Hunting Sweetie Rose

CHAPTER 21.

I spent the rest of the night in the Jeep, parked at the back of the Bohemian’s building. Surprisingly, I slept until a garbage truck came to empty the Dumpster. It was eight forty-five. The Bohemian’s black Mercedes sedan was in the lot.

His receptionist, a sweet-looking brunette that I would have remembered if I’d been thinking clearly, must have remembered me, because she didn’t scream when I walked right through the cluster of startled people parked in the green leather chairs in the lobby and went into the inner offices and past the cubicles. Outside the Bohemian’s office, helmet-haired Buffy didn’t scream, either. Then again, expressing emotion was not her way.

The Bohemian’s door was closed. I opened it. He was sitting with two pale, powdered elderly women, no doubt talking about matters of money.

“Jesus Christ, Vlodek,” he said, calmly enough.

It was then that I looked down and saw I was covered with dried blood, from helping Sweetie Fairbairn get up from the body of the dead guard.

“I need your help, Anton,” I said, perhaps unnecessarily.

The elderly ladies had gone even paler under their caked rouge. Unhealthy-looking white powder ridges now raked their wrinkled, unnaturally reddened skin.

“Vlodek, may I have Buffy take you to a conference room, perhaps get you some coffee?”

I must have nodded, because the grim-faced secretary instantly touched my elbow.

She took me to a conference room I’d been in once before, back when houses had started exploding in Amanda’s old gated neighborhood. I remembered the room because of the English hunting print hanging on the wall. I’d been hired to investigate the explosions, and the dogs in the picture, their noses confidently on the ground, had taunted me with their sureness. They knew what they were hunting; I did not.

Like now.

The door opened and the Bohemian came in, carrying two dainty cups of coffee on saucers pinched between his thick thumbs and forefingers. Overrouged ladies love dainty china. He set the cups on the table and sat down.

Taking a fresh yellow pad of lined paper from the stack on the side table, he uncapped an enormous antique fountain pen. “Now, Vlodek, tell me how you soiled your shirt.”

“You’ve not read the papers, or listened to the radio?”

“I prefer Bach on my drive in.” He turned to the laptop computer on the sideboard and brought up the Tribune Web site. I could read the headline from the other side of the table: SOCIALITE PHILANTHROPIST MISSING. BODYGUARD FOUND MURDERED.

He scrolled down the text, reading silently and making notes. When he had the gist of it, he turned back to me. “You’re a celebrity.”

I laughed, after a fashion, and told him all of it, beginning with the arrival of the party invitation, and ending with my arrival at his parking lot just a few hours earlier. He was now my lawyer, the one who must keep the hounds away.

When I leaned back, exhausted into silence, he studied my clothes. “Thirty-six-inch waist, Vlodek?”

“Perhaps no longer.”

“Thirty-eight, then,” he said, standing up. “Drink coffee. Read the computer if you must. Do not communicate with anyone.” He left the room.

I don’t know that I thought about much of anything while I waited. Telling everything to the Bohemian had drained my mind-relieved me, at least temporarily, of custody of the mess of loose ends that dangled from the disaster that was Sweetie Fairbairn.

Buffy knocked on the door an hour later, came in, and set a box on the table. “Clothes,” she said and left. I opened the box. Inside were khaki trousers, but in a softer twill than I’d ever owned. The blue button-down shirt beneath them was softer as well, and had better stitching than what I kept crumpled in the turret. I changed, then put the bloodstained trousers and shirt in the box. The Bohemian would keep them protected, but inaccessible to anyone from a police evidence unit, with or without the proper paperwork.

He came in after another twenty minutes. “John Peet will represent you,” he said, naming the best-known criminal defense lawyer in Chicago. Peet had just finished successfully defending a young third wife accused of murdering her eighty-eight-year-old husband. It had been a sensational trial. Their sex life wasn’t brought up, such as it might have been, but the woman’s tennis pro lover was, as was the hundred million dollars she stood to inherit. Slam dunk; drumroll, please. Everyone thought she’d be convicted. Except John Peet. Who got her off.

“John is making calls, Vlodek. We’ll stay in this room until he tells us what to do next.”

We’d barely begun to force conversation-something about the fountain pens he loved to restore, I think-when the phone rang. The Bohemian picked it up and listened. “Of course I’ll be co-counsel,” he said, after a few moments. I took that to mean he’d guarantee payment of Peet’s fee. Then, “Yes. I have them in a box, here… I see… That explains why they didn’t take them. Very encouraging, John.” He handed the phone to me.

“Mr. Elstrom,” Peet began. “Good news, of a sort. The police don’t like you for the shooting.”

“Shooting?” I asked, confused. “They said stabbing.”

“Actually, Lieutenant Plinnit told me he was very careful not to say either. They also let you go on believing and saying, at least for a while, that the murdered guard you thought was stabbed was Timothy Duggan. Not exhibiting knowledge of either the means of the murder or the identity of the victim saved your bacon, so to speak. For now, they’re willing to think you walked in on something, nothing more. Still, you’re a material witness. They’re after what you know and have not said. We must be cautious. Other than Anton, don’t talk to anyone about this. That means, doubly, do not talk to the press. Eat at home, Mr. Elstrom. Do not answer your door to friends or strangers. If the police come for you again, don’t utter a syllable until I arrive.”

“Are we doing better, Vlodek?” The Bohemian, that ever-effective fixer, asked after I hung up the phone.

I told him I truly desired that to be true.