Hunting Sweetie Rose

CHAPTER 61.

The EMT probed the sutures on my side one last time. Sounding shocked, he said they had held.

“What’s all the mess, then?” Plinnit asked him.

“Some tearing, but mostly it’s just leakage,” the EMT said. He put a fresh bandage over the wound.

I lay on my good side, on a stretcher in the lobby of the Wilbur Wright. Well-dressed hotel guests and blue-dressed cops surrounded us. They’d just watched an ambulance take away the officer Plinnit had planted in the penthouse, the man I’d fallen over in the hall. Plinnit told me he’d been cut a dozen times and was unconscious, but was expected to live.

“Lucky for you, your assailant dropped the knife in the living room before he could then use it on you,” he said.

“In the hall.” I remembered how the man-animal had clawed at the carpet, frantic to find it.

“Just before the hall. We found the knife in the living room. By the blood trail, we ascertained my officer was stabbed there, then staggered down the hall, trying to get out the emergency door.”

It made no sense. But I was alive.

The EMT bent and began wiping my left hand.

Plinnit froze. “What the hell are you doing?” he shouted.

“Cleaning away the blood,” the EMT said. “This man used his left hand to protect himself. He might have infected cuts.”

“His cuts can be tended later.” Plinnit turned to a crime scene technician. “Bag his hands until you can scrape underneath his fingernails.”

An elderly lady, ten feet away, gasped at me, the killer.

The crime scene technician put paper bags onto my hands.

“I fell onto your man,” I said. “Of course I’ll have his blood and his skin on me.”

“More interesting,” Plinnit said, “we’re checking my officer to see if he got your skin under his fingernails, trying to defend himself.”

The elderly lady, now within six feet, gasped again.

“It was someone else, Lieutenant. Short and light, but powerful.”

The elderly lady edged forward another foot. Her perfume got even closer, thick and cloying, like Elvis Derbil’s coconut hairspray.

I gestured at her with my bagged hand. “I think it was her, Lieutenant.”

“Asshole,” the old woman said, shuffling away.

“Christ, Elstrom,” Plinnit said.

“All right, Lieutenant,” the EMT said. He pulled my sodden shirt down over my side and stepped back.

The crime scene technician came back with some sort of kit, removed the bags from my hands, and scraped underneath my fingernails.

When he was done, Plinnit said, “Let’s go to the movies.” He helped me sit up, and he and the EMT lowered me into a wheelchair. As Plinnit began pushing me into the manager’s office, I saw that the wood trim around the door had been splintered.

“We had to break our way in. The day manager was unconscious, but you might already know that. Either you or someone else cracked his head open with a stapler.”

The glossy-headed concierge was waiting inside the office. He pressed the button on a small video monitor on top of a file cabinet. Plinnit stood behind me, exhaling on the top of my scalp, and we began to watch the images on the screen.

“This is our only camera,” the concierge said. “It’s old, not digital, and records only the people in the lobby.” He fast-forwarded the security tape, turning the silver-haired, well-dressed people into jerk-legged comics, like actors in Charlie Chaplin movies.

“There,” Plinnit said. “Our hero arrives.”

The concierge slowed the tape. I came into the picture, pushed the elevator button, and got in.

“This is our ending point. If we can go backward from here?” Plinnit said to the concierge.

The concierge reversed the tape, again at high speed. First me, then the other Chaplin figures began speed-walking backward through the lobby, robots run amok.

“Stop there,” I said, when he got to something dark, approaching the penthouse elevator.

The concierge slowed the video to regular speed. Someone in dark clothing was crossing the edge of the lobby.

“That’s nobody,” the concierge said, advancing the video frame by frame. “A homeless woman. She comes in to use the first-floor washroom. The manager throws her out.”

“She comes in frequently?” Plinnit asked.

“Not frequently, but she’s been in here before.”

On the screen, the woman paused to look around, and inserted a key into the lock that opened Sweetie Fairbairn’s elevator.

“Ah, hell,” the concierge said.

“Freeze that,” I said, as the woman again looked to the side.

The concierge pressed the remote.

Only her profile was visible, but it was enough.

“She look familiar, Lieutenant?” I asked.

Plinnit walked around my wheelchair, to stop two feet in front of the monitor. “Something about her…” He turned to look at me, confused.

“Call the Michigan City police. Ask them what they have on that person they brought in to give me a look-over.”

“That guy who collected cans?” Plinnit leaned closer to the video screen. “You’re saying that odd little man is masquerading now as a woman?”

“You tell me.”

“But why?”

“I think he was the torch for Andrew Fill’s trailer. He could have done Fill earlier, as well.”

“You were there, weren’t you?” he asked, his eyes hot on me. “You were in Indiana beforehand.”

I said nothing.

“Michigan City called me. It took a long autopsy, but they found that Fill was dead way before the day of the fire,” he said.

I could only shrug. Anything more might get me arrested for Fill’s murder.