Hunting Sweetie Rose : A Mystery (9781429950879) (21 page)

What I couldn't understand was how that would benefit him.

Or how I could nail him for it.

I drank my tea, hummed along too loudly with the music from the tonks, and thought. By three in the morning, when the tonks quit serenading the night, when the last of the hookers had moaned and the last of the johns and the cherry bombs had exploded, I was sure of only a fraction of it.

The motive had to be money, as it so often is when people kill. Sweetie Fairbairn was a financial wellspring, Koros was a financial guy, and Andrew Fill was a sap. Koros worked Andrew Fill, except he worked him dead. He killed him, then manipulated him, missing, to take the blame for embezzling a half-million dollars.

None of that, though, explained killing James Stitts, or Robert Norton, or why Koros told me Fill had been paying the stolen money back.

None of it explained why Sweetie Fairbairn had run, either.

The tea had gone vile, and I'd gone cold. I climbed the ladders down to the fifth floor, then to the fourth. It was as I was going down the stairs to the third floor that I heard the noise from my would-be office on the second.

It was my cell phone, vibrating itself into a frenzy on the card table. I thumbed in the code, and listened.

“Mr. Elstrom.” George Koros sounded panicked. “Andrew Fill is dead. It's on the radio. Please call me.”

It could have been a warning, meant to stop me from going those last miles to Andrew Fill's place. Certainly, it didn't sound like a message from a cunning killer.

That blew up what little fancy thinking I'd done up on the roof, as surely as the drunks along Thompson Avenue had blown up the night.

CHAPTER 34.

“Interesting message you left yesterday, Mr. Koros.” I said, when I called him the next morning. It was a new day for everyone, and I wanted to begin mine by setting his on edge.

“I heard about Andrew on the midnight news, and realized I'd sent you into a murder investigation.” He paused for a deep breath. “Recovering what's left of Sweetie's money—money she'll need to get her head fixed, money she'll need for her defense—that was my priority. Now, with Andrew dead, we'll never find the money…”

“You're still thinking Ms. Fairbairn is sick?”

“Why else would she behave as she has? I don't know what happened to Andrew; the radio said there was a fire of some sort. Sweetie's guard sure didn't shoot himself, and she sure as hell wouldn't have given away all her money if she were thinking right. She's sick.”

“You're thinking she did all that?”

“I need to get her into a treatment facility. The right doctors will make sure she stays there, instead of standing trial.”

“Only if we find her.”

“She'll surface when she's ready. She's tough; she's safe.”

“Some would say you could have taken that half million, George.”

His voice quivered, maybe from anger, maybe from fear. “Me?”

“Sure. You said yourself you managed the Symposium's checking account. You were in a position to withdraw money.”

For a moment he was silent. “You're right,” he said finally. “I had that responsibility.”

“I'm going to keep looking for her, George.”

“It'll be a waste of time.”

“I'll stay in touch.”

He took another moment, then said, “All right. I'm going to messenger over a corporate Visa card for you. Be prudent with it, Mr. Elstrom, but use it to find her.”

I hung up without saying that using his credit card would pinpoint exactly where I was, and from that, he would know what I was doing.

I figured he already knew that.

*   *   *

I called Jenny. “Let me tell you about my second trip to Indiana,” I said, and did.

“You're lucky that little man on the bicycle didn't put the finger on you,” she said when I was done.

“He saw me as an innocent man.”

“He saw you as the guy who gave him fifty bucks to keep his mouth shut. That's a lot of recycled cans.”

I asked her to check out Sweetie's life before she came to Chicago.

“How far back do you want me to go?”

“The day she was born. She might have gone back to one of the places she's been.”

“You still think George Koros has a secret?”

“I still think he has a thousand of them.”

*   *   *

I called the Bohemian next. “Can you put me in touch with Silas Fairbairn's closest friend?”

“Have you consulted your lawyer, the esteemed John Peet, about whether it's wise for you to continue nosing around Sweetie Fairbairn's life?”

“She's still my client. She's still missing.”

“You're still the object of police interest, not to mention press scrutiny.”

“I can't sit back, waiting for her to reappear on her own.”

“Big doubt, now?”

“I no longer think she's free to come back.”

CHAPTER 35.

The Bohemian had asked for a day but only took an hour. “Gillman Tripp was Silas Fairbairn's most frequent golf partner. He'll see you midafternoon, in the bar at the Arrow Way Golf Club. He's wearing yellow slacks and a white shirt.”

I got to the Arrow Way at three o'clock. It was tucked down a long private drive lined with gnarled, ancient evergreen trees. The gentlemen moving slowly to and from the Cadillacs and Mercedes in the parking lot were gnarled and ancient, too. With its aged membership and total seclusion, Arrow Way looked to offer a place where rich old men could play golf without wearing pants, either from preference or forgetfulness, and no one else would see well enough to mind.

The bar was at the back of the low brick clubhouse. There wasn't a dark hair on any of the men, but all of them appeared to be wearing pants. Three of them, in particular, were wearing yellow pants, with white shirts. One, sitting at a table by himself, waved me over.

“Mr. Elstrom? Gillman Tripp.” We shook hands, and I sat down.

I guessed he was well past eighty, but there was no sallowness to his skin. It was browned from the sun, and reddened on the nose and cheeks from what I imagined was a fourth or fifth gin and tonic.

“Like a drink?” he asked.

“Just a Coke.”

He called a waitress over and ordered my Coke and another reddener for himself.

“Anton Chernak told me you're helping to look for Sweetie Fairbairn?”

“I am.”

“You're the one whose name was in the paper? The one who found her with that dead guard?”

“My name was in the paper, yes.”

He leaned forward to study my shirt. I realized I should have worn the good one the Bohemian bought me. “How the hell can you afford John Peet?”

“I suspect he's praying my innocence will minimize his time.”

Gillman Trip barked out a laugh, leaned back, and said, “What can I tell you?”

“Where is Sweetie Fairbairn from?”

He laughed again, all gin, tonic, and mirth. “We all wondered about that, but none of us ever found out. All I know is Silas brought her home after a visit to one of his factories.”

“Do you remember which factory?”

“I do not. What I remember was thinking this was no chickadee. Sweetie was well into her forties at that time. That can be a desperate age for a certain kind of woman without means. I was convinced that Silas had bit it this time, for sure.”

“She acted like a hustler?”

“No. It's just that Silas was a very wealthy man, smart in the ways of manufacturing, utterly obtuse in the ways of women. It was natural to conclude he'd fallen as easy prey.”

Our drinks came. His hand was steady on the new glass as he raised it to his lips. After a sip and a smile, he continued.

“I was wrong, of course. We all were. Sweetie adored Silas, and he adored her. I got the impression he'd been pursuing her for quite some time, and that she'd only reluctantly agreed to marry him.”

“What made you think she was reluctant?”

“In the beginning she was … she was…” He stopped to fuel his memory with another sip at the gin. “Nervous. That's the right word: nervous.”

“Nervous, how?”

“When we were out to dinner, those first times, she was pleasant enough, a real charming lady, but she was always looking around, like she was afraid someone would come up to her to tell her she didn't belong. It was understandable. A girl from the sticks, a factory-working girl, gets swept off her feet by a rich industrialist. No matter that she's older and has solid values, she's entered a world where she doesn't belong.” He sighed. “At least, that's the way I saw it, in the beginning.”

“You changed your mind?”

“I began to consider the possibility that something else was causing her nervousness. She was always guarded, careful to not say much about herself. Silas was evasive about her as well. Her nervousness settled down, after a few months, but a little of that evasiveness always remained, in both of them.”

“I don't suppose you ever caught a hint of her maiden name?”

He smiled. “I never got a hint about her real first name, either.”

I wished for a small board at that instant, something to strike the side of my thick, unthinking head. “‘Sweetie' was just a nickname?”

He gave me a pitying look and said, as though to a child, “No mother names her kid ‘Sweetie.' It was what Silas called her, and that was good enough for us.”

He had another gin and tonic, I had another Coke, and we went over all of it again, but he'd gotten it all out the first time. There'd never been much to know about Sweetie Fairbairn.

*   *   *

I called the Bohemian from the Arrow Way parking lot.

“You had a productive conversation with Gillman Tripp?” he asked.

“Yes, but it's led to more questions. Can you find out the factories Silas Fairbairn owned?”

“There weren't very many, as I recall. They made wiring harnesses for cars and trucks. Hold on.”

He came back in five minutes. “Only three plants, Vlodek. One in Florida, one in Tennessee, and one in Missouri.” He named towns I'd never heard of. “Rural operations. Cheap labor. Farm wives, mostly, pulling wires around posts nailed to big sheets of plywood. Silas sold them the year before he died.”

“Are they still in operation?”

“I have no idea. You can call to verify that.”

“Thank you.”

“Stay out of the news, Vlodek.”

*   *   *

I called Jenny when I got back to the turret.

“Nothing yet on her background, Dek. I spent two hours online at the newspaper archives, and then I called around to the people who used to do celebrity columns when newspapers still had money for such things. Everybody on the social ladder in Chicago knows her, but nobody seems to know about her, at least not of her life before she married Silas. That's unusual, for someone as prominent as Sweetie Fairbairn.”

“One of Silas's old golfing buddies originally thought she might have been embarrassed over her origins.”

“Originally?”

“He came around to another conclusion.”

“That she deliberately obscured her past?”

“Bingo,” I said.

CHAPTER 36.

Before I'd gone to bed the previous night, the Internet told me that all three Fairbairn Wire and Cable assembly plants were still making wiring harnesses for automobiles, trucks, and appliances.

By ten o'clock the next morning, a FedEx driver had delivered an overnight envelope containing the Visa card George Koros said he'd send along.

By twelve o'clock, I knew, from the telephone, that none of the Fairbairn plants was big enough to have a full-fledged human resources department, that each relied on a single clerk to do the personnel work. None of the three clerks had been working for Fairbairn Wire back when Sweetie might have been there, which I guessed was at least ten years before, but each of the clerks had just learned, through the twin miracles of gossip grapevines and cable television news, that Silas's widow had disappeared, up in Chicago, following the murder of her bodyguard. None of the clerks had ever heard of Silas befriending any woman in their plant, and each supposed that if such a thing had happened, everyone in town would have known about one of their own striking it rich.

So, by noon, I was done, smacked flat against a dead end.

And I was out of Ho Hos.

The Ho Hos I could do something about. I went outside and took the wood trays of flowers off the Jeep's hood, top, and spare tire. Using the flowers to convert the Jeep into a multitiered lawn planter had worked so far—Benny Fittle had issued me no tickets—but the victory was temporary; a lizard was surely at work drafting a new lawn decoration code, specifically prohibiting the use of red Jeeps. For now, though, my potted, planted Jeep represented a victory and, as such, deserved to be celebrated. With Ho Hos.

I headed east, toward the supermarket, but then responsibility slapped a sudden, shocking hand against me and forced me to do something I hadn't done in a month. I took a hard left turn and bobbed onto the cratered parking lot of the Rivertown Health Center. Dropping the transmission into first gear, as one would to navigate the surface of the moon, I eased the Jeep over the potholes to my usual spot next to the doorless Buick that had rested there for decades. There would be Ho Hos—but first there must be exercise.

It was midday. There were still a few hours before the thumpers, Rivertown's least-evolved grade of criminal, would arrive. Delinquents from the high schools, and in some cases the grammar schools, thumpers were trainees, interns of a sort. They came to the health center parking lot to study at the studded boots of the more hardened scumbags who congregated at dusk to sell their powders, plan their burglaries, and decide which automobiles might offer the most reward from disassembly that night.