Hunting Sweetie Rose : A Mystery (9781429950879) (19 page)

Jennifer arrived five minutes later.

“Your mother and I had a short, but efficient, chat.”

She groaned. “About?”

“Small stuff, like how much money my ex-wife has.”

“I'm sorry, Dek. My mom…”

“I told her Amanda will inherit tens of millions. Your mother lost interest in me when I told her I didn't have that kind of money.”

“Speaking of Ms. Phelps, how was your evening after I dropped you off?”

“You knew that was Amanda, waiting in that car?”

“Easy guess. She looms large in your life. More interesting, I've never heard you refer to her as your ex-wife, until just now. I'm thinking something, more final than you wanted, happened last night.”

I shouldn't have been surprised. Jennifer Gale had antennae like NASA. For sure, she'd inherited her mother's directness.

“It's…” I let the thought die away, unformed.

“That complicated?”

“She's a wonderful person, orbiting in a very public executive suite, trying to do real good. The newness of it is a strain.”

“And you?”

“The oldness of me is a strain, too. I keep complicating her life. My new notoriety has brought forth my old notoriety. It's affecting what she's trying to do.”

A waitress came, and we ordered cheese omelets.

“I think it's time you called me Jenny. It's who I am.”

“Why the change? 'Jenny Galecki' is certainly not too ethnic for media in a Polish town like Chicago.”

“It seemed too ethnic for a national post.” She stirred her coffee. “Or so I thought when I got into this business. My next step was going to be a local anchor slot, then on to national fame. ‘Jennifer Gale' sounded so much more cosmopolitan.”

“Is that still the dream?”

“Not so much. For a national slot, I should have been overseas the past few years. After my husband…” She took a sip of coffee, set down the cup. “Look, Dek, I still want a story, a big story, but not at the expense of leaving that poor man—”

“I know; we left Andrew Fill in a place where he shouldn't be. My priority still has to be helping Sweetie Fairbairn. There are unsolved murders: James Stitts, Robert Norton, maybe even Sweetie herself.”

“And Andrew Fill.”

“I think he was first.”

“What?”

“Perhaps a month ago.”

Her eyes were wide. “My God, he's been lying there a month? Absolutely, we must go to the cops.”

“I could tell you you'll get in trouble with your station. You were there when I discovered Andrew. You went along with my not reporting it, at least for the night. I could try to convince you all that will play hell with your reputation, if it doesn't get you fired.”

She nodded. “I thought about that—but a man lying there, dead, for months…”

Our omelets came. She pushed hers aside.

“More important, more selfish, going to Plinnit now will stop me cold,” I went on. “He won't accept my showing up at another murder site. I was at Sweetie's penthouse, the night the guard was killed. I was at Fill's apartment, after he'd gone missing. Now, I'm at Fill's trailer, with his corpse inside?”

“You said Fill's been dead for a month. Duggan can corroborate you were hired two weeks afterward.”

“You said this is a heater case. Plinnit will arrest me, just to play to the media.”

“That will stop the investigation? You're that important?”

“You think the police are making any progress?”

“No.”

“Remember Fill's wallet? Neat and orderly; nothing that shouldn't be there?”

“Money, driver's license, Visa, insurance, and health club cards.”

“And one scrap of paper with George Koros's phone number on it.”

“It was Koros who pointed you to Andrew Fill,” she said, understanding.

“Everything I learned, I got from Koros.”

“Truths, or lies,” she said.

“Koros knows a lot more than he's been saying. I want to take a run at him, see what I can shake loose. I need you to go along with me on that.”

“Because no one else is doing anything?”

“Because I don't know what else to do.”

CHAPTER 31.

I showed up at Koros's office unannounced. Smiling for the camera behind the hanging plant, I pressed the buzzer next to the door to the inner office. Neither the smile nor the buzzer got a response. I gave the button another quick tap. There was still no answer. Given that the outer door was open, I figured Koros was in, but perhaps in conference with a client.

I sat down, in good view of the camera, and leafed through one of the
Forbes
magazines on the table. It featured a ranking of the world's wealthiest people. Disappointingly, none had made their fortunes rehabbing turrets.

After fifteen minutes, I got up and pushed the buzzer again. This time I leaned against it for a full ten seconds, all the while smiling for the camera behind the plant.

It worked. Koros slipped out, tugging the door closed behind him. I'd been right. He'd been in conference.

In spite of the fact that it had taken him fifteen minutes to open the door, he acted pleased to see me. “Thank you so much for stopping by, Mr. Elstrom. I was going to call you. I owe you an apology. I should have called you once Sweetie disappeared, to offer help in anything you're doing to find her.”

“Really? What's prompted this?”

“The police. Lieutenant Plinnit assures me she is their top priority, but they're making no progress.”

“I don't see how I can do any better, Mr. Koros.”

“I have a proposal. I imagine you're somewhat limited in terms of resources, now that Sweetie has disappeared. You might still have a little of her retainer left, but I want you to start charging all your time and expenses directly to me.” His eyes were unblinking. “No expenditure questioned, Mr. Elstrom. I will pay whatever it takes to secure Sweetie's safe, immediate return.”

“She ran, Mr. Koros. Even if I did find her—and I have no idea where to look—there's nothing to suggest she'll come back willingly.”

“Then let us at least satisfy ourselves that she is all right. She must have been frightened out of her mind. She probably still is. We must locate her before whoever killed her bodyguard does.”

“I wouldn't know where to start.”

“Stay with Andrew Fill. Perhaps he does know something.”

I watched his unblinking eyes. They betrayed nothing.

“I've run down Andrew Fill as far as I can,” I said. It was true enough.

He took a piece of paper from his shirt pocket. “Andrew Fill's address in Indiana.”

I looked at it. It was the address of the trailer park.

“This is better given to the police.”

“I'd like you to check it out. At my expense, as I said.” He made a tent of the fingers of both hands. “As the newspapers this morning have informed us, Sweetie Fairbairn is no longer a woman of unlimited means. Not even very wealthy, I would imagine. Now that it appears she's given away most of what she had, the half million Andrew is to repay may prove to be vital to her future well-being.”

“Why would she give away the last of her money?”

“Severe stress, obviously. She's no longer thinking rationally. I'll pay, Mr. Elstrom. You must find her, and quickly.”

“Any idea where she was from?”

“I don't know. She was very secretive about that. I wondered if she'd been abused as a child, or something. I do recall her mentioning something about growing up in California, or Oregon.” He shrugged. “I'm sorry, Mr. Elstrom; is that important?”

“It might be a place for her to head to, a place where she'd feel safe. She could have relatives there.”

“The fact that she never mentioned a hometown makes that unlikely.”

“I suppose.”

“You'll check out Andrew's place in Indiana?”

“For the half million?”

“Andrew is no killer, Mr. Elstrom.”

I told him I'd go to Indiana the next day.

As lies went, I didn't figure mine were very big.

Especially not when my gut was thinking that Koros's were bigger.

I rode the elevator down to the lobby, went out to the sidewalk, and started down Wacker Drive. It was a fine summer day, and for a minute I stopped, to turn back and look at the great green curved glass that was Koros's building.

The lobby door opened, and a short woman came out and began hurrying off in the opposite direction. Though most of her face had been turned away, I glimpsed leathery, weathered skin, the complexion of a woman who'd long worked outdoors. Her slacks were pilled, and she wore a stained nylon Windbreaker.

Her hair, though, was a younger woman's blond. For one brief, strange instant, I took her for someone else. I thought she was Sweetie Fairbairn.

Too much Sweetie Fairbairn on the brain, I thought, as I walked down to get the Jeep.

*   *   *

I let the day manager of the Wilbur Wright think I was part of Sweetie's staff. The keys I'd picked up off Sweetie's carpet the day I'd found her kneeling over the dead guard helped.

“The police just released the penthouse as a crime scene,” he said, sniffing as I unlocked the elevator with her keys. “That ghastly yellow police tape across this was unnerving everyone.”

The doors closed on his angst, and I rode up silently, alone. The elevator seemed especially hushed as it opened into Sweetie Fairbairn's penthouse.

The foyer, windowless, was dark, and though it had only been three days since Robert Norton had been killed, the penthouse smelled like it had been shut up for years. I wondered if that's what happened when a place that was used to fresh flowers suddenly went dead.

I turned on every light I passed, before my mind could make menacing shapes out of the long late-afternoon shadows. Other than the once pristine, soft white carpet, ruined now by blood dried to a dark brown stain, the penthouse appeared to be immaculate. The magazines on the coffee tables in the living room were neatly fanned; the occasional chairs had been precisely aligned. Every dish in the kitchen had been washed and put away. The bathrooms looked freshly cleaned. The guest bedrooms were neat.

Come home, Sweetie Fairbairn; your penthouse awaits. Immaculately.

Except for all that blood dried on your floor.

I spent almost an hour in her bedroom, a cheerful place of pinks and beiges. It was where I'd sent her after I discovered her with her guard.

There were no gaps in the clothes hanging in the closets, nor did any of the dressers look to have been rustled by Sweetie hurriedly packing. Her decision to vanish had been made on the spur of the moment. She'd taken nothing, other than her checkbook and the determination to give away everything she had.

The sun was almost down when I went into the room I'd saved for last. Sweetie's private study, her Shangri-La, looked as it had the night of her party, when she and I had gone for what I assumed to be a chat about the strength of my grasp on Amanda's life.

The papers in the file cabinet and desk had been haphazardly jammed in, as though they'd been pawed through, by the police, or perhaps by Sweetie's own sloppiness. As with so many things about Sweetie Fairbairn, I might never know.

I studied the appointment calendar tacked to the corkboard. Most of the days of the months ahead had been penciled in with names and times. I felt a small chill. The annotations no longer looked like reminders of meetings, appointments, and parties, but rather, the futile scratchings of a future lost by someone doomed.

I looked at the picture of the weathered covered bridge tacked next to the calendar. I'd liked Sweetie Fairbairn for that worn old postcard, like I'd liked her for setting out Velveeta for a bunch of swells. Now it felt like one more thing I'd never get to ask her about.

I left Sweetie's penthouse, having learned nothing of where she might have gone.

Or whether she was anywhere, anymore.

CHAPTER 32.

Black clouds rising from an unmuffled exhaust drew me to the window the next morning. Benny Fittle's rusting Maverick was parked on the street with its door sagging open. Benny, freshly talcumed with the day's new sugar, stood on my lawn, next to the Jeep, writing a ticket.

“No parking on the grass, Mr. Elstrom,” he said when I charged out.

“I can't park on the street. According to you people, I live on a fire lane.”

“You could park across Thompson, like I told you.”

“That's a half mile away.”

Parking tickets are a hundred dollars in Rivertown, unless they're paid by something other than cash, in which case they cost more. I got in the Jeep. “I'm moving it, Benny. Put the book away.”

I twisted the key. Got nothing. The battery had died in the night.

Benny nudged his tongue out and resumed writing. “Got to write you, Mr. Elstrom. Thing's got to get off the grass.”

I had an inspiration. “Thing's not supposed to move right now, Benny. It's in its other mode.”

He looked up, brow wrinkled, his brain taxed by thought. “Whaddaya mean, other mode?”

I got out of the Jeep. “When it is on the grass, this is no longer a vehicle. It is in its lawn ornament mode.”

By the confusion clouding his face, I worried that “mode” meant nothing to Benny except when ordering ice cream to top a slice of pie.

Benny Fittle, though, surprised me. “You mean like one of those wheelbarrow planters?”

I beamed at his brilliance. “Exactly. The Jeep, when on the lawn, becomes a wheeled device just like a wheelbarrow planter.”

“I don't see no flowers.”

“They'll be here today.”

“Mode or no mode, there's no flowers. I got to write you, Mr. Elstrom.”

“The flowers are on their way, honest.”

He put the ticket pad back into his pocket. “Only until this afternoon,” he said and walked across the street to the dark cloud of his idling Maverick.