A Safe Place for Dying by Jack Fredrickson Read Free Book Online Page A

don’t spoil the integrity of the structure and we make you rip out what you done.”
    â€œI want to make it into a residence.”
    He shook his head. “No can do, even if it wasn’t a historical. It’s zoned municipal.”
    â€œWhat’s that mean?”
    â€œMean’s the property’s only approved for city buildings.”
    â€œI know what municipal zoning is. I meant, how can private property be zoned only for public buildings?”
    â€œYour aunt approved it after she took sick.” The corners of his mouth twitched; something funny had penetrated his consciousness.
    â€œWhy the hell would she do that?”

    â€œMight have been because of us waiving sixty years’ worth of unpaid taxes and penalties. Municipal property don’t pay tax, so there’d be no liens against her estate.” He showed me his bad teeth again, in the kind of feral grin hyenas give to fresh meat. “You been away a long time.”
    â€œDoes this mean I can’t live there?” I was struggling to maintain an even tone.
    â€œIt’s a municipal. Still, I suppose I could give you a temporary exception, so’s you can repair the place and all.” He batted his eyelashes like a virgin bride, dropped his head, and started making a notation on the permit. He wrote slowly, giving me time to fish in my pocket for a fifty to express my gratitude.
    I didn’t have the fifty. Nor the gratitude.
    He finished writing. I scooped up the permit before he noticed I wasn’t flashing any green and started for the door.
    â€œHey!”
    I stopped and turned.
    Elvis had his index finger in the air. “Just you can live there, and only to fix up the place on the inside. No wives,” he snickered, “no girlfriends. I catch wind of anybody else living there, you’re gone.”
    I went out quickly, before I got stupid. Like the movie cop said, a man’s got to know his limitations, and mine were screaming to be let loose, all over Elvis’s oily head.
    The next afternoon, I saw a zoning lawyer who told me, for a billable hour, that I’d been away a long time. Rivertown was under new management, he said. Grandson and granddaughter lizards had taken over, and the new lizards were college educated, not to be satisfied with small-change pimp and pinball money. They wanted Mercedeses, not Cadillacs, and for that they needed condominium developers with big, greasy wads of building application and zoning variance cash. But to get those developers, they first had to shake off the old Rivertown tank-city image of wet-floor bars, gambling houses, and strip joints. So they hired consultants
who came up with a marketing campaign. Rivertown Renaissance, they called it. To kick it off, they chose the turret—my turret—as the symbol of the rebirth of the town. They put it on the town’s stationery, police cars, fire trucks, and municipal Dumpsters. They even put it on the portable toilets in the town’s one park.
    I could fight, the attorney said, but that would take money I didn’t have. Since I’d already moved in, he recommended I rehab cautiously on the inside and, when I could afford his three hundred an hour, take the City of Rivertown to court to change the turret’s zoning into something I could sell. Until then, he suggested I keep a low profile. Don’t provoke.
    My hour expired. I left the lawyer’s office mumbling to myself. The dominoes of my life were still tipping over.
    In the beginning, it wasn’t difficult to follow the lawyer’s advice. As November changed into winter, I had more pressing things than a zoning conversion to worry about. Like heat. I got a small personal loan at the bank, bought pipes, electrical conduit, and wiring—and three space heaters—and spent the winter clearing out seventy years’ worth of pigeon droppings and squirrel carcasses and repairing the rudimentary plumbing and wiring