Hunting Sweetie Rose : A Mystery (9781429950879)

by Fredrickson, Jack

  As always, he’d written in his usual breathless style, using fat letters to take up the space where the facts should have gone. Keller’s teasers never had middles or ends, just boldface beginnings followed by his signature tagline, “Details to follow.” Except details never followed; Keller never wasted time on research or probing credible sources. The nuggets that appeared in his daily “Keller’s Korner” were a vile mix of half-baked truths, served up in thick print.

  I knew John Keller. I’d felt the burn of his acid-etched innuendos years before, when I’d gotten caught up in a false evidence scheme during the trial of a suburban mayor. He’d raked me over live coals because, at the time, I was the son-in-law of one of the major industrialists in Chicago. I was innocent of any wrongdoing, and exonerated within a week, but those were the sorts of details that never followed in “Keller’s Korner.”

  Still, there had been truths, between the lines, in Keller’s teasers about me. Evidence had been falsified in the Evangeline Wilts trial. Just not by me.

  I wondered how much truth Keller was hinting at now, about the clown.

  I went back outside, finished the window I was painting, did another, and then it was dusk and time to knock off. I climbed the stairs to the semifinished kitchen on the second floor. It awaits new countertops and nonrusted appliances, which await more than the two thousand dollars I’d just gotten from Duggan.

  I heated two generic lo-cal frozen entrées—one fish, one lasagna—in the dented microwave, not because I love variety, but because they were what I had. I took them, smoldering, across the hall.

  The other half of the circle that is the turret’s second floor will one day be a library, or a dining room, or whatever anyone sporting enough money wants it to be. For now, it is my office, lounge, and occasionally the place where I sleep, in the electric blue La-Z-Boy that I’d acquired, like the room’s other furnishings, the card table and the tilting red desk chair, truly used. I shifted the La-Z-Boy into full recline, picked up my microtelevision from the floor and balanced it on my lap next to the first of the evening’s delights—the radiated fish—and turned on Channel 8.

  Jennifer Gale’s segment came on at 9:08. As I’d noticed outside city hall, the cameraman had done a nice job of framing her in the video. Even as Elvis was being led out, the cameraman had filmed over Jennifer’s shoulder, keeping the side of her face in the shot, as befitted the station’s objective of delivering beauty with news.

  Sadly, the piece ended without showing the horror on the young suit’s face as he palmed Elvis’s head. I supposed the news director felt that showing an agent recoiling from a sticky scalp would be a discourtesy to the courage of steel-jawed lawmen everywhere.

  Leo Brumsky called ten seconds after the segment ended. “Dek, you’re not gonna—”

  I stopped him because I’d known he would call. We’d been one-upping each other since seventh grade.

  “Elvis,” I said, casually readying my bait.

  “You saw him on the news, too.”

  Gently, I dropped my hook into the pool of his imagination. “Better. I was there, outside city hall.”

  He paused, his waters beginning to roil. I knew what he was thinking. Though Leo’s girlfriend, Endora, is beautiful and has a genius IQ to match his, the adolescent lust of the young male, no matter how old he has become, never fully withers.

  “How close?” He wasn’t asking about my proximity to Elvis.

  Slowly, I began taking up my slack. “Close enough to smell her perfume,” I murmured.

  “Jeez.” Envy burbled up, coating the word like syrup.

  I pulled harder, still patient. “I talked to her.”

  “Jeez,” he said again.

  “You want to know what we talked about, Leo?” I asked softly, ready now.

  “Yes.” It was a whisper. A seventh-grade, testosterone-revved, prepubescent kid’s begging whisper.

  “Salad oil,” I murmured, jerking, hooking him tight. “About how salad oil, slick oil, delicately warmed, might feel…”

  He hung up, destroyed. Seventh grade went away. For the time being.

  I picked up the second generic cuisine and scraped back some of the topping that could have been marinara or ketchup or thin red latex paint. The lasagna noodles that lay beneath were the same pale beige as the fish I’d just eaten. In fact, it could have been the same substance, merely pressed into a corrugated pasta shape. I took a bite. It tasted like the fish, too. I scraped back more red, looking for signs of gills. I found none. Still, I finished it quickly, pushing away the thought that my lasagna had once swum in the sea.

  I climbed the curved metal stairs to the third floor. It’s where I have a fiberglass shower enclosure and the bed Amanda and I shared during our marriage.

  I looked out the window. A half-moon was high over the Willahock River. Its light was soft, enough to mask the debris on the opposite bank and make the gently rippling water appear clean. I dropped my clothes onto the chair I use as a closet and slipped under the blanket.

  I thought again about the Willahock, and the death of a clown, and how, like the camouflage of a soft moon, a dark limousine might be so very excellent at hiding truths.

  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 insur
ance 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.

  CHAPTER 4.

  Leo called, saving me from an edgy afternoon of waiting for the phone to ring.

  “Busy today?” he asked.

  “Waiting for a phone call.”

  “A potential client?”

  “A real client, flashing cash.”

  He whistled. “Happy times are here again. You can tell me about it when I pick you up. I need your brawn.”

  “It comes with brains.”

  “Rarely necessary. Your tools would be nice, though.”

  “Which tools?”

  “Anything to cut metal tubing. Plus a power screwdriver to attach things to ceilings and floors. You can ride with me to the hardware store?”

  I told him that would be fine.

  An hour later, a motor sounded outside. It wasn’t the strong, full-throated Porsche I was expecting. This engine was tinny and weak. I looked out one of the slit windows. A light blue pickup truck, accented with irregular splats of rust and fitted with a rack to haul lumber, was idling at my curb. I’d never seen the truck. Inside it, though, were familiar flashes of outrageous color—this day, a yellow Hawaiian shirt and lime green trousers, obnoxiously bright even through the double filters of the truck and turret windows. It was Leo, in bloom. I went out, set my toolbox in the truck bed, and got in.

  “Where the hell are we going?” I asked, by way of a greeting.

  His thick, bushy eyebrows cavorted on his narrow bald head like overcaffeinated caterpillars. “I’ve had a flash of genius. We’re off to get fitness equipment, for Ma.”

  He is five foot six and weighs the same one-forty he did in high school. Also like in high school, he lives with his mother in her brown brick bungalow in Rivertown because she won’t consider living anywhere else.

  His expertise is in establishing provenance. The big auction houses in Chicago and on both coasts pay him in excess of a half-million dollars a year to establish the lineage of the pieces they offer to their bidders. For Christie’s, Sotheby’s, and the others, he wears Armani suits selected by his girlfriend, Endora, an exotic onetime model and current researcher at the Newberry Library. For me and his other friends, he selects duds from the back rack at the Discount Den, Rivertown’s retailer of odd lots of hardware, appliances, canned goods, and occasionally clothing that no one but Leo wants.

  As he headed toward Thompson Avenue, Rivertown’s seedy adult playground, I studied the day’s ensemble. Regrettably, I’d seen the lime green pants before, as I had the black-and-white saddle shoes. The shirt, however, was new. It was no ordinary tropic yellow. It was covered—or perhaps more accurately, infested—with multilegged insects, the color of blood. Like all of his casual shirts, he’d purchased it in double extra large. He won’t admit it, but I believe he buys them wretchedly oversized so he can crawl into them without unbuttoning them first.

  “Fitness equipment, for Ma?” I asked.

  “You’ve got a client?”

  It wasn’t like Leo to dodge any question, but I went along. “A security guy came by in a limousine yesterday. He hired me to look into the death of the clown that went off the Rettinger building.”

  He looked over. “It wasn’t an accident, like the paper said?”

  “He didn’t say what he thought. Nor whether he’s inquiring on his own or for somebody else.”

  “A negligence liability issue for the building’s owners?”

  “That’s what I would have thought, but there’s something else.” I told him about the door on the roof. “It should have been marked by the rope pulling away. I’m waiting for a cop to call, to tell me what they’re thinking.” I turned on the seat. “So, fitness equipment, for Ma?”

  “A healthier body can lead to a healthier mind.” His eyes stayed fixed on the road.

  For years, Ma Brumsky—a low-slung, gray-haired babushka who favors catalog housedresses and furry slippers—had run a proper Polish, fish-o
n-Fridays Catholic home. She played bingo at the church, knitted for charity, and had other Polish ladies—all but one widows like her—over for cards every eighth Saturday evening. Other than tippling at Leo’s whiskey, and stealing the occasional coffee cup or silverware setting for two when Leo took her out to dinner, the woman had led an exemplary life.

  Until Leo bought her a big-screen television.

  It loomed in their front room, taller even than the high-backed sofa Ma had kept pristine for decades under a succession of clear plastic slipcovers. With its side speakers, the set was almost as wide, too.

  It wasn’t the size and the sound of the new TV that took over Ma’s life, though; it was the adventure it summoned. For, after a week, possibly two, of marveling at how her regular shows—the soaps, the realities, the cop dramas, even the shopping channel—had been transformed by being quadrupled in size, Ma Brumsky ventured toward newer horizons. She found channels she’d never seen before. She discovered soft porn.

  Out went having her friends over for cards every eighth Saturday evening. In came big-screen events for Ma and the other ladies, every night there wasn’t bingo at the church.

  At first, Leo saw it as harmless. On those movie nights when he wasn’t staying at Endora’s condo, he worked in his basement office, willing to dial up the volume on his bossa nova CDs to drown out the excited Polish chattering and occasional stomping of an orthopedic shoe or metal walker leg just a few feet above his head.

  Then Ma’s tastes in videos expanded even more. She discovered hard-core, pay-per-view. Suddenly, she was witnessing twosomes and threesomes and foursomes interact in ways she and Pa Brumsky, rest his soul, never would have imagined in the dark beneath their goose down comforter.

  Out went the tame romance novels from the library; out went the Polish-language newspapers. Out went words in general. Daytime hours were now for rest, so that she could be fully alert and observant far into the night.

  Leo became concerned.

  “A healthier body can lead to a healthier mind,” Leo said again, working his lips as though mumbling an incantation, as he pulled into the Home Depot.