Hunting Sweetie Rose : A Mystery (9781429950879) (13 page)

“That's where I was.”

“In the foyer, right by the elevator, where you would have seen her leave?”

“If she took the elevator—but there's a back stairs, Duggan told me.”

“Told you today?”

“No. You know I found him dead today. This was yesterday.”

“You were there yesterday?”

“Someone set a fire in her powder room.”

“That wasn't reported?”

“Certainly it was reported; fire trucks came. The building was emptied. Ask the Wilbur Wright's manager. Check with the fire department.”

“But the police weren't called? It wasn't reported as a home invasion, arson?”

“I don't know.”

“There's a boarded-up window in the guest bedroom.”

“Point of entry.”

“Convenient,” he murmured.

“Convenient for whom, Plinnit? Timothy Duggan? He's dead. Sweetie Fairbairn? She's missing. Maybe she's dead, too.”

“Convenient for anyone to enter unseen. Like you, Elstrom.”

I stood up, daring them to push me back down, daring them to come right out and accuse me of murder. I am not at my brightest, angry.

They let me stand.

Plinnit continued. “It must have been someone big, your size, to have gotten close enough to that bodyguard—”

“Duggan,” I said, cutting him off. “His name was Duggan.”

“No. His name was Norton, Robert Norton. Duggan's at the station, here. He's giving a statement right now.”

It took a moment to digest. “He'll tell you about the fire.”

“Norton had a gun, Elstrom. How do you think someone got close to him?”

Everyone—me, Plinnit, the silent slab of gray beef by the door—knew there was only one answer to that.

“Norton knew his assailant, trusted him,” I said.

“You,” he said.

“You betcha,” I said.

“Or her?” Plinnit's eyes were steady.

Both Sweetie and I were a good cop's obvious suspects. Me, because I was being evasive. Her, because I'd placed her in the penthouse, kneeling down over the dead man, and because she'd taken off. I wasn't going to play with Plinnit on that. Missing, even dead, Sweetie Fairbairn was still a client.

“I don't see Sweetie Fairbairn using a knife, Lieutenant.”

“Did Norton know you, Elstrom?”

“As I told you, I was there, several times. He would have known me by sight.”

“Why did Sweetie Fairbairn hire you?” Plinnit asked, and asked again. It was what he most wanted to know. Each time, my refusal to answer that question signaled the end of the round, that we were going to start it all again.

“Ask her, Lieutenant,” I said each time.

So it went, around and around and around, each of us unyielding, as the afternoon changed into evening, and the evening changed into night.

Until, at midnight, I asked, “Do I call my lawyer?”

He surprised me.

“You can do it from home,” he said.

*   *   *

There was no offer of a ride back to my Jeep. I didn't protest. I was desperate enough for free air to walk until I could find a cab. I went out the front door of the station house.

Into the sudden glare of television camera lights.

The reporters behind them started shouting.

“Vlodek Elstrom! Will you be charged with the murder of Sweetie Fairbairn?” the loudest of them yelled.

Plinnit had probably tipped them I'd be coming out, a little extra pressure from a cop who'd spent his evening not believing most of what I was saying.

I remembered those kinds of reporter noises, those kinds of shouted questions that could be edited into something else entirely. My livelihood, my Amanda, my future; I'd lost everything in that same kind of din.

I smiled, I waved. I walked swiftly away, into the darkest street I could see. When I was sure that none of the cameramen had been able to keep up, I ran like I was being chased by the hounds of hell, until I couldn't run anymore. Then I walked, chest heaving, gulping air, for six more blocks, or maybe ten. Finally, a cab slowed. He looked me over, real slow, said he'd need cash up front before he'd drive me the few blocks north of the river, to the parking lot close to the Wilbur Wright, where I'd left the Jeep.

There were television lights at the hotel, too. Waiting for news of Sweetie Fairbairn, dead or alive.

I stayed close to the buildings and moved up enough to hear the personalities and their crews talking about what they didn't know.

“She's got to come back, right?” and “Someone said she killed all of them,” and “Some guy named Elstrom has been arrested.”

Then someone called out, “Hey! You! With the clothes!”

A videocam light swung onto me, followed by another. I didn't understand. It didn't matter. I ran down to the parking lot, stuffed cash—I didn't know how much—into the hand of the late-night attendant, and fired up the Jeep. I was almost out of the lot when one of the newsies thought to step in front of me. I revved the engine. He blinked once, twice, must have seen that I wasn't blinking once, or twice. He jumped aside.

By then, a silver sedan—another newsman—had pulled up to block the exit onto the street. I drove onto the sidewalk, almost striking an elderly pair of late-night strollers into the next life. Bouncing over the curb, I gunned the Jeep down Oak Street. I ran a red light at the next intersection and turned left. I shot a glance into the rearview mirror. I'd lost the silver sedan.

Suddenly, my whole body started to shake. Squeezing the steering wheel to keep the Jeep in control, I drove east, to Lake Shore Drive, then south, paralleling the lake. Newspeople would be at the turret, too. Some would have even remembered the way, from the last time, during the Evangeline Wilts trial. The old can was going to be pried open; the worms were going to dance in the glare of the lights again. That long-ago man who'd been thought to have falsified evidence—accused in big print, exonerated in small—was going to be back bigger than ever. Pressure would build. Plinnit would have to act. I'd have to be charged.

No turret, not yet.

I drove past the turn to the expressway to Rivertown.

CHAPTER 21.

I spent the rest of the night in the Jeep, parked at the back of the Bohemian's building. Surprisingly, I slept until a garbage truck came to empty the Dumpster. It was eight forty-five. The Bohemian's black Mercedes sedan was in the lot.

His receptionist, a sweet-looking brunette that I would have remembered if I'd been thinking clearly, must have remembered me, because she didn't scream when I walked right through the cluster of startled people parked in the green leather chairs in the lobby and went into the inner offices and past the cubicles. Outside the Bohemian's office, helmet-haired Buffy didn't scream, either. Then again, expressing emotion was not her way.

The Bohemian's door was closed. I opened it. He was sitting with two pale, powdered elderly women, no doubt talking about matters of money.

“Jesus Christ, Vlodek,” he said, calmly enough.

It was then that I looked down and saw I was covered with dried blood, from helping Sweetie Fairbairn get up from the body of the dead guard.

“I need your help, Anton,” I said, perhaps unnecessarily.

The elderly ladies had gone even paler under their caked rouge. Unhealthy-looking white powder ridges now raked their wrinkled, unnaturally reddened skin.

“Vlodek, may I have Buffy take you to a conference room, perhaps get you some coffee?”

I must have nodded, because the grim-faced secretary instantly touched my elbow.

She took me to a conference room I'd been in once before, back when houses had started exploding in Amanda's old gated neighborhood. I remembered the room because of the English hunting print hanging on the wall. I'd been hired to investigate the explosions, and the dogs in the picture, their noses confidently on the ground, had taunted me with their sureness. They knew what they were hunting; I did not.

Like now.

The door opened and the Bohemian came in, carrying two dainty cups of coffee on saucers pinched between his thick thumbs and forefingers. Overrouged ladies love dainty china. He set the cups on the table and sat down.

Taking a fresh yellow pad of lined paper from the stack on the side table, he uncapped an enormous antique fountain pen. “Now, Vlodek, tell me how you soiled your shirt.”

“You've not read the papers, or listened to the radio?”

“I prefer Bach on my drive in.” He turned to the laptop computer on the sideboard and brought up the
Tribune
Web site. I could read the headline from the other side of the table:
SOCIALITE PHILANTHROPIST MISSING. BODYGUARD FOUND MURDERED.

He scrolled down the text, reading silently and making notes. When he had the gist of it, he turned back to me. “You're a celebrity.”

I laughed, after a fashion, and told him all of it, beginning with the arrival of the party invitation, and ending with my arrival at his parking lot just a few hours earlier. He was now my lawyer, the one who must keep the hounds away.

When I leaned back, exhausted into silence, he studied my clothes. “Thirty-six-inch waist, Vlodek?”

“Perhaps no longer.”

“Thirty-eight, then,” he said, standing up. “Drink coffee. Read the computer if you must. Do not communicate with anyone.” He left the room.

I don't know that I thought about much of anything while I waited. Telling everything to the Bohemian had drained my mind—relieved me, at least temporarily, of custody of the mess of loose ends that dangled from the disaster that was Sweetie Fairbairn.

Buffy knocked on the door an hour later, came in, and set a box on the table. “Clothes,” she said and left. I opened the box. Inside were khaki trousers, but in a softer twill than I'd ever owned. The blue button-down shirt beneath them was softer as well, and had better stitching than what I kept crumpled in the turret. I changed, then put the bloodstained trousers and shirt in the box. The Bohemian would keep them protected, but inaccessible to anyone from a police evidence unit, with or without the proper paperwork.

He came in after another twenty minutes. “John Peet will represent you,” he said, naming the best-known criminal defense lawyer in Chicago. Peet had just finished successfully defending a young third wife accused of murdering her eighty-eight-year-old husband. It had been a sensational trial. Their sex life wasn't brought up, such as it might have been, but the woman's tennis pro lover was, as was the hundred million dollars she stood to inherit. Slam dunk; drumroll, please. Everyone thought she'd be convicted. Except John Peet. Who got her off.

“John is making calls, Vlodek. We'll stay in this room until he tells us what to do next.”

We'd barely begun to force conversation—something about the fountain pens he loved to restore, I think—when the phone rang. The Bohemian picked it up and listened. “Of course I'll be co-counsel,” he said, after a few moments. I took that to mean he'd guarantee payment of Peet's fee. Then, “Yes. I have them in a box, here … I see … That explains why they didn't take them. Very encouraging, John.” He handed the phone to me.

“Mr. Elstrom,” Peet began. “Good news, of a sort. The police don't like you for the shooting.”

“Shooting?” I asked, confused. “They said stabbing.”

“Actually, Lieutenant Plinnit told me he was very careful not to say either. They also let you go on believing and saying, at least for a while, that the murdered guard you thought was stabbed was Timothy Duggan. Not exhibiting knowledge of either the means of the murder or the identity of the victim saved your bacon, so to speak. For now, they're willing to think you walked in on something, nothing more. Still, you're a material witness. They're after what you know and have not said. We must be cautious. Other than Anton, don't talk to anyone about this. That means, doubly, do not talk to the press. Eat at home, Mr. Elstrom. Do not answer your door to friends or strangers. If the police come for you again, don't utter a syllable until I arrive.”

“Are we doing better, Vlodek?” The Bohemian, that ever-effective fixer, asked after I hung up the phone.

I told him I truly desired that to be true.

CHAPTER 22.

I told myself that my second bout with bad fame was going to be easier than the first. The Evangeline Wilts trial had erased my business, my marriage, and my custom of wintering indoors with sufficient heat. This time, I didn't have those to lose.

I told myself all these things quite literally—actually speaking the words aloud as I drove toward Rivertown. Feeling free to talk aloud to oneself, anywhere, anytime, without drawing a startled glance is an often-overlooked benefit of the cell phone era.

Used to be, people crossed the street to avoid someone who was moving lips, making sounds, saying words to nobody at all. No longer. Cell phones and earpiece microphones have unchained mankind, not just the lunatics. Nowadays, anyone can chatter on, seemingly to no one at all. Nobody cares, nobody stares; it's assumed the talker is merely on the phone.

I once stood next to a young man, nineteen or twenty, in the cookie section of a grocery store. He kept saying, “I love you,” over and over, to a shelf of gingersnaps. True, he was wearing an earpiece, but I did not see an actual phone. He could well have been addressing a beloved, or he could have been murmuring to the gingersnaps. Or, perhaps, they were one and the same. There is no longer any sure way of telling.

Leaving the Bohemian's that morning, I was appreciative of all that. I owned no cell phone earpiece, but I had lots to say, and I was in a fury to get it out. I'd failed to unravel any of the mysteries of Sweetie Fairbairn, I told the windshield, and for that her life might now be in danger. As the only person of interest so far, I would become Target One for the press, and that would endanger, maybe even destroy, Amanda's attempt at a new life, along with any hope I had of being part of it. On and on I raged, upshifting and downshifting along the expressway, a man alone in a Jeep, frothing at the mess he'd made. The windshield accepted it all, saying nothing, judging nothing. No one, in any adjacent car, paid me any mind at all.