Free A Safe Place for Dying by Jack Fredrickson Page A

didn’t worry. He even brought her back the disposable plastic hotel cups she
buried at the bottom of the kitchen garbage so she could think she’d left no visible evidence of her drinking.
    I called Leo’s cell phone before starting the Jeep and told his voice mail I’d left another note with Ma but that she’d been vaguely disengaged. He’d understand. Hurry home, Leo.
    It was two o’clock. The turret would feel like a cage until Leo looked at the letter and I could press for a meeting with the Bohemian.
    I drove west, meandering, wrestling with the last words on the note: SAME PLACE. Words that meant the Bohemian or the Board already knew where to drop the money, words that meant there had been other communications, letters, maybe even phone calls they hadn’t told me about. Fair enough. I was the document guy, hired to be a cog, not the whole wheel. I didn’t need to know.
    But need and want are two different things.
    I swung over to Thompson Avenue and headed west to Gateville. If I showed up unexpectedly, I might be able to open up Stanley Novak about what had happened in the past.
    From the crest of the hill, Gateville once again looked like paradise: green lawns, big houses, shading oaks, all nestled inside a protecting wall in its own little valley. I drove down the hill.
    A stake truck loaded with plastic flats of flowers was stopped diagonally in front of the wrought-iron gate, blocking the entrance. Its engine was off, but its driver was still behind the wheel. I pulled onto the shoulder across the street and shut off the Jeep’s motor.
    Two masons in white overalls were tuck-pointing the outside wall, troweling small amounts of mortar from wood pallets into the brick joints. It looked to be slow, painstaking work, pushing in the little amounts of mortar and then smoothing the joints with a jointer. One tuck-pointer sang to himself, his lips moving softly.
    Two pale-blue-uniformed guards came out from between the white pillars, waited for a break in the traffic, and crossed the street toward the Jeep. Each wore a gun belt, something the Gateville
guards had never done when I’d lived there. The retaining straps of their holsters were unsnapped.
    It was good. The landscaping truck blocking the entrance and the slow-moving tuckpointers were security. The one tuckpointer hadn’t been singing; he’d been speaking into a microphone to alert the guardhouse that a Jeep had stopped across the street.
    I put both hands on top of the steering wheel where they were easily visible. One guard came up to my side window as the other moved to the front of the Jeep.
    â€œDek Elstrom, working with Stanley Novak. Would you like to see a driver’s license?”
    The guard nodded.
    I kept my right hand on the wheel and extracted my wallet with my left. I thumbed it open, slid out the license, and passed it out. The guard bent down to compare my face with the photo, then backed away from the Jeep to use his cell phone. After a minute he came back and handed me my license.
    â€œMr. Novak said if you need to speak with him, to call him at home.”
    â€œI just saw him a couple of hours ago. Is he ill?”
    â€œNot him. His wife.”
    â€œNothing serious?”
    The guard shrugged. “Call him at home if you need him.”
    He motioned to his partner, and the two guards walked back across the street. I watched them disappear between the white pillars and thought about another time.
    Nine months before, in the black of the night of Halloween, Stanley Novak had escorted me out from between those same pillars, at the direction of my ex-wife.

Six
    It hadn’t been an acrimonious split. We’d only been married for a few months, not long enough to build up a big list of hatreds. Instead, our divorce had been a last, loving gesture of Amanda’s, a veering away, before my unraveling of my life caused us to despise each other.
    Driving her to O’Hare on