Hunting Sweetie Rose : A Mystery (9781429950879) (32 page)

“I have questions,” Jenny Galecki said, stepping into the front door light.

For a moment, nobody spoke.

“Damn it to hell,” Plinnit said, getting into his car and slamming his door.

“For sure, I'm calling you tomorrow,” Leo said, getting into the minivan.

“This will lead our first news, at noon,” Jenny said to me, the only one left.

“You've been alone out here, in the dark, all this time?”

“My cameraman just took off. We had officer Fittle to protect us.”

“Still, it was dangerous to wait. Whoever killed Darlene Taylor also tried to break in here.”

“Gone now?”

I nodded. “Coffee?”

“Sounds perfect.”

Upstairs, my hand shook as I went to the sink to rinse the carafe. I took that to mean I'd had too much coffee and nothing more.

I set down the carafe. “We could have wine and Ho Hos instead,” I said.

“Even lovelier.” She sat at the plywood table.

I've had the same gallon of Gallo for years. It used to be a temptation, which is why I still keep it. It is covered with dust, untouched since the day I moved into the turret. I accept victory wherever I can find it.

I poured us each two inches of the wine, opened a fresh pack of Ho Hos, and told her everything I knew that wouldn't point at Sweetie Fairbairn.

“Not much of that is usable,” she said when I'd finished.

“Everything I told you about Alta Taylor and what I think was her role at the gas station killing is conjecture. Same with Darlene's role in the murders of Stitts, the guard, Andrew Fill, and George Koros.”

“For now, I'll go with the discovery as a Jane Doe next to your turret—by you, Dek; you're the one who discovered the body. With you comes mention of Sweetie Fairbairn, because you were the one who discovered her kneeling over the guard's body. It's all part of the story.”

“I understand.”

“When Plinnit gets solid identification that it was Darlene, the link between her, Koros, and Sweetie Fairbairn will come out. Then the story will go back to Hadlow, and to you getting shot up there.” She tried to smile. “You'll be the talk of the town.”

“No Amanda,” I said.

“Not from me, but somebody will connect her to you.” Then she said, “Are you tired?”

“I slept half the way back from Minnesota, then drank coffee here for at least two hours. Now I've had wine and Ho Hos. I'm rested, caffeinated, and sugared enough to be awake for a month.”

She held out her glass for another two inches of wine. “How about building a small fire in one of your big fireplaces?”

I could have paused to think, but I didn't. I picked up some wood scraps from the pile in the kitchen, and we walked across the hall to my office. I opened the flue for the very first time since I'd lived there. The wood was dry, and caught almost immediately. I wheeled the tilting red desk chair over to the electric blue La-Z-Boy, and for a time we sat, mismatched people in mismatched chairs, silently watching the fire.

“I can't believe you've never had a fire here,” Jenny said, taking a sip of wine. “Not on the first floor, either.”

“I have on the third floor.”

“Ah, the bedroom.” She grinned.

I added more wood.

“I'm sorry,” she said. “I should have wondered whether you were saving this fireplace to use on a more special occasion.”

“Finding a corpse behind one's home isn't special enough?”

“I meant with Ms.…”

It was a nice thought. Although it was probably no longer relevant. I shook my head.

She looked into the fire. “My husband and I had a small cabin. Not much more than a shack, in Kentucky. No electricity, no running water, but it had a big fireplace.” She turned to me and smiled. “We had great heat, he and I. We used it all the time.”

“Your husband,” I said.

“Afghanistan. We knew it was a gamble, but he—no, we—” She stopped, and looked away, back toward the fire, but not before I'd seen the tears in her eyes.

“No,” she said, after a moment. “It was I who wanted the national stage. He wanted it because I wanted it. He got a job as an independent, got sent to Afghanistan. Road bomb.”

She set down her plastic cup, still staring into the fire. After a time, she fell asleep.

I watched her, I watched the fire. Then I covered her with a blanket as she slept in my ridiculous blue chair and went upstairs to try to sleep.

CHAPTER 57.

I ought to have slept soundly, for eventually the coffee, the wine, the Ho Hos, and even the nerves should have worn off.

I ought to have slept soundly, for Plinnit had left behind two plainclothes officers in a dark Buick sedan, to watch the door.

I ought to have slept soundly, for I was tired, even though Jenny Galecki, a woman I liked to think I admired because I didn't want to call it anything else, was sleeping in my La-Z-Boy, just one lone, warmer floor below.

I ought to have slept, but I didn't, because I couldn't think who was left to kill Darlene Taylor, nor why she'd been dropped alongside the turret, nor why the killer had needed to get inside. It should have been enough for Darlene's murderer to drop her corpse and leave.

Unless, as Plinnit said, Darlene's killer also wanted to kill me.

I thrashed with all of it until eight in the morning, and then I got up, shaved closer than usual, and came down in better clothes than I ever wore around the turret.

She was gone. She'd left a note. “Good wine. Good fire. Great Ho Hos. J.”

It was just as well. I went into the kitchen and made a pot of the marginally splendid Discount Den coffee. I wanted to take a cup up to the roof, to look at the town, but I couldn't figure out how to negotiate the ladders with my wounded side. I thought about going down to the bench by the river, to watch the flotsam bob in the water, but I'd be on view to Plinnit's plainclothesmen—and, perhaps, to whoever had left Darlene Taylor dead in my yard.

I looked out the window. No press vans had yet arrived. Jenny and Plinnit must have reached an accommodation. Apparently, Plinnit was keeping a lid on the discovery of the corpse until noon, when Jenny was set to broadcast it to the world.

I took the coffee into my office, eased aboard the La-Z-Boy, and watched the rising sun brighten the beiges, browns, and yellows of the curved block walls.

The sunlight had reached the card table I use as a desk. The table is old, something I found in someone else's trash. It is covered with a nubby gray sort of plastic that never looks good, no matter how the sun moves across it.

Something sparkled there, caught by the sun. I craned my neck to see. It was my letter opener, a cheap stainless steel thing. It lay by itself, on the center of the table. It shouldn't have been by itself.

I knew then what was gone. I knew what Darlene's killer had taken.

It was the small ring of Sweetie's keys that I'd picked up so mindlessly from the carpet the day I'd found her kneeling over the dead guard. The keys I'd never told Plinnit I'd found. The keys I'd used to get in to take another look around Sweetie's penthouse.

Only one person could have known I might even have had those keys.

The person who'd dropped them. The person who'd run away.

Sweetie Fairbairn.

CHAPTER 58.

Though she couldn't have gotten much sleep, Jenny Galecki looked every bit a fresh, rested Jennifer Gale that afternoon. Her report led the noon broadcast, beginning with a very short video of several men leaning over the shiny blue tarp. Featured prominently in the center of the frame was me, mouth agape. I looked like someone who'd been thrown off a bus.

She reported that the dead woman had not yet been identified, but since the body had been found at the home of Vlodek Elstrom, the associate of Sweetie Fairbairn's who'd discovered her murdered bodyguard, police suspected the newest killing was also linked to Ms. Fairbairn's disappearance.

She did not say that any of that was sure to renew police interest in me as a suspect.

I called Leo and asked him to drive me to get the Jeep, pronto.

“You're not going to believe what's happening,” he said.

“Jennifer Gale, on the news. I saw.”

“No, I mean Ma.”

“She all right?”

“She's still redecorating. As for you coming along to get the Jeep, forget it. Endora's much better company. We're leaving now.”

“I insist.”

“Possession is nine-tenths of the law. You gave me your keys last night, remember?”

There was no arguing with that. The day had become a game of movable keys. I told him to hurry up.

I called Plinnit's cell phone. It went right to voice mail. I left him a message, asking him to call me. Then I called his precinct.

“He's off for the long weekend,” a woman, young-voiced, said.

It took me a minute to remember it was the Fourth of July. “I have to talk to him.”

“He's off for the long weekend, Mr. Elstrom,” she said again, this time testily. “Can someone else help you?”

“Plinnit has the background.”

“He's off for—”

I stopped her third swing. “Tell Plinnit that I'm going to break into a crime scene, and maybe risk getting killed. He'll never be able to put me behind bars if I'm dead.” I did not mention that Sweetie's keys were missing. It would only unnecessarily irritate him.

“Are you crazy?” the young-voiced woman asked.

“Have a great day,” I said, and hung up.

Plinnit called in five minutes. “Did your sleepover end badly?”

I told him I wanted another look around Sweetie Fairbairn's penthouse.

“You want me to call the Wilbur Wright, say it's OK for you to go in?”

“Yes.”

“To look for what?”

“Anything that might tell me where Sweetie Fairbairn is.”

“Why now?”

“What?” I asked, confused.

“Why call now for my permission to enter Sweeetie Fairbairn's penthouse? Last time, you marched in there alone, brazenly unlocked the elevator using keys you no doubt merely overlooked giving to us, and rode up like you owned the place.”

I started to sputter, summoning indignation, but he cut me off. “That video camera in the lobby we talked about, the one that had you entering the penthouse the day Robert Norton was killed? We can play you a more recent tape, showing you coming back, using the keys you're pretending to be confused about, the ones that have Sweetie Fairbairn's initials on them.”

“The concierge,” I managed.

“Of course the concierge,” he said, laughing. “He called us as soon as you went up.”

“Why didn't you come for me?”

“I had a man in the lobby by the time you came down. He advised that you looked too stupid to be bringing anything out with you. I concurred, telling him you're too stupid to be a killer as well.”

“Thank you,” I said stupidly. Then, “The keys are missing.”

“That's why your visitor broke in last night?”

“I don't know.”

“Tell me what else you haven't yet told me, Elstrom.”

I told him about the manuscript Sweetie Fairbairn had written in high school, and how that was meant to point to Sweetie as having murdered James Stitts.

“Darlene Taylor and George Koros came at her quite deliberately,” I said. “They wanted her to run, and to stay gone, so they could be thorough, and steal every nickel she had.”

I stopped then, wondering if I should tell him about the gas station incident, and a too-fast investigation by Sheriff Roy Lishkin, who may have been Alta's father. I decided anything Plinnit learned about that he could get from Ellie Ball. Or from the press.

“It was Darlene under that tarp?” I asked.

“Ellie Ball confirmed it from the photo I sent her.”

“Now, about my getting into Sweetie's penthouse…?”

“You still haven't told me what you hope to find.”

“Whatever Darlene's killer was looking for at my place.”

“Which is?”

“Some clue to where Sweetie Fairbairn ran.”

“You think Darlene's killer left your turret with Sweetie's keys, and used them to get into her penthouse?”

“It's worth a look.”

He stopped to think, then said, “I can't put civilians in jeopardy.”

“Put a man at the Wilbur Wright, maybe even up in Sweetie's penthouse. Call the manager, or the concierge, tell him to let me in.”

“How's that help me?”

“I find Sweetie, you get answers, and cooler air on the back of your neck.”

“How about whatever you find you turn over to me, and I'll get my own answers from Sweetie Fairbairn?”

“I might have issues with that.”

He sighed. “First I'll tell the officers I've got watching you that you're deranged. Then I'll think. Then maybe I'll call you back.”

*   *   *

Leo pulled the Jeep onto the lawn an hour later. Endora had followed in the Porsche, with the top down.

“Care to come up for coffee?” I called out the second-floor window. I wanted company. I'd been counting minutes, waiting for Plinnit to call.

“You made fresh?” Leo asked, getting into the passenger's seat of his Porsche.

“I can make fresh.”

“With different beans and a different pot and different water?”

“We could have Ho Hos, too.”

“Jeep key's under the mat,” he said, “though I can't imagine anyone stealing it.”

Endora called up to add that they had plans. Obviously, Leo had poisoned her mind about my coffee.

They took off, in love with each other and, apparently, good coffee.

Across the spit of land, the dark blue Buick had been replaced by a maroon Chevrolet Impala.

More minutes, and then more hours, dragged. Then, two hours before dusk, Plinnit called and said I could go to the Wilbur Wright.