Hunting Sweetie Rose : A Mystery (9781429950879) (11 page)

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 fit 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.

“Spur-of-the-moment kind of thing, a sort of spontaneous combustion of good intentions among the moneyed set?”

“Sweetie Fairbairn,” she said. She'd ignored my sarcasm, another bad sign.

“What about her?”

“Two other ladies on the Memorial fund-raising board got the same kind of call from her that I did. She's become hugely interested, hugely fast. We're going to try to enlist her as a director. If we do that, we raise tens of millions in a hurry.”

“That's the way hospitals are funded, so spontaneously?” I pressed, because I didn't quite believe. “You people land a hitter like Sweetie Fairbairn, then do a week's worth of meetings, and presto, a new hospital wing gets built?”

“Honestly, when we talked about a movie and dinner, I didn't know…”

The wise part of my brain, never larger in size than a speck, told me to let it go. Amanda's life was going through an upheaval. I'd told her I'd support her new priorities, that I'd be as understanding as she'd tried to be when I'd gone through my own upheaval—at least until I'd pushed her away by pickling myself in alcohol.

I mumbled something about nothing at all, and then we hung up, both of us relieved that the call was over.

CHAPTER 17.

The next morning, I drove a half-baked plan and a full mug of coffee over to Leo's.

I'd spent the previous evening trolling the Internet, trying to get a fix on Andrew Fill. His mentions were numerous, all accumulated from his stint as executive director of the Midwest Arts Symposium. During the years he'd headed that group, it appeared he'd gotten photographed alongside every writer, stage actor, and opera singer who'd come to Chicago.

He was a thin fellow, with a thin nose and thin hair, and a stoop to his thin shoulders. He didn't look like a killer; he looked like the president of a stamp club. For sure, he looked smart enough to take a freebie Stay-out-of-Jail card offered by a charitable socialite. All he had to do was pay back the embezzled funds. He had no motive for coming back at her.

Certainly, not by killing a clown.

Besides, Bea Stitts had said it was a woman who'd hired her husband, a woman in a dark limousine, perhaps playing out some twisted fantasy.

I had to push my mind away from that. Andrew Fill was who I had.

Unless it was a twisted client.

*   *   *

Leo's Porsche wasn't in his garage. I knew Endora started at the Newberry Library at nine o'clock. Chances were, Leo was on his way home from her place. I decided to hum show tunes while I waited. That's what one does when one doesn't have a car radio.

I'd just gotten through an eighth rendition of the first verse of “Singing in the Rain,” which was what one does when one knows only the first verse, when my cell phone rang, spoiling what I was sure was an improving performance.

“How about buying me dinner?” Jennifer Gale asked.

“I thought you always worked.”

“This is my day off.” She told me she'd swing by the turret at seven thirty and hung up.

Leo's Porsche's exhaust sounded behind me before I could think to examine how I felt about seeing Jennifer Gale again, or, more futilely, begin another rendition of “Singing in the Rain.” Leo had the top down, a straw hat string-tied under his chin, and was sporting the huge sunglasses that, with his pale skin, made him look like a glaucoma patient escaped from a prison eye clinic. He gave me a nod as he pulled into his garage, trailing German exhaust and riffs of Brazilian bossa nova. I pulled up behind the big door and climbed out.

He made a disdainful show of surveying my attire. I was wearing painting clothes.

“Don't start,” I said. “Don't dare to stand there in yellow rayon, adorned with purple birds and what look like green tarantulas, and deign to mock my wardrobe.”

“
Deign
?”

“Deign,” I repeated.

“I consider this”—he fingered the hem of the shiny untucked shirt, which in double XL hung on him like a silk robe—“to be perfect attire to wear when deigning, whatever you might think that word means. More important, though, I am not speckled everywhere with crusted bits of white and black, from sloppiness with a brush.”

“It's a disguise,” I said. “For breaking and entering, which we're going to do today.”

“Unfortunately, my schedule, unlike yours, is cluttered. I must work today.”

A series of low beats began pulsing slowly from his bungalow.

“At nine in the morning?” I asked.

He stared at the back of his home, disbelieving. “I had to work last night. Ma had bingo at the church. They came over afterward. All of them. They stayed upstairs at first, having vodka and watching dirty movies. I thought it would be OK; I kept working. Then, at midnight, they came down the basement stairs, liquored up and ready to strut. It was too much. I fled to Endora's.”

The bass beats were coming faster now, loud and deep enough to vibrate the clapboards on the old garage. He pointed to the stuff I'd piled in the back of the Jeep. “A stepladder, a paint tray, a gallon of paint?”

“And a brush. It's part of the disguise.”

“You're really going to break in someplace?”

I told him about my visits to Sweetie Fairbairn's penthouse, the powder room fire, and my conversation with George Koros. “Andrew Fill had a beef with Sweetie Fairbairn. It's all I can think to do.”

He looked back at the house. “I can't go in there.”

He was weakening. “A home invasion always brightens the day,” I said.

He nodded, and we got in the Jeep.

As I pulled away, he asked, “How about we go out for pizza tonight? Real late.”

“Can't.”

“Date with Amanda?”

“She canceled, for every night next week. She has meetings about her hospital renovation.”

“Important work.”

“It might be true,” I said.

“Of course,” he said, staring straight ahead.

“It might also be that she'll be with that white-haired old commodities trader.”

“This will pass,” he said.

“I'm having dinner with Jennifer Gale tonight.”

He shifted on his seat. “Is that wise?”

“A potential disaster. She charged ahead after she gave me the clown photos. She got us in to see the rope.”

“And?”

“The rope was cut.”

“Murder for sure,” he said. “Does Jennifer Gale know Sweetie Fairbairn is your client?”

“I don't even know if Sweetie Fairbairn is my client. It's touch and go with her.”

“You've got to be careful around Jennifer Gale. Hell will pay if all this makes the news.”

“She's smart; she'll tumble to it sooner rather than later. For now, the best I could do was cut a deal with her. She stays quiet on everything until I approve. In return, I keep her informed about the clown's death.”

“You are a man facing constant dilemmas.”

“I like her, Leo,” I said, after a minute. “She's straight up about what she wants.”

“Jennifer Gale.”

“Jennifer Gale.”

“She's beautiful. And Amanda is sending you bad signals.”

I moved on to tell him about the crime we were to commit.

“So what if his mail is piling up?” he said, when I was done. “He got fired, he swiped some money. He's not finding another job. He might have gone home to see the folks, plot his next move. Or maybe he's on a beach, spending his ill-gotten loot.”

“Then he wasn't around to set the fire in Sweetie Fairbairn's penthouse.”

“That's reason enough to see if Andrew's been at home?”

“A dead clown, and now a fire in her home. Someone's applying pressure to Sweetie Fairbairn. Right now, Andrew Fill is the only one who's got motive.”