Hunting Sweetie Rose

CHAPTER 64.

After Leo dropped me off, I went down to sit on the bench by the Willahock. I would have preferred the isolation of my roof, for I had many nagging thoughts and I think better in thinner air, but the EMT who treated me at the Wilbur Wright told me any more trauma to my right side would put me in a hospital bed with an antibiotic drip for a week. Possessing some genius, I took that to mean I should not climb ladders.

There was also the matter of Plinnit’s cops in a dark sedan. They’d followed us from Amanda’s. This time, I was much more amenable to letting them keep an eye on me.

So for all sorts of good reasons, I walked my shot side down to the river, to watch the milk jugs tango with the oil containers.

I’d only been there for five minutes when I heard footsteps hurrying along the river walk, approaching the turret and city hall. No one ever walked along the river. When the developers lost interest in paying the grease it would take to develop Rivertown, the lizards lost interest in maintaining the asphalt walk. It had been a skin coat anyway, put down cheaply and hurriedly by some lizard relative with more greed than tar, and it had cracked and heaved in just a few weeks. Since I’d moved back to Rivertown, I’d never seen anyone use it.

I turned to look. Elvis Derbil, dressed in a black shirt and black, low-riding jeans, scuttled into view like one of the rats I occasionally saw moving in the bramble alongside the water.

His eyes widened when he saw me. The skin on the top of his head, already glistening from the midday heat, deepened now to an alarming red. He made a swallowing face, looked away, and hurried on toward city hall without saying a word.

These were strange days. Elvis never walked more than the few steps it took to get to one of the city’s Cadillacs. Certainly, I’d never seen him walk along the river.

Except for today. Today, Elvis was walking-and sweating.

I watched him disappear past the untrimmed bushes, and let him disappear from my thoughts. Today, Elvis was irrelevant.

I looked across the water… and saw, in the sifting shadows and shapes the wind was making of the leaves, the shadow, too, of Darlene Taylor.

I wanted the simplicity of seeing her purely as a ruthless killer, but that image was being jostled by other imagined snapshots, firing fast inside my head.

I saw her on a fine autumn day, a pretty young girl with her blond hair blowing back, laughing beside Georgie Korozakis as they raced in his convertible down Main Street, Minnesota.

I saw her in late winter, after her mother died, in a shack stuck on frozen ground, determination already cutting lines into her pretty young face as she began alternating school days with Rosemary, so that someone would always be home with Alta.

I saw her in spring, on a lush afternoon gone suddenly, shockingly bad, watching horrified as Alta, crazed and screaming, fired a revolver at a gas station attendant, and sent the rest of their lives to hell.

Not quite, though. Georgie and Rosemary got to flee. Georgie, within days; Rosemary, in two short months. It was Darlene who had to remain, bound to Alta as surely as if by a chain.

I saw her that summer, struggling to remain impassive when Roy Lishkin stopped by time and again, probing, implying, maybe even saying outright he knew damned well there hadn’t been just three of them in that convertible. That Alta had been along, too.

I saw her years later, after life had cut the last smile out of her face, when Georgie Korozakis called, out of the black of her past, to tell her that Rosemary, another golden girl but the one who had gotten away, had married rich and was living high above any trace of old grit in a penthouse in Chicago.

And I saw her dead beneath a blue tarp, not fifty feet from where I was now sitting.

I saw all that with clarity, in the leaves in the trees across the river. Yet when I tried to see Darlene snap, and perhaps kill Alta, or put a gun to the back of Georgie Korozakis’s head so many years later, the shadows in the leaves across the river blurred. I could see her killing the clown, James Stitts. I could see her killing the guard, Robert Norton. But I couldn’t see her killing those she’d once loved.

“You get attacked in Sweetie Fairbairn’s penthouse and don’t think to call me?” Jenny said, startling me into attempting a fast turn, which startled my newly tightened stitches into fast pain.

“It just happened last evening,” I said, still turning but now more prudently.

“I know,” she said, sitting beside me on the bench. She wore huge dark glasses, and the same baggy jeans and loose sweatshirt she’d worn the first time she’d come to the turret. An incognito outfit, I’d thought then. An incognito outfit, I thought now.

“You heard about me from Plinnit?”

“From a source,” she said. “Actually, I heard several hours ago. You’ve not been answering your phone.”

“So you drove out?”

“I was in the neighborhood. Our bike-riding friend attacked you?”

“I disturbed him in the penthouse. He must have been looking for a lead to Sweetie Fairbairn’s whereabouts.”

“Why? His employers, Koros and Darlene, are dead. Their target, Sweetie, gave away all her money, and has disappeared.”

“Incriminating leftover loose ends, maybe. Otherwise, I don’t know.”

“There’s nothing more you can do, Dek.”

I looked down the river walk, toward city hall, then turned to smile at her. “You just missed Elvis Derbil.”

Her face betrayed nothing behind the big sunglasses. “Besides your being beaten in her penthouse, there is other Sweetie Fairbairn news,” she said. “You must promise it’s not for broadcast, nor will you repeat it to anyone, nor will you even think about it unless you are in my presence-”

I tried on a grin. It hurt the road map lines on my face, but it felt good anyway. “Stop making fun of my conditions. Can’t you see I’m wounded everywhere?”

She took off her sunglasses and rewarded me with mirthful eyes. “Sweetie never married Silas Fairbairn.”

Across the river, the milk jugs made noise, seeming to bob faster at the news.

“What the hell?”

“I’ve checked everywhere, even hired a national service to double-check databases I’ve never heard of. Silas Fairbairn never married anyone.”

I saw the future then, and I laughed, really laughed. It was worth the pain.

“Perfect,” I finally managed.

“It will lead the news, along with you, tonight at six.” She glowed with what was going to be a huge triumph. “They’re moving me up to the dinner hour, because they’re afraid someone else will find out about it.”

“You’re sure: Sweetie gave away millions that were never hers?”

“Just like I’m sure Silas will have more relatives than he ever knew. They’ll hire lawyers to recover those millions. Can you imagine how that will look? Greedy relatives going after cancer foundations, children’s hospitals, trying to take that money back? There will be no shame, not for the people after those millions.”

“News at noon, six, and nine, for years to come,” I said.

Her face turned serious. “Do you think Sweetie Fairbairn will ever be found, dead or alive?”

“I don’t know.”

“But you’re done, aren’t you?”

She was smart, the beautiful Jenny Galecki. More, though, she was intuitive. Enough lives had already been snuffed out. Hunting Sweetie Fairbairn, inadvertently leading others to her so that she might be prosecuted for a death long ago or those more recent, or even for giving away millions of dollars that weren’t hers to give, required someone with more rectitude than I now had.

“I imagine,” I said. Then, making a show of admiring her incognito outfit, I asked, “How’s the salad oil investigation going?”

She smiled and put on the cover of her sunglasses. “There won’t be anything on it for months.”

“Or maybe for forever?”

Her head didn’t move. Her sunglasses only reflected, nothing more.

“How about those citizens’ committees, unknown to actual citizens, you said have been formed in Rivertown?” I asked.

“I’m sure I don’t know what you mean,” she said, but one pair of the faint lines at her mouth was working against a smile.

“I did tell you, did I not, that Elvis just passed by here, walking toward city hall?”

The pair of faint lines at her mouth gave way, just a little more.

It had been no coincidence that Jenny had appeared so soon after Elvis Derbil passed by, sneaking back to city hall. Elvis had become Jenny’s newest source.

She stood up and kissed an uncut part of my cheek. “There’ll be no sharing any of your conjecturing, on any subject, for the time being.”

Her kiss stayed warm on my cheek, long after she’d driven away.

Strange days, indeed.