Hunting Sweetie Rose

CHAPTER 6.

The responsible thing to do, when I got back to the turret, was to report to Duggan.

To tell him the cops liked Stitts’s death as an accident from a poorly knotted rope and that they saw no reason to investigate further, especially not if that might lead to a suicide finding that would null an insurance payout to a widow.

To tell him, too, that Stitts’s widow was having none of that. Her husband had been a careful man, meticulous enough to practice knotting his new rope until he’d gotten it right. Nor was there any chance the man was suicidal.

I’d tell him I was with the widow on both counts. The door had not been marked, abraded by a poorly tied rope pulling away. It had been no accident.

Just like it had been no suicide. The Argus-Observer photographs showed Stitts had been at the edge of the roof when the rope began to fall behind him; he was too far away from its other end to have untied it himself.

Not an accident; not a suicide. Someone at the other end had loosened the rope.

Likely as not, Timothy Duggan already suspected that-and that, I wanted to think through.

So I made no call. I retreated instead to what I often do, when too much is banging around too loudly in my head. I cut wood.

Cutting, sanding, and staining allow me a degree of mental drift. Busying my hands sometimes calms whatever is loose in my brain.

Not that afternoon. After three hours, all I’d finished was six pieces of ceiling trim. None had been accompanied by any mental breakthrough.

Then I cut one piece too short. It looked all right, at first. When I held it up to the kitchen ceiling, though, I saw it was an inch too short.

That snapped my lazing brain back to the door on the roof of the Rettinger building, and to how a rope could come loose without leaving a mark.

Lieutenant Jaworski said the rope appeared to be in excellent shape. That there’d been no rips or frays supported his conclusion that the knot had simply worked itself loose.

I called Bea Stitts. “Just a small detail, ma’am: That rope your husband practiced knotting, then brought to the Rettinger building? You said it was new?”

“Brand-new. He bought it at the True Value here in Arlington Heights. Is that important?”

“I like to be thorough.” I hung up before she could ask anything else.

The man who answered the phone at the True Value sounded proud of their selection. They stocked rope in three different thicknesses, he said. Each came in ten-, twenty-five-, and fifty-foot lengths.

Calling Lieutenant Jaworski, to ask about the length of Stitts’s rope, would excite him into asking why I wanted to know. I was not ready to discuss what was still a small, but growing, burr in the blanket under my brain.

I called Jennifer Gale at Channel 8. The receptionist took a message. Jennifer called back in ten minutes. She remembered me. I told her what I needed.

“Why do you need them?”

“A liability issue.”

“Insurance? You’re working for the building owners?”

“I don’t know for sure. I got hired by an intermediary.” It could have been true.

“Odd, though, that you of all people would get hired to check that clown’s death.”

“I don’t just paint windows,” I said, trying to sound mildly offended. “My primary business is insurance investigation.”

“Of course it is,” she said soothingly, as though wishing I were nearby so she could pat me on the head.

She thought for a moment and then said, “You’ll have to trade for them. You have something I need, as well.”

The dim little red warning bulb in my mind flickered. “What might that be?” I asked, as if I didn’t know.

“Background on your zoning story. I’ve done a little research. You really do own that turret. Yet it’s zoned as a municipal structure.”

“A television story on me will rile the lizards that run the town. They might never change my zoning to residential, which means I might never unload this place.”

“The exposure might make them change your zoning back to residential.”

Her logic was at least as good as mine, maybe even better.

“Background for now, nothing for broadcast until I approve?” I asked.

She said that sounded fine, for the time being, and told me she’d see what she could do.

That evening, Jennifer Gale did a piece on the horrors of living rich. A new resident of an upscale golf course subdivision, having plunked down a number of millions for a mansion along the fourth fairway, became enraged by the frequency with which wildly hit golf balls were striking his dream home. Finally, after yet another ball had ricocheted off his plate glass, the mansion owner’s fuse had fried. He charged out, waving a pellet gun to scare the golfer, who was now on the property, searching for his ball. As luck had it, though, the mansion owner slipped on a spot made slick by a number of visiting geese. Falling, he accidentally discharged his gun. The pellet hit a goose. The golfer ran away, unharmed. Not so the goose. It died. A bird-loving neighbor saw it all and called the police, who arrested the mansion owner, now smeared and reeking and glistening, for killing the goose.

Jennifer Gale reported it all with a straight face.

It was a laugh, and it was not. When it was over, I played with my television for another few minutes, switching channels with no real interest. Finally I shut it off, worn down once again by what wasn’t on TV.

I started up the stairs to bed. Then someone began pounding on my door. It happens in the late evening, occasionally. Fun lovers, boozed and woozed along Thompson Avenue, sometimes lose sight of their neon guideposts and stagger across the spit of land to the turret, thinking it might be a place for more amusement, or at least a secluded spot to urinate.

This time, though, it was no drunk. It was Jennifer Gale, dressed in a tight-enough pink sweater and considerably well-tailored blue jeans. She carried a laptop computer.

“This is a sort of ambush journalism,” she said. “I have what you want, and I have questions. I am hoping I caught you late enough that you are not at your sharpest.”

“I don’t sleep well,” I said, holding the door open for her to come in. “I am never at my sharpest.”

She paused as soon as she got inside. First-time visitors do that. The turret’s curved, rough limestone walls cast dramatic shadows, no matter what the time of day or type of light. Respecting that, I’d furnished the first floor simply, so as not to detract from the architecture, with two white plastic lawn chairs and a table saw.

“Neat,” she said, staring up at the dark beamed ceiling.

“The chairs I found in an alley,” I said, drawing her attention to my own contributions. “The table saw came from Sears, originally. I bought it used.”

She walked over to the enormous stone fireplace. There is one on each of the five floors.

“This has never had a fire,” she said. She leaned in to look up at the flue.

I looked away, so as to not stare at her leaning in, in those considerably well-tailored blue jeans.

“Until me, this place never had a human occupant,” I said, my thoughts almost under control.

She pulled a small digital recorder out of her pocket. “For notes, not for broadcast?”

“You’ve brought me pictures?”

“As you requested.”

She set her laptop on my table saw, and we sat on the plastic chairs.

“Let’s begin with your background, and the history of this place,” she said.

“My grandfather, trained as a brewmaster in the old country, was transformed by Prohibition into becoming a minor bootlegger. He had no Outfit aspirations; he merely sought to brew premium beer for the Slavs and the Czechs who worked at the Western Electric plant in Cicero. The big gangs that controlled whiskey and beer in Chicago didn’t mind him much, because his operation was so small. However, they did begin to mind each other, and for a time, they quit brewing and distilling and distributing to concentrate on killing each other. Which left my grandfather’s business to blossom. Money rolled in. With his newfound wealth, he did what anyone with a lunatic sense of grandeur would do: He started building a castle along the Willahock River. Sadly, the big guys soon came to an accommodation and resumed deliveries. My grandfather’s business tanked. He died, after having finished only this one turret.”

“How did this place get zoned municipal?”

“How many pictures did you bring?”

She pointed at the laptop on the table saw. “Every one the Tribune received, though they published none. I would imagine they’re the same ones the Argus-Observer got.”

I went on. “After my grandfather died, the title for the land, the pile of limestone, and this turret went to my grandmother. She tried to sell it, but no one wanted part of a castle. After she died, title passed to her daughters, who did not think it necessary to pay the property taxes. Years went by, no taxes were paid. Then, right after World War II, it occurred to the lizards-”

She held up her hand to interrupt. “You keep calling your city administrators lizards.”

“They operate low to the ground, and out of sight.”

“Ah.” She motioned for me to continue.

“After the war, it occurred to the lizards that they’d need a thick, dark, soundproof place to collect graft from what they were hoping would be a postwar business boom. They appropriated most of my grandfather’s land and his mountain of limestone for nonpayment of taxes and built the magnificent temple of enormous offices and tiny public rooms you see across the lawn.”

“They didn’t want the turret?”

“No. It sat for another sixty years, accumulating rodent excrement and more unpaid tax bills, until the last of my grandmother’s daughters was near death. My last surviving aunt didn’t want to burden her own children with old tax bills, so she cut a deal with city hall. They wouldn’t come after her estate for the unpaid taxes if she would approve changing its zoning to municipal. The lizards didn’t want to own the turret; they merely wanted control of its exterior to use as a city icon.”

“So, zoned as a municipal building, which made it worse than valueless, she left it to you?”

“She never liked me. It was her last flush, on her way out of the world.”

“You moved right in?”

“I ignored it for a few years. Until I needed a place to live.”

“After your life with Amanda Phelps fell apart.”

That was new territory, beyond our agreement. I stood up and moved toward the laptop on the table saw.

“Fair enough, for starters,” she said, coming over to join me.

She switched on the computer. The first dozen photographs appeared on the screen. “As you asked, every one, on the roof and going down.” She grimaced. “Plus some of him on the sidewalk, after he hit.”

“I need copies of my own.”

“This is merely an insurance liability issue?”

“As I said, I got hired by an intermediary.”

“You’ll tell me eventually?”

“No.”

She sighed and bent over the laptop. “Your e-mail address?”

I gave it to her. She typed it in and forwarded the pictures.

She smiled then, closing the laptop. It was a lovely smile-and probably made of the hardest steel.

“I’m going to be mad as hell if John Keller scoops me on this clown story,” she said at the door.

Of course she would have known about Keller’s taunt to the cops. She would have researched the Internet, after I’d asked for the pictures.

“What’s the matter with geese?” I asked.

She looked up at my face in the light of the outside lantern, taking a last measure of her odds of extracting more information from me. Then, gently, she shook her head in mock resignation.

“Entirely too slippery,” she said.