Hunting Sweetie Rose : A Mystery (9781429950879) (3 page)

“The insurance file on the clown that went off the roof at the Rettinger building,” I said.

“You trying to make him a jumper so your company won't have to pay?”

“Nothing like that.” I gave him one of my winning grins. “Is the officer in charge in?”

“Later this afternoon,” he snapped.

“You'll give him my card?”

“Even if it's with my dying breath.”

Walking out, I looked back. He was leaning over, to drop my card in a wastebasket.

There was a Plan B. The Bohemian's office was less than a mile away.

*   *   *

The Bohemian's name is never in the papers. Anton Chernek values secrecy the way Midas valued gold, except with more fervor.

He is an attorney, a CPA, and a certified financial manager, but his degrees suggest only that he manages high-dollar investment portfolios for high-dollar clients. His real responsibilities reach much further. For those whose net worth transcends tens of millions, he can be a facilitator, a fixer, an overseer of entire lives—the go-to guy when trouble erupts. An errant child, a sticky business partnership, an even stickier personal partnership; those are Chernek's real domains. He resolves difficulties quietly, compassionately, and almost always fairly. He is first-generation American, old-world courtly, and very quietly essential to the well-being of many of Chicago's most prominent people.

I first met him at the conference my ex-wife's lawyers called to work out the details of our divorce. He'd come with Amanda's lawyers, sat in the background, said nothing. I came alone. He liked that I didn't want anything from her. I think he also liked that my first name, always unused, is Vlodek. It is a solid Bohemian name, like his own.

His are the only offices on the top floor of a yellow brick former bicycle factory. The elevator let me off into his reception area, a dark expanse of money-green leather furniture, burgundy carpeting, and blue-suited financial fund brokers, hoping to see the Bohemian but willing to settle for one of his staff.

His personal secretary didn't keep me waiting. She's a formidable, helmet-haired woman with a British accent and a Transylvanian demeanor. Her name is Buffy, and that is the only laugh she offers the world. She smiled an eighth of an inch to express her ecstasy at seeing me again and led me back to his office.

“Vlodek,” the Bohemian called out, exaggerating the syllables—Vuh-lo-dek—on his tongue. “What a pleasant surprise.”

He is sixtyish, six-four like me but thirty pounds thicker, tanned almost to mahogany, and always better dressed. That day, he wore a peach-colored dress shirt with a white collar, a deeper-colored peach tie, and midnight blue suit trousers. The matching suit coat was hung on an antique mahogany rack next to his mahogany credenza. The Bohemian wears mahogany like he wears money, very well.

I sat down on leather taken from a burgundy cow.

“How is the lovely Amanda?” It is always his leadoff question, and it is never idle or social. My ex-wife is the daughter of one of his most prominent clients, the tycoon Wendell Phelps.

“Very busy.”

“I understand she is doing a marvelous job.”

Amanda had recently joined her father's electric utility, directing its charitable endeavors. It left her little time for teaching at the Art Institute, or working on one of the art history books she occasionally authored. Or me.

“That's good to know,” I said.

“It will settle down, Vlodek.”

“Of course,” I said.

He smiled. “Anything I can help you with?” He knew I would not drop in merely to chat.

“I'd like a phone call from the officer who's in charge of investigating the death of that clown two weeks ago.”

“The poor man who fell off the roof?”

“Yes.”

“Not much press on that. Just a few words in the paper, as I recall.”

I nodded.

He didn't ask why I wanted to know, and I offered no explanation. It was like that between the Bohemian and me. He just smiled, and I smiled, and not a confidence was broken.

CHAPTER 4.

Leo called, saving me from an edgy afternoon of waiting for the phone to ring.

“Busy today?” he asked.

“Waiting for a phone call.”

“A potential client?”

“A real client, flashing cash.”

He whistled. “Happy times are here again. You can tell me about it when I pick you up. I need your brawn.”

“It comes with brains.”

“Rarely necessary. Your tools would be nice, though.”

“Which tools?”

“Anything to cut metal tubing. Plus a power screwdriver to attach things to ceilings and floors. You can ride with me to the hardware store?”

I told him that would be fine.

An hour later, a motor sounded outside. It wasn't the strong, full-throated Porsche I was expecting. This engine was tinny and weak. I looked out one of the slit windows. A light blue pickup truck, accented with irregular splats of rust and fitted with a rack to haul lumber, was idling at my curb. I'd never seen the truck. Inside it, though, were familiar flashes of outrageous color—this day, a yellow Hawaiian shirt and lime green trousers, obnoxiously bright even through the double filters of the truck and turret windows. It was Leo, in bloom. I went out, set my toolbox in the truck bed, and got in.

“Where the hell are we going?” I asked, by way of a greeting.

His thick, bushy eyebrows cavorted on his narrow bald head like overcaffeinated caterpillars. “I've had a flash of genius. We're off to get fitness equipment, for Ma.”

He is five foot six and weighs the same one-forty he did in high school. Also like in high school, he lives with his mother in her brown brick bungalow in Rivertown because she won't consider living anywhere else.

His expertise is in establishing provenance. The big auction houses in Chicago and on both coasts pay him in excess of a half-million dollars a year to establish the lineage of the pieces they offer to their bidders. For Christie's, Sotheby's, and the others, he wears Armani suits selected by his girlfriend, Endora, an exotic onetime model and current researcher at the Newberry Library. For me and his other friends, he selects duds from the back rack at the Discount Den, Rivertown's retailer of odd lots of hardware, appliances, canned goods, and occasionally clothing that no one but Leo wants.

As he headed toward Thompson Avenue, Rivertown's seedy adult playground, I studied the day's ensemble. Regrettably, I'd seen the lime green pants before, as I had the black-and-white saddle shoes. The shirt, however, was new. It was no ordinary tropic yellow. It was covered—or perhaps more accurately, infested—with multilegged insects, the color of blood. Like all of his casual shirts, he'd purchased it in double extra large. He won't admit it, but I believe he buys them wretchedly oversized so he can crawl into them without unbuttoning them first.

“Fitness equipment, for Ma?” I asked.

“You've got a client?”

It wasn't like Leo to dodge any question, but I went along. “A security guy came by in a limousine yesterday. He hired me to look into the death of the clown that went off the Rettinger building.”

He looked over. “It wasn't an accident, like the paper said?”

“He didn't say what he thought. Nor whether he's inquiring on his own or for somebody else.”

“A negligence liability issue for the building's owners?”

“That's what I would have thought, but there's something else.” I told him about the door on the roof. “It should have been marked by the rope pulling away. I'm waiting for a cop to call, to tell me what they're thinking.” I turned on the seat. “So, fitness equipment, for Ma?”

“A healthier body can lead to a healthier mind.” His eyes stayed fixed on the road.

For years, Ma Brumsky—a low-slung, gray-haired babushka who favors catalog housedresses and furry slippers—had run a proper Polish, fish-on-Fridays Catholic home. She played bingo at the church, knitted for charity, and had other Polish ladies—all but one widows like her—over for cards every eighth Saturday evening. Other than tippling at Leo's whiskey, and stealing the occasional coffee cup or silverware setting for two when Leo took her out to dinner, the woman had led an exemplary life.

Until Leo bought her a big-screen television.

It loomed in their front room, taller even than the high-backed sofa Ma had kept pristine for decades under a succession of clear plastic slipcovers. With its side speakers, the set was almost as wide, too.

It wasn't the size and the sound of the new TV that took over Ma's life, though; it was the adventure it summoned. For, after a week, possibly two, of marveling at how her regular shows—the soaps, the realities, the cop dramas, even the shopping channel—had been transformed by being quadrupled in size, Ma Brumsky ventured toward newer horizons. She found channels she'd never seen before. She discovered soft porn.

Out went having her friends over for cards every eighth Saturday evening. In came big-screen events for Ma and the other ladies, every night there wasn't bingo at the church.

At first, Leo saw it as harmless. On those movie nights when he wasn't staying at Endora's condo, he worked in his basement office, willing to dial up the volume on his bossa nova CDs to drown out the excited Polish chattering and occasional stomping of an orthopedic shoe or metal walker leg just a few feet above his head.

Then Ma's tastes in videos expanded even more. She discovered hard-core, pay-per-view. Suddenly, she was witnessing twosomes and threesomes and foursomes interact in ways she and Pa Brumsky, rest his soul, never would have imagined in the dark beneath their goose down comforter.

Out went the tame romance novels from the library; out went the Polish-language newspapers. Out went words in general. Daytime hours were now for rest, so that she could be fully alert and observant far into the night.

Leo became concerned.

“A healthier body can lead to a healthier mind,” Leo said again, working his lips as though mumbling an incantation, as he pulled into the Home Depot.

He had me wait in the truck. Fifteen minutes later, he came out pushing a contractor's cart. On the cart were long lengths of metal tubing and a box filled with metal parts. After strapping the pipes onto the truck rack, we started back toward Rivertown.

“What's with the pipes?” I asked, ever the ace investigator.

“Surely it's obvious.”

“A fence?”

“Some detective.”

When I pressed him, he offered up a sly smile and changed the subject to an exhibit Endora was curating at the Newberry Library. “Female literary provocateurs of the 1920s,” he said.

“Endora is no mean provocateur herself.”

“Amen to that.”

He parked in the alley behind his house. We carried the poles, hardware, and my tools through his back porch, past Ma's cases of diet soda, cheese curls, and All-Bran, and down the basement stairs.

Where I stopped, stunned, at the bottom.

Through its unfinished door opening, Leo's office was as it had always been, a mismatched medley of cast-off furniture and state-of-the-art magnifiers, enclosed by untaped, unpainted drywall. The rest of the basement, though, had been ruined.

Leo's basement had always been a jumble of the artifacts of the Brumskys—the fake, small Christmas tree they used to shake off and put on the television, before the big screen; boxes of old dinnerware, some bought, most liberated by Ma from one restaurant or another; the model train layout on green-painted plywood I'd helped Leo put together in grammar school, on one of those many afternoons when I'd sought sanctuary at his house instead of trudging to whatever aunt's apartment I'd been assigned for the month. As a child, I'd envied Leo his basement clutter of family things. As an adult, I envied him his clutter more, because it showed good in his past.

No longer. The basement had been cleared out. Ruined.

“What did you do with all of your nice things?” I waved my arm at the newly denuded space.

“I rented one of those big storage spaces. That's where I got the truck.”

“For what?”

“I decided Ma and her friends need an exercise room,” he said simply.

“And less movies?”

“Absolutely.”

I touched the toe of my shoe to one of the pipes we'd just set on the floor. “So these are…?”

He pointed up to the ceiling. He'd chalked eight circles on the wood joists. One for each of the pipes he'd gotten at the Home Depot.

“For stretching, kicking,” he said.

I looked down, then back up. An outrageous image had blown hot into my head.

“No,” I managed, but it was tentative.

Leo's lips widened into a sly smile. “Brilliant, huh? Low-impact workouts, easily done, standing up.”

“Not pipes.” I pointed to the hardware on the floor. “Poles.”

His smile broadened until his head was half teeth. “Ma's lady friend Mrs. Roshiska has a nephew, Bernard. He's an accountant. He told me it's all the rage. Excellent exercise, particularly for older ladies.”

“Septuagenarians?” I started laughing. No, not laughing; shrieking. The picture forming in my head, of Ma Brumsky and her lady friends, struggling to work poles like the torsos who pranced in the joints along Thompson Avenue, was going to blind me.

“Just muscle toning, you letch,” Leo sputtered, trying not to lose control himself. “Bernard—”

“I know.” My eyes had filled with tears. “Bernard, the nephew accountant, says it's all the rage.”

With great will, I calmed myself, and we went to work. Periodically, though, I had to pause, to wipe my eyes, and to convulse.

It took less than an hour to mount the eight pipes to the floor and ceiling. When we were done, I stood back to study the loose maze we'd created. Almost all of the poles were within five feet of each other.