Hunting Sweetie Rose : A Mystery (9781429950879)

by Fredrickson, Jack

  “At his instigation.”

  “Yes, and for that, he is to be applauded. I also think, if given the opportunity, I’d jump at the chance to connect with my mother, or the Norwegian who supposedly was my father.”

  Her face was still guarded. She wasn’t accepting what I was trying to blithely pass across the table as a change in my attitude.

  “Sweetie Fairbairn,” she said, steering to a safer harbor. “You had a good time?”

  “I always enjoy mingling with swells on the tops of buildings. The elevation does something for my appetite.”

  “Appetite or not, you did well. As I said earlier, she was all business this afternoon. She’s seriously interested in helping the children’s wing.”

  “After I told her you and I never had shared a checkbook.”

  She laughed, just like old times. “Strange, though,” she said. “I’ve been told Sweetie likes to start out slow with new charities. Ten, twenty thousand dollars, usually. This afternoon, though, she hinted at a donation approaching a hundred thousand.”

  “How did she sound?”

  She shot me a quizzical look. “All business, as I said. Why did you ask if she’d mentioned you?”

  The newspaper photos of Amanda and the silver-topped jokester came back at me. She’d appeared happy, in her element. Or maybe it had been something more. She might have become close enough to the commodities man to trade confidences.

  The thought cut, that I might have to guard information around Amanda.

  “Vanity,” I said. “I like to be remembered.”

  Her face changed. She recognized the brush-off.

  “Well, whatever it was, I hadn’t anticipated hearing from her for some time. You helped, Dek.”

  I wondered, then, if we were at Rokie’s because she felt she owed me, for not screwing up at Sweetie Fairbairn’s the previous evening.

  We made small talk. She asked about Leo, and about Endora. I asked more about the children’s wing. We talked about my working on the turret, and whether Rivertown would ever become upscale enough for me to make a buck on my rehabbing.

  We talked about Elvis Derbil and salad oil, too, because she’d seen Jennifer Gale’s coverage of his arrest. In the not-so-long-ago days, she would have called me right away, laughing, incredulous, demanding to know what I knew about what was going on. No longer. Spontaneity had left us; we’d become careful about even the most inconsequential things.

  “I met her, you know,” I said.

  “Met who?”

  “Jennifer Gale. The television reporter who broke the story.”

  “The day they arrested Elvis?”

  “She wanted to know about the lizards.” Suddenly, I felt like I ought to confess things I hadn’t done.

  “She’s beautiful. Did you like her?”

  “She is, and yes. I like her.”

  She looked away then, at the cars parked in the lot.

  “Your picture’s been in the paper,” I said. It was on my mind. It just came out.

  Her eyes flashed back to mine. “Fund-raising.”

  We said more careful things, but I don’t remember what they were. We were like two old friends who’d bumped into each other on a street and decided to grab a quick bite before going different ways. For forever.

  “We’ll have our proper date at our trattoria next week?” I asked.

  “That would be nice,” she said softly.

  Then there was nothing more to talk small about, and we walked to our cars. The night, still young, had become old. She got in her car, I got in mine. She drove east and I headed south, as if we were off to separate planets.

  CHAPTER 15.

  I did serious time up on the roof, through the night, into the dawn, trying to rationalize Sweetie Fairbairn’s behavior. Trying not to dwell on Amanda’s.

  Sweetie Fairbairn had been too accepting.

  Too accepting that I’d developed information that might place her in a limousine, hiring Stitts to dance into oblivion.

  Too accepting that she was being blackmailed by someone willing to kill.

  She shouldn’t have accepted any of it. She should have demanded that things be done. Instead, she’d sent me away.

  Dawn changed into daylight. I’d rationalized only one good thing.

  I had to take another run at Sweetie Fairbairn.

  * * *

  Traffic along Michigan Avenue was stopped from turning onto Oak. Two police cars had blocked the street. Beyond them, I saw fire engines parked in front of the Wilbur Wright. I gunned the Jeep into a tended public garage, tossed the key to the valet, and ran down Oak.

  Three fire trucks and one ambulance, their diesel engines idling loudly, were stopped in front of the hotel. I didn’t see hoses and I didn’t see smoke. A policeman blocked the door to the hotel.

  A throng of people who looked rich enough to stay at the Wright were milling about across the street. They looked angry. I walked over and listened to two of them grouse about false alarms and damned kids.

  I’d started to cross back when I saw Duggan. He was down the block, leaning against a double-parked limo. I walked up slowly. He nodded when he saw me, then leaned in the car to say something. After a moment, he got in the front passenger’s seat.

  The rear window powered down. Sweetie’s face appeared, pale against the dark interior of the car. “Mr. Elstrom,” she said in a small voice. She unlocked the rear door, then slid over as I got in. She wore a soft pink pantsuit, an even softer pink blouse, and the blankness of shock on her face.

  No one—not Sweetie, not Duggan—asked why I was there.

  “Some kid pulled a fire alarm?” I said.

  She turned her head slowly, to look back at the Wilbur Wright. “Small fire in a powder room, they said. Nothing major, they said. Just something like a forgotten cigarette that set off some tissues, enough to make smoke and set off the alarms.”

  I settled back in the leather. “No big deal?”

  Timothy Duggan shifted on the front seat but didn’t turn around.

  “It’s my powder room,” Sweetie Fairbairn said. She took a breath. “We’d just gotten back from a breakfast.” She spoke in a monotone, as if the precision of her words, and not their content, were what mattered. “I didn’t smell the smoke when we entered the apartment, but Tim noticed it right away.”

  She leaned forward to touch Duggan’s shoulder, in the front seat, as if for reassurance. “Then our smoke alarm went off?”

  “Yes, Ms. Fairbairn,” Duggan said, not turning away from watching the street and the sidewalks.

  By the gentleness in his voice, I realized that he, too, suspected she was on the verge of shock.

  “No guard was upstairs?” I asked.

  “Not necessary,” Duggan said, “when we weren’t going to be there.”

  It was boneheaded reasoning, but I let it go.

  One of the fire trucks, then another, rumbled behind us, driving away. Sweetie’s driver looked over at Duggan, who shook his head. We’d stay in place. The driver leaned back.

  “Tim turned me around right away, and we came back down in the elevator,” Sweetie continued. “A half hour later—a half hour, Tim?”

  Duggan nodded, still looking restlessly around.

  “A half hour later,” Sweetie said, “the manager called Tim to say the fire had broken out in the powder room just off the foyer.”

  The last fire truck drove away, followed by the ambulance. Then Duggan’s cell rang. He clicked it on, listened, and mumbled something into it. A second later, he nodded, and the driver slipped the limo into drive and we started down the street.

  “Robert said there’s no smoke damage, Ms. Fairbairn,” Duggan said. “He put the exhaust system on high. It will be fine.”

  “Parties can make a room so stuffy, even now that no one smokes,” Sweetie said, staring absently past me out the window as the car circled the block.

  I leaned forward. “Who is Robert?” I asked Duggan.

  “R
obert Norton. One of the contract men I use. Once Ms. Fairbairn was safely back in the car, I called him to come over and secure the residence.”

  The limo eased to a stop in front of the Wilbur Wright. Duggan walked closely beside Sweetie as they went to the elevator. The contract guard, Robert Norton, was waiting in the foyer of Sweetie’s penthouse. I recognized him as the guard I’d seen in the hallway, the night of her party.

  Norton had been right. There was no smell of smoke in the air. The room was ready for another party.

  “One more look,” Duggan said and left us with Norton. Sweetie and I sat on two small chairs by the elevator, silent as kids just home from school, waiting for milk and cookies.

  When Duggan came back, he opened a small door. “Can’t even smell it in the powder room, Ms. Fairbairn,” he said, stepping aside.

  A few damp pieces of scorched paper lay in the small antique porcelain sink. It wasn’t enough to destroy anything. Except maybe a woman’s reluctance to pay a blackmail demand.

  “How could someone get in here?” I asked Duggan.

  “Broken window in the guest bedroom,” he said, pointing past the living room. “This place is set back from the hotel’s lower walls. Getting onto the roof gets you to any of the windows.”

  “There are outside ladders?”

  “One. There’s another up through a supply closet. Both come from the floor below. The maintenance people use them to get to the roof.”

  “Does the building have video surveillance?”

  “Only in the lobby. The day manager said no one got near her private elevator. Our boy did his homework, went up to the hotel’s top floor in one of the guest elevators, then used the outside ladder to get up here.”

  “You’ll call the police?”

  Duggan looked at Sweetie Fairbairn. Her face was immobile. “I would expect not,” he said, after a few seconds.

  There was no point in questioning Sweetie. Her mind was somewhere beyond the penthouse.

  Duggan saw it, too. “Best you lie down for a time, Ms. Fairbairn,” he said.

  She nodded meekly and left.

  “Who doesn’t like her?” I asked Duggan.

  He started to shake his head.

  “No, damn it. There’s no time left for musing and denying. Someone is coming at her.”

  “She hired me to do security. That’s it.”

  “You must have heard things.”

  He thought for a minute. “One name, maybe: Andrew Fill.”

  “Who’s Andrew Fill?”

  “I think he used to work at one of her charities. All I know is that I heard Ms. Fairbairn asking one of her advisers about Fill. They were arguing, I think.”

  “Who was the adviser?”

  “A guy named Koros. I gather he stops by once in a blue moon. I don’t think he does much for Ms. Fairbairn.”

  “The exact name?”

  “George Koros. I think he’s got an office downtown.”

  “Will he talk to me?”

  “I’ll call him, tell him Ms. Fairbairn requested it.”

  I left, without either of us seeing fit to wonder whether I’d been rehired.

  CHAPTER 16.

  G. K. Investment Management was on Upper Wacker Drive, on the fifth floor of a curved glass building that mimicked the bend in the Chicago River. A blond woman was leaving Koros’s office, going the other way, as I got off the elevator.

  By the quality of the address, I expected a snappy receptionist and big leather chairs, like the Bohemian’s office. What I saw, when I pushed open the oak door, was something that would have shamed an insurance agent starting out in a strip mall. The reception room had a worn black two-seat sofa, a small wood desk that held only a telephone, and a lamp table piled with dog-eared old issues of Fortune and Forbes. The ceiling was decorated with a camera tucked behind a hanging plastic plant. A buzzer was mounted on the inner door frame. I smiled at the plant and pushed the button.

  A dead bolt was electronically released, and the door to the inner office opened an inch. I pushed it all the way open and went in.

  A gray-haired, thickset man got up from behind a desk. He wore a dark blue suit and a light blue tie, and a face that looked pained by my intrusion.

  “Mr. Elstrom? George Koros. Nice to meet you,” he said, extending his hand.

  The office was spacious, and had a view, through curved glass, of the river and the Merchandise Mart. Like the reception area, it was sparsely furnished, holding only a bare desk that was too small for the large room, a desk chair, and one guest chair. The furniture was old, and cheap for the room. A few weeks of the Wall Street Journal were stacked on the floor in one corner.

  “Tim Duggan phoned, said Sweetie asked that I help you in any way I can,” he said as we sat. “I’m afraid he was quite vague.”

  Duggan had seen fit to play cagey with Koros.

  “Really a minor matter,” I lied, “having to do with an anonymous, upsetting note Ms. Fairbairn received. Mr. Duggan told me there’d been some difficulty with one of Ms. Fairbairn’s employees some time back?”

  “I really don’t know…”

  “Andrew Fill?”

  “Ah, yes.”

  “A bad act?”

  “Hardly. Merely a young man who lost his way for a time.” Koros smiled. “Certainly not someone who’d send a threatening note.”

  “Revenge, jealousy, anger, lust? What’s Fill’s problem?”

  “None of those, Mr. Elstrom. He headed up the Midwest Arts Symposium, a group that Sweetie and her friends formed some years ago. They bring in writers, painters, photographers—all sorts of artists—every November for a series of free public lectures. It’s quite well known.”

  He studied me then, for the uninformed cretin that I was. I could only shrug, cretinously, and ask, “And?”

  “Sweetie and her fellow board members had him fired.”

  “For what?”

  “For some missing funds. Sweetie didn’t file charges. She suggested that if he repaid the money, he could leave quietly. He agreed.”

  “Did Ms. Fairbairn do the actual suggesting?”

  “She entrusted that to me.”

  “A lot of money?”

  “Enough.”

  “When was he canned?”

  “A couple of months ago. He has much to lose, if this matter ever becomes known. He could be prosecuted. I’m sure he means Ms. Fairbairn no harm.”

  “I’d like to talk to him.”

  Koros opened a side drawer, withdrew an address book, and wrote down Fill’s address for me.

  “You’ll find he’s quite harmless,” he said.

  “How long have you worked for Ms. Fairbairn?”

  “I don’t do much work for her, I’m afraid. I merely manage checking accounts for a few of her charities. However, I’ve enjoyed Sweetie’s friendship for several years.”

  “You can think of no one else who might bear a grudge against Ms. Fairbairn?”

  “Even Andrew Fill is a stretch, Mr. Elstrom. He must have gotten in a jam; gambling, perhaps, or drugs. I can think of no one else.”

  “Nobody?”

  “Nobody at all,” he said.

  * * *

  Andrew Fill lived in an old building with black metal windows. It could have once been a factory or a warehouse and was built of Old Chicago Brick, that particular blend of yellowish, grayish, tannish bricks that line the sides and backs of most of the older factories and apartment buildings in the city. There’s lots of bland, vague ish in that long-ago blend of brick, except for the dark, burned ones. Those they call clinkers, and they’re in the mix, too, because in the years following the great fire, not even overbaked bricks got wasted rebuilding old Chicago, not when they could be used on the dark sides and backs of buildings where no one except the owners would see.

  Still, it’s always those clinkers that draw the eye, because there’s nothing vague—nothing ish—about them. They look stronger and rougher than the others. They don’t fi
t in.

  Fill didn’t respond to his buzzer. Judging by the amount of mass-mailed flyers piled on the tile floor beneath his little mail door, he hadn’t been around to answer his buzzer for quite some time.

  Someone had saved a buck on the mailboxes. They were flimsy, made of cheap plated tin. The lid flexed enough to show a box stuffed with envelopes. I pinched two out. One was an electric bill. The other was an investment account check. Both had been mailed almost a month earlier.

  They would have arrived about the time James Stitts was killed.

  Andrew Fill could have gone away, perhaps on vacation, without thinking to put a hold on his mail. Nothing but an oversight, an act of forgetting.

  Or those month-old pieces of mail could have been clinkers. Things that didn’t fit in.

  I jammed Fill’s two envelopes back in his cheap tin mailbox and went out to the Jeep.

  * * *

  I called Duggan. “Andrew Fill took some money from one of Ms. Fairbairn’s charities, and then he might have taken off. His mail is piling up.”

  “Did Koros have any other potentials?”

  “He didn’t even see Fill as a likely suspect.”

  “All right, then.”

  “Any luck on finding out who set that fire?”

  “The building manager has changed the locks on the doors that access the ladders to the roof.”

  “That’s it? No further investigation?”

  “Ms. Fairbairn wants no publicity.” He mumbled something about calling me later and clicked me away.

  I was sure he would.

  When pigs flew.

  * * *

  Amanda put the last nail into the day when she called that evening. “I’ve got to cancel for next week.”

  “We haven’t even set a specific day yet. Now you’re saying you’re unavailable for the entire week?”

  Mine was a thin protest, though. Yesterday’s evening at Rokie’s had been stilted, probably for reasons neither of us quite understood. We’d ended up with nothing to say to one another.

  “A group of us are going to be working rather intensely on the Memorial Hospital project,” she offered.