Hunting Sweetie Rose : A Mystery (9781429950879) (7 page)

Once, early in our relationship, Amanda and I were walking along Michigan Avenue. It was a splendid spring evening, and we paused to look at the men's clothing displayed in the window of one particularly expensive-looking place. Go in and look around, she taunted, knowing full well that although I liked good, grand made me itch. A dare was a dare, though, so I took it. We went in, and I moved around trying to appear like I belonged, all the while avoiding looking at what I was sure would be a smirk on her face. At one point I stopped to finger the cuff of a two-thousand-dollar sport coat. A salesman came up and inquired whether I liked it. Indeed I did, I said, but then inspiration struck. I told the man I was wondering about the pants. Sir? he asked, confused. The pants, I responded; surely, for two thousand dollars, the coat came with about fifty pairs of pants? Amanda lost it then. Choking with laughter, she hustled me out of there quick as lightning, and proposed that we never walk along Michigan Avenue again.

Sweetie Fairbairn's address was in the middle of all that, on Oak, a side street. I drove past it three times before I realized she lived in the Wilbur Wright. It was an old, ten-story hotel built right after the Wright Brothers' first flight and named after one of them, though whether Wilbur was the one who flew the contraption or jumped up and down on the ground, I couldn't remember.

The doorman didn't come over when I pulled to the curb. He might have been reluctant to offer encouragement to anyone lingering in such a battered vehicle, or perhaps he was confused about how to communicate through a plastic side window crisscrossed with so much silver tape.

I unzipped the window corner and fluttered my hand out in a beckoning fashion. It was enough. He nodded, came over, and bent down to put his mouth to the small triangular opening.

“Sir?”

“Does Sweetie Fairbairn live here?”

“We're not allowed to give out…”

I'd spiked her invitation on a wire that used to connect to the radio. I pulled it off and held the paper to the opening.

What I could see of his mouth softened as he reclassified me from poor to strange. “Very well, sir. We have valet parking.”

I got out and handed the key to the kid who came up. “Anything falls off, put it in back, on top of the Burger King wrappers.”

The kid nodded like that was a usual request, and I walked inside.

The lobby was small, polished stainless steel and shiny black marble. The concierge was a young man with glossy black hair, hired perhaps because he matched the marble. I flashed Sweetie's invitation, punctured though it was.

“Sweetie Fairbairn's suite,” I said, not only using the S words symmetrically, but announcing as well that I had enough class to know hers would not be some closet-sized room facing an air shaft.

“Penthouse,” the glossy young man corrected, raising his nose a half inch. “Not suite.” He pointed to the last elevator down a short corridor, where a broad-shouldered man was talking to two slender blond women.

They turned as I approached, anticipating a fellow social traveler. It wasn't just the man's shoulders that were broad, I saw; his whole suit coat was cut wide. He had a gun on his hip.

All smiled—the man carefully; the women uncertainly, and then only after all four of their eyes had lingered on my necktie. I'd taken special care with my outfit, going over my blue blazer twice with my Shop-Vac to make sure I'd gotten up all the oak dust. The khakis were selected as being the cleanest from the pile on the chair by my bed, though I supposed their wrinkles might have caused the pickiest of observers to wonder if I'd slept in them more than once. Finally, I'd selected the new-looking floral necktie because it matched my blue button-down shirt. Also because it was the only tie I owned.

The elevator had barely begun to rise when first one woman, then the other, began sneezing. Apparently, I'd not vacuumed enough. I took a discreet step back into the corner, to give them better air. It didn't work. They sneezed, almost in unison, a second and then a third time.

Mercifully, the door opened after that. The women fled. The guard remained, motioning me out.

I stepped into a small foyer papered in red silk. A young man in a tuxedo offered me a flute of champagne from a tray. I took it into an enormous, softly yellow living room.

At least a hundred people were there, chatting and laughing and bobbing their heads with such animation that they could well have been filled with helium. There was lots of tan cleavage—some wrinkled, some not—white teeth, and glittering jewelry, but no formal evening gowns or tuxedos other than on the waitstaff, I was relieved to see. The room smelled of the fresh cut flowers that seemed to be everywhere, and, I supposed, of the smug self-assurance that comes from mingling with one's affluent own.

I'd paused, unsure where to go, when a hand gently touched my arm. It was a lovely hand, attached to an equally lovely arm, all part of my most favorite terrain on the planet.

“I've been watching the door, hoping I could stop you before you belly flopped onto the buffet table,” Amanda whispered.

She was, as always, magnificent. She wore a simple black dress that matched her hair, and a garnet and diamond pendant that caught the flecks of fire in her eyes. The skin around them was taut, though—and wary. She looked tired.

“You look tired,” I said.

She squeezed my arm. “I told Sweetie you'd want to bolt as soon as you saw the crowd.”

She led me to a quiet place by a tall window that looked out over the city. Even though the Wilbur Wright was small—ten stories is nothing in any city anymore—the Wright Brothers for sure would have been impressed. I was standing higher than they first flew, and I'd made the ascent without getting a single bug stuck to my teeth.

Amanda made a show of standing back and looking at my outfit. “Same blazer, same pants, same shirt, same tie,” she said.

“I remain unchanged.”

She winced slightly at what she took to be a small pettiness.

“I didn't mean that the way it came out,” I said quickly.

“It won't last forever, Dek. Just until I get settled into whatever it is I'm settling into.”

“Good deeds.”

“Good deeds.”

For a minute we both stared out the window like strangers new to town.

“Ever hear of the heiress who built that penthouse?” She pointed at another hotel, across Michigan Avenue.

“Never.”

“Airlifting the construction material by helicopter required F.A.A. approval.”

“Sounds like a reasonable use of an inheritance.”

“Sweetie heard about that. Ten years ago, she and Silas bought the roof on this place and did the same, helicopters and all.”

“Airlifting two-by-fours doesn't impress.”

“It does them, the social creatures. They take their cues from one another. That means outrageous things, sometimes. That can also mean big donations. One person gives; others follow. A lot of money is raised for charity that way.” She turned away from the window. “This can be my chance to make something positive out of my father's wealth and connections.” She smiled at me with those weary, beautiful eyes. “How about a movie, a week from tomorrow night?”

“And dinner.”

“At our trattoria,” she added, smiling. It was where I'd proposed, after so very few dates.

Before she got snagged by charitable works, we'd started going back there, first tentatively, then frequently, after our divorce. The reminding was part of the rebuilding.

“All right,” I said, rolling my eyes with exaggerated reluctance, “but don't expect anything afterward.”

Her laugh was loud then, and genuine. It warmed the room, and my core, where I keep my sense of well-being.

“I must go, schmooze with rich people,” she said. “The buffet is against the far wall.”

“What about Sweetie Fairbairn?”

“I told her you'd be by the food.”

Then she was gone.

Having subsisted on modestly portioned, microwavable meals for too long, I found the buffet with the urgency of a falcon diving for a mouse. The table was twenty-five feet long and filled with the usual caviar, squiggly little pastries stuffed with squiggly little cheeses, veggies, and meats that were not at all usual to me. At the far end, there was a goodly portion of a steer up on its side, attended to by a fellow with a white hat and a long knife. Most exciting of all, nothing on the table appeared to have been painted red to disguise marine origins.

The item in the center of the table, though, gave me pause. It was long, orange, and shaped like a paving brick.

The color was right, the shape perfect. A bizarre thought formed. I gave the table a nudge with my hip, but the thing did not quiver, at least not convincingly.

“Wondering?”

A short blond woman in a black dress and a single strand of small pearls had come up.

I turned. “Yes.”

She picked up a bone china plate—no paper for those digs, high atop the Wilbur Wright—and a linen napkin. “Let me help you,” she said. Her voice had a slight lilt, a trace of something Scandinavian.

She could have been forty, she could have been fifty. She could have been beautiful, or perhaps not. Certainly her makeup had been artfully, and maybe professionally, applied. As she started filling the plate, I noticed faint age spots on her hands, spots that no creams could completely hide.

She filled the plate quickly. At the caviar, she paused, raising an eyebrow.

I thought back to the lasagna I'd eaten, not that many nights earlier, and shook my head. “I've had too much seafood lately.”

She nodded and continued adding to the plate. She finished at the end of the table, when the white-hatted man laid a large slice of rare roast beef over the mound on the plate, as though trying to hide an embarrassment of too much food with a blanket.

“You deliberately avoided that?” I asked, pointing at the brick on the table's center.

She smiled and nudged the table with her hip as she'd seen me do. Again, I could not tell if the yellow-orange thing had quivered.

“It's getting old,” she said, sighing. “A connoisseur?”

“I know certain delights.” I shrugged modestly. “No one else seems to be interested in it, though.”

“They don't know what it is. I set it out every time, but no one takes.”

“Same brick?”

“I'm afraid it's lost some of its suppleness; it no longer jiggles.”

“Velveeta,” I said.

“Velveeta,” she confirmed.

With that, I felt as though I'd liked her forever.

She carried my mounded plate past a man standing at the head of a short hallway. He, too, wore a square suit, like the guard who'd ridden up in the elevator.

She opened a door, and I followed her in. The room was small, no bigger than the one I had in college, and decorated about as well. A laptop computer sat on a beat-up wood desk backed against a wall. Above the desk, a huge corkboard held a large calendar that was penciled in with dozens of appointments, and a worn picture postcard of a covered bridge that had octagonal windows.

Next to the desk, a metal typing table held an old red IBM Selectric typewriter. A row of high beige filing cabinets ran along an adjacent wall.

I'd seen crummier-looking home offices, but not many.

She motioned me to a worn wood armchair that creaked when I sat down. After handing me my plate, she went to sit at the desk, in an ultramodern black mesh chair that appeared to be the only expensive furnishing in the room.

“Welcome to Shangri-La, Mr. Elstrom.”

“It does feel quite comfortable,” I agreed.

“I can think in here.”

“I do my thinking on my roof,” I said, as though that made sense.

“Eat, Mr. Elstrom,” she said. “Amanda told me you like to eat.”

The beef blanket was tender enough to cut with my fork. For sure it had never developed muscle swimming in the sea.

I chewed, and waited to chit and chat.

“You're still very close to Amanda,” she said.

“You heard this from Amanda?”

“Not in so many words.”

I looked up from a particularly interesting little piece of cheese. “I like to think we're still close, yes.”

“Sometimes you appear in the newspapers.”

Amanda wouldn't have told her that. Sweetie Fairbairn had done research.

“I try to avoid publicity.” I chewed faster, to clear my mouth. Our small talk, even mitigated by fine nibbles, was presenting the potential to turn nasty.

“I'm considering making a rather sizable contribution to an effort she's leading,” she said.

It was as Amanda had said. Sweetie Fairbairn wanted to make sure I had no way of getting at any of the money Amanda raised.

“We never did share checkbooks, Ms. Fairbairn. Anyway, we're divorced.”

“I don't wish to offend, but I must be careful.”

“I understand.”

“Are you really an understanding man, Mr. Elstrom?”

“Unfortunately, I've demanded to be understood more than I've learned to understand,” I said. It was one of the things I thought about, up on my roof.

She smiled faintly and stood up. “Thank you for coming,” she said. She'd satisfied herself about me in record time.

We went out into the hall. She aimed for a cluster of glittering people. I moved toward the window where Amanda and I had stood a few moments earlier.

I watched Amanda's reflection in the glass. She was engrossed in conversation with one very thin woman and two distinguished-looking, silver-haired men. She looked happier than I'd seen her in months, and seemed to especially enjoy the witty asides of one of the distinguished men.

I tried to concentrate on the drama of the view she and I had enjoyed just a few minutes before, but the picture out the window had been changed by the superimposition of Amanda's reflection on the glass. Chicago no longer sparkled. It looked like a cold, hard town, a place of dark shadows and too bright lights—the kind of place where a guy could lose his girl, or a clown could go off a roof, and nobody would much mind.