Hunting Sweetie Rose : A Mystery (9781429950879) (31 page)

Leo stopped the van. “Look at the turret door.”

Even from a distance, I could see the long scratches around the lock, fresh and white against the dark wood. They looked like claw marks made by an animal.

“Someone was anxious to pay me a visit,” I said.

“Let's call the cops.”

I looked at Jenny's Prius. “In a moment.”

He pulled forward another twenty feet, angling the van to best shine the high beams on the tarp. I was just reaching for the door handle when his hand shot out and grabbed the back of my shirt collar.

“No,” he said.

The shiny plastic hadn't been laid out flat on the ground. It was covering something. Something mounded.

I pushed his hand away, opened the door, and slid off the seat to stand on the ground. For a second, I teetered from the pain, and from what I knew, in my gut, was under the tarp.

“I'm calling the cops,” Leo's voice said, from far away.

I headed for the tarp. There was no doubt what the shape was, covered up.

My right side was throbbing around the stitches. I moved slowly, suddenly in no hurry to see what was under that tarp.

I bent down, pulled back a corner.

I saw a woman's naked foot.

CHAPTER 55.

A new pair of high bright headlamps angled onto me.

“Stop!” a cigarette-roughened voice yelled.

“I need to see.” I tried to shout, but it hurt my side. I started toward the opposite end of the tarp. The head end.

“Hey, I was the one who called,” Leo yelled.

“Damn it, step away!” Cigarette Voice called out.

Car doors slammed. Two long shadows came running up. A hard hand clamped the back of my neck.

“That's far enough,” the second voice said, next to me.

Rivertown uniforms, the cops Leo had called.

“Your hands,” the cop with his hand on my neck said. “Show me your hands.”

I turned toward him, hands out, so he could see they were empty.

“We're the ones who called,” I said, dumbly mimicking Leo. It was all I could think to say.

The second cop's hand relaxed on my neck as the cigarette-voiced cop moved around the tarp. He knelt at the head end and pulled back the corner.

The body lay facedown, its hair white and colorless in the glare of the headlamps. It could have been blond.

For sure, it wasn't dark, it wasn't lustrous. It wasn't Jenny.

Air came into my lungs then, sweet and cool in the summer night.

“Female. Older. Dead,” the kneeling cop said in his cigarette voice.

“Who is it?” Jenny said, behind us.

The cop's hand on my neck fell away. I turned with him. She stood ten feet back, a dark shape in the white glare of the headlights.

“You are?” Cigarette Voice asked, looking up.

“The reporter broad that's been rousting Mr. Derbil,” the cop next to me said. “What are you doing here, lady?”

“I was driving by, and thought I'd take another look at city hall. Marvelous architecture. Spur-of-the-moment thing. Then I saw you come up.”

Both of the uniforms must have recognized a lie, but they were smart enough to not antagonize her. She was the fire under one of their own, Elvis Derbil.

“There's no story for you here,” the cop next to me said. “Please wait out by the street.”

Another car pulled up. Jenny turned and started walking toward Leo. I took a step to join them.

“Not you. You stay,” the kneeling cop said, standing up.

Two Rivertown detectives got out of the car and came over.

“Quite a party you guys are having,” one of them said, staring at the shape beneath the tarp. He had whiskey on his breath, and a soft slur to his words. He'd been enjoying an evening of free fuel at one of the tonks along Thompson Avenue. “Who's the stiff?”

The smoker cop bent and pulled back the tarp.

I had to look for a number of seconds, to be sure.

“Darlene Taylor, I think,” I heard myself say.

“You kill her?” one of the detectives, probably the sharpest, asked.

“Sure. Then I covered her up on my property so there would be no doubt, and called you guys to arrest me.”

“Wiseass,” Cigarette Voice said.

“You need to call Lieutenant Plinnit of the Chicago police,” I said. “He's got a bulletin out on her.”

“For what?”

“Call Plinnit. You're going to want to hand off this crime scene before an army of reporters gets here.”

As though on cue, Jenny's Channel 8 News van rolled up and stopped. She must have called her station before she'd approached the tarp.

“You got a number for this Plinnit?” the detective asked quickly.

“Ms. Gale over there does,” I said.

He walked back to the street.

Cigarette Voice covered up Darlene, and then nobody moved. We stood, the Rivertown uniforms and one detective and me, white as plaster statues in the headlamp beams shining on us from the street, while the other detective talked to Jenny.

The same bearded, burly cameraman I'd seen the day Elvis was arrested got out of the news van. The detectives glared at him.

I looked down at the ground. Almost everything I'd come to believe about Sweetie Fairbairn lay dead under the shiny blue tarp just inches from my feet.

Plinnit arrived, too quickly for him to be responding to the Rivertown detective's call. Jenny must have called him, too, after she'd called her newsroom.

Plinnit had brought a van and two evidence technicians from the Cook County Sheriff's Office. The evidence team looked at us, standing around the blue tarp, mucking up the crime scene, and told us to move away, fast.

As I walked toward the street, someone moving well behind the small throng of people caught my eye. I thought I recognized the man's skulking gait as Elvis Derbil's, but his being around city hall so close to midnight didn't make sense.

By now, Jenny had gone to talk with her cameraman. Perhaps pointedly, perhaps not, she wasn't looking anywhere near where I'd seen Elvis. I walked over to Leo.

“Did you see the face?” he asked.

“Darlene Taylor.”

“Who does that leave?”

He'd asked it rhetorically. I didn't need to answer him. We both knew Sweetie Fairbairn was the only one left.

I stayed with Leo, well back of Plinnit's crew. I looked at the river, rippling silver in the moonlight, and at the turret, blindingly white in the glare of all the lights. I did not look at Jenny, now filming with her cameraman. I did not look at the people clustered around the corpse.

After a time, a technician stood up from the body. He and Plinnit came to the street, and found me.

“At least a day,” the tech was saying to Plinnit. Then, to me, “The tarp has been here?”

“Yes, covering my ladders in back.”

“We'll check it for prints,” the tech said to Plinnit and walked away.

Plinnit turned to me. “Popped up in the thick of it again, I see.”

“This is my home. I pop up every day here, usually before dawn.”

“Your local detectives said you identified her as Darlene Taylor?”

“I believe I saw that woman coming out of George Koros's building. She startled me into thinking, for an instant, that she was Sweetie Fairbairn. The family resemblance was certainly there in those yearbook photos.”

“What about behind her home in Hadlow? Didn't you see her there as well, when she allegedly assaulted you?”

“It was dark.”

“It's motive. She shot you; you wanted revenge.”

“I just got back from Hadlow. Ellie Ball had a deputy tail us to the county line. She can verify I couldn't have gotten back here in time to kill Darlene Taylor.”

“How do you know when Darlene Taylor died?” he asked, but the enthusiasm was gone from his voice. No doubt I'd disappoint him by having an alibi once again.

“There's something else.” I told him about the scratches on my front door.

Plinnit left us for a moment and came back with a uniformed officer and one of the evidence techs. We walked over to the door.

“You say the scratches are new?” Plinnit asked me, looking at the marks around the handle.

“Someone wanted in.”

“Me, too, now,” Plinnit said.

We waited for the crime scene technician to finish pressing some sort of tape on the lock for fingerprints. When he was done, Plinnit put on fresh gloves and pressed the thumb latch. The door swung open.

“You're sure you locked it?” Plinnit asked me.

“Yes.”

I reached in past him to switch on the light, then moved aside to allow Plinnit and the uniformed officer to go in first. Finding a corpse alongside the turret had whetted my appetite for caution. Considering that the killer might now be inside my turret provoked outright fear.

Jenny and her cameraman had come up to the door. “Not you,” Plinnit said to them. They stepped back onto the lawn.

“Charming,” the lieutenant said, of the plastic conversational grouping I'd arranged around the table saw.

“Upstairs is better.” Leo had followed us in. “The lawn chairs up there are webbed.”

“You live here?” Plinnit asked him, ready to throw him out.

“I hang around whenever Mr. Elstrom needs protection,” Leo said.

Plinnit looked at me. I nodded. It was a laugh, but it could be true enough, for that night.

“What's out of place?” Plinnit asked.

“Everything looks as I left it.”

Plinnit and the uniformed officer signaled for Leo and me to wait on the first floor as they walked the second floor, and then the ones above that.

Sometime later, they came down.

“We checked all five floors. Nobody's here now,” Plinnit said.

The uniformed officer went out the front door. Plinnit, Leo, and I went up to the kitchen. They sat on the webbed chairs, and I made coffee as though I needed to get wired.

“Interesting coffee,” Plinnit said, grimacing at his first sip.

“I get it on sale where Leo gets his shirts.”

Plinnit raised his cup in a sort of vague salute to Leo. “Tastes as good as your shirts look, certainly.”

“Thank you,” Leo said.

“How soon will you make a positive identification?” I asked.

“I'll send photos up to your friend Ellie Ball. She'll find someone who knew Darlene Taylor.”

He looked at me and waited.

After I said nothing, he said, “Any thoughts, Elstrom?”

I took another sip, pretending to consider. “You may be right. This coffee is really lousy.”

“Sweetie Fairbairn,” he said.

“I'm not seeing motive, Lieutenant.”

“Best motive of all: self-defense,” he said. “Darlene Taylor and George Koros came at Sweetie Fairbairn to bleed her dry, and they killed her guard to do it. Ms. Fairbairn could have killed Darlene to keep from getting killed herself.”

“OK,” I said.

“Or not OK, if Sweetie Fairbairn hired you to kill her sister,” he said.

“Ask Ellie Ball, when you send up the pictures. I couldn't have been down here when Darlene was killed.”

“Again: You know her time of death, how?”

“For now, I'm supposing she's been dead for some hours this evening. If I'm wrong, I've got a problem.”

“Why would Sweetie Fairbairn want to lay this on you, Elstrom?”

“She didn't shoot me in Hadlow, Lieutenant. Besides, I can't see her coming out here to dump Darlene's body.”

“Unless it was to set you up even more. Listen to me. You're over your head. Loyalty's OK, but you're dumb to stick to it longer than you should. You're being set up, and now you've really got something to worry about.”

“I'm betting your ME will show Darlene has been dead for hours, and Mr. Brumsky will tell you I've been with him, driving down from Minnesota.”

Plinnit looked over at Leo.

“Once we've negotiated an appropriate fee,” Leo said to him.

Plinnit scowled. “You're missing the point,” he said to me. “Big things are being dumped around you: Sweetie Fairbairn's guard, Koros and his murder weapon, now the dead Darlene Taylor. That's groundwork, Elstrom. You're being set up for a grand finale, the last big event.”

“More coffee?” I asked.

“Someone didn't slip your lock for nothing, Elstrom.”

“I'll look around, but I doubt anything's missing.”

“He has nothing worth taking,” Leo added, to be helpful.

“Damn it, Elstrom,” Plinnit said.

I knew, but I played anyway. “OK, Lieutenant; what's the next big event?”

“Your corpse, to end the show.”

CHAPTER 56.

So it went, until three in the morning. Plinnit never got satisfied with what I was telling him. I didn't, either. I could not figure why Darlene Taylor turned up dead behind my turret, or who could benefit from that.

Surely, after Leo and Plinnit helped me walk all five floors, I could not figure out how anyone had benefited from breaking into the turret. Nothing was missing.

Finally, we walked out into the night. By then, the Channel 8 News van and Plinnit's crew had left. Oddly, Jenny's Prius was still there, but she might have hitched a ride back to the studio with her cameraman, to process footage, or whatever newspeople did in the middle of the night.

A dark sedan also remained, parked back toward Thompson Avenue.

“My people, to keep you alive, at least until I can verify Darlene Taylor's time of death,” Plinnit said.

Leo pulled a parking ticket from his windshield. “Damn it,” he said.

Plinnit had gotten one, too. “What the hell is this?” he asked, ripping it from beneath his windshield wiper.

I pointed up at the sign. “Parking citation. You've parked in a fire lane.”

“I'm a police officer.”

“I'll call you tomorrow,” Leo said.

“I'll call you tomorrow, too,” Plinnit said, “after I learn your alibi doesn't check out.”