Hunting Sweetie Rose : A Mystery (9781429950879)

by Fredrickson, Jack

  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.

  My appetite was gone. I set my plate on an end table, and left Sweetie Fairbairn’s penthouse as quietly as if I were sneaking away with a pocket full of silverware.

  The same guard who’d ridden up with me was waiting when I got out of the elevator. Across the lobby, outside the glass door, someone’s black limousine had pulled up under the canopy.

  It prompted an inspiration.

  “Tim Duggan around?” I asked the guard.

  “Somewhere,” he said.

  I pulled out the little spiral notebook I am never without. I wrote two words on a sheet, signed it, and tore it out. I folded the little note in half and handed it to him.

  “For Ms. Fairbairn,” I said, and walked out, quite alone, into the night.

  CHAPTER 11.

  It should have been a clown tumbling off a high roof, or Sweetie Fairbairn murmuring lies, or Amanda ecstatic at the wit of a finely dressed man, but it was a dream of Elvis Derbil that tore me, sweating, from sleep at four thirty the next morning. He’d been kneeling on the far side of the Willahock, filling empty salad dressing bottles with the muck that moved cloudy at the bank.

  It didn’t matter. Most nights, one dream or another usually wakes me earlier than four forty. At least Elvis had the decency to let me sleep until almost sunrise.

  I pushed myself out of bed, rang the curved wrought-iron stairs going down to the would-be kitchen, and awoke Mr. Coffee. Leaving him to burble, I went outside, crossed the street, the spit of land, and Thompson Avenue, and bought an Argus-Observer from the box under the red and white Jiffy Lube sign. The coffee was ready when I got back. I took a travel mug’s worth and the paper up to the roof. I keep a lawn chair there for when faces awaken me in the night and I go up to wait for the sun to make them go away.

  Rivertown is best in the dark just before dawn, when the neon and the noise from the honky-tonks along Thompson Avenue have shut down; when the girls who work the curbs have shut down, too, gone to the rooming houses back of where the factories used to light the night, to lie for a few hours blessedly alone. It is a good time to think.

  I started with the strong probabilities. Sweetie Fairbairn learned I did investigations from some earlier, innocuous comment of Amanda’s. Supposing I’d be as g
ood as anyone to take a fast, anonymous look at the death of James Stitts, she sent Duggan to hire me. I’d become troublesome, insisting on meeting with Duggan’s client. That demanded an inspection by Sweetie Fairbairn, before she proceeded with me. Or not.

  After that, my certainty floundered. If Sweetie Fairbairn was innocent of any knowledge of the clown’s death, she would have gotten better and faster results using the connections a woman like her must have had to the highest levels of the Chicago police.

  If she weren’t innocent, she’d never respond to the note I left at the Wilbur Wright.

  My mind flitted then, back to the party and the delight on Amanda’s face, as she laughed at a slick man’s joke. I pushed the image away.

  The sky had begun to lighten to the east. The tonks, liquor stores, hockshops, and the bowling alley were beginning to materialize, gauzy and indistinct, in the dim, growing light of the new morning. There was enough light to read now. I picked up the Argus-Observer.

  As usual, the rag carried little serious news. Keller teased about a supposed kickback scheme in Chicago; another columnist wrote of a diet regimen gone wrong in Hollywood. The longest story was on the third page, about a cat that could play the piano. Or not.

  There was nothing about the clown. I tossed the remains of my cold coffee over the wall and went inside.

  * * *

  “You look like hell.” Leo said a couple of hours later, stepping out onto his front steps. He wore a neon green sweatshirt with Woody Woodpecker embroidered on it. “Would you like coffee?”

  “I’ve been up on the roof for hours, drinking coffee.”

  “You have a dilemma?”

  I nodded.

  He told me to sit on the steps and went inside. We’d sweated a thousand dilemmas on those front steps, spring through fall, since seventh grade.

  He came out with two of Ma’s scratched porcelain mugs, steaming with coffee. He’d also brought several newspaper sheets, tucked under his arm.

  “Coffee with fortifier,” he said. “You’ll bloom like a rose.”

  It was a surprise. Coffee and fortifier was coffee and Jack Daniel’s.

  I took a sip. He’d made it weak, just enough to flavor the brew, because he knew I avoided booze since my divorce.

  “My dilemma,” I began, after he sat down.

  He looked at the folded newspapers he’d set on the concrete between us. “I know.”

  I set down my cup. “What do you mean?”

  “Amanda and that guy. Three times, their photos have been in the papers.”

  My face must have looked paralyzed. Because his then registered the shock of realizing he’d just told me something hurtful that I didn’t know.

  “Lovely day today,” he said, looking for even the smallest laugh.

  “What guy, Leo?”

  “I thought that was why you came over.” He unfolded one of the newspaper sheets and handed it to me. “Today’s Tribune. A party, night before last.”

  It was one of those society lineup photos, fine folks dressed in fine duds to do fine deeds. Amanda stood next to the silver-haired fellow I’d seen at Sweetie Fairbairn’s, the guy who’d made her laugh. They’d been at a fund-raiser for the Lyric Opera. His hand rested around her waist.

  Leo mumbled something about getting us more fortifier, meaning he was going to give me a minute with the other news sheets. He took my cup, which I’d barely tasted, and went inside.

  The man’s name was Richard Rudolph. In addition to heading a commodities trading firm, he sat on charitable boards. He looked every bit a rich, do-gooding son of a bitch. In each photo, Amanda looked delighted to be with him.

  Leo must have been waiting just inside the screen door, because he came out the instant I looked up.

  “It doesn’t have to mean anything,” he said, setting down the coffees. “Those people travel together, in packs.”

  “Not with their arms around each other.”

  I picked up my cup, took a taste. He’d added only more coffee. He was my friend.

  “That was only in today’s photo, Dek.”

  “Maris Mays?” I asked, keeping my eyes on the shutters of the bungalow across the street. Maris was a girl Leo and I had known. She’d disappeared right after high school. Years later, someone hired me to execute a will, and that led me back to those very old times. Maris haunted me during that investigation, and that had haunted Amanda.

  “Maris didn’t reorient Amanda’s world,” Leo said. “Wendell Phelps did. Old Dad brought her into his company, and into his life. Those pictures don’t have to mean anything.”

  “They meant something to you; you saved them.”

  “I was thinking you’d seen them, and would want to talk.”

  “Shit, Leo.”

  “Tell me about your dilemma,” he said.

  “You mean my other dilemma?” Whining, self-indulgence, and churlish words were still called for.

  “OK. Your other dilemma.”

  “Ever hear of Sweetie Fairbairn?” I folded the news sheets so I wouldn’t have to look at the photos of Amanda and the silver-topped gigolo.

  “I did work for her once, part of a team she’d hired to authenticate two Jackson Pollocks she wanted to buy for the Art Institute.”

  “Jackson Pollock? Was that the guy who threw paint?”

  “Boor.” He laughed too hard and too long at my feeble joke. Then, “Why do you ask about Sweetie Fairbairn?”

  “I went to a party at her penthouse last night. Amanda was there, and at first I thought she’d arranged the invitation, so we could steal a few moments.”

  “Go on,” he said, after I’d paused for too long, thinking about naïveté.

  “Sweetie herself took me aside for a short, intimate chat, ostensibly about my relationship these days with Amanda.”

  “Ostensibly?”

  “She told me she was considering donating to one of Amanda’s projects, and asked certain perfunctory questions about how close we were.”

  “Meaning whether you could get your lunch hooks on money Amanda took in?”

  “That’s what I was thinking, yes.”

  “Can you blame her? Look at the way you dress, as opposed to someone with refinement.” He touched Woody Woodpecker’s beak. He was going to get a laugh out of me, no matter how long it took.

  “She satisfied herself about my trustworthiness too quickly.”

  “Your winning smile, working at its usual warp speed?”

  “She’d been sizing me up, all right, but it had nothing to do with Amanda. Sweetie Fairbairn is my client.”

  “The clown case? She was the one who hired you?”

  “To be certain, I asked one of last night’s guards if Duggan, the guy who’d hired me, was around. He said yes.”

  “What’s the dilemma? That Sweetie Fairbairn somehow knew the clown?”

  “The widow Stitts told me her husband had been hired by a woman who rolled up in a chauffeured limousine.”

  “Come on, Dek. A lot of women in this town get around in limos.”

  “Only one invited me to a party to give me the once-over.”

  “Now you’re thinking she hired you to see if there’s evidence that ties her to the clown’s death?”

  “The scenario works.”

  He gave that some thought and said, “That’s a humdinger of a dilemma.”

  “For sure.”

  “What are you going to do?”

  “If my client’s a killer…” I let the thought fade.

  I shook my head, he shook his, and we walked—two bobble-heads—down to the sidewalk.

  “Seriously, what are you going to do?” he asked through the open door, after I got in the Jeep.

  “I already did it. I left her a two-word note, last night: ‘The Clown?’”

  “What if she doesn’t respond?”

  “Then what I’d like to do is wait after school for the silver-haired bastard who’s sniffing around my girlfriend, and beat the shit out of him o
n the playground.”

  CHAPTER 12.

  Jennifer Gale called right after I got back to the turret. “Let’s meet for lunch,” she said.

  “The rope?”

  “I’ve got news.”

  She would also have questions about the clown’s death, Rivertown, and my zoning. She would dig at all kind of things I didn’t want to talk about.

  At that moment, sour and cranky from thinking about Amanda and her silver-haired friend, the idea of being interrogated by Jennifer Gale about anything at all sounded splendid. I agreed in less time than I should have.

  “We’ll meet at noon,” she said. She gave me directions to a place I’d never heard of, adding, “Typical gourmet: miniscule portions and enormous prices, but there’s never a crowd. It’s a great place to talk. I hope you’ll be dressed appropriately.”

  “I never am, not for a gourmet place.” I was wearing one of my three pairs of khakis and one of my three blue button-down shirts.

  “See you in a half hour.”

  I put on my floral tie and my blazer. Then, mindful of the sneezing I’d set off in the elevator rising to Sweetie’s penthouse, I lingered for a moment outside, in the cleansing breeze off the Willahock, before getting into the Jeep.

  The name of the place, Galecki’s, matched what she’d given me, but everything else about it was wrong. The walls were paneled in fake knotty pine, worn yellow-and-white-checkered oilcloths covered the tables, and the place was mobbed with enough blue collars to make me think the food was good and reasonably priced. The day’s special, stuffed cabbage rolls, was chalked on a board above the cash register, in English and in Polish.

  I’d been had, by a woman who might be as playful as she was beautiful and threatening. I took off my tie, jammed it into my blazer pocket, and worked my way through the crowd to add my name to the waiting list.

  “Elstrom?” The hostess looked me up and down as if she were inspecting beef. She was a babushka with a heavy Polish accent, another Ma Brumsky, though ideally she possessed a more refined taste in movies.