An old, boxy station wagon was idling at the curb. Several heads moved inside.
I paused behind a tree, trying to decide which was dumber: charging up the stairs to accost the person by the door, or sneaking up to see who lurked in the idling car.
Neither felt particularly brilliant, but the three guns I had in my coat pockets offered a fortifying weight.
Pulling out the heaviest of the automatics, I ran across the street, jerked open the front passenger’s door, and thrust the gun barrel inside.
“Teef, teef!” the babushka in the front passenger’s seat screamed.
“Teef; morder?” the two octogenarians chorused from the back.
“Teef?” an old woman’s voice shouted from the darkness of Leo’s porch. Something metal-a four-footed metal cane-began clanking down the cement stairs.
They screamed other words then, but all of it was foreign. The ancient idling station wagon had become a Polish henhouse, erupted into chaos. I jammed the gun back in my coat and retreated to safety in the middle of the street
The woman with the clanking cane had rounded the front of the station wagon and now leaned against its front fender to catch her breath. “Creeminal,” she yelled, raising the metal cane two-handed like a battering ram at me, the would-be criminal.
I held up my empty hands. By now, all the windows in the station wagon had been powered down. “Creeminal, creeminal,” everyone but me screamed.
“No criminal,” I shouted back. “No thief; no murder.”
The aged woman at the front of the idling car lowered her cane and, leaning on it, pushed herself off the front fender and started hobbling toward me. I recognized her then. She was the friend of Ma’s who ordered the special movies that came in unmarked envelopes.
“Mrs. Roshiska,” I shouted. “I’m Dek Elstrom, Leo’s friend.”
The good black wool wrapped around her face fluttered. “Leo? You frenn?”
“Friend, yes. Dek Elstrom.”
“Dake?” Behind her, I heard more Dakes, cackled, coming from the car.
“Elstrom.”
At last, she recognized me. She lowered her cane. “Where Mrs. Baroomsky?”
“Away, on vacation.”
The old woman shook her head. “No goot; mus’ be home. Call today for us come over.” Then she gave me a sly look and added, “Moofies.”
“Moofies,” the girls in the car chortled.
It all came clear, then. Ma Brumsky had wasted no time after she returned. With Leo all right, things could get back to normal. She called her friends. Movies would resume. Endora must surely have had to drag her away.
“Vacation,” I repeated and walked away. I could add no words that would salve their disappointment.
I drove the long way back to the turret, so I could pass the health center. The old Malibu was gone, safely on its way to becoming parts of other old Malibus.
Two blocks later, I put fifty dollars in the parking ticket envelope and dropped it in a city box. Now, no Rivertown official would ever have cause to think of the Malibu.
I parked at the turret, but before going in, I walked down to the river. Broken sheets of ice moved white in the faint moonlight, drifting lazily downstream. They would shatter against each other when they hit the debris trapped by the dam.
Blue lights were pulsing rhythmically down there, along with two very bright yellow search beams aimed at the far bank. Cops and a city crew had been called out. Something had gotten stuck, impeding the flow of the water. I didn’t envy them, having to work so late.
The gaps between the ice sheets in front of me were wide enough to take guns that would never fall into the hands of kids. I threw the three automatics into them, one by one, and went inside.
I treated myself to a cup of cold coffee, sat at the makeshift plywood table, and opened the dead man’s wallet. The bright gold of a badge flashed at me. It had the seal of the State of Illinois set in the center of it, a wide-winged eagle at the top, and said PRIVATE DETECTIVE in letters circling the seal. It was the kind of thing that anyone could buy to impress morons.
There were two laminated detective licenses, however, that were the real deal. Robert Wozanga, a man who until yesterday had been alive, was licensed by the states of Missouri and Illinois to sniff around. He had an address in a suburb near O’Hare International. The wallet also contained a driver’s license, a Visa card, and a picture of a white Shelby Ford Mustang from the sixties.
There was a little money, just a few singles, two fives, and one ten. Mixed in with them, apparently forgotten, was the ticket stub for a ferry ride from Mackinaw City out to Mackinac Island.
I thought back to the three guns I’d just thrown into the Willahock. No doubt their serial numbers had been ground off, like the weapon the cops had recovered from the empty bungalow. For all of Wozanga’s legitimate licenses, he was ultimately just a thug who killed people.
The question was, for whom.
I went out and drove north, toward O’Hare.
Twenty-six
Robert Wozanga had lived behind a screen of tall bushes next to a 7-Eleven. The other houses on the block were just like his, modest two-bedroom homes painted in conservative whites, beiges, and pale blues that were sure to draw no attention. Wozanga’s was one of the blue ones, perhaps as blue as Wozanga himself was now, lying in the frozen ground beneath what was destined to become a rich person’s rec room.
I parked behind the 7-Eleven, went in to get coffee like that was the objective, and took it to the bare tendrils of the privet hedge that bordered Wozanga’s property. Without leaves to block the light, his backyard was as bright as the parking lot. I set my coffee down at the edge of the asphalt and pushed through the branches. I was still fifty feet away when I saw I wouldn’t need to take out his keys. The back door was ajar, its window smashed. I slipped inside the kitchen and stopped.
No sounds came from the rest of the house. I hoped that meant whoever had broken in had left.
The wattage from the convenience store seemed to light the whole of the house as brightly as the backyard. Wozanga looked to have lived neatly, and apparently alone. There was one dirty bowl and one milk-smeared glass in the sink. Nothing cluttered the counters except for one yellow box of Cheerios, and that gave me pause. The little life-extending O’s might have been Wozanga’s last meal. He’d been disciplined, eating for better health. Yet the low-fat cholesterol-scrubbing O’s had ultimately done nothing to prolong his life. Somehow, that seemed like a cruel irony, even on a killer.
The living room was as tidy as the kitchen. A three-seat sofa was set against a long wall. A worn upholstered chair was placed next to it, alongside a scarred low table that held a dozen car magazines stacked neatly. A big flat-screen television was hung so it could be seen from both the sofa and the chair.
There were two bedrooms. The largest had a queen-sized bed, a lamp table, and a dresser. The bed was made, but the drawers and accordion closet doors had been pulled open in a hurry. The room had been searched.
He’d used the smaller second bedroom as an office. It was trashed. The desk drawers had been pulled out and upended. File folders lay on the floor in front of a black four-drawer cabinet. A computer keyboard rested on the desk, but there was no computer. Whoever had ransacked his office had carted it away, perhaps along with some of the paper files.
A shelf hung from brackets on the wall. It held two tiny cacti in little clay pots, a larger framed version of the picture of the Shelby Mustang, and a three-ring binder imprinted with the name of an office furniture store, set upright next to the picture of the car.
The binder was meant to hold catalogs. It was a good binder and would be useful to a frugal man for holding more than catalogs. Wozanga had been such a frugal man. Inside were copies of the invoices he sent clients. It was what I needed.