Hunting Sweetie Rose : A Mystery (9781429950879) (34 page)

I had nothing left. I leaned against the wall, wanting only air. My cheek was hot against the soft cool fibers of the silk wallpaper. I breathed, deeply. It was almost a miracle.

My right side was sodden. I couldn't stay. I had to get down for help.

I put a foot forward, and, leaning my left shoulder against the wall for support, I moved toward where the yellow light had been. Ten steps, nine, and I felt the cold metal of an emergency door. I pushed the panic bar and the door swung out.

Doubled over, clutching at my torn flesh, I hobbled into the harsh safe light at the top of the stairs.

CHAPTER 61.

The EMT probed the sutures on my side one last time. Sounding shocked, he said they had held.

“What's all the mess, then?” Plinnit asked him.

“Some tearing, but mostly it's just leakage,” the EMT said. He put a fresh bandage over the wound.

I lay on my good side, on a stretcher in the lobby of the Wilbur Wright. Well-dressed hotel guests and blue-dressed cops surrounded us. They'd just watched an ambulance take away the officer Plinnit had planted in the penthouse, the man I'd fallen over in the hall. Plinnit told me he'd been cut a dozen times and was unconscious, but was expected to live.

“Lucky for you, your assailant dropped the knife in the living room before he could then use it on you,” he said.

“In the hall.” I remembered how the man-animal had clawed at the carpet, frantic to find it.

“Just before the hall. We found the knife in the living room. By the blood trail, we ascertained my officer was stabbed there, then staggered down the hall, trying to get out the emergency door.”

It made no sense. But I was alive.

The EMT bent and began wiping my left hand.

Plinnit froze. “What the hell are you doing?” he shouted.

“Cleaning away the blood,” the EMT said. “This man used his left hand to protect himself. He might have infected cuts.”

“His cuts can be tended later.” Plinnit turned to a crime scene technician. “Bag his hands until you can scrape underneath his fingernails.”

An elderly lady, ten feet away, gasped at me, the killer.

The crime scene technician put paper bags onto my hands.

“I fell onto your man,” I said. “Of course I'll have his blood and his skin on me.”

“More interesting,” Plinnit said, “we're checking my officer to see if he got your skin under his fingernails, trying to defend himself.”

The elderly lady, now within six feet, gasped again.

“It was someone else, Lieutenant. Short and light, but powerful.”

The elderly lady edged forward another foot. Her perfume got even closer, thick and cloying, like Elvis Derbil's coconut hairspray.

I gestured at her with my bagged hand. “I think it was her, Lieutenant.”

“Asshole,” the old woman said, shuffling away.

“Christ, Elstrom,” Plinnit said.

“All right, Lieutenant,” the EMT said. He pulled my sodden shirt down over my side and stepped back.

The crime scene technician came back with some sort of kit, removed the bags from my hands, and scraped underneath my fingernails.

When he was done, Plinnit said, “Let's go to the movies.” He helped me sit up, and he and the EMT lowered me into a wheelchair. As Plinnit began pushing me into the manager's office, I saw that the wood trim around the door had been splintered.

“We had to break our way in. The day manager was unconscious, but you might already know that. Either you or someone else cracked his head open with a stapler.”

The glossy-headed concierge was waiting inside the office. He pressed the button on a small video monitor on top of a file cabinet. Plinnit stood behind me, exhaling on the top of my scalp, and we began to watch the images on the screen.

“This is our only camera,” the concierge said. “It's old, not digital, and records only the people in the lobby.” He fast-forwarded the security tape, turning the silver-haired, well-dressed people into jerk-legged comics, like actors in Charlie Chaplin movies.

“There,” Plinnit said. “Our hero arrives.”

The concierge slowed the tape. I came into the picture, pushed the elevator button, and got in.

“This is our ending point. If we can go backward from here?” Plinnit said to the concierge.

The concierge reversed the tape, again at high speed. First me, then the other Chaplin figures began speed-walking backward through the lobby, robots run amok.

“Stop there,” I said, when he got to something dark, approaching the penthouse elevator.

The concierge slowed the video to regular speed. Someone in dark clothing was crossing the edge of the lobby.

“That's nobody,” the concierge said, advancing the video frame by frame. “A homeless woman. She comes in to use the first-floor washroom. The manager throws her out.”

“She comes in frequently?” Plinnit asked.

“Not frequently, but she's been in here before.”

On the screen, the woman paused to look around, and inserted a key into the lock that opened Sweetie Fairbairn's elevator.

“Ah, hell,” the concierge said.

“Freeze that,” I said, as the woman again looked to the side.

The concierge pressed the remote.

Only her profile was visible, but it was enough.

“She look familiar, Lieutenant?” I asked.

Plinnit walked around my wheelchair, to stop two feet in front of the monitor. “Something about her…” He turned to look at me, confused.

“Call the Michigan City police. Ask them what they have on that person they brought in to give me a look-over.”

“That guy who collected cans?” Plinnit leaned closer to the video screen. “You're saying that odd little man is masquerading now as a woman?”

“You tell me.”

“But why?”

“I think he was the torch for Andrew Fill's trailer. He could have done Fill earlier, as well.”

“You were there, weren't you?” he asked, his eyes hot on me. “You were in Indiana beforehand.”

I said nothing.

“Michigan City called me. It took a long autopsy, but they found that Fill was dead way before the day of the fire,” he said.

I could only shrug. Anything more might get me arrested for Fill's murder.

CHAPTER 62.

Leo cabbed down to the Wilbur Wright, had the valet pull the Jeep around, and was behind the wheel when the concierge wheeled me out. Getting in, I saw a clumsy sort of wide strap that lay on the dashboard.

“You can wrap it around like a belt to hold your arm at your side, if movement is painful,” he said.

“Where the hell would you get something that barbaric?”

“Barbaric? That was Pa's. From one of the times he fell, coming out of the tavern. He hurt his arm.”

“I don't remember him hurting anything.”

Leo grinned. “He never spilled a drop.”

Instead of heading west toward the Eisenhower, he drove east, almost to the lake, and picked up Lake Shore Drive, southbound.

“No,” I said.

He kept looking straight ahead.

“I mean it, Leo. Amanda and I, we're not, ah…” He was heading toward Amanda's condominium.

“I know you're ‘not, ah…,' but from what you told me on the phone, some guy approximately half your size, and apparently a cross-dresser, keeps beating on you.”

“I can take care of myself.”

“Of course you can. If the killer cross-dresser comes for you again, I'm sure you can puncture his, or her, eardrums with your screaming.” He slowed to turn in front of Amanda's high-rise.

She was waiting under the canopy, dressed in a glittering dark evening gown. Next to her stood one of the building's uniformed security people, and a younger, dark-haired man who had the unsmiling face of someone who was used to shooting people.

“I can do this myself,” I said to Amanda after she opened my door. Getting out, I fell back against the Jeep. The young dark-haired man was at my side in an instant, and caught me before I fell to the ground.

“Of course,” Amanda said, “and if you can't, Mike here”—she gestured at the unsmiling young man who was holding me up—“can throw you over his shoulders and carry you to the elevator like potatoes.”

“Ex-cop?” I asked Mike.

“Current cop, moonlighting,” he said.

Amanda reached to steady my elbow. “He does security for my father.”

Leo had stayed behind the steering wheel.

“How are you getting back to Rivertown?” I asked him.

“In this.”

“I'll be stuck here.”

“In a high-security building, with extra security? Jeez, why didn't I think of that?” He grinned, ever a smartster. “Want the strap?” he asked, reaching for the top of the dashboard.

“See those stenciled initials: R.P.D.?”

He looked down at the strap now in his hands. “Yes?” he said, uncertainly.

“Rivertown Police Department. It's an old-time restraint, meant to cinch both arms tight to the torso. Supposed to work like a straitjacket, only it's cheaper. Your pa probably found it on the street, thought it might be a way of controlling you.”

His grin got wider, and then he drove away.

Truth was, I didn't like the idea of being alone in the turret that evening, not with a killer loose, and me feeling like I'd dripped the last of my strength away in Sweetie Fairbairn's hallway. Then again, I didn't like the idea of being alone with Amanda, either, because I didn't want to think about what she'd been in the middle of, dressed as she was for a fine evening.

I said nothing more to any of them, and instead concentrated on beating Amanda and Mike to the lobby.

“I'm not helpless,” I said, unnecessarily, as we rode up in the elevator.

“Darn tootin',” she said. “Thank you, Mike,” when we got to her condominium.

“We'll be watching your door from the end of the hall, Miss Phelps.”

“Thank you, Mike,” I said.

“You're a real prize,” he said.

“Darn tootin',” I said.

I understood the reason for her evening dress as soon as I hobbled into her apartment. She'd been hosting a dinner. The last time I'd been there, several months earlier, the living room was sparsely furnished, containing only a low magazine table and a long sofa facing a sort of gallery wall on which she'd hung her big Monet, small Picasso, and the other works that together were worth over eleven million dollars. We'd made love on that long sofa.

Now that sofa was gone. In the room was new furniture, lots of it. An elegant dining room table was set for eight, on which remained plates of half-eaten food. The place smelled of candles, hurriedly snuffed.

I resented all of it—that new decor, the fancy food, the candlelit conviviality that she could enjoy without me.

“I didn't want to come here,” I said.

“So I would expect.” She slid out one of the high-back dining room chairs. When I sat down, she turned up the dining room lights and bent to peer at the scratches on my face.

“A bite?” she asked, lightly touching my neck.

“Yes.”

“You look like you've just had sex with an angry woman,” she said, trying to smile.

“Not yet.” I could always be counted on for lame, inappropriate jokes.

She straightened up. “You can watch me clean up.”

“What? No staff?”

She didn't know whether to take that as a barb or not. I wasn't even quite sure how I meant it. The Amanda I knew, or maybe the Amanda I used to know, didn't have nice furniture and elegant dinner parties, and she didn't wear fancy evening clothes. That Amanda, my Amanda, had been content with her old, long sofa, to sit and study her artworks and to make love, as though those were the only things that would ever matter.

“Actually, I did have people to serve, this evening,” she said, evenly. “I asked them to leave, along with my guests, right after Leo called.” She picked up two plates. Starting for the kitchen, she asked, “Does that count for anything?”

“I'm a jerk,” I said.

“No lasting damage,” she said, going into the kitchen. Then, in the arch, mock-bitch voice she used to use, whenever I'd tease her about owning eleven million bucks in art, she said, “Besides, the fish was quite overdone.”

CHAPTER 63.

I woke up to sunlight streaming in from the east, over Lake Michigan. Alone, in Amanda's guest room.

She'd put my terry robe on a chair close to the bed. That robe had survived our marriage, our estrangement, a divorce, and the beginnings of a reconciliation. I was not sure if it was surviving anything now, but I took comfort in the fact that it was still in Amanda's home. I slipped it on and crossed the room to the guest bath—with much grace and good balance, I thought, being that everything hurt.

She'd set my spare shaving kit on the vanity, another sign that my presence still survived in that otherwise redone high place. The mirror showed me a face that had been scratched raw, top to bottom, twenty times. Shaving would be out of the question for some days. I took a long, careful shower, and emerged, perfumed by her soap, robed in terry, and moved as jauntily as I could out to the living room.

Amanda and Leo were drinking coffee on the balcony. I split my face, lined as it was in red like some crazed map showing only north and south routes, into an idiot's smile.

“He returns from death,” Leo said, through the screen. They both got up, made appropriate fussing gestures, and got me settled onto a chair. Amanda gave me the kind of brief peck on the top of the head one would give a visiting nephew with acne, and went inside to get me some coffee.

“I bought you clean clothes,” Leo said. “Alas, they are identical to your other clothes: blue shirts and khaki pants. At least they are not bloody.”

My raw face pulsed hot. “You've got to stay away from the turret. There's a killer out there, maybe still looking for me.”