Hunting Sweetie Rose

CHAPTER 29.

“Why won’t that damned smell go away?”

Her voice came unnaturally high, and her hands were shaking jackhammer hard on the steering wheel. I told her to pull over, onto the narrow shoulder of Route 12. Neither of us had said a word for the first miles, speeding away from Fill’s trailer.

She shut off the motor and put her forehead against the wheel. “What the hell, Dek?” she said, her voice lower now.

“Andrew’s wallet.” It lay on the floor behind her. I hoped the stench came from the wallet, and not from me. I didn’t want the smell of Andrew Fill’s corpse to be on me.

“Why do you need his wallet?”

“See what’s inside.” My words somehow sounded ridiculous.

She raised her head to look at me. “I’ll pull into the next gas station so you can look. Then throw it away.”

“No gas stations. They’ve got security cameras.”

“We’ve got gas, right? Christ, I can’t even remember that.”

I looked at the display on the dash. “Three-quarters of a tank.”

“Enough to get us to California, in this car. Let’s run.” She giggled.

I touched the back of her neck. At first she stiffened, but then her skin warmed. She straightened back from the steering wheel and turned toward me.

I turned toward her, until our faces were but a couple of inches apart.

Our ghosts came then, hers and mine.

I laughed, sort of. She laughed, sort of. I got out, and we switched places, and I sped us west onto the expressway, away from the dunes and away from the heat of an instant, momentarily as giddy as fools.

I got off at the first exit on the Illinois Tollway and pulled into a parking lot in front of a church. She had a flashlight and tissues. We went through Andrew Fill’s wallet on the hood of her car, extracting its few contents carefully, as though each had been coated with anthrax. He had a Visa; a membership card to the East Bank Club, a high-end fitness center in Chicago; the Illinois driver’s license; two twenties and two singles; a State Farm Insurance card showing he drove a Volvo; and one scrap of paper with a phone number written on it. It was George Koros’s number. I ripped it up and scattered the pieces.

I put the cards and the driver’s license back in the wallet and tossed it into the bushes. The forty-two dollars got walked to the mailbox in the door of the church. Then I rubbed my hands furiously on the grass, thinking for an instant of the day I’d met Jennifer Gale, and the agent who’d palmed Elvis Derbil’s head. He’d been desperate to do what I was now doing. Except he was trying to rid his hands of coconut hair spray. I was trying to rub away death.

When there was nothing more to rub off but skin, I drove us back onto the Tollway.

“His car should have been at his trailer,” she said.

“It would have attracted too much attention, sitting idle. His killer took it, abandoned it elsewhere so it wouldn’t attract attention, sitting there unused.”

“You’ll call Plinnit?” She was teasing, settling us down.

“He’ll be delighted I’m still venturing where I don’t belong.”

“You do that, don’t you?”

I wondered whether she was thinking about me, in Fill’s trailer, or us, later, in that one supercharged moment at the side of the road.

I decided I was better off not wondering about anything, for a time.

A small white Toyota was idling with its parking lights on in front of the turret. This Toyota was much older, and not nearly as environmentally correct as Jennifer’s. I knew it, of course, like I knew the short dark hair, and then the eyes and the lips on the head that turned around to look at the back window at the approaching headlamps.

“I’ll call you tomorrow,” I said, pulling the Prius to a stop well short of the white Toyota.

“We’re still a hundred feet away,” Jennifer said.

“Close enough,” I said.

I got out; Jennifer slid over and made a U-turn to go back down the short road.

I watched her taillights turn onto Thompson Avenue as I walked to the white car.

Amanda cut the engine and hand-cranked down the window on the driver’s side. I liked that she kept the old crank-window Toyota. It was a remnant of her former life.

“You’re here,” I said.

“I didn’t even think the car would start, it’s been so long.” She dabbed at her eyes with a tissue. “I’ve been sitting here for two hours, feeling bad about my father, you, Richard, me, getting sidetracked, charities, what I’ve given, what my father took.” She tried a smile. “The damned publicity is probably going to wreck everything I maybe didn’t want to do anyway.”

I reached in and touched her cheek to stop the torrent of words. “Come in. We can have coffee and Ho Hos.”

“I don’t know that I should,” she said, more slowly.

“I have Cheerios, if you prefer,” I said, cracking wise as cheerily as I could, so soon after picking the pocket of a dead man.

“I didn’t mean that.”

“Why did you drive out?”

“You weren’t answering your phones.” She was looking ahead, at the great stone shadow that was city hall. “And when I got here, I saw your Jeep parked up on your lawn…”

“You shouldn’t have worried.”

“I didn’t. I saw the fire lane sign, knew that parking on the lawn was your way of dealing with that.”

“I am resourceful,” I said.

“I was the one who told Sweetie about you in the first place, and now-”

“Only because she asked about me, when she began checking you out.” I opened her door. “Cheerios are good. They lower cholesterol.”

The skin around her eyes crinkled. Not a lot, but enough. “What girl could refuse such an enticement?”

Inside the turret, she stopped in mock amazement. “Same plastic chairs, same table saw. Why, this place looks no different than the last time I was here.”

“Which was months ago.”

She turned, surprised.

“Really, it’s been that long,” I said. “Anyway, the work has gone on upstairs.”

Up in the kitchen, she went to touch one of the cabinets I’d built. “You do have a talent, Dek.” Then she put a finger on the table I’d fashioned from scrap plywood, and sat on one of the curb-treasure lawn chairs I’d dragged home a dozen garbage days before. “But your furnishing skills…”

I went to make coffee.

“What about those Cheerios?” she asked, when I set down our mugs.

I reached behind me for the box.

“Milk?” she asked.

“I don’t have any milk.”

“Then what do you do with the Cheerios?”

“You’ll notice the box has not been opened. Just looking at the cholesterol claims on the box while I eat breakfast makes me feel healthy.”

“What have you been eating for breakfast?”

“Ho Hos lately, but I’ll move on.”

“I remember.”

For a time, we talked about my rehabbing the turret, because that was safe.

“I’m still hoping my zoning will get changed,” I said.

“When Elvis Derbil goes to prison?”

“Jennifer thinks that’s a long way off.”

“Jennifer?”

“Jennifer Gale. I told you about her,” I said. “She just dropped me off. She got interested in Rivertown because of Elvis, and wanted to do a story on my zoning. I didn’t want any press…” I slowed down. I was talking too much, and too fast. “I cut a deal with her. No references to you or to your father.”

“It’s all right, Dek. That night at Rokie’s, you told me you met her.”

“Yes. She finds this small, surviving bastion of old-time, iron-fisted corrup-”

“You’ve become friends?”

“I’m a source.” Everything that was spilling out of my mouth was still coming out too frothy, too light. Too forced. “She can do me a lot of good, if she gets my zoning changed.”

“That’s not her main interest, though, is it Dek?”

“Sweetie Fairbairn is every reporter’s interest, right now,” I said, not pausing to wonder what Amanda really meant, “but later, a little sunlight on Rivertown could lead to better times for me.” I took a sip of coffee, and a bigger step. “You mentioned a Richard, out in the car.”

She looked away, at the cabinets above where a stove would one day go. “Richard’s someone I’ve met.”

“You’ve become friends?” Only when the words were out did I realize my words mimicked hers.

“He attends the same functions I do, serves on the same boards. He’s third-generation money, like me. His father founded Illinois General Insurance.”

“And he’s president of his own commodities trading firm,” I said.

She raised an eyebrow.

“Your pictures have been in the paper, Amanda. Together.”

“Dek, we haven’t…”

“He’s polished, successful; he understands your world. He’s not some goof huddled in a turret.”

She set down her coffee, looked at something, or nothing, across the hall. “Who could have known?” she asked softly.

“You mean Sweetie Fairbairn, or something more?”

“I think Sweetie Fairbairn, for now.” She checked her watch, suddenly brisk. “Meeting, tomorrow morning at seven.”

We went down the stairs. Every step rang the old wrought iron like a knell for the dead, or maybe for us. I didn’t know.

Outside, I held her door. She looked up from inside the car. “Who’s going to come out of this all right, Dek?”

I didn’t answer. I didn’t know.