Hunting Sweetie Rose : A Mystery (9781429950879) (22 page)

I made sure both of the Jeep's doors were unlocked, so that even the most untutored of an early-bird hoodlum could see that the radio had already been ripped out, grabbed the gym bag I keep in the backseat, and went in.

I changed into my gym duds under the supposedly dozing eye of the locker room attendant. I never bring a lock to dull his bolt cutters, and always take my wallet and keys with me. Still, I'm sure he always does a fast search of my locker before he returns to his nap, if only as a matter of self-respect.

Frankie was roosting on a broken exercise cycle upstairs, regaling Dusty, Nick, and the other retirees with the same jokes he'd been telling since the factories used to pulse in Rivertown. Dusty, Nick, and the others never waited for Frankie's last line to begin laughing. They knew the jokes. What counted were the words and the laughs from their pasts, reminders of times when their knees were steady and the backs of their hands hadn't yet darkened from enlarging veins and spreading spots of brown. They waved me over. I shook my head. I had to run.

I'd built up a high sweat when, thirty minutes later, my cell phone rang. It was Miss Logsdon, one of the personnel clerks I'd talked to earlier that day. She worked at the Fairbairn assembly plant in Whitaker Springs, Missouri.

“I believe I've found someone you might be interested in speaking with, Mr. Elstrom. One of our longer-term employees told me of a woman who used to work here a number of years ago. Her name is Linda Coombs.”

I leaned against a wall, trying to not pant like a St. Bernard. “She remembers someone Silas Fairbairn had a relationship with?”

“Unfortunately, I don't know what Ms. Coombs remembers. All our employee remembers is that Linda Coombs once said that Silas Fairbairn was involved with a woman from Whitaker Springs. Our employee doesn't think the woman's name was Sweetie, though.”

“Do you have a phone number for Linda Coombs?”

“Ms. Coombs has no phone, and lives on the outskirts of town. I don't have the names of any of her neighbors, and I don't want to intrude on anyone's privacy. I'm afraid you'll have to arrange a visit if you want your questions answered.”

I thanked her and hung up. My breathing had slowed. Certainly, the news justified suspension of any further exercise. I headed for the showers, my mind firing thoughts of an airplane trip and an expedition-sized bag of Ho Hos.

*   *   *

I called the bankcard company from the turret, to activate Koros's Visa, and the nice lady asked if I wanted to activate the ATM feature as well. I said you betcha, real fast, and logged on to their Web site to provide a PIN. Two hours later, just to be confusing, I'd stopped at four ATMs on my way to Midway Airport and withdrawn the two-thousand-dollar maximum that was available for the month. Koros would get receipts, and an accurate accounting of my expenses, but he wasn't going to find out where I was searching for Sweetie Fairbairn until I'd finished.

I caught a last-minute flight to Kansas City. In Missouri, I rented a tiny Ford, pointed it southwest, and got to Whitaker Springs at dusk.

The town looked about as I'd expected—three blocks of tired storefronts, half of which were empty. A drive-in called the Dairy Delight stood in the middle of the middle block. Three older men wearing overalls sat outside on a picnic bench, eating sundaes. I pulled over and powered down the window.

“Is there a motel in this town?”

One man nodded. “Marge's,” he said, “right around the next corner.” He said it would be a fine place to spend an evening or two. In fact, he added, he said he could guarantee it, since Marge herself was his cousin on his mother's side of the family.

Marge's Stop and Rest was a single-story white building with a
VACANCY
sign in the window and nothing parked in its lot. Marge Herself told me I could have my pick of rooms, as they had vacancies at the moment. And, she added demurely, a very select number of those very rooms had original marine art, painted directly on the walls by her Daughter Herself. If that sounded appealing, she especially recommended the room next door to the office.

I've never been one to turn away from free art, nor had I ever thought that art in a motel room mattered, one way or another. I was wrong. As soon as I stepped into my room, I realized I'd rather be bunking with Norman and what was left of his mother at the Bates Motel. The original art on my wall consisted of octopuses, dolphins, and a bloated manatee, painted in what Daughter Herself must have imagined to be playful poses. They were not. The sea creatures were all frozen in contortion, their eyes bulging as though they were suffering the last spasms of painful deaths.

Even worse than their popping eyes were their teeth. Either Daughter Herself did not know what was in the mouths of octopuses, dolphins, and manatees, or she had issues that demanded psychiatry. For instead of teeth, she'd given her sea creatures long, saw-toothed fangs, and tinted them in varying shades of pink, as though blood were washing from them as they writhed away their last seconds.

It was art to induce nightmares. I threw my duffel on the bed and went out.

By now the sky and most everything along Main Street were dark. I walked down to the Dairy Delight and told the young girl behind the window that I'd like to be delighted. When that dropped a blank veil over her features, I told her I'd have two cheeseburgers, an order of fries, and a cherry Coke. She smiled with relief.

The three men eating sundaes I'd seen earlier were gone. Every table was now filled with the youth of Whitaker Springs, set frantically alive by the smells, sounds, and possibilities of a midwest midsummer night. It would be no place to savor fine cuisine. Yet I dared not bring the food back to my room, for fear that the smells and sounds of me eating would excite the pained painted creatures and draw them from the walls.

I went down to the end of the block, to a bench in front of a vacant hardware store that had a sheriff's foreclosure notice in its window. I sat and ate and watched boys, in old cars with new, big-pipe exhausts, rumble back and forth past the Dairy Delight. Whitaker Springs seemed as good a place as any to while away a summer night. And I supposed it could have been as good a place as any for a woman to meet a rich man who'd buy her a new life in a big city.

CHAPTER 37.

“Sleep well, Mr. Elstrom?” Marge Herself asked when I came into the motel office the next morning, looking for coffee. She stood illuminated in the sunlight coming in through the window. I hoped she wouldn't open her mouth to give me a full smile; I was afraid I'd see pink on her teeth.

“Very well.” There was no need to say that I'd mumbled a few incantations before I'd climbed into bed, or that I'd thought to leave the bathroom light on all night.

She nodded her head in short little bobs, prompting me to go on.

“Your daughter certainly has a knack for painting things in new ways,” I said, pouring coffee into a foam cup.

Her face flushed with pride. I took my coffee out to the micro-Ford before she could offer a tour of the galleries in the other rooms.

*   *   *

Miss Logsdon at the Fairbairn plant had given me good directions. I got to Linda Coombs's place in just a few minutes.

It had been years since the house had been touched with paint and brush, but the windows were clean, and the yard had been carefully mowed. I parked on what was left of the asphalt drive and walked up. A gray-haired woman opened the door a crack.

“Ms. Linda Coombs?”

She nodded.

“My name's Elstrom. I was told you might have worked with the woman who became Silas Fairbairn's wife.”

“Now why in the hell would someone tell you that?”

“Because Sweetie Fairbairn has gone missing.”

“That's the name: ‘Sweetie'?”

“May I come in?”

“You may not. I'll come out.”

Come out she did, in worn jeans, a man's red knit shirt, and lavender flip-flops.

I handed her a photo of Sweetie Fairbairn I'd printed off the Internet. “Do you know her?”

She held it out and studied it for a long minute. Then she nodded. “Older, but yeah.”

“What do you know about her?”

“First thing you got to know, mister, is I'm broke. Damned broke. Second thing is I know that any woman who married Silas Fairbairn isn't broke. Third thing, anybody who is sent looking for her must be getting paid, and isn't broke, either.” She stopped, so I could consider the meaning of her words.

I gave her a twenty-dollar bill. “Another will follow when we're done, if your information goes beyond what I already know.” I knew nothing about Sweetie's background, but I didn't want the woman to start lying for money.

She put the twenty in her jeans. “First off, Kathy didn't work at the plant. She waitressed at a diner that used to be in town. My sister and I ate there ham night, which was Tuesdays. That's how we got to know her. We liked the ham.”

“Do you remember Kathy's last name?”

“Don't know that I ever knew it. Kathy wasn't much for talking, at least not at first. Nervous, rabbitty-like, she was always looking out the front window like she was expecting bad news. Cautious with the customers, too; took our orders, hustled them back, so she wouldn't have to talk again until the food came out. But over time, she relaxed a bit, leastways around Agnes and me, and took to jawing with us when nothing else demanded her attention. We got to be quite conversational, if not friends exactly, those Tuesday nights.”

“Silas Fairbairn would come to the diner?”

“No sir, not Mr. Fairbairn, least not so I ever saw. He used to come to town once every month or so, meet with the people at the plant. Usually, he'd stay over one night, sometimes two, probably ate with the big shots somewheres away. There wasn't much going on in Whitaker Springs, cuisine-wise, then as now.”

She made a small laugh at that and went on. “Twice, maybe three times, me and Agnes, leaving as we did at closing time, noticed somebody sitting in a car a few stores down. Anybody waiting for anything in this town, especially in the dark, was cause for our curiosity. We got interested in who was sitting in that car. So one night, instead of heading right home after our dinner, we ducked between two buildings and waited. Ten, fifteen minutes later, out came Kathy, and got into that waiting car. As it passed under the streetlight, we could see who was driving. Could have knocked me over with a pincushion. It was Mr. Silas Fairbairn himself.”

“You ever learn where they were went?”

She winked, made a circle with her left thumb and forefinger, and put her right forefinger through it. “A rich man on the road's got needs, same as any man. I figured they were off to the woods or something, to take care of things.”

“Kathy ever say anything about him?”

“She was supposed to announce she was screwing some rich guy, maybe for money?”

“How long did this go on?”

“Most likely until she left, a few months later. Up and out without so much as a see-you-later, the woman who owned the diner said. No one knew where she took off to.”

“But you did? Or at least who she went with?”

“No. I never did connect her leaving to Mr. Fairbairn.”

“You never tried to find out?”

“She was gone; we were here. End of story.”

“Did she ever say where she was from?”

Linda Coombs paused, looking down the ruts at the tiny Ford I'd driven up in.

“That ain't yours, is it?”

“It's a rental.”

“How much?”

“Fifty bucks, with taxes.” I didn't tell her that was a day rate, worried she'd think I was an idiot.

It didn't work. “I'll need a total of fifty before I say anything more.”

I handed her a ten and another twenty. “Where was she from?”

“She never said direct, but she implied it was the same kind of rinky-dink town as Whitaker Springs, except hers was up somewhere on the Mississippi River, in Minnesota or Wisconsin. Biggest thing in town was a statue of an Indian, Chief Runamuck, or Whackamock, or some damned thing. They lit it up all to hell at dusk. Folks came up to it most nights, leastways in the summer, because they didn't have anything else to do.” She laughed. “We ever build such a thing around here, folks will go to that nights, too.”

*   *   *

I called Leo's cell phone.

“Are you at home?” I asked. An electric bass thumped in his background.

“Of course.” His voice was barely audible above the bass.

“That noise?”

“Ma and her friends.”

I checked my watch. It was ten o'clock. “They're doing mornings now?”

“Mrs. Roshiska bought a shoe box full of videos after bingo. They started at one in the morning. I've been in here all night.”

The electric bass thumped faster.

“You're in your office?”

“Ma had the guy who's doing the basement put in a door. A thick door. It didn't help.” He dropped his voice. “Did you hear that?”

“All I can hear is bass.”

“There it is again. Hear it?”

“What are you talking about?”

“Things, hitting my new door.”

“Leo, you need to get some sleep.”

“Ma says I can't come out once they've started exercising.”

“But it's been nine hours.”

“They take breaks, for vodka.”

“Go see Endora at the Newberry. Have lunch in the park across the street.”

“I told you: Ma says once they start up, I have to stay in until they're done.” His voice dropped again. He was struggling for control. “I'm afraid.”

“Of what?”

“Of the future.”

“You need to sleep. But first, I need you to do something for me.”

“Anything. Anything, so long as it keeps me from wondering what Ma, the other ladies, Mrs. Roshiska, leaning on her walker…”