“This is close,” Plinnit said, getting out.
The station house was small, dark brick, and had white-painted windows. Three police cars, a red van, and an old tan Ford Taurus were parked in front. The tan Taurus looked vaguely familiar. Then again, I supposed the world was filled with tan sedans.
A sergeant escorted us down a short hall cramped by scarred wood benches that lined both sides. The potentially androgynous bike rider from Lake Vista Estates sat on one of them, sipping Pepsi from a two-liter bottle.
“Excuse me, sir,” the sergeant said to the bike rider.
With that, two confirmations were offered up. The first was that the rider was indeed a man—a fact that, in fairness, I’d pretty much assumed two days before.
The second was more troublesome. I’d been brought to Indiana to be shown to the bike rider. The little one-perp parade I was starring in was a lineup, without the bother of rounding up look-alikes. It had the potential of being one hundred percent effective. There was no way the bike rider could fail to remember me being at Andrew Fill’s trailer.
The bike rider separated his head from the Pepsi and looked up. Nothing showed on his face before he dropped his mouth to the Pepsi again.
At least not yet. He could have been told to show nothing.
The sergeant, Plinnit, and the gray-haired man escorted me into a room with a yellow Formica table and four chairs. I watch television. I know those rooms are supposed to have two-way mirrors, but this one didn’t.
“Why don’t you have a two-way mirror?” I asked. “Budget cuts?”
Plinnit frowned and leaned back in his chair. “Sergeant Colfax here has some questions for you.”
“First off, you have the right to an attorney,” Colfax said.
“He has a high-priced big-gun lawyer in Chicago,” Plinnit said.
“Impressive. You want to call him?” Colfax gave me a minute to think as he made a show of studying my T-shirt and jeans. The bits of old paint and caulk were still dirty and damp from the gardening I’d done on my Jeep.
“Am I being charged with something?”
“Not at the moment.”
“Then I don’t need a lawyer,” I said.
“We’ve been informed you came to Mr. Andrew Fill’s residence today,” Colfax said.
“You were misinformed. Car trouble kept me mostly at home today.”
Colfax looked over at Plinnit.
Plinnit shrugged. “On the way here, we learned he bought a battery in Chicago sometime after noon. Then, it appears, he spent the rest of the day planting flowers on his Jeep.”
Colfax didn’t understand. “In his Jeep? He went somewhere, in a Jeep, to plant flowers?”
Plinnit spoke slowly. “No. On his Jeep. He spent the rest of the day decorating his vehicle with flowers.”
“You some sort of hippie?” Colfax asked me, distaste curling his lip.
“Power to the people, right on,” I said, recalling a line from an old Woodstock documentary. Power, too, to the little man sucking Pepsi down the hall, a ticking bomb—but I didn’t say that.
“A smart-ass?” Colfax asked Plinnit.
Plinnit grinned. “Oh my, yes.”
Colfax turned back to me. “Tell me about Andrew Fill.”
“George Koros, Sweetie Fairbairn’s employee, hired me to find him. Koros thinks Fill knows something about Sweetie’s disappearance, and told me Fill has a cottage near here. He wanted me to come out today, to interview Fill, but my battery died.”
“And this evening, you rode with these gentlemen all the way here without asking why?”
“When the good lieutenant here stopped by, suggesting a ride, I figured I’d get new information.”
Colfax looked at Plinnit and the gray man. “Why doesn’t this man Koros work with you, instead of this jerk?”
I answered for the detectives. “Mr. Koros thinks the police are spending too much time driving aimlessly, from state to state, instead of digging in to accomplish something.”
At that, Mr. Gray sat up straighter in his chair, but Plinnit stayed leaned back in his chair, grinning.
Colfax’s next question was predictable. “You know Andrew Fill?”
“We’ve never met. As I’m sure Lieutenant Plinnit has told you, the closest I got was to enter Fill’s apartment through an open door, illegally. I’m interested in talking to Fill, about whether he had motive to harm Sweetie Fairbairn.”
Colfax stared at me for an uncomfortable few seconds, then stood up and went out to the hall. I could hear him whispering to someone, but not what they were saying. After a minute, he came back. “Thank you, Mr. Elstrom,” he said, because apparently there was nothing else he could say.
“My turn,” I said, because it was expected. “Why was I brought here?”
Colfax ignored me, thanked Plinnit, and then led us out into the hall. The bike rider still sat on the bench, sipping Diet Pepsi.
Colfax gave it a last shot. “Excuse me, sir,” he said to the man.
The little man looked up. Colfax nodded toward me.
Again the Pepsi was lowered. This time the rider stood up to what was barely four and a half feet. He looked squarely into my eyes.
“Nope,” he said, after a long minute, and took another pull at the Pepsi.
“Why the short guy?” I asked Plinnit, when we got outside.
“He collects cans for recycling money, sleeps in his car. Colfax was hoping he’d seen someone out by the trailer park.”
“Seen me?”
“That was the hope,” he said.
“Why?” I asked, to further the charade. No one had yet mentioned that Andrew Fill was dead.
Plinnit didn’t answer. No matter.
It had been the best fifty dollars I’d ever spent.
* * *
We drove back pretty much as we’d come—in complete silence. I tried questions about Sweetie Fairbairn’s disappearance and Norton’s murder from the backseat, but those were met with grunts. Asking about Andrew Fill didn’t even get that.
When Mr. Gray pulled up in front of the turret, Plinnit got out with me. “You keep popping up, Elstrom,” he said.
“Like blossoms in summer?” I asked, gesturing at the Jeep horticulturally.
“Who’d call us anonymously, to say you were in Indiana today?”
“You won’t even tell me why that matters.”
“Andrew Fill was found burned to death, in a trailer, not far from that police station.”
“Then someone wants me blamed for that.”
“Who?”
“George Koros pointed me toward Andrew Fill. He insisted I go to Indiana today.”
“You don’t like Koros?” he asked.
“I don’t understand his relationship with Sweetie Fairbairn.”
“That’s it?”
“For now.”
He turned to get back in the car.
“Any idea where Sweetie Fairbairn comes from?” I asked.
“Hometown-wise, growing-up-wise?”
“Yes.”
“We haven’t focused on that.”
“That’s it?” I asked, when he said nothing more.
He smiled. “For now.”
* * *
It was too late to see if Jenny was reporting, but the ten o’clock broadcasts had just begun. Channel 5’s anchor, a smiley fellow with shellacked hair, led with the big news from Indiana: “A tantalizing new lead may have arisen in the missing Sweetie Fairbairn case. Acting on a tip, Indiana police today discovered Andrew Fill, a onetime employee of Ms. Fairbairn’s and someone long active in the arts in Chicago, dead in a house trailer fire. Fill was the director…”
I switched stations. Channel 2 was saying, “Andrew Fill, former head of the Midwest Arts Symposium, was found brutally…”
I turned off the little television, made tea, and took it up to the roof.
Rivertown was in its own full fire. Neon flashed up and down Thompson Avenue. Mixed in the usual cacophony of to
nk tunes and the hysterical shrieks of lubricated people having Just Plain Fun were the rips and flashes of drunks getting a jump on the Fourth of July. Short bursts of firecrackers and cherry bombs were going off across the spit of land, sights and sounds of war on a bawdy street.
As I watched the tiny explosions, I let my mind nibble at the probability that George Koros was also trying to lay Sweetie Fairbairn’s disappearance, and maybe Norton’s murder, on me. He’d tried to send me to Indiana, to get caught sniffing around Andrew Fill’s trailer at the same time he’d tipped the police that I’d be there. He’d meant for me and the cops to collide, leading to more suspicions.
What I couldn’t understand was how that would benefit him.
Or how I could nail him for it.
I drank my tea, hummed along too loudly with the music from the tonks, and thought. By three in the morning, when the tonks quit serenading the night, when the last of the hookers had moaned and the last of the johns and the cherry bombs had exploded, I was sure of only a fraction of it.
The motive had to be money, as it so often is when people kill. Sweetie Fairbairn was a financial wellspring, Koros was a financial guy, and Andrew Fill was a sap. Koros worked Andrew Fill, except he worked him dead. He killed him, then manipulated him, missing, to take the blame for embezzling a half-million dollars.
None of that, though, explained killing James Stitts, or Robert Norton, or why Koros told me Fill had been paying the stolen money back.
None of it explained why Sweetie Fairbairn had run, either.
The tea had gone vile, and I’d gone cold. I climbed the ladders down to the fifth floor, then to the fourth. It was as I was going down the stairs to the third floor that I heard the noise from my would-be office on the second.
It was my cell phone, vibrating itself into a frenzy on the card table. I thumbed in the code, and listened.
“Mr. Elstrom.” George Koros sounded panicked. “Andrew Fill is dead. It’s on the radio. Please call me.”
It could have been a warning, meant to stop me from going those last miles to Andrew Fill’s place. Certainly, it didn’t sound like a message from a cunning killer.
That blew up what little fancy thinking I’d done up on the roof, as surely as the drunks along Thompson Avenue had blown up the night.
CHAPTER 34.
“Interesting message you left yesterday, Mr. Koros.” I said, when I called him the next morning. It was a new day for everyone, and I wanted to begin mine by setting his on edge.
“I heard about Andrew on the midnight news, and realized I’d sent you into a murder investigation.” He paused for a deep breath. “Recovering what’s left of Sweetie’s money—money she’ll need to get her head fixed, money she’ll need for her defense—that was my priority. Now, with Andrew dead, we’ll never find the money…”
“You’re still thinking Ms. Fairbairn is sick?”
“Why else would she behave as she has? I don’t know what happened to Andrew; the radio said there was a fire of some sort. Sweetie’s guard sure didn’t shoot himself, and she sure as hell wouldn’t have given away all her money if she were thinking right. She’s sick.”
“You’re thinking she did all that?”
“I need to get her into a treatment facility. The right doctors will make sure she stays there, instead of standing trial.”
“Only if we find her.”
“She’ll surface when she’s ready. She’s tough; she’s safe.”
“Some would say you could have taken that half million, George.”
His voice quivered, maybe from anger, maybe from fear. “Me?”
“Sure. You said yourself you managed the Symposium’s checking account. You were in a position to withdraw money.”
For a moment he was silent. “You’re right,” he said finally. “I had that responsibility.”
“I’m going to keep looking for her, George.”
“It’ll be a waste of time.”
“I’ll stay in touch.”
He took another moment, then said, “All right. I’m going to messenger over a corporate Visa card for you. Be prudent with it, Mr. Elstrom, but use it to find her.”
I hung up without saying that using his credit card would pinpoint exactly where I was, and from that, he would know what I was doing.
I figured he already knew that.
* * *
I called Jenny. “Let me tell you about my second trip to Indiana,” I said, and did.
“You’re lucky that little man on the bicycle didn’t put the finger on you,” she said when I was done.
“He saw me as an innocent man.”
“He saw you as the guy who gave him fifty bucks to keep his mouth shut. That’s a lot of recycled cans.”
I asked her to check out Sweetie’s life before she came to Chicago.
“How far back do you want me to go?”
“The day she was born. She might have gone back to one of the places she’s been.”
“You still think George Koros has a secret?”
“I still think he has a thousand of them.”
* * *
I called the Bohemian next. “Can you put me in touch with Silas Fairbairn’s closest friend?”
“Have you consulted your lawyer, the esteemed John Peet, about whether it’s wise for you to continue nosing around Sweetie Fairbairn’s life?”
“She’s still my client. She’s still missing.”
“You’re still the object of police interest, not to mention press scrutiny.”
“I can’t sit back, waiting for her to reappear on her own.”
“Big doubt, now?”
“I no longer think she’s free to come back.”
CHAPTER 35.
The Bohemian had asked for a day but only took an hour. “Gillman Tripp was Silas Fairbairn’s most frequent golf partner. He’ll see you midafternoon, in the bar at the Arrow Way Golf Club. He’s wearing yellow slacks and a white shirt.”
I got to the Arrow Way at three o’clock. It was tucked down a long private drive lined with gnarled, ancient evergreen trees. The gentlemen moving slowly to and from the Cadillacs and Mercedes in the parking lot were gnarled and ancient, too. With its aged membership and total seclusion, Arrow Way looked to offer a place where rich old men could play golf without wearing pants, either from preference or forgetfulness, and no one else would see well enough to mind.
The bar was at the back of the low brick clubhouse. There wasn’t a dark hair on any of the men, but all of them appeared to be wearing pants. Three of them, in particular, were wearing yellow pants, with white shirts. One, sitting at a table by himself, waved me over.
“Mr. Elstrom? Gillman Tripp.” We shook hands, and I sat down.
I guessed he was well past eighty, but there was no sallowness to his skin. It was browned from the sun, and reddened on the nose and cheeks from what I imagined was a fourth or fifth gin and tonic.
“Like a drink?” he asked.
“Just a Coke.”
He called a waitress over and ordered my Coke and another reddener for himself.
“Anton Chernak told me you’re helping to look for Sweetie Fairbairn?”
“I am.”
“You’re the one whose name was in the paper? The one who found her with that dead guard?”
“My name was in the paper, yes.”
He leaned forward to study my shirt. I realized I should have worn the good one the Bohemian bought me. “How the hell can you afford John Peet?”
“I suspect he’s praying my innocence will minimize his time.”
Gillman Trip barked out a laugh, leaned back, and said, “What can I tell you?”
“Where is Sweetie Fairbairn from?”
He laughed again, all gin, tonic, and mirth. “We all wondered about that, but none of us ever found out. All I know is Silas brought her home after a visit to one of his factories.”
“Do you remember which factory?”
“I do not. What I remember was t
hinking this was no chickadee. Sweetie was well into her forties at that time. That can be a desperate age for a certain kind of woman without means. I was convinced that Silas had bit it this time, for sure.”
“She acted like a hustler?”
“No. It’s just that Silas was a very wealthy man, smart in the ways of manufacturing, utterly obtuse in the ways of women. It was natural to conclude he’d fallen as easy prey.”
Our drinks came. His hand was steady on the new glass as he raised it to his lips. After a sip and a smile, he continued.
“I was wrong, of course. We all were. Sweetie adored Silas, and he adored her. I got the impression he’d been pursuing her for quite some time, and that she’d only reluctantly agreed to marry him.”
“What made you think she was reluctant?”
“In the beginning she was … she was…” He stopped to fuel his memory with another sip at the gin. “Nervous. That’s the right word: nervous.”
“Nervous, how?”
“When we were out to dinner, those first times, she was pleasant enough, a real charming lady, but she was always looking around, like she was afraid someone would come up to her to tell her she didn’t belong. It was understandable. A girl from the sticks, a factory-working girl, gets swept off her feet by a rich industrialist. No matter that she’s older and has solid values, she’s entered a world where she doesn’t belong.” He sighed. “At least, that’s the way I saw it, in the beginning.”
“You changed your mind?”
“I began to consider the possibility that something else was causing her nervousness. She was always guarded, careful to not say much about herself. Silas was evasive about her as well. Her nervousness settled down, after a few months, but a little of that evasiveness always remained, in both of them.”
“I don’t suppose you ever caught a hint of her maiden name?”
He smiled. “I never got a hint about her real first name, either.”
I wished for a small board at that instant, something to strike the side of my thick, unthinking head. “‘Sweetie’ was just a nickname?”
He gave me a pitying look and said, as though to a child, “No mother names her kid ‘Sweetie.’ It was what Silas called her, and that was good enough for us.”
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