Hunting Sweetie Rose : A Mystery (9781429950879) (26 page)

I would have laughed at the nonsense of it, but that would have hurt.

“Anything you want to tell me, before I let Plinnit in?” he said.

“I'll fill you in later, when we're away from here.”

He left the side of the bed and came back with Plinnit.

“Killer, Lieutenant Plinnit is here,” Leo announced.

“Your smart-assed tone isn't helping your client, Mr. Brumsky,” Plinnit said.

“Why the cuffs, Plinnit?” I asked.

“Suspicion of murder.”

“That's what the sheriff said. Still Robert Norton, the guard? Or are you still flailing away at Andrew Fill?”

He held up a small plastic evidence bag. Inside was a spent bullet. “The sheriff just gave me this. They dug it out of your side. It matches the gun that fell from your hand.”

“Why would I go off and shoot myself in some remote woods?”

“Remorse. You crawled there to die a sorry death, after you shot yourself. And it wasn't just any old remote woods. Sheriff Ball found blood at a small farm nearby, owned by a woman named Darlene Taylor. We're hopeful it's your blood, like we're hopeful this bullet will match two we recovered from behind the left ear of one George Koros, late of Chicago, Illin—”

“Koros is dead?” I struggled to sit up. A chained left foot and a shot right side brought me down, fast.

“Two shots to the back of his head, as you well know. Cleaning staff found him facedown at his desk.”

“I killed Koros, then came up here to shoot myself?”

Plinnit nodded too happily. “Fits together nicely, doesn't it?”

“It's crap.”

“It's enough to hold you for some time. If you've got other thoughts, tell me now.”

“When was Koros killed?”

“The ME hasn't issued his final report, but it was the day before yesterday. We've been looking for you ever since. Your ex-wife said she didn't know where you were.”

“I was here, in Hadlow.”

“Beyond you possessing the gun we think killed George Koros, we found a credit card statement lying next to his head,” he said, ignoring my alibi. “He'd pulled it off his online account. It shows you've been making substantial cash withdrawals against his card.”

“He sent me that card. I used it for traveling cash, to get to Missouri, then up here.”

“To find Sweetie Fairbairn?”

“Yes.”

Plinnit wasn't taking notes. He knew I didn't kill George Koros.

“So what have you found?” he asked.

“A concrete Indian chief.”

He frowned.

“And, of course, someone with a gun,” I added.

“Rosemary Taylor's sister's cottage is what you found, Elstrom. Remember Rosemary Taylor, the girl who became Sweetie Fairbairn?”

“The truck,” I said. “Ellie Ball told you about the truck.”

“Uh-huh, and the copies of yearbook photographs she found in it. She contacted the high school. They said you'd stopped by. I looked at the photos. Sweetie Fairbairn, in high school, looked back.”

“Sweetie Fairbairn hasn't been here for a long, long time.”

“Are you saying Darlene Taylor shot you and then beat you? A woman who, by most accounts, is small of stature and around sixty years old?”

When I didn't respond, Leo said, “Dek's never been good with women of any age, Lieutenant.”

Plinnit kept his eyes on me. “Did Darlene Taylor shoot you, Elstrom?”

“I can't imagine.”

“For getting wise to her and Koros's extortion of Sweetie Fairbairn?”

He'd learned a lot, none of which pointed to any wrongdoing by Sweetie Fairbairn. It was time to tell him more.

“That, and their murders of Andrew Fill and Robert Norton,” I said.

I told him I suspected that somehow Koros had discovered his old high school friend, Rosemary Taylor, living as Sweetie Fairbairn at the end of a rainbow in Chicago; that he convinced her to set him up with a monthly retainer and a fancy office on Wacker Drive; and that at some point, that hadn't been enough. He killed Andrew Fill for a half-million dollars, but that wasn't enough, either, not when there was so much more. So he brought down Sweetie's struggling sister, Darlene, to help him with a crafty extortion plot, probably centered around getting Sweetie blamed for Fill's and Norton's deaths. She outfoxed them, though. She ran, but not before giving away most, if not all, of her money. It killed the plan. Darlene murdered Koros so there'd be no remaining witness to their plot, and ran back up to Hadlow to resume life in the slow lane, at least until she could ease away with what was left of the half million Koros had embezzled from the Midwest Arts Symposium.

The only things I left out were the clown and the woman in the limo who'd hired him. Those pointed too directly at Sweetie Fairbairn.

“Slinking back here, hoping nobody knew she'd even been away, she got a bonus: you, peeking in her kitchen window?” Plinnit asked when I was done.

“Why not? Koros had told her I'd been sniffing around. I was a loose end. She shot me, and tried to make it look like a self-inflicted wound. She figured on me bleeding out in the woods, perhaps clutching the gun that killed Koros.”

“You really think it was Darlene Taylor, a short, sixty-year-old woman, who shot and kicked the crap out of you in the woods?”

“She could have had help. There could have been two people.”

“Can you prove any of this?”

“Not a bit.”

“All I'm certain of is that you keep popping up where you shouldn't be.” He treated himself to a false laugh. “Even up here, first thing you did was find the wrong side of the road, to run down a truckload of pigs.”

“You know I didn't kill anybody. Not Andrew Fill, not Robert Norton, not George Koros.”

“Here's all I need to prove for now, Elstrom: You were up here, with what we both believe is the weapon used to kill George Koros.”

“I have no motive.”

“He found out you were tapping his charge account. He got mad, said he was going to report you to the police.”

“Cash for airplane tickets.”

“Plus another ten grand for crashing your rental car. People get killed every day for a lot less.”

“Bullshit, Plinnit.”

“That's what I think, too.” He started for the door. “Until I think otherwise, you and the bed are chained.” He walked out of the room.

CHAPTER 45.

Ellie Ball came to my room three hours after Plinnit left.

“You are?” she asked Leo, frowning at his outlandish blue rayon shirt.

He got up from the chair in the corner, not that it made much difference, height-wise.

“Mr. Elstrom's adviser.”

“Not his lawyer, as you told Lieutenant Plinnit?”

“I said only that I was Mr. Elstrom's representative, Madame Law Woman. I never directly lie to the police.”

She turned to me. “He must sit in with us?”

“Yes.”

She came to the side of the bed, unlocked my leg, and set the cuffs next to the chair she took. “I've spent quite a bit of time with Lieutenant Plinnit. He just got confirmation from his medical examiner: George Koros was killed when you were up here. That made him angry. He is on his way back to Chicago.”

“I'm free to go?”

“Depends on your doctors—and on me.”

“You?”

“I can think of charges: unlawful possession of a firearm, trespass at the Taylor place, and,” she said, smiling just a little, “there's still the matter of your run-in with those pigs, even though it's not my county.”

Leo spoke. “What about the attempted murder of Dek, here?”

She lowered her eyes to the shirt drooping on him. “How do you keep that so bright?”

He smiled, bisecting his pale, narrow, bald head with perfectly white teeth. “Plant food.”

“Who shot you?” she asked me.

“George Koros's killer.”

“Don't evade.”

“There's only one person left with motive: Darlene Taylor.”

“A sixty-year-old woman shot and beat you?”

“The only thing I'm sure of is that Darlene's involved deeply in this thing. Down in Chicago, she must have seen, like the cops would see, that I'd pulled cash from Koros's credit card account. She knew I was on the move, tracking her sister. She also knew those withdrawals could point to me as Koros's killer. She came back up here, hoping no one knew she had ever left. As I told Plinnit, I think she brought back a substantial amount of money that Koros had embezzled from Sweetie Fairbairn. I think she intended to wait things out a bit, maybe until I was arrested, before disappearing from Hadlow permanently.”

“Except you showed up at her place?”

“It must have been a shock, learning I was sniffing around her property, but then she saw I could be a bonus. She could shoot me with the gun that killed Koros, fire another round with my hand on it to put my prints on the handle, and leave me to bleed out in the woods. My death would look like a suicide, perhaps an act of remorse after killing Koros. The problem was, she couldn't know that I'd already been up here for a while, and could prove I wasn't in Chicago when Koros got shot. The finger's going to come back to point at her. You've got to be vigilant. If she learns I have an alibi, she'll run, if she hasn't already.”

“She killed her sister's guard and George Korozakis?” she asked. “Rosemary, too?”

“I'm hoping Sweetie's alive, and running.”

She said nothing for a moment. Then, “If you're right, it's a tragedy, all around. Folks say Georgie Korozakis and Darlene Taylor were quite an item, once upon a time.”

“Things can change people. Like the incident.”

A hardness flashed across her face, and then it was gone. “So you're saying their romance got rekindled, all these years later?”

“For the love of money, this time.”

“I suppose.” Ellie Ball looked at the door. She was ready to leave. To be done with me.

“You know what I can't figure, Sheriff?”

“What's that?”

“Whether any of this ties back to that incident, when they were kids.”

I was right. Her face tensed again at the second mention of the incident. She stood up and started toward the door. “Have a safe journey back to Chicago, Mr. Elstrom.”

I'd struck a nerve with that random question about something that had happened long ago.

“Any thoughts as to why Darlene Taylor hung around that shack all those years, living in such squalor?” I asked her back.

“The doctor is going to release you today,” she said, without turning around. “Lieutenant Plinnit said he'd be happy to arrest you down in Chicago, if I don't decide to charge you with something up here first. Best you leave town before I change my mind.”

“Haven't you ever been curious why Darlene stayed on, after her sister Alta died? Don't you want to know why someone would live out in that shack, for forty years?”

“There's those of us who love Hadlow,” she said and stepped out into the hall.

CHAPTER 46.

I'd had much time to think, and to imagine, chained to my hospital bed.

Motives I understood. It was money, for Darlene and Koros. It was money, too, with Sweetie. She threw it away as she ran, to stop the killing.

Means, though, troubled me. I didn't understand the clown.

I called Miss Mason from my wheelchair, out front, while a nurse assistant and I waited for Leo to bring around faster transportation.

“Did you talk to Darlene?” Miss Mason asked.

“I didn't find her at home.”

“I heard you got shot.”

“Yes.” News like that would have traveled fast across Hadlow. “I'm still interested in that story Rosemary Taylor wrote in high school.”

“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.”