Hunting Sweetie Rose

CHAPTER 22.

I told myself that my second bout with bad fame was going to be easier than the first. The Evangeline Wilts trial had erased my business, my marriage, and my custom of wintering indoors with sufficient heat. This time, I didn’t have those to lose.

I told myself all these things quite literally-actually speaking the words aloud as I drove toward Rivertown. Feeling free to talk aloud to oneself, anywhere, anytime, without drawing a startled glance is an often-overlooked benefit of the cell phone era.

Used to be, people crossed the street to avoid someone who was moving lips, making sounds, saying words to nobody at all. No longer. Cell phones and earpiece microphones have unchained mankind, not just the lunatics. Nowadays, anyone can chatter on, seemingly to no one at all. Nobody cares, nobody stares; it’s assumed the talker is merely on the phone.

I once stood next to a young man, nineteen or twenty, in the cookie section of a grocery store. He kept saying, “I love you,” over and over, to a shelf of gingersnaps. True, he was wearing an earpiece, but I did not see an actual phone. He could well have been addressing a beloved, or he could have been murmuring to the gingersnaps. Or, perhaps, they were one and the same. There is no longer any sure way of telling.

Leaving the Bohemian’s that morning, I was appreciative of all that. I owned no cell phone earpiece, but I had lots to say, and I was in a fury to get it out. I’d failed to unravel any of the mysteries of Sweetie Fairbairn, I told the windshield, and for that her life might now be in danger. As the only person of interest so far, I would become Target One for the press, and that would endanger, maybe even destroy, Amanda’s attempt at a new life, along with any hope I had of being part of it. On and on I raged, upshifting and downshifting along the expressway, a man alone in a Jeep, frothing at the mess he’d made. The windshield accepted it all, saying nothing, judging nothing. No one, in any adjacent car, paid me any mind at all.

It was therapeutic. By the time I left the expressway, I was calm enough to stop at a supermarket for the microwavable nutrition and petrified sugary products I’d need to hunker down with while the world tried on my fit as a murder suspect and waited for more news of Sweetie Fairbairn.

Ten minutes later, turning off Thompson Avenue, I slammed to a stop.

The press had come, as I’d expected-but they’d been blocked by City of Rivertown sawhorses, well before the left turn to the turret and city hall. There was no police cruiser minding the barricade, just an orange Ford Maverick, more rust than paint, angled in the middle of the street. Against its hood, intimately close to the box of doughnuts beside him, rested Benny Fittle.

Benny was a second or third cousin of a village clerk. Normally he was seen in denim cutoffs and a rock band T-shirt, cheeks inflated by something crème filled, writing parking tickets along Thompson Avenue. The lizards valued Benny for his speed; he rarely slowed to squint at the meters to see if they’d expired.

This day, though, he’d been stuffed into a cop’s uniform, to enforce the barricade.

Protecting me from the press was laudable. And incomprehensible.

I looked past the newsmen, past the spit of land. Something fluttered slowly from a second-floor window of the turret. It was a bedsheet. It pictured a bottle, but the lettering was too far away to read.

Below the sheet moved two bright, multicolored shapes of tangerine and chartreuse and neon yellow. One was small, thin, and topped with an oval of pale, bald flesh that, from a distance, looked like a huge egg. The other was a foot taller, thinner, and topped with luxuriant short brown hair.

Leo and Endora had taken control of the turret. Whatever they’d hung from the second-floor window had stirred the lizards to set up a barricade to keep back the press.

I turned the Jeep around, hoping its cross-taped, milky plastic side windows would obscure my face long enough to escape being photographed, and sped away. I parked four blocks down, alongside the river, and came back low along the weed-choked crumbles of the river walk.

When I got to the back of the turret, I edged forward, staying in the shadows.

“Leo,” I called softly.

“Hark, Princess,” he said. “Do you hear something?”

“Might it be the master of the turret?” she asked, laughing.

“It might, and a dim master is he. Anyone else would realize the press is too far away to hear, and would not deign to whisper.”

Despite the hailstorm of crap that had come down on me in the last twenty-four hours, I started to smile. I remembered using the word “deign” with Leo-and I knew that, like every time I got to talking too fancy, he was now going to come down on me as hard as the hailstorm.

“Deign?” Endora said, in a stage voice. “Deign, with no brain?”

“’Tis insane, to deign with no brain,” Leo answered.

“For the pain of the deign will remain,” Endora rhymed back.

It was too much. Both were good enough with words to go on for hours. I carried my paper bags of food into the sunshine and looked up at what fluttered from the turret.

It was brilliant.

Leo’s grin widened his pale, bald head. “It was I who hung the banner that made the City of Rivertown banish the press from your door.”

“It was I who conceived and drew it,” Endora said.

Then they both laughed, two kids showing off mega IQs.

The sheet hanging large above the front door featured a bottle of salad dressing, label side out. Beneath the bottle it read, YOU CAN’T ALWAYS BELIEVE WHAT YOU READ.

“The lizards freaked,” Leo said.

I didn’t wonder. The press, in Rivertown to film me for the Sweetie Fairbairn story, would use the reminder of Elvis Derbil in a sidebar alongside whatever they presented about me. It could be diverting. For sure, it would be funny, to everyone except the lizards.

“They hauled out the sawhorses ten minutes after we hung the sheet,” Leo said.

“They don’t realize news cameras have zoom lenses?”

Leo laughed, shaking his head. “You saw Benny?”

“Dressed up to guard road and dunkers alike.”

“Truly the icing on the doughnut. Rivertown will be on everyone’s lips tonight.”

Trust Leo to warm even the coldest day.

I turned to Endora. “You’re wasting your time with him, you know.”

She curtsied. Her sundress of tangerine squid and chartreuse fish cavorting in a neon yellow sea matched Leo’s shirt.

I raised one of my paper bags. “Come in. I have Ho Hos.”

I made coffee and we sat on the lawn chairs in my kitchen. I gave them Ho Hos on paper plates and a criminal’s-eye view of my last twenty-four hours.

“Sweetie Fairbairn is being blackmailed, Dek?” Endora asked when I finished.

“That’s what she inferred,” I said, “but the way she said it sounded like she hadn’t yet received a demand.”

“Which she would have been able to pay,” Leo said. “The woman gives away hundreds of thousands of dollars a year.”

“Easily,” I said.

“Andrew Fill?” Leo asked.

“I’m having trouble seeing why he’d need to kill the clown or the guard. He’s paying back the money, or was, until he disappeared.”

“There’s always the scenario that Sweetie Fairbairn killed the guard herself, perhaps because he overheard something,” Leo said. “Her running away makes her look guilty as hell.”

“I’m hoping it makes her look innocent,” I said. “I’m hoping she ran because she had no choice.”

My landline phone rang a minute after they left. The answering machine clicked on to announce that it was full. The Channel 5 reporter on the other end was having none of that. He started arguing. I was tempted to pick up, to tell him that he was screaming at a machine. Then I had a vision of myself, as I’d been but an hour earlier, yelling at my windshield, and I regarded the reporter with more compassion. He and I were fellow travelers on an increasingly bumpy road.

Most of the messages on my machine were from the local television stations and newspapers. Mixed in with them were a call from city hall, saying I had to remove my banner immediately, and one from the local water and sewer utility, telling me my payment was late. Again.

I couldn’t afford a municipal citation. I went upstairs and pulled in the offending banner.

Coming down, I thought to check for messages on my cell phone, switched off since I’d gone to the police station. Leo had called twice, before he and Endora had decided to come over. Amanda had called six times, increasingly exasperated that I wasn’t picking up. Jennifer Gale had called once, reminding me I’d stood her up for dinner the previous night, and saying that my being detained for police questioning was no excuse for stiffing her on the biggest story in town. Then she laughed.

The one call I really needed-from Sweetie Fairbairn, telling me she was all right, but in hiding-hadn’t come.

Nor had the one call I’d expected.

I called his number. The answering machine at his office picked up. I hung up and tried his cell phone.

“Timothy Duggan,” he said.

“Dek Elstrom.”

“You’ve got balls, Elstrom, calling me.”

“Heard from Sweetie?”

“If I did, I sure as hell wouldn’t tell you.”

“I’ll take that as a negative. We’ve got to talk to Andrew Fill. In person.”

“I wouldn’t go anywhere with you. You’re radioactive.”

“I didn’t kill your guard.”

“Says you.”

“I didn’t finger Sweetie for killing him, either.”

“You said she was there, kneeling over the body. Same thing.” He hung up.

I thumbed the redial button. “You need to find her, to protect her. And we need to find Fill, to learn what he knows.”

“Let the cops find Fill. As for Ms. Fairbairn, somebody is out to kill her. She’s on the run, unprotected. She’s safest that way.” The phone went dead.

I walked to the window. Benny Fittle’s Maverick and his barricade had disappeared. The news vans hadn’t. Four of them had pulled up in front of the turret and raised their broadcast antennae like alien periscopes, ready to transmit the first moment I showed my face.

It wasn’t even noon, but I was exhausted. I dropped into the electric blue La-Z-Boy.

I didn’t see Sweetie Fairbairn as a killer. I didn’t see her hiring someone to cut a clown’s rope to drop him off a roof. I didn’t see her with a gun, shooting her guard.

I didn’t see Andrew Fill for any of that, either. He had a motive-revenge-to want to harm Sweetie Fairbairn, but she’d thrown the man a lifeline, the chance to pay the money back and escape jail.

I rubbed my eyes. It didn’t help. I still couldn’t see anything else.