Hunting Sweetie Rose

CHAPTER 3.

The Rettinger Hardware Supply building was an old sandblasted, redbrick, nuts-and-bolts warehouse that looked to have been gentrified into four floors of residences and street-level stores twenty years before. I parallel parked between two BMWs, waited next to the door that led to the upstairs condos, and slipped in when someone came out. A narrow stairway on the fifth floor led up to a little hutch on the roof. A door that was flaking old green paint opened to the outside.

The roof was flat to the edge, covered with tar and enough loose gravel to make it a fool place to go tap dancing. I walked around, staying well back from the edge. There were no marks on the gravel, no scuffs or scrapes at the edge that indicated the clown had tried to grab or kick his way back onto the roof. Either he’d gone off the roof on purpose, a suicide, or he’d gone off surprised, the victim of a bad knot or a frayed rope.

Or as Keller had vaguely implied, the victim of murder.

I thought back to the slim paragraphs in the news accounts. The commuters heading to the trains had assumed, naturally enough, that the clown’s act was an advertising stunt. Yet none of the newspaper or Internet reports had mentioned what the clown was touting. It was a question for the cops.

I took another turn around the roof. There were no rings or cleats. I walked back to the hutch, looking for the place where the clown had tied his rope.

Most of the green paint on the door had weathered away, exposing wood that had gone gray from the sun and the wind and the rain and the snow. I looked closely at the edges. Several faint indentations, exposing fresh yellow wood that had not yet weathered, were visible above the top hinge. It was the place where the clown had looped and tied his safety rope.

I pressed my thumbnail against the door. It easily cut a semicircle into the spongy wood-and that was a problem. There were no deeper marks in the wood, no rough abrasions that should have been made by the rope rubbing back and forth as it worked itself loose.

I went down the stairs.

The district’s police station was one of Chicago’s older cop houses, set in the middle of a block. I parked between a Pontiac that had one headlight and an Oldsmobile that had no bumpers at all. I imagined I heard the Jeep sigh, settling in comfortably among its own, when I shut off the clatter of my engine.

The desk sergeant frowned as he read my business card. “Records researching what?”

Records researcher is a vague title. Illinois government, rarely picky about much at all, ethics-wise, is uncharacteristically careful about licensing private detectives. A law school degree or law enforcement experience is required. I have neither. So I avoid even the inference of working as a private investigator. Records researcher does well enough as a job title, and it sounds harmless.

“The insurance file on the clown that went off the roof at the Rettinger building,” I said.

“You trying to make him a jumper so your company won’t have to pay?”

“Nothing like that.” I gave him one of my winning grins. “Is the officer in charge in?”

“Later this afternoon,” he snapped.

“You’ll give him my card?”

“Even if it’s with my dying breath.”

Walking out, I looked back. He was leaning over, to drop my card in a wastebasket.

There was a Plan B. The Bohemian’s office was less than a mile away.

The Bohemian’s name is never in the papers. Anton Chernek values secrecy the way Midas valued gold, except with more fervor.

He is an attorney, a CPA, and a certified financial manager, but his degrees suggest only that he manages high-dollar investment portfolios for high-dollar clients. His real responsibilities reach much further. For those whose net worth transcends tens of millions, he can be a facilitator, a fixer, an overseer of entire lives-the go-to guy when trouble erupts. An errant child, a sticky business partnership, an even stickier personal partnership; those are Chernek’s real domains. He resolves difficulties quietly, compassionately, and almost always fairly. He is first-generation American, old-world courtly, and very quietly essential to the well-being of many of Chicago’s most prominent people.

I first met him at the conference my ex-wife’s lawyers called to work out the details of our divorce. He’d come with Amanda’s lawyers, sat in the background, said nothing. I came alone. He liked that I didn’t want anything from her. I think he also liked that my first name, always unused, is Vlodek. It is a solid Bohemian name, like his own.

His are the only offices on the top floor of a yellow brick former bicycle factory. The elevator let me off into his reception area, a dark expanse of money-green leather furniture, burgundy carpeting, and blue-suited financial fund brokers, hoping to see the Bohemian but willing to settle for one of his staff.

His personal secretary didn’t keep me waiting. She’s a formidable, helmet-haired woman with a British accent and a Transylvanian demeanor. Her name is Buffy, and that is the only laugh she offers the world. She smiled an eighth of an inch to express her ecstasy at seeing me again and led me back to his office.

“Vlodek,” the Bohemian called out, exaggerating the syllables-Vuh-lo-dek-on his tongue. “What a pleasant surprise.”

He is sixtyish, six-four like me but thirty pounds thicker, tanned almost to mahogany, and always better dressed. That day, he wore a peach-colored dress shirt with a white collar, a deeper-colored peach tie, and midnight blue suit trousers. The matching suit coat was hung on an antique mahogany rack next to his mahogany credenza. The Bohemian wears mahogany like he wears money, very well.

I sat down on leather taken from a burgundy cow.

“How is the lovely Amanda?” It is always his leadoff question, and it is never idle or social. My ex-wife is the daughter of one of his most prominent clients, the tycoon Wendell Phelps.

“Very busy.”

“I understand she is doing a marvelous job.”

Amanda had recently joined her father’s electric utility, directing its charitable endeavors. It left her little time for teaching at the Art Institute, or working on one of the art history books she occasionally authored. Or me.

“That’s good to know,” I said.

“It will settle down, Vlodek.”

“Of course,” I said.

He smiled. “Anything I can help you with?” He knew I would not drop in merely to chat.

“I’d like a phone call from the officer who’s in charge of investigating the death of that clown two weeks ago.”

“The poor man who fell off the roof?”

“Yes.”

“Not much press on that. Just a few words in the paper, as I recall.”

I nodded.

He didn’t ask why I wanted to know, and I offered no explanation. It was like that between the Bohemian and me. He just smiled, and I smiled, and not a confidence was broken.