Hunting Sweetie Rose

CHAPTER 35.

The Bohemian had asked for a day but only took an hour. “Gillman Tripp was Silas Fairbairn’s most frequent golf partner. He’ll see you midafternoon, in the bar at the Arrow Way Golf Club. He’s wearing yellow slacks and a white shirt.”

I got to the Arrow Way at three o’clock. It was tucked down a long private drive lined with gnarled, ancient evergreen trees. The gentlemen moving slowly to and from the Cadillacs and Mercedes in the parking lot were gnarled and ancient, too. With its aged membership and total seclusion, Arrow Way looked to offer a place where rich old men could play golf without wearing pants, either from preference or forgetfulness, and no one else would see well enough to mind.

The bar was at the back of the low brick clubhouse. There wasn’t a dark hair on any of the men, but all of them appeared to be wearing pants. Three of them, in particular, were wearing yellow pants, with white shirts. One, sitting at a table by himself, waved me over.

“Mr. Elstrom? Gillman Tripp.” We shook hands, and I sat down.

I guessed he was well past eighty, but there was no sallowness to his skin. It was browned from the sun, and reddened on the nose and cheeks from what I imagined was a fourth or fifth gin and tonic.

“Like a drink?” he asked.

“Just a Coke.”

He called a waitress over and ordered my Coke and another reddener for himself.

“Anton Chernak told me you’re helping to look for Sweetie Fairbairn?”

“I am.”

“You’re the one whose name was in the paper? The one who found her with that dead guard?”

“My name was in the paper, yes.”

He leaned forward to study my shirt. I realized I should have worn the good one the Bohemian bought me. “How the hell can you afford John Peet?”

“I suspect he’s praying my innocence will minimize his time.”

Gillman Trip barked out a laugh, leaned back, and said, “What can I tell you?”

“Where is Sweetie Fairbairn from?”

He laughed again, all gin, tonic, and mirth. “We all wondered about that, but none of us ever found out. All I know is Silas brought her home after a visit to one of his factories.”

“Do you remember which factory?”

“I do not. What I remember was thinking this was no chickadee. Sweetie was well into her forties at that time. That can be a desperate age for a certain kind of woman without means. I was convinced that Silas had bit it this time, for sure.”

“She acted like a hustler?”

“No. It’s just that Silas was a very wealthy man, smart in the ways of manufacturing, utterly obtuse in the ways of women. It was natural to conclude he’d fallen as easy prey.”

Our drinks came. His hand was steady on the new glass as he raised it to his lips. After a sip and a smile, he continued.

“I was wrong, of course. We all were. Sweetie adored Silas, and he adored her. I got the impression he’d been pursuing her for quite some time, and that she’d only reluctantly agreed to marry him.”

“What made you think she was reluctant?”

“In the beginning she was… she was…” He stopped to fuel his memory with another sip at the gin. “Nervous. That’s the right word: nervous.”

“Nervous, how?”

“When we were out to dinner, those first times, she was pleasant enough, a real charming lady, but she was always looking around, like she was afraid someone would come up to her to tell her she didn’t belong. It was understandable. A girl from the sticks, a factory-working girl, gets swept off her feet by a rich industrialist. No matter that she’s older and has solid values, she’s entered a world where she doesn’t belong.” He sighed. “At least, that’s the way I saw it, in the beginning.”

“You changed your mind?”

“I began to consider the possibility that something else was causing her nervousness. She was always guarded, careful to not say much about herself. Silas was evasive about her as well. Her nervousness settled down, after a few months, but a little of that evasiveness always remained, in both of them.”

“I don’t suppose you ever caught a hint of her maiden name?”

He smiled. “I never got a hint about her real first name, either.”

I wished for a small board at that instant, something to strike the side of my thick, unthinking head. “‘Sweetie’ was just a nickname?”

He gave me a pitying look and said, as though to a child, “No mother names her kid ‘Sweetie.’ It was what Silas called her, and that was good enough for us.”

He had another gin and tonic, I had another Coke, and we went over all of it again, but he’d gotten it all out the first time. There’d never been much to know about Sweetie Fairbairn.

I called the Bohemian from the Arrow Way parking lot.

“You had a productive conversation with Gillman Tripp?” he asked.

“Yes, but it’s led to more questions. Can you find out the factories Silas Fairbairn owned?”

“There weren’t very many, as I recall. They made wiring harnesses for cars and trucks. Hold on.”

He came back in five minutes. “Only three plants, Vlodek. One in Florida, one in Tennessee, and one in Missouri.” He named towns I’d never heard of. “Rural operations. Cheap labor. Farm wives, mostly, pulling wires around posts nailed to big sheets of plywood. Silas sold them the year before he died.”

“Are they still in operation?”

“I have no idea. You can call to verify that.”

“Thank you.”

“Stay out of the news, Vlodek.”

I called Jenny when I got back to the turret.

“Nothing yet on her background, Dek. I spent two hours online at the newspaper archives, and then I called around to the people who used to do celebrity columns when newspapers still had money for such things. Everybody on the social ladder in Chicago knows her, but nobody seems to know about her, at least not of her life before she married Silas. That’s unusual, for someone as prominent as Sweetie Fairbairn.”

“One of Silas’s old golfing buddies originally thought she might have been embarrassed over her origins.”

“Originally?”

“He came around to another conclusion.”

“That she deliberately obscured her past?”

“Bingo,” I said.