Hunting Sweetie Rose

CHAPTER 57.

I ought to have slept soundly, for eventually the coffee, the wine, the Ho Hos, and even the nerves should have worn off.

I ought to have slept soundly, for Plinnit had left behind two plainclothes officers in a dark Buick sedan, to watch the door.

I ought to have slept soundly, for I was tired, even though Jenny Galecki, a woman I liked to think I admired because I didn’t want to call it anything else, was sleeping in my La-Z-Boy, just one lone, warmer floor below.

I ought to have slept, but I didn’t, because I couldn’t think who was left to kill Darlene Taylor, nor why she’d been dropped alongside the turret, nor why the killer had needed to get inside. It should have been enough for Darlene’s murderer to drop her corpse and leave.

Unless, as Plinnit said, Darlene’s killer also wanted to kill me.

I thrashed with all of it until eight in the morning, and then I got up, shaved closer than usual, and came down in better clothes than I ever wore around the turret.

She was gone. She’d left a note. “Good wine. Good fire. Great Ho Hos. J.”

It was just as well. I went into the kitchen and made a pot of the marginally splendid Discount Den coffee. I wanted to take a cup up to the roof, to look at the town, but I couldn’t figure out how to negotiate the ladders with my wounded side. I thought about going down to the bench by the river, to watch the flotsam bob in the water, but I’d be on view to Plinnit’s plainclothesmen-and, perhaps, to whoever had left Darlene Taylor dead in my yard.

I looked out the window. No press vans had yet arrived. Jenny and Plinnit must have reached an accommodation. Apparently, Plinnit was keeping a lid on the discovery of the corpse until noon, when Jenny was set to broadcast it to the world.

I took the coffee into my office, eased aboard the La-Z-Boy, and watched the rising sun brighten the beiges, browns, and yellows of the curved block walls.

The sunlight had reached the card table I use as a desk. The table is old, something I found in someone else’s trash. It is covered with a nubby gray sort of plastic that never looks good, no matter how the sun moves across it.

Something sparkled there, caught by the sun. I craned my neck to see. It was my letter opener, a cheap stainless steel thing. It lay by itself, on the center of the table. It shouldn’t have been by itself.

I knew then what was gone. I knew what Darlene’s killer had taken.

It was the small ring of Sweetie’s keys that I’d picked up so mindlessly from the carpet the day I’d found her kneeling over the dead guard. The keys I’d never told Plinnit I’d found. The keys I’d used to get in to take another look around Sweetie’s penthouse.

Only one person could have known I might even have had those keys.

The person who’d dropped them. The person who’d run away.

Sweetie Fairbairn.