The Dead Caller from Chicago Read Online Free

outside.”
    â€œJeez, you should have heard them, Dek. They sounded like a highway crew jackhammering a road.” He sighed. “Let’s bring coffee down to my office. Ma will be too embarrassed to show herself with you around.”
    Leo’s office was directly under the living room. It must have been deafening, beneath a loud cloud of moaning porn stars, banging walkers, and falling wrenches.
    Leo read my mind as always. “I couldn’t stand it and spent the night at Endora’s.” Endora was his girlfriend. An ex-model and current Newberry Library researcher, she was a head taller than he was, though both their heads possessed the same oversized IQ. She lived in a condo, downtown.
    His office was furnished with mismatched furniture, files, and equipment and was always orderly and neat. He sat behind the ancient wood desk, and I took the huge green upholstered chair his father had died in, all those years before.
    â€œTell me about this new client that’s going to make you rich.” He took a yellow wood pencil from the cup on his desk and leaned back. Leo was amazingly dexterous and often walked a pencil up and down between his fingers.
    â€œOffices in ten states. They’ve hinted that the twenty-eight hundred was just for openers, that there will be a retainer coming for a lot more work. Maybe I’ve hit a golden confluence—”
    â€œConfluence?” he interrupted.
    â€œConfluence. It means a joining of two or more streams, like—”
    â€œI know what a confluence is, you jackass. I just can’t let you throw around such words as though they’re part of your regular vocabulary.”
    â€œConfluence,” I went on. “Maybe I’ll have the dough to finish the turret and get my zoning changed just as yups are a-gathering right here in Rivertown—”
    His landline phone rang. “Leo Brumsky,” he said, holding the receiver with his left hand as his right kept finger-walking the pencil.
    I tuned him out and looked around the office. As always, there was no sign of any current project, but I knew there had to be several. Leo Brumsky was highly regarded in the auction world.
    On display, though, was Bo Derek. The movie goddess from the late seventies looked back at me from a poster above the light table. She sat in the surf and wore only a thin blouse, mostly unbuttoned. The blouse was wet. It was why Leo bought the poster when he was in high school. It was still the only work in his, an art examiner’s, office. Even as adults, we agreed, it was all the art he needed.
    The soft tap of his pencil hitting the tiled floor caught my ear.
    â€œSnark?” His voice was higher than I’d ever heard.
    I kept my eyes on Bo. The office had gone absolutely silent, except for Leo’s breathing. It had quickened.
    A moment passed, then another. Then he spoke, in a voice that was disbelieving. “Speak up, will you? You’re whispering.”
    I had to look. His normally pale face had gone absolutely white. He was staring at the blank place on the wall above his four-drawer file cabinets, seeing nothing.
    â€œNo. I ran into Tebbins, and he told me about you, and all, so I threw it out; I didn’t figure you’d want—” he said, his own voice now barely above a whisper. “I tell you: It’s gone.”
    His free hand reached for another pencil. It snapped in his fist. He mumbled something that I couldn’t make out and hung up the phone.
    â€œWho was that?”
    His head didn’t move.
    â€œLeo?” I said, louder.
    He looked up at me, slowly, like his neck hurt.
    â€œThat first summer you were gone,” he said softly. “After first year of college…” His voice trailed away, and he again turned to look at the blank spot above the filing cabinets.
    I remembered that summer. I’d left Rivertown at the end of the summer before, to begin college in Chicago, but really to