Hunting Sweetie Rose : A Mystery (9781429950879) (6 page)

“Except today you bought the
Argus-Observer.
”

I sat down. The bench was not long, but it could provide sufficient distance between two people, if one of them remembers he loves the woman he's used to sharing it with, even if she's his ex-wife and has trouble returning his phone calls.

“You needn't bother,” she said, tapping the
Argus-Observer
I'd set on the bench between us. “I already looked through it. There's nothing new from Keller.”

She'd seen through the smoke I'd sent up about wanting the clown photos for an insurance matter.

“You just happened to be driving by?” I asked, thinking a diversion might be productive.

“Nice view, if they'd clean it up,” she said, of the containers and jugs bumping against their tire prisons.

“They did once. They hired high school kids to haul out all the debris. Then the lizards held a series of soirees, pitching the idea of a Rivertown Renaissance to developers.”

“I've seen those Renaissance banners on the light poles along Thompson Avenue. They're tattered.” She grinned suddenly. “How perfectly medieval: They need your turret for their Renaissance.”

“The developers never bought into the idea. Only the garbage came back.” I turned to look at her. “You didn't come to enjoy the Willahock.”

“Driving by, I thought I'd stop in, see what I can learn about a death that everyone, except John Keller and you, thinks was a tragic accident.”

“I'm really supposed to accept that you were just driving by?”

“It would be convenient.”

Just like I hadn't figured her for just driving by, I couldn't figure her appearance. The two previous times I'd seen her, Jennifer Gale had been impeccably dressed and made up. Though both times had been for a camera—when Elvis had been arrested, and then, last night, immediately following her broadcast—I didn't imagine she went anywhere without makeup, dressed in baggy, worn clothes. Unless, that morning, she was deliberately trying to avoid recognition.

“Trying for incognito this morning?” I asked.

“So, what did the photos show?” she asked, dodging.

“I just got them last night,” I said, dodging as well.

“Yes, and you told me you never sleep.”

I shrugged.

“OK,” she said. “Let's talk more about you and Rivertown.”

“Nothing more to tell.”

“Rivertown has always been known as a harmlessly crooked little town. Run tightly by the same expanded family for decades. Word has always been that no one much minds, because the place is so small, and its greasy goings-on—the hookers, the gambling, the payoffs—never seemed to affect anyone outside the town limits. So I'm wondering why the mayor's nephew, a dullard by all accounts, would now venture beyond the safety of those town limits.”

“You're suggesting Elvis didn't come up with this scheme on his own? I agree. Yet I don't see the lizards risking scrutiny over something like salad oil.”

“You don't like scrutiny, either, Mr. Elstrom,” she said after a moment.

I turned to watch the milk jugs dance with the oil containers.

“You used to have a tidy little business,” she went on, “researching, photographing, working for law firms and insurance companies. You married Amanda Phelps, daughter of Wendell, one of the biggest movers and shakers in Chicago. You moved into her mansion at Crystal Waters. You were living the golden life.”

“Every day was sunny, for sure.”

“Then you were accused of validating false evidence in the Evangeline Wilts trial.”

“I was duped. I was exonerated.”

“Yes, and fairly quickly, but only after being trashed by John Keller in the
Argus-Observer
, and that ruined you, of money and business. And perhaps of Amanda Phelps, because you brought dishonor to the doorstop of the powerful Wendell Phelps. She dumped you—”

“Actually, I dumped myself,” I cut in. “She just had me rolled out the door.”

“You returned to the town of your youth, to huddle in your grandfather's turret.”

“Awaiting the Rivertown Renaissance.”

“At which time you can sell your turret for a princely sum?”

The banter was giving me a headache. “That's the plan.”

“Except your turret is zoned as a municipal structure, even though you own it. Who would buy it, if it's zoned only for city use?”

“Where's this going?”

“Right back to Elvis Derbil, salad oil king and zoning commissioner. He's got you under his greasy thumb. Your story will make a heck of a follow-up to the piece we ran on Derbil.”

“You're not pushing for my little story, though.”

She smiled. She hadn't come to follow up on Elvis; she was scratching for leverage, to find out what I knew about the clown.

“I'll be more direct: You want to come with me to see the rope?” she asked.

“What?” I managed, but it was too late to play dumb.

“You wanted the pictures because you think the clown was murdered, right? You're thinking the rope was cut?”

I kept my eyes on the oil containers and milk jugs, but they offered no counsel on how to deal with someone who thought as fast as Jennifer Gale.

“I'm going to check out the rope,” she went on. “I can get you in, too—but you've got to give me what you know.”

“I don't know anything, not yet,” I said.

“You know enough to suspect that rope was cut.” She checked her watch and stood up. “I'll call you when everything is arranged,” she said and walked up the hill to her car.

CHAPTER 9.

A messenger came an hour later. He handed me an envelope. I was expecting a termination letter from Duggan, firing me for demanding to get close to his client. It wasn't. Handwritten on the upper left corner of the envelope, where the return address goes for people who don't use messenger services to deliver their mail, was lettered, simply, “Sweetie.”

The note inside was written on thick cream-colored stock that matched the envelope. “Dear Mr. Elstrom, I apologize for the lateness of this, but Amanda Phelps suggests that you are a person I should know. Can you join us at a small get-together this evening, at seven o'clock?” It named an address off Michigan Avenue, on Chicago's Gold Coast, and was signed “Sweetie Fairbairn.”

I looked up. “Thank you,” I said.

The messenger made a polite cough. “I'm to wait for the favor of a reply, sir.”

It was easy enough to do. I didn't know Sweetie Fairbairn, but I did know Amanda Phelps, my dark-haired, sparkling eyed, vixen ex-wife.

The messenger was resolutely keeping his eyes away from my paint-splattered, caulk-encrusted clothes. He probably learned that kind of self-control in messenger school.

“Tell Miss Fairbairn I'll be happy to attend.”

He nodded and went to his car. I went inside, to my computer.

Google reported that Sweetie Fairbairn was the widow of an important industrialist, Silas Fairbairn. She was a socialite, a board member, and seemingly a friend to all of Chicago's rich and famous. Mostly, she seemed to be a philanthropist, judging by the number of charity Web sites that showed her, an attractive, middle-aged blond woman, quite short, posing with other attractive, middle-aged blond women, almost all of whom were at least half a head taller than she was. They all appeared to be wearing clothes that cost more than the kitchen appliances I couldn't afford.

I went outside and climbed up my ladder. It was where I belonged. I didn't know people who traveled in Sweetie Fairbairn's circles, except for that most exquisite lady she'd mentioned in her invitation—and that one wasn't even blond.

*   *   *

Amanda had been raised rich, by a man who controlled Chicago's largest electric utility but was indifferent to raising his daughter. I'd been raised indifferently, too, but poor, by a trio of aunts who shuffled me around like a suitcase left behind by a long-gone relation. The relation was their sister, my mother, who took off the day after I was born.

I met Amanda when I was making a stab at what I imagined was the good life. I was living downtown in Chicago, driving a used Mercedes, building up a small research firm that serviced lawyers and insurance companies. I thought I was done with Rivertown forever. She was living in a gated suburban community, in a micromansion mostly unfurnished because she'd blown her grandfather's inheritance on the eleven million dollars' worth of art she hung on the walls. We married because we didn't think seriously about the differences in our backgrounds. We divorced a year later because, by then, we could think of nothing else. And because I'd been portrayed as a fool in the newspapers, after being falsely accused of rigging evidence in a suburban mayor's trial. I'd blamed the bad publicity on Amanda, reasoning—in an increasingly sodden state—that my notoriety was her fault because her father was such a prominent man.

The love, though, never left. It survived the Wilts trial, and my reckless days that followed. It survived our divorce, and later, a crazed man's attempt to blow up her gated community, one house at a time. It survived a reappearance, of a sort, of a girl I'd once been suspected of killing, years before.

It had survived all of that, and we'd actually begun nibbling at the notion of living together again, when her father, always a distant shadow when she'd been growing up, experienced some sort of come-to-the-mountain moment. He shed his indifference and set out to take over his daughter's life as craftily as he took over the smaller, less defensible utility companies he routinely added to his conglomerate. He offered her the directorship of his organization's multimillion-dollar charitable works programs. They both knew it was a guilt play—his, at not having been around when she was growing up—hers, if she passed on an opportunity to help thousands of people.

She took the job. Gone went the classes she taught at the Art Institute, gone went the book on Renaissance art she'd been working on. And gone, maybe, was the time we needed to rebuild what had been between us. We now communicated through the buffers of answering machines—mostly hers—and e-mails … and now, through an invitation from one of her friends.

It was good enough.

*   *   *

I called Amanda's office at four o'clock, intending to leave the message that I'd see her at Sweetie Fairbairn's that evening. Amazingly, her secretary put me right through.

“Thanks,” I began, when Amanda picked up.

There were voices in her background. “For what?” she said, after she did something to quiet them.

“For Sweetie's party.”

A voice near her got louder. “Sure, that will be fine,” Amanda said. Then, to me, “Sweetie called an hour ago to tell me it was a bit of a last-minute thing, but that you'd accepted her invitation for tonight.”

“I'll bet she gets through to you easier than I do.” It came out cranky, and I regretted it.

“Listen, Dek—”

“I know you're busy, Amanda.”

“Don't patronize me.”

“OK; you're not busy.”

“And don't be your usual smart-assed self.”

I shut up, and waited.

After a few seconds, her breathing slowed. “Look, I'm sorry I haven't returned a couple of your phone calls. It's just that this is becoming so much more than I imagined…” Her voice trailed off.

“You don't have to be doing it.”

“I should go back to indulging myself at the Art Institute, a princess with millions in art and no conscience?”

It was an argument we'd had, a dozen times. I skipped my usual self-righteous pronouncement that her father was bribing her, saying instead, “Forget it. No big deal, if you've been busy.”

“Thank you,” she said, too simply.

“And thank you, for engineering that invitation.”

“You started to say that before. What do you mean?”

“Snagging me the invitation to Sweetie Fairbairn's party. A date's a date, no matter where we have it.”

Something buzzed; probably her phone. “Hold, please.” She parked me in the ether so quickly it took me a second to realize I was listening to dead air.

After a long three minutes, she came back. “I did not ‘engineer' your invitation, as you say. I met Sweetie a month ago, at a dinner. I'm afraid I put the arm on her for the new children's wing at Memorial Hospital. We traded histories a little; she wants to know about the people who hit her up for money. In the course of things, I must have mentioned you. That's it, Dek. I had no idea you'd be attending this evening until an hour ago, when she called to tell me.”

“Perhaps she learned I am someone who could add a little gravity to her circle of friends.”

She laughed, for the first time I'd heard in a month. “I'm sure it's just a little background checking.”

“To put a face to the man you're seeing?”

She paused one heartbeat too long to be encouraging. “More likely to be sure I'm on the up-and-up. Sweetie is very particular about her donations.”

“I could be a liability?”

“There'll be food, Dek. She'll give you an air kiss, spend two minutes talking to you, and leave you thinking you are the most important person she's ever met. She's nice.”

“Then we can slip away, have a drink someplace?”

Again, a pause. “Not tonight, I'm afraid. There'll be people from foundations there, people who can get things done.”

“Tomorrow night, then?”

“A dinner with the board of the Metropolitan YMCA.”

I didn't bother to ask if she was free for dinner any other nights. That's what bothered me the most, after we hung up.

That I hadn't bothered.

CHAPTER 10.

The Gold Coast of Chicago, those blocks along and surrounding Michigan Avenue north of the river, is studded with solid midwestern values, so long as the midwesterner is a millionaire and values huge-buck condominiums and glitzy stores that offer hundred-thousand-dollar necklaces and thousand-dollar shoes.