Hunting Sweetie Rose : A Mystery (9781429950879) (28 page)

I spoke fast, to beat him to it. “Koros and Darlene didn't have to kill all those people to get at Sweetie's money. They only had to kill one person: Sweetie Fairbairn herself. Darlene was Sweetie's closest surviving relative. Even with a will cutting her out, she could make claim against at least some of those millions.”

He smiled and stood up, happy that I'd seen his logic, and helped me to my feet. We started toward the rental van.

I looked past him, at the high school kids circling each other at the front of the Would You? Boys, shaggy and scruffy, too cool to comb; girls, studiedly casual, too eager to not be eager. All of them were full of themselves, full to bursting, full of the night. It seemed like a thousand years since I'd felt a summer's evening that way—the heat, the musk, that special young lust for almost everything.

Then I saw the sheriff's cruiser, parked a bit too far down the block.

“We'll start for Chicago first thing in the morning?” Leo asked, still strutting brain-wise, as we got in the van.

I didn't answer. He drove us away in silence, enjoying his crafty refutation of my theories about Sweetie Fairbairn. I watched the outside mirror. After a mile I was sure.

“Sweetie Fairbairn was a philanthropist,” I said. “She'd have had an ironclad will, leaving money only to those charities she believed in, not to some sister she hadn't had contact with in forty years.”

He groaned.

“We're of interest here,” I said.

“What are you talking about?”

“Those headlamps following us.”

He checked the rearview.

“They belong to the sheriff's car that was parked down the street from the Would You? Ellie Ball wants to know what we're up to.”

“Which means?”

“Tomorrow, we ask her why.”

CHAPTER 48.

The next morning, a sheriff's car was parked right in front of my door when I stepped out with thin, room-brewed coffee to smell the day.

“Mr. Elstrom?” the deputy asked, getting out. “The sheriff would like you to come to her office.”

“Come, or be brought?”

He shrugged.

I said we'd be there in an hour, and went to knock on Leo's door.

*   *   *

“Been out to the Taylor place recently?” Sheriff Ball asked as Leo and I sat down.

Her office had a glass-topped table, four chairs, and a window that looked out over a small parking lot. She'd decorated her walls with photos of uniformed officers. Some of the photos were old, yellowed with age.

“Yesterday evening,” I said.

“Both of you?”

“Just me.”

“In spite of just being shot, you felt well enough to drive?”

“Piece of cake.”

“What were you doing out there?”

“Wondering, like you, if Darlene was around, and whether there was anything out there that might incriminate her in her sister's disappearance.”

“And in your shooting?”

“That's of some interest, yes.”

“You smashed your way in?” She turned to look at the purple iridescence, spotted here and there with shell shapes of orange and light blue that, today, was Leo.

Leo smiled.

“Nah,” I said. “I just pushed some cardboard back from an unlocked window.”

“You then crawled through, twisting your wounded side?” Ellie Ball asked.

“I'm agile, even in pain.”

She let the lie go. “What did you find?”

“Gossip magazines and adult clothes—and kid clothes, for someone twelve, fourteen years old.”

“Alta's clothes,” she said.

“After all this time?”

“I've heard Darlene never got over her sister's death,” she said.

“The mother died earlier that year?”

“January or February. Though she was only a senior in high school, Darlene was quite fierce about keeping the family together. She and Rosemary, a junior at the time, alternated days, so one would always be home with Alta.”

“What was wrong with Alta, that she needed constant care?”

“She was a high-tempered girl, small physically, but very intelligent. Did well in the primary grades. Then, around junior high, she contracted a virus that apparently caused some damage. They pulled her out of school, and that was the last folks saw of Alta Taylor.”

“After high school, Darlene worked janitorial at night?”

“Also so she could be home days, to take care of Alta.”

“What did the mother die of?”

“Fell and hit her head. Where's this going, Mr. Elstom?”

“Why did you pull us in here?”

“I'm always interested in trespassers.”

“There was an autopsy for the mother?”

“Why would you ask that?”

“Isn't an autopsy expected, in cases of questionable death?”

“Nothing about it was questionable. Darlene saw her mother fall. Besides, we were poor rural, then as now. No money laying around for an unnecessary autopsy.”

“No autopsy for Alta, either?”

“No mystery there, either.”

“What did she die of?”

“Sickness of some sort.”

“A lot happened to the Taylor family that year,” I said. “The mother dies early, in January or February. In April, a gas station attendant gets killed—”

Sheriff Ellie Ball's eyes flashed. “Wait just a damned minute. How does that fit in?”

“Both Darlene and Rosemary were seen near the gas station that day.”

“With Georgie Korozakis, riding around in his convertible. They were kids, out joyriding. Nothing more.”

I went on. “Then Rosemary Taylor takes off, in June. Alta dies three months later. Tell me, Sheriff, have things happened that fast to other families in Hadlow?”

Ellie Ball glared at me, said nothing.

“What did Alta Taylor die of, exactly?”

“You're asking whether Darlene murdered Alta?” Her words came out exaggeratedly slow, weighted with fury.

“Whether Darlene murdered the mother, as well.” I tried to smile sweetly.

She stared at me for a long moment. Then she reached for her phone and tapped three digits.

“This is Ellie. Could you look up Alta Taylor's cause of death?” We waited in silence for longer than we should have until, finally, the sheriff nodded and hung up. “Alta Taylor died September third.”

“Cause of death?”

“She's working on that.”

For a time, Leo's insanely purple shirt was the loudest thing in the room. Then Sheriff Ball said, “I might have to call you later with Alta's cause of death.”

I stayed in my chair. “Why did Georgie Korozakis get sent away from here, with just a few weeks to go before he was to graduate?”

“Sent away? I heard his parents thought he'd have a better chance at a good college if he graduated from a higher-ranked high school than ours.”

She'd spoken in a monotone, as if she were offering up the words from practice rather than any new consideration of my question. Ellie Ball had already thought about Georgie Korozakis, plenty. Like she'd already thought about the Taylor girls, plenty. About how they all fit into that incident at the gas station.

She glanced at the telephone, as though willing it to ring with the answer about Alta's cause of death. Then she looked at her watch. “My, the time,” she said.

“Tell me it's time to let me go through the file on that gas station robbery, so we can be on our way.”

She raised her eyes, and surprised me. She smiled.

CHAPTER 49.

She walked us to a small interview room. The walls were the green of dying plants; the chairs, the pink of red plastic rubbed too many times with bleach. The ceiling tiles were yellowed, from when smoking had been allowed. I might have confessed to something, too, if I were interrogated in that room.

She came back five minutes later and set a worn large brown tie-envelope down on the scarred wood table. “It won't take you long to see there's nothing in here,” she said.

“There were never any suspects, never any leads?”

“The gas station was kind of remote.”

“Or never any real investigation?”

“The sheriff did what he could.”

“You know this?”

“You'd do well to remember I'm being hospitable, Mr. Elstrom. I could make you file a Freedom of Information Act request for this material. Given your social skills, processing your request could take weeks, months, or perhaps years.” She left the room.

“You found a nerve,” Leo said.

I lowered myself onto a chair and undid the tie on the envelope.

Ellie Ball's assessment of its contents had been right. There wasn't much inside, just three thin manila file folders, a blue wire-bound notebook, and a plastic sandwich bag containing two spent bullets.

“Though the station is old, we should assume this room is bugged,” I said, reaching for the notebook.

Leo laughed, taking a file. “Nuts. I was hoping to say something of interest.”

The notebook contained Sheriff Roy Lishkin's record of his investigation. The first page summarized the details, such as they were: Willie Dean, age twenty-four, had worked at the gas station, three miles east of Hadlow, for two years. According to the station's owner, Willie was a reliable employee, a competent mechanic, and as honest as the day was long. The station's owner could not imagine Willie having an enemy, certainly not one who would shoot him in the stomach.

Lishkin's notes made it clear, based on the fact that the station's cash drawer, beneath the counter, had been emptied, that Willie had been killed in the course of a robbery.

The next two pages recorded his interviews with eight individuals who lived out near the gas station. Five had not seen or heard anything. Each of the remaining three remembered seeing the Taylor girls breezing along with Georgie Korozakis in his convertible, the day of the robbery. All three had known the Taylor girls since they were little. None thought it remotely possible they could have had anything to do with the murder.

“You'll find the files interesting,” Leo said when I looked up after reading Lishkin's notes a second time. He pushed them across, and I gave him the notebook.

A name had been written on each of the three file folders: George Korozakis, Darlene Taylor, Rosemary Taylor. Inside each file was a single piece of paper, apparently torn from the wire-bound notebook. Lishkin had intended to maintain a light surveillance on each of the three teenagers in the weeks and months following the killing.

Georgie Korozakis's sheet began with the date he left Hadlow, four days after the killing. According to Lishkin, he enrolled in a prep school in Connecticut. Georgie graduated two months later, remained in Connecticut for the summer to work as a clerk in a Woolworth's, and left at the end of August for a college I'd never heard of in Vermont. No entries followed after that.

Darlene Taylor's sheet had only one entry: “Remains in Hadlow.”

Rosemary's lone entry was just a few words longer: “Left Hadlow, following graduation, June 12. Per SP, no DL. Whereabouts unknown.”

“‘Per SP, no DL,'” I read aloud, from Rosemary's sheet. “Per state police, no driver's license. He tried to track her, but couldn't.”

“She must have started using aliases right away,” Leo said.

“Not only did Sheriff Lishkin not have other suspects, it looks like he gave up tracking Georgie, and trying to find Rosemary, by the end of August.”

“Certainly by September third?”

“The day Alta died.”

His twin caterpillar eyebrows rose up on his bald head. “Not very tenacious, the sheriff?”

“Or by then, he'd learned all he needed to know.”

I picked up the small bag containing the two spent bullets. They looked almost pristine, not at all damaged by their business of killing a young gas station attendant.

For a moment, I let my fingers linger on the wire tie that kept the little bag closed, wondering if anyone would notice whether one of the two was missing. I pushed the thought away; I had no gun to compare them to. I put the bag, its contents intact, back into the large envelope with the wire-bound notebook and the three thin manila file folders.

That the Taylor girls and Georgie Korozakis had been near the gas station quite naturally interested Sheriff Lishkin.

What interested me was all the blank pages in the wire-bound notebook … and why Sheriff Lishkin hadn't used one of them to write down the one question that must have haunted him to his death.

CHAPTER 50.

“Sheriff Lishkin had doubts,” I said from Ellie Ball's office doorway.

She leaned back in her chair, trying to paste surprise onto her face. It was a faint fit. “Doubts?”

“Have you gone through that material?”

“There's nothing there.”

“That says plenty. Perhaps Sheriff Lishkin's search naturally narrowed to the link between Darlene Taylor and Georgie Korozakis and the gas station robbery—”

“And Rosemary?” she interrupted. “Don't forget your Sweetie Fairbairn.”

“He quit investigating by September. That's too soon to give up on a murder investigation.”

“Roy Lishkin was a very thorough man. He did what he could, I'm sure.”

“It must have driven him crazy, not solving that case,” I said.

“What more do you want, Mr. Elstrom?”

Leo moved past me, gently dropped the file envelope on her desk, and retreated back out of the office.

“Who's still around that can tell me about Alta Taylor?”

“Alta?” She almost spat the word.

“Who knew her? Who knew what kind of shape she was in?”

“That can't matter now.”

“It does when you can't tell me what killed her. Was she able to get around by herself? Could she feed herself? Could she bathe? Why did Darlene and Rosemary have to alternate staying home, so that one was always with Alta?”