Hunting Sweetie Rose

CHAPTER 59.

The Eisenhower Expressway was jammed with cars jammed with people headed downtown, for beers and wienies and fireworks at the beach. My shot right side started its own fireworks early, throbbing as soon as I began working the Jeep’s gears. By the time I got to Damen Avenue, the few miles of shifting from first gear to second and back to first again had enraged my side into a full fury. I got off the expressway and pulled over. The bandage around my chest was still dry, but the pain was telling me there were no long-term guarantees.

I started threading north on the side streets, but it was no better. I got stopped at almost every intersection by slow-moving clusters of people toting lawn chairs, blankets, and red coolers that looked like little white-topped coffins. Each time, I patted my shirt, feeling for wet. Each time, I heard Plinnit’s voice, “Because you’re dumb, Elstrom. You don’t know when to give up.”

Several times, I thought I spotted Plinnit’s men in the maroon Chevy, trailing me. I tried to find comfort in having such protection, but with the thought came the reminder that someone might still be out there, hunting me.

Either way, it didn’t matter for long. Plinnit’s men finally disappeared for good into the traffic behind me, and I never did see them again.

I got to the Wilbur Wright at eight o’clock, gave my car key to the valet, and went inside.

The concierge frowned and told me the hotel manager was shut in his office, and no, the concierge didn’t know anything about any arrangement to let me into the penthouse elevator. I asked him if he might knock on the manager’s door.

“Strange,” the concierge said. “He almost never shuts his door. Let’s wait a few moments, then I’ll knock.”

Someone else came up then, a hotel guest, and that returned the concierge to grinning. I walked over to the penthouse elevator, wondering if perhaps Plinnit’s man had already arrived and had unlocked the door.

I pressed the button. The elevator doors slid open. Plinnit had called and instructed the manager to unlock them. I stepped in and rode up.

The empty, hushed foyer smelled faintly of old sweat. For an insane instant, it sent my mind darting back to Minnesota and the dark of a night behind Darlene Taylor’s shack. The man who’d shot me had smelled of old sweat, too. I switched on a small lamp. It made the foyer brighter, but no warmer.

I called out to Plinnit’s man. He didn’t answer. He might have been down in the lobby, cadging a cup of coffee, or perhaps in with the manager, behind those closed doors.

I wondered if I should go back down to the lobby and try to find the cop. Sweetie’s keys were in the hands of a killer; I didn’t need to be banging around the penthouse without protection from one of Plinnit’s men. Then I realized the cop would have cleared the place, to make sure no one was lurking.

I stepped into the living room, lit only by the sun starting its slow settle into the west. Horns had begun honking on the streets below, drivers caught in the Fourth of July crush, anxious to find a place to park before the fireworks began.

I wanted to hurry, too. I felt like an interloper, an intruder into a space that had settled itself to die. I looked into the darkness down the hall. I was going to only one room, her study. I wanted to look again at her papers and her pictures and her notes, to see if something might trigger a fast thought about where she might have run.

Even if I couldn’t find a clue, I wanted a rationalization that I could give myself in the middle of the nights sure to come, that I’d searched absolutely and thoroughly, done every last thing I could to find her and warn her that whoever was coming for her might never give up.

That is, unless she’d been the one doing the killing.

Fifteen minutes was all it would take.

A car alarm went off down below, impatient, blaring eight times before it went silent. I started through the living room, careful to step around the large stain that had dried black in the middle of the room. I switched on a lamp, and another. Fifteen minutes and I could be gone.

Sweetie’s study had one small window that faced west. The building next door, taller and sided with flat planes of dark glass, was a monstrous, hulking shape that blocked out everything behind it. I turned on her desk lamp and sat down.

The contents of the file drawers seemed to be in the same disarray as the last time. I pulled out a file, then another, fanning its contents before setting it on the floor. It was all charitable stuff, one folder per charity. Each file included initial request letters, her research notes and Internet investigations, and copies of her letters informing the applicants of her decision, up or down, concerning the possibility of a donation. Sweetie Fairbairn had spent thousands of hours giving hundreds of thousands of dollars away.

At some point, I thought to look at my watch. I’d lost track of the time. A whole hour had passed. I leaned back, to rub the strain from my eyes, and looked again at the calendar thumbtacked to the cheesy corkboard. June had changed to July, but there was no one now who needed to turn the page.

I remembered, then, the postcard that had been tacked next to the calendar. It showed an old covered bridge that had octagonal windows. The postcard was frayed, and riddled with punctures at the top, as though it had been taken down and studied a thousand times.

I’d liked Sweetie Fairbairn for her old postcard, like I’d liked her for her Velveeta, the night she’d brought me into her study. It showed she had roots in soil better than some fool penthouse atop an overpriced boutique hotel.

The postcard was gone. A souvenir hunter could have taken it, a cleaning person or a cop, someone wanting some last thing of Sweetie Fairbairn’s.

Something stirred faintly, outside the room.

Then came the smell I’d first noticed when I’d first come in. Old sweat.

I looked toward the hall.

The barest hint of a leg was sticking out from the edge of the doorway.