He was babbling, now even more nervous.
“Coffee would be good.”
He got up and went to a small table against the wall. “Our secretary said you and Tebbins had strong words. I told the police I was here, and you had no such things.” His hands shook as he set down my coffee on his desk. He dropped into his chair.
I sipped the coffee. He was right. It was very decent coffee. Then again, my standards were compromised; I was used to reruns.
“Look, you got to be straight with me,” he said. “You think Tebbins’s death had something to do with Snarky?”
“Tebbins tried lying about not remembering him.”
“Of course he did. He tried hard with that boy. He knew darned well Snark was fencing stolen stuff.”
“How?”
“Look, we wanted no drugs in that garage so, like I told you, we had a master key to all the lockers. Every time Tebbins found something small-time stolen in Snarky’s, he hauled him around to the back, where nobody could hear, and tried to yell some sense into the punk’s head…” His face lost focus as his voice trailed away. Then he said, “Son of a bitch,” but it was more to himself than to me.
“What are you saying?”
“Tebbins had a side business installing home security systems. They were half-assed little things, mostly hardware-store motion sensors and the like, but part of the setup was boxes with tiny flashing lights visible from outside the windows, and security system signs stuck in the flower beds. In those unsophisticated, predigital times, Tebbins’s little installations worked as well as any to frighten would-be burglars away, or so he told customers.” He cleared his throat. “From time to time, Tebbins would need extra help, and he’d hire guys from the garage to work after hours and on weekends.”
He was watching my face, to see if I’d caught his drift.
“Extra guys like Snark Evans?” I asked.
“And a couple of mechanics from the garage. And your friend, Leo Brumsky.”
“Snark stole from Tebbins’s customers?”
“Until now, I never considered that. Tebbins never mentioned a connection between his after-hours jobs and Snark’s little inventories, but now that it’s come up, it’s something to think about. Maybe that’s why he was watching Snark so close. And right after Snark quit so sudden and left town, Tebbins never again worked on another security system.”
“Cops ever come around?”
“You mean cops from other towns, following up on reports of stolen goods?” He frowned. “Not that I know, but people came around sometimes. Customers of his, I think. I never paid it any mind.”
“Snark died at the end of that summer?”
“Tebbins was real broke up about it, when he heard.” Robinson’s face froze for an instant, and then he popped out of his chair like it was on fire. “You’re not saying Snark was killed for his thieving, are you? That somehow, Tebbins got shot for it after all these years?”
“Anybody ever think Snark’s death notice was a put-up job, a faked notice in his local newspaper to shake the law off his tail?”
“Nobody wanted to talk about Snark, period. He was bad news, and everybody was glad he quit.” He sat back down. “Listen, you got to tell me why young Master Leo is taking an interest in this, after all these years. Has he found out something?”
“Not such a young master anymore,” I said, evading his question.
“Leo absolutely hated us calling him a young master,” he said, relaxing into a laugh, “but we couldn’t help it. His mother packed him such precise lunches.”
“Precise lunches?”
“Two sandwiches every day: rare roast beef and yellow cheese on white bread. Cut on a diagonal and wrapped precisely in waxed paper folded, I swear, with hospital corners.” He started laughing again. “Get this: She always sent along exactly sixteen potato chips in a little Baggie.”
“How could you know there were sixteen?”
“Leo quickly became the object of much interest, as you might imagine. A college boy with such a doting mama wasn’t ordinarily found in our grimy garage. Somebody snatched his chips one day, held them up. Leo told him he’d give him eight. The guy said he wanted half. Leo said that was half, that his mother always sent sixteen chips.” Robinson was laughing so hard tears had begun to glisten in the corners of his eyes. “Know why?”