Hunting Sweetie Rose

CHAPTER 2.

“Mr. Vlodek Elstrom?” the chauffeur asked as I walked up.

When I nodded, he nodded, but at someone in the car’s backseat. The door opened, and a tall man, thickset enough to have played professional football thirty years earlier, got out. He stuck out his hand. “Tim Duggan,” he said. “Let’s go down and look at the river.”

His suit coat was cut wider than he was. He was carrying, probably in a belt holster.

“This is all very dramatic,” I said.

He made a smile that didn’t move his cheeks. “I just like rivers.”

We walked down to the Willahock. For a minute, we said nothing, just rocked on our heels and watched empty motor oil quarts and opaque milk jugs frolic inside the half-submerged tires and tree limbs at the opposite bank.

“You keep your side of the river clean,” he said.

“I try to do one moral thing a day.”

“I understand you do investigations.”

“From whom do you understand this?”

“Here and there. The newspapers, too, some time back.”

“I try to avoid the newspapers,” I said.

He nodded. He understood that, too.

“I’m not licensed,” I said. “Mostly I do insurance work, examine accident scenes, research court records.”

I left out that, for a time, I’d also written an advice column, masquerading as a woman, for a freebie supermarket rag masquerading as a newspaper. I’d quit that some months before, because the column was making me too aware of the kinds of minds that were loose across America.

“You hear about that clown that went off the roof a couple of weeks ago?” he asked.

I looked at his broad, tough face. “There was only a single paragraph in the Tribune. They called it a tragic accident.”

“The Argus-Observer was the only one that gave it any real play. The story pretty much disappeared.”

“I don’t read the Argus-Observer.”

He made another smile. “So I would imagine.”

For sure, he’d checked me out.

“What is it you want, Mr. Duggan?”

“What do you charge?”

“It depends on how forthcoming my clients are.” I was developing an aversion to Duggan’s cementlike demeanor. “For standard stuff, photographing accident scenes, running down records, I’m reasonable. For others, I bill premium-two hundred dollars an hour.”

It was a laugh. It had been a long while since I’d billed anybody for much of anything. Thanks, in huge part, to the Argus-Observer.

“I’d like you to look into that clown’s death.” He took a white envelope from his suit jacket. Holding it out, he said, “There’s two thousand dollars in there.”

“Do you represent the building’s owners?”

He gave that a noncommittal shrug.

“You’d do better going to the police, get their information,” I said.

“I’m looking for discretion.”

Something itched on my face. I touched my cheek, and a small piece of caulk fell off.

He noticed. He raised the envelope higher.

It was enough. I took his envelope, and we started up the hill to the street.

“How will I get in touch with you?” I asked, at the limousine.

He handed me a business card. It read, TIMOTHY DUGGAN. SECURITY.

“You do security for the building?” I asked.

“If your billing exceeds the two thousand, let me know.” He got in the car.

Unlimited budget. Limousine. A cash offering. He wasn’t my typical client, not even before my life collapsed.

As he was driven away, I pulled out my cell phone and called a man I’d once done a favor for. He worked for the State of Illinois and had nothing to do with vehicle licenses, but he had access to the database. It’s like that in Illinois government; everybody has access to everything. It’s why so many of the state’s workers, right up to the recent governors, retire in prison.

My contact put me on hold, came back in a minute. “The limousine is registered to Prestige Vehicles, in Chicago,” he said.

“Leased?”

“Most likely. You’re wasting your time. Those outfits don’t disclose information. Some of their clients are pretending rich, and don’t want it known they get carted around in leased cars.”

“Me, I own what I drive,” I said.

“You still driving that heap of a Jeep?” He chuckled, proud of his rhyme.

“I just put fresh duct tape across the rips in the side windows. It looks almost new.”

“Newly slashed, you mean.” He hung up before I could brag that I’d primed the rust spots in the same shade of gray as the tape.

I went into the turret and onto the Internet. Google, that collector of all lint, had a dozen Timothy Duggans in Illinois. One was an actor, another owned a restaurant, a third coached high school soccer. None ran a security firm. Duggan’s operation must have been small, and very private. He worked at not getting noticed.

I then keyed in “Clown, fall, Chicago.” The first listings belonged to the major newspaper Web sites. The Tribune, Sun-Times, Reader, and Southtown Star all had carried the story, two weeks before. Each had given it a bare few sentences, seeing the death as an obvious accident or, unmentioned, a possible suicide. None had updated the story since.

I scrolled down the screen to the Argus-Observer’s site and saw the three photos they’d run. A clown dancing, a clown tipping, a clown dropping.

Just that morning, they’d updated. John Keller, the bastard who wrote a two-inch-wide column called “Keller’s Korner,” had posted one of his trademark teasers: DIVING CLOWN? WHY DON’T COPPERS COP?

As always, he’d written in his usual breathless style, using fat letters to take up the space where the facts should have gone. Keller’s teasers never had middles or ends, just boldface beginnings followed by his signature tagline, “Details to follow.” Except details never followed; Keller never wasted time on research or probing credible sources. The nuggets that appeared in his daily “Keller’s Korner” were a vile mix of half-baked truths, served up in thick print.

I knew John Keller. I’d felt the burn of his acid-etched innuendos years before, when I’d gotten caught up in a false evidence scheme during the trial of a suburban mayor. He’d raked me over live coals because, at the time, I was the son-in-law of one of the major industrialists in Chicago. I was innocent of any wrongdoing, and exonerated within a week, but those were the sorts of details that never followed in “Keller’s Korner.”

Still, there had been truths, between the lines, in Keller’s teasers about me. Evidence had been falsified in the Evangeline Wilts trial. Just not by me.

I wondered how much truth Keller was hinting at now, about the clown.

I went back outside, finished the window I was painting, did another, and then it was dusk and time to knock off. I climbed the stairs to the semifinished kitchen on the second floor. It awaits new countertops and nonrusted appliances, which await more than the two thousand dollars I’d just gotten from Duggan.

I heated two generic lo-cal frozen entrées-one fish, one lasagna-in the dented microwave, not because I love variety, but because they were what I had. I took them, smoldering, across the hall.

The other half of the circle that is the turret’s second floor will one day be a library, or a dining room, or whatever anyone sporting enough money wants it to be. For now, it is my office, lounge, and occasionally the place where I sleep, in the electric blue La-Z-Boy that I’d acquired, like the room’s other furnishings, the card table and the tilting red desk chair, truly used. I shifted the La-Z-Boy into full recline, picked up my microtelevision from the floor and balanced it on my lap next to the first of the evening’s delights-the radiated fish-and turned on Channel 8.

Jennifer Gale’s segment came on at 9:08. As I’d noticed outside city hall, the cameraman had done a nice job of framing her in the video. Even as Elvis was being led out, the cameraman had filmed over Jennifer’s shoulder, keeping the side of her face in the shot, as befitted the station’s objective of delivering beauty with news.

Sadly, the piece ended without showing the horror on the young suit’s face as he palmed Elvis’s head. I supposed the news director felt that showing an agent recoiling from a sticky scalp would be a discourtesy to the courage of steel-jawed lawmen everywhere.

Leo Brumsky called ten seconds after the segment ended. “Dek, you’re not gonna-”

I stopped him because I’d known he would call. We’d been one-upping each other since seventh grade.

“Elvis,” I said, casually readying my bait.

“You saw him on the news, too.”

Gently, I dropped my hook into the pool of his imagination. “Better. I was there, outside city hall.”

He paused, his waters beginning to roil. I knew what he was thinking. Though Leo’s girlfriend, Endora, is beautiful and has a genius IQ to match his, the adolescent lust of the young male, no matter how old he has become, never fully withers.

“How close?” He wasn’t asking about my proximity to Elvis.

Slowly, I began taking up my slack. “Close enough to smell her perfume,” I murmured.

“Jeez.” Envy burbled up, coating the word like syrup.

I pulled harder, still patient. “I talked to her.”

“Jeez,” he said again.

“You want to know what we talked about, Leo?” I asked softly, ready now.

“Yes.” It was a whisper. A seventh-grade, testosterone-revved, prepubescent kid’s begging whisper.

“Salad oil,” I murmured, jerking, hooking him tight. “About how salad oil, slick oil, delicately warmed, might feel…”

He hung up, destroyed. Seventh grade went away. For the time being.

I picked up the second generic cuisine and scraped back some of the topping that could have been marinara or ketchup or thin red latex paint. The lasagna noodles that lay beneath were the same pale beige as the fish I’d just eaten. In fact, it could have been the same substance, merely pressed into a corrugated pasta shape. I took a bite. It tasted like the fish, too. I scraped back more red, looking for signs of gills. I found none. Still, I finished it quickly, pushing away the thought that my lasagna had once swum in the sea.

I climbed the curved metal stairs to the third floor. It’s where I have a fiberglass shower enclosure and the bed Amanda and I shared during our marriage.

I looked out the window. A half-moon was high over the Willahock River. Its light was soft, enough to mask the debris on the opposite bank and make the gently rippling water appear clean. I dropped my clothes onto the chair I use as a closet and slipped under the blanket.

I thought again about the Willahock, and the death of a clown, and how, like the camouflage of a soft moon, a dark limousine might be so very excellent at hiding truths.