Hunting Sweetie Rose : A Mystery (9781429950879)

by Fredrickson, Jack

  “I found it, and read it again, last evening. Quite remarkable.”

  “About a man who entertained kids.”

  “Yes.”

  “The man was a clown, wasn’t he? And he fell off a roof?” It was one of the things I’d become certain about, chained to my bed. Young Rosemary Taylor had written about a clown who’d gone off a roof.

  “How did you know?”

  “I’d really like to read it,” I said.

  “So you said earlier. You also said you’re here on an insurance matter.”

  “I can’t tell you what I’m working on.”

  “Is Rosemary in trouble?”

  “Yes.”

  “Would the manuscript help or hurt her?”

  “I don’t know.”

  For a moment, there was only silence. Then she said, “I’m on my way out. I will leave it in an envelope outside my front door at home. I would like it returned tomorrow.” She gave me directions and hung up.

  A blue Chrysler minivan pulled up under the canopy. The nurse’s aide started pushing me toward the curb, having recognized Leo. I hadn’t, not at first, not in such a vehicle. I told her I could manage by myself, and pretty much did, though there were moments when all three of us held our breaths.

  “What were you doing, jabbing the sheriff about that long-ago murder?” Leo asked after I eased in. It was the first time we’d been alone since my chat with Ellie Ball.

  “For a guy whose regular ride is a Porsche, your idea of a fun vacation rental is perverted.”

  “Don’t sidestep. Though for your information, I thought you might need to be carted horizontally back to Rivertown, especially if you’d ceased breathing. Hence, the minivan. What was that with the sheriff?”

  “As you said, I was jabbing, and doing it blindly. Motive, for Koros and Darlene, I can understand: control of Sweetie’s millions. What I can’t quite figure is means. What did they have on Sweetie Fairbairn, and how did they use it?”

  “Something to do with that clown’s death.”

  “That I think I’m about to understand. That can’t be all of it, though. There’s that gas station killing, and how Georgie Korozakis left right after, and then Sweetie, at the end of the school year.”

  A smile played on his lips. “Shall I start this fine vehicle, drive us back to the motel, then on to the airport? Or do you think driving down to Chicago would be easier?”

  “Driving will be easier on me, physically,” I said, adding slowly, “We’ll get back in the wee hours.”

  “Yes.”

  “About the time Ma will be firing up her new speakers.”

  There was silence. Then he said, “I’m being played. You’re going to suggest an alternative?”

  “More of a diversion.” I signaled for him to start up.

  * * *

  Miss Mason’s house wasn’t far. An envelope was leaned against the front door, as she’d promised.

  “What’s this?” Leo asked, after he’d retrieved it.

  “Confirmation, I think.”

  We stayed in the driveway while I fanned the manuscript. It was thin, mimeographed in faint blue ink, and less than a hundred pages. I found what I’d expected quickly.

  “Now what?” he asked, when I set the manuscript on my lap.

  “Now, a return.”

  Leo nodded like he’d been given a choice.

  * * *

  “Just a quick drive-by, to see if she’s home,” I said, when we were a mile away. It was an hour before sunset.

  “You’re crazy.”

  “Nobody’s said she’s been around.”

  “Darlene’s around. Touch your shot flesh if you don’t believe.”

  “She’s not being smart. She should be here, acting innocent, visibly renewing her vows of poverty until it’s safe to take off with the half million.”

  “Unless she doesn’t want to be questioned, a frail sixty-year-old, for beating the crap out of you.”

  “There is that, yes.”

  We got to the cottage. There was no car parked in front.

  “She could still be home,” Leo said uncertainly. “With another gun.”

  He was nervous. So was I.

  He pulled to a stop. I opened the car door.

  “What the hell, Dek?”

  I eased onto my feet. It was like standing in a rowboat, in a squall. I hung on to the outside rearview mirror.

  He killed the engine, got out, and came around. “Didn’t I just remind you that you got shot here?”

  “The memory is fresh.” So was the pain in my side. I started walking up to the cottage.

  “Not to mention beaten, by that frail, older…?” He let the insinuation dangle.

  “I believe I’m not the only one troubled by older women,” I said, dangling my own insinuation next to his.

  He sighed, a fine confirmation that he was thinking about his mother and her friends, all of whom were no doubt jiving in the bungalow basement at that very moment.

  He followed me to the door. I knocked. Then I banged.

  No one answered. I tried the handle. It was locked.

  “Maybe she went to town, to buy another gun,” Leo offered.

  “Plan B,” I said.

  “That would be?”

  “You going through a window, to unlock the door.”

  “Into a creepy cottage, to be confronted by a madwoman with a gun?”

  “Just to see if she’s packed up and left for good.”

  “Why pack? She’s got half a million dollars to buy new things.”

  “She’s not home. Let’s at least look.”

  “What if she comes home? She’ll call the cops.”

  “No; she’ll shoot us with that new gun you said she’s buying. Best to hustle, Leo.” I pointed to the window covered by taped cardboard.

  He went over to it. Sun rotted and soggy, it fell inward with a faint push. He hoisted himself up and dropped into the blackness behind it.

  I waited by the front door, feeling every beat of my heart grind into the torn flesh at my ribs. The sun was setting. The road and the fields around the house were getting darker. I didn’t want to be there; I didn’t want to see a pair of headlights working their way down the road toward the cottage.

  The lock on the front door clicked, and the door swung open. Foul air came out.

  “Jeez, Dek, it’s bad in here,” Leo said from inside the gloom.

  Memories of Andrew Fill in his trailer came back. “Bad-housekeeping bad?”

  “I hope.”

  I hobbled in, and he shut the door. “What are we looking for?” he asked.

  “Fast enlightenment,” I said. The dark house seemed to be darkening by the second.

  “Shit,” he said and went to the back.

  The tiny front room was a mess. Soiled plates, crusted with ancient food, were stacked on an end table. One leg had broken off the couch and been replaced with a split piece of a log. Stubs of candles were everywhere, stuck to mismatched saucers and one in a ridiculous plated candelabra.

  A hundred People magazines, years of peeks at the lives of the rich and famous, lay in a spilled-over pile in the corner. I wondered if Darlene had been able to look at them after Koros sent word that her own sister Rosemary was living such a life high in a penthouse in Chicago.

  It was a place to go mad, that cottage without plumbing or electricity. A place to get out of before Darlene came rolling up the road.

  “Anything, Leo?” I called toward the back of the house

  He came out in the hall. “Two bedrooms. Two closets. Two sets of clothes, one adult’s, one kid’s.”

  “Kid’s clothes? You’re sure?”

  “Teenager’s, thirteen maybe. Jeans, knit shirts, flannel shirts.”

  “Old clothes?”

  “One pair of jeans looked new.”

  “There’s nothing to be learned here.”

  He was in the living room, by the front door, in an instant.

  For sure, it was a p
lace to go mad—and it had gotten way too dark.

  CHAPTER 47.

  We sat on the side of the Would You? at the table farthest from the high school hormones firing under the yellow bug lights in front. Leo had taken our empty chicken baskets back up to the counter and come back with new Cokes, and for another half hour we’d traded Miss Mason’s mimeographed pages back and forth.

  “Damning stuff for Sweetie Fairbairn, I suppose, if this got out,” Leo said, looking up from what young Rosemary Taylor called Hunting Will Slater.

  He read the key paragraphs aloud. “Will Slater leaned forward over the edge of the roof. Down below the children yelled in excited exuberance. One by one, Will began unleashing his balloons into the Wedgwood blue sky, sending them soaring weightlessly, freely forever, into the cloudless heavens. Transfixed, the boys and girls laughed excitedly at the soaring balloons and at Will Slater, the leaning man handsome even under clown makeup. For from below, he seemed to be leaning almost straight out from the edge of the building, godlike, weightless, and so manly. Samantha laughed, too, excitedly and exuberantly, caught up in the adoring enthusiasm of all the children around her, their zest for laughter and excitement. And her love.”

  He took a sip of Coke and went on. “Suddenly something changed. Will Slater’s voice, that wonderful, deep baritone, called out, higher in pitch than Samantha had ever heard it. The children sensed it immediately, and stopped their laughing. It was a note of fear from the throat of a man who was never afraid. And then, as she watched, the man she loved, handsome and youthful, the safety rope that Will Slater had always told her he checked and double-checked, let go suddenly, and Will Slater fell over the edge of the building, his safety rope now horribly unhooked, to the certainty of death below.”

  He set the sheets on the table. “Thus he became a dead hunk of a clown. A tragic romance, written by a high school girl.”

  “A script for murder, written by a high school girl.”

  “Used to kill a clown and then prime Sweetie for blackmail?” He arched his formidable eyebrows. “That’s too extreme. Why risk an actual murder? Koros or Darlene could have simply mailed a copy of the old manuscript to Sweetie, along with a specific threat: ‘Pay up or we’ll kill a clown. We’ll send your old story to the newspapers and you’ll be blamed.’ Sweetie could have just laughed. A story she wrote in high school doesn’t make her a murderer forty years later. No, Dek; it’s too extreme.”

  “By then, things were extreme. Koros had already killed Andrew Fill, to make sure the fall guy for the embezzled Symposium’s half million could never return to tell the truth about who really took the money. I think his initial plan was simply to bury Fill in the muck behind the dunes, let people think Fill absconded with the dough.”

  “Then big greed reared its head? Koros changed his mind, decided to keep the corpse around to get Sweetie blamed for Fill’s murder?”

  “Why settle for a measly half million when there were so many millions more? The corpse could be useful, if it were found with something of Sweetie’s—perhaps just a hair—on it. Sweetie had motive: Fill had shamed her, embezzled from her. Getting the money back wasn’t enough for her; he had to die. The police would buy it.”

  “So he kept Fill in the trailer, ripening, while he formulated a new plan?”

  “Koros remembered his old high school love, and how closely the two sisters had resembled each other. He looked her up, and found her ripening, too, on the old Taylor homestead—and he saw, with extreme delight, that Darlene could still pass for her sister, at least from a distance. She must have gone nuts when he told her Rosemary was living the good life in Chicago.”

  “And one of them remembered this?” He tapped the pages on the table.

  “Getting blamed for the clown’s death, on top of Fill’s, could be enough to get Sweetie to run. Koros could then loot her estate at his leisure. It was perfect. Sweetie would be blamed for taking all her millions with her.” I picked the title page from the pile of papers and held it up. “Even the pseudonym Rosemary used—”

  “‘Hunting Will Slater,’” Leo read aloud, “‘by Sweetie Rose.’ Sweetie Rose, Sweetie Fairbairn. I don’t know. It still sounds too circumstantial.”

  “Combine it with Stitts’s widow recalling it was a woman in a limo who’d hired her husband to dance on a roof, and throw in the killing of her guard. Who wouldn’t run, Leo?”

  “Why didn’t Sweetie hire some high-priced lawyer to pick apart what still seems like an awfully circumstantial case?”

  “I think there’s more I can’t see.”

  “Why did Koros tell Sweetie that Fill had begun to pay back the embezzled funds?”

  “That’s easier to understand. Koros needed time to ready his new plan.”

  “To keep anyone from nosing around?”

  “Sweetie could have changed her mind about not prosecuting Fill. Or maybe one of Sweetie’s fellow board members at the Symposium might want an investigation. Saying that Fill was paying back shut all that down. The money was being repaid, end of story.”

  “Shut you down, too, after you wandered into the investigation?”

  “I was an added complication, a sign that Sweetie wasn’t about to run. That’s when they killed the guard, to put more pressure on her. They figured right, and they figured wrong. They sent Sweetie running, all right, but she gave away her money on her way out of the penthouse. In an instant, everything got ruined. Also, there was still Andrew, spoiling in his trailer, yet to be found. Sooner or later, someone in that trailer park was going to get a whiff, and maybe things wouldn’t point only to Sweetie Fairbairn. They had to cover their tracks. That’s why they torched the trailer, to destroy Fill’s body.”

  “A murder they tried to get you blamed for.”

  “They must have worried I’d learned too much. It was either Koros or Darlene who tipped the police that I’d be coming to the trailer.”

  “They had to shift gears, though, when you didn’t show.”

  “One of them was watching me in Rivertown while the other was in Indiana, torching Fill’s trailer. When they realized I wasn’t going to come to the trailer, Koros backpedaled, calling me to pretend surprise that Fill’s trailer had been burned, and apologizing for insisting that I go.”

  “OK,” he said. “I’ll buy that Koros was an evil mastermind, that he found Darlene rotting in that shack with no electricity, no indoor plumbing, doing nighttime cleanup at the high school for subsistence wages, and stoked a big rage by telling her Sweetie was living rich in Chicago. I’ll buy that it was Darlene in the limo, trying to be seen as Sweetie hiring the clown. I’ll buy that it was Darlene or Koros who cut the rope, and who later killed Sweetie’s guard, to induce Sweetie to run, and run fast.”

  He paused and offered up a smile.

  I recognized the smile. He’d found a fatal flaw in my reasoning. He usually did.

  “Nice and tidy thinking,” I ventured, but it was tentative.

  His eyes glistened; his smile widened. “I’ll even accept that it was a sixty-year-old woman you were wrestling with, on that dirt farm.”

  “We weren’t wrestling. She’d shot me. Once I was down, she mostly kicked.” I arched my own eyebrows, desperate for a retort. “Surely you know older ladies who can kick?”

  “Alas, yes,” he said, unfazed, “but that is irrelevant to the major flaws in your reasoning.” His straw slurped at the bottom of his cup. “Most likely, Sweetie Fairbairn is simply running from her own crimes. She could have killed Andrew Fill for stealing money from her. She could have killed the clown, to act out her own long-festering fantasies. She could have killed her guard because he’d heard something about her misdeeds. She could have killed George Koros because he got wise to what she’d done. As for her giving away all that money, on her way out the door, remember that no one yet knows how much money she had in the first place. For all the money she gave away, she might have taken plenty more with her, to use to stay invisible for the rest of her life.�
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  He leaned across the table as much as his height would allow. “That said, do you know what really knocks the hell out of your theories?”

  I knew what he was going to say. I had considered it as I lay in the hospital.

  I spoke fast, to beat him to it. “Koros and Darlene didn’t have to kill all those people to get at Sweetie’s money. They only had to kill one person: Sweetie Fairbairn herself. Darlene was Sweetie’s closest surviving relative. Even with a will cutting her out, she could make claim against at least some of those millions.”

  He smiled and stood up, happy that I’d seen his logic, and helped me to my feet. We started toward the rental van.

  I looked past him, at the high school kids circling each other at the front of the Would You? Boys, shaggy and scruffy, too cool to comb; girls, studiedly casual, too eager to not be eager. All of them were full of themselves, full to bursting, full of the night. It seemed like a thousand years since I’d felt a summer’s evening that way—the heat, the musk, that special young lust for almost everything.

  Then I saw the sheriff’s cruiser, parked a bit too far down the block.

  “We’ll start for Chicago first thing in the morning?” Leo asked, still strutting brain-wise, as we got in the van.

  I didn’t answer. He drove us away in silence, enjoying his crafty refutation of my theories about Sweetie Fairbairn. I watched the outside mirror. After a mile I was sure.

  “Sweetie Fairbairn was a philanthropist,” I said. “She’d have had an ironclad will, leaving money only to those charities she believed in, not to some sister she hadn’t had contact with in forty years.”

  He groaned.

  “We’re of interest here,” I said.

  “What are you talking about?”

  “Those headlamps following us.”

  He checked the rearview.

  “They belong to the sheriff’s car that was parked down the street from the Would You? Ellie Ball wants to know what we’re up to.”

  “Which means?”

  “Tomorrow, we ask her why.”

  CHAPTER 48.