Hunting Sweetie Rose

CHAPTER 11.

It should have been a clown tumbling off a high roof, or Sweetie Fairbairn murmuring lies, or Amanda ecstatic at the wit of a finely dressed man, but it was a dream of Elvis Derbil that tore me, sweating, from sleep at four thirty the next morning. He’d been kneeling on the far side of the Willahock, filling empty salad dressing bottles with the muck that moved cloudy at the bank.

It didn’t matter. Most nights, one dream or another usually wakes me earlier than four forty. At least Elvis had the decency to let me sleep until almost sunrise.

I pushed myself out of bed, rang the curved wrought-iron stairs going down to the would-be kitchen, and awoke Mr. Coffee. Leaving him to burble, I went outside, crossed the street, the spit of land, and Thompson Avenue, and bought an Argus-Observer from the box under the red and white Jiffy Lube sign. The coffee was ready when I got back. I took a travel mug’s worth and the paper up to the roof. I keep a lawn chair there for when faces awaken me in the night and I go up to wait for the sun to make them go away.

Rivertown is best in the dark just before dawn, when the neon and the noise from the honky-tonks along Thompson Avenue have shut down; when the girls who work the curbs have shut down, too, gone to the rooming houses back of where the factories used to light the night, to lie for a few hours blessedly alone. It is a good time to think.

I started with the strong probabilities. Sweetie Fairbairn learned I did investigations from some earlier, innocuous comment of Amanda’s. Supposing I’d be as good as anyone to take a fast, anonymous look at the death of James Stitts, she sent Duggan to hire me. I’d become troublesome, insisting on meeting with Duggan’s client. That demanded an inspection by Sweetie Fairbairn, before she proceeded with me. Or not.

After that, my certainty floundered. If Sweetie Fairbairn was innocent of any knowledge of the clown’s death, she would have gotten better and faster results using the connections a woman like her must have had to the highest levels of the Chicago police.

If she weren’t innocent, she’d never respond to the note I left at the Wilbur Wright.

My mind flitted then, back to the party and the delight on Amanda’s face, as she laughed at a slick man’s joke. I pushed the image away.

The sky had begun to lighten to the east. The tonks, liquor stores, hockshops, and the bowling alley were beginning to materialize, gauzy and indistinct, in the dim, growing light of the new morning. There was enough light to read now. I picked up the Argus-Observer.

As usual, the rag carried little serious news. Keller teased about a supposed kickback scheme in Chicago; another columnist wrote of a diet regimen gone wrong in Hollywood. The longest story was on the third page, about a cat that could play the piano. Or not.

There was nothing about the clown. I tossed the remains of my cold coffee over the wall and went inside.

“You look like hell.” Leo said a couple of hours later, stepping out onto his front steps. He wore a neon green sweatshirt with Woody Woodpecker embroidered on it. “Would you like coffee?”

“I’ve been up on the roof for hours, drinking coffee.”

“You have a dilemma?”

I nodded.

He told me to sit on the steps and went inside. We’d sweated a thousand dilemmas on those front steps, spring through fall, since seventh grade.

He came out with two of Ma’s scratched porcelain mugs, steaming with coffee. He’d also brought several newspaper sheets, tucked under his arm.

“Coffee with fortifier,” he said. “You’ll bloom like a rose.”

It was a surprise. Coffee and fortifier was coffee and Jack Daniel’s.

I took a sip. He’d made it weak, just enough to flavor the brew, because he knew I avoided booze since my divorce.

“My dilemma,” I began, after he sat down.

He looked at the folded newspapers he’d set on the concrete between us. “I know.”

I set down my cup. “What do you mean?”

“Amanda and that guy. Three times, their photos have been in the papers.”

My face must have looked paralyzed. Because his then registered the shock of realizing he’d just told me something hurtful that I didn’t know.

“Lovely day today,” he said, looking for even the smallest laugh.

“What guy, Leo?”

“I thought that was why you came over.” He unfolded one of the newspaper sheets and handed it to me. “Today’s Tribune. A party, night before last.”

It was one of those society lineup photos, fine folks dressed in fine duds to do fine deeds. Amanda stood next to the silver-haired fellow I’d seen at Sweetie Fairbairn’s, the guy who’d made her laugh. They’d been at a fund-raiser for the Lyric Opera. His hand rested around her waist.

Leo mumbled something about getting us more fortifier, meaning he was going to give me a minute with the other news sheets. He took my cup, which I’d barely tasted, and went inside.

The man’s name was Richard Rudolph. In addition to heading a commodities trading firm, he sat on charitable boards. He looked every bit a rich, do-gooding son of a bitch. In each photo, Amanda looked delighted to be with him.

Leo must have been waiting just inside the screen door, because he came out the instant I looked up.

“It doesn’t have to mean anything,” he said, setting down the coffees. “Those people travel together, in packs.”

“Not with their arms around each other.”

I picked up my cup, took a taste. He’d added only more coffee. He was my friend.

“That was only in today’s photo, Dek.”

“Maris Mays?” I asked, keeping my eyes on the shutters of the bungalow across the street. Maris was a girl Leo and I had known. She’d disappeared right after high school. Years later, someone hired me to execute a will, and that led me back to those very old times. Maris haunted me during that investigation, and that had haunted Amanda.

“Maris didn’t reorient Amanda’s world,” Leo said. “Wendell Phelps did. Old Dad brought her into his company, and into his life. Those pictures don’t have to mean anything.”

“They meant something to you; you saved them.”

“I was thinking you’d seen them, and would want to talk.”

“Shit, Leo.”

“Tell me about your dilemma,” he said.

“You mean my other dilemma?” Whining, self-indulgence, and churlish words were still called for.

“OK. Your other dilemma.”

“Ever hear of Sweetie Fairbairn?” I folded the news sheets so I wouldn’t have to look at the photos of Amanda and the silver-topped gigolo.

“I did work for her once, part of a team she’d hired to authenticate two Jackson Pollocks she wanted to buy for the Art Institute.”

“Jackson Pollock? Was that the guy who threw paint?”

“Boor.” He laughed too hard and too long at my feeble joke. Then, “Why do you ask about Sweetie Fairbairn?”

“I went to a party at her penthouse last night. Amanda was there, and at first I thought she’d arranged the invitation, so we could steal a few moments.”

“Go on,” he said, after I’d paused for too long, thinking about naïveté.

“Sweetie herself took me aside for a short, intimate chat, ostensibly about my relationship these days with Amanda.”

“Ostensibly?”

“She told me she was considering donating to one of Amanda’s projects, and asked certain perfunctory questions about how close we were.”

“Meaning whether you could get your lunch hooks on money Amanda took in?”

“That’s what I was thinking, yes.”

“Can you blame her? Look at the way you dress, as opposed to someone with refinement.” He touched Woody Woodpecker’s beak. He was going to get a laugh out of me, no matter how long it took.

“She satisfied herself about my trustworthiness too quickly.”

“Your winning smile, working at its usual warp speed?”

“She’d been sizing me up, all right, but it had nothing to do with Amanda. Sweetie Fairbairn is my client.”

“The clown case? She was the one who hired you?”

“To be certain, I asked one of last night’s guards if Duggan, the guy who’d hired me, was around. He said yes.”

“What’s the dilemma? That Sweetie Fairbairn somehow knew the clown?”

“The widow Stitts told me her husband had been hired by a woman who rolled up in a chauffeured limousine.”

“Come on, Dek. A lot of women in this town get around in limos.”

“Only one invited me to a party to give me the once-over.”

“Now you’re thinking she hired you to see if there’s evidence that ties her to the clown’s death?”

“The scenario works.”

He gave that some thought and said, “That’s a humdinger of a dilemma.”

“For sure.”

“What are you going to do?”

“If my client’s a killer…” I let the thought fade.

I shook my head, he shook his, and we walked-two bobble-heads-down to the sidewalk.

“Seriously, what are you going to do?” he asked through the open door, after I got in the Jeep.

“I already did it. I left her a two-word note, last night: ‘The Clown?’”

“What if she doesn’t respond?”

“Then what I’d like to do is wait after school for the silver-haired bastard who’s sniffing around my girlfriend, and beat the shit out of him on the playground.”