“You’re a cop?”
“Of course I’m a cop. We get called on gunshot wounds, even if they are self-inflicted.”
“I didn’t shoot myself, damn it.” I grabbed the bed rail with my left hand, to pull myself up, but my foot tugged back from the end of the bed. “You cuff suicides up here?” I said.
“When requested.”
“I didn’t put a bullet anywhere. It was put into me.”
“By who?”
“I don’t know.”
“Would you like a lawyer?”
“I want to speak to your superior.”
“I am the superior. I’m the sheriff, Ellie Ball. I’m also the newest friend of a Lieutenant Plinnit, down in Chicago. He responded right away to the inquiry I sent. He’s quite interested in your, ah, accident, and is on his way up here.”
It explained why I was cuffed to the bed frame. Plinnit.
“It was no accident. It was no suicide. I was shot.”
“Mind if I record this?” She pulled a bed tray over and set a small recorder on it.
I rattled the cuff chain with my left foot. “Obviously, you can do whatever you please.”
She spoke the date and then the time—5:15 P.M.; I’d lost almost the whole day—named the hospital, and identified a deputy, standing against the wall, as a witness to the proceedings. “Mr. Elstrom has consented to this interview without presence of counsel to represent him,” she said to the recorder. “Right, Mr. Elstrom?”
“Why is this necessary?”
“Lieutenant Plinnit asked that your statement be taken promptly. He said he was worried you’d find another gun and finish the job.”
“How did you find me?”
“One of our locals was driving by at daybreak, and recognized Ralph’s truck parked out in the middle of nowhere. He couldn’t find Ralph, but he did hear you, moaning, not far off the road.”
Even through the drugs, I had an inspiration. “I’ll bet you didn’t find the gun.”
“Actually we did, right where you dropped it. We’re testing it now.”
“So you’re arresting me for attempted murder on myself?”
“I’m merely taking a statement, Mr. Elstrom.”
“Then remove the cuff.”
“You’re being held as a courtesy to Lieutenant Plinnit. He said he wants to arrest you. He’ll detail his charges against you when he arrives tomorrow morning.”
“What charges?”
“Suspicion of murder.”
“Who got killed?”
“You can ask the lieutenant.”
“I need to call my attorney.”
Ellie Ball and her deputy left the room.
I called Leo’s cell phone. “Where are you?” I asked when he clicked on. Loud accordion music was playing at his end.
“I just got home from Los Angeles. Ma has the stereo guy over. He’s setting up huge television speakers in the basement. I want to cry.”
“I’m in Hadlow, Minnesota.”
“Doesn’t sound as good as L.A.”
“I’ve been shot, and I am leg-cuffed to a hospital bed.”
“Definitely not as good as L.A., though I hear those movie star types go for cuffs.”
“I’m serious.”
“You’re not.”
I gave him a one-minute summary.
“I don’t understand,” he said.
“Neither do I, but I’m medicated and in deep shit.”
He said he was on his way back to the airport.
* * *
“No surprise, Mr. Elstrom,” Sheriff Ellie Ball said when she came back in. “You had residue on your left hand.”
“I fired no—” I stopped, remembering the touch of someone’s hand as I lay on the ground in the woods. I remembered the explosion.
Someone had fitted my hand to a gun—and fired.
“Son of a bitch,” I said.
“I thought you’d say something like that,” she said. “What were you doing in those woods? Nearest house is a half mile away.”
I’d stumbled far enough from the shack for her not to make the connection. She would, though, when she learned I was in Hadlow tracking Darlene Taylor, and I had no doubt that she’d find that out. Hadlow was a small town.
“I’ll wait for Plinnit,” I said.
She clicked off her recorder and headed for the door.
“By the way, Chief…?” I said. My pain medication was wearing off.
“It’s Sheriff,” she said. “Sheriff Ellie Ball.”
“By the way, Chief. Something you’ve neglected: I’m right-handed.”
My pain meds were in full retreat now, chased away by the hot fire from the hole in my side.
“So what?”
I wanted to scream for a nurse, but first I wanted to scream at the sheriff.
“I want you to ponder how the hell I got gunshot residue on my left hand when I’m right-handed.”
“Oh, I thought of that, Elstrom. I’ll consider it again, and out loud, if you’d like. You had to use your left hand, if your intent was to wound your right side.”
“Where’s the sense in that?”
“To make it look like you didn’t shoot yourself. I’ll tell the nurse you might need a pill,” she said and walked out.
CHAPTER 44.
A riot of color moved next to me, no doubted a cheery nurse in a cheery tunic. I rubbed at my eyes, to see through the fog of drugs they’d used to quiet me for the night.
“Morning, Killer,” Leo said.
His shirt was brighter than the blue of any sky, except in those spots where it was orange, or red, or green, or pink. A riot of color, for sure—and of relief.
“They’ve cuffed me to the bed, Leo.”
“At the direction of Lieutenant Plinnit, who is outside, dying to talk to you.”
“You’ve kept him away?”
“I told him I’m here because John Peet is addressing the Supreme Court.”
“Dressed like that? You, a lawyer?”
“I never used the L word. I merely said I was representing you. As far as the clothes, I implied I practice in Miami.”
“Practice?” I repeated, not understanding because there was still a residue of drugs. “In Miami?”
He stepped back and did part of a dance thrust. “Samba,” he said.
I would have laughed at the nonsense of it, but that would have hurt.
“Anything you want to tell me, before I let Plinnit in?” he said.
“I’ll fill you in later, when we’re away from here.”
He left the side of the bed and came back with Plinnit.
“Killer, Lieutenant Plinnit is here,” Leo announced.
“Your smart-assed tone isn’t helping your client, Mr. Brumsky,” Plinnit said.
“Why the cuffs, Plinnit?” I asked.
“Suspicion of murder.”
“That’s what the sheriff said. Still Robert Norton, the guard? Or are you still flailing away at Andrew Fill?”
He held up a small plastic evidence bag. Inside was a spent bullet. “The sheriff just gave me this. They dug it out of your side. It matches the gun that fell from your hand.”
“Why would I go off and shoot myself in some remote woods?”
“Remorse. You crawled there to die a sorry death, after you shot yourself. And it wasn’t just any old remote woods. Sheriff Ball found blood at a small farm nearby, owned by a woman named Darlene Taylor. We’re hopeful it’s your blood, like we’re hopeful this bullet will match two we recovered from behind the left ear of one George Koros, late of Chicago, Illin—”
“Koros is dead?” I struggled to sit up. A chained left foot and a shot right side brought me down, fast.
“Two shots to the back of his head, as you well know. Cleaning staff found him facedown at his desk.”
“I killed Koros, then came up here to shoot myself?”
Plinnit nodded too happily. “Fits together nicely, doesn’t it?”
“It’s crap.�
�
“It’s enough to hold you for some time. If you’ve got other thoughts, tell me now.”
“When was Koros killed?”
“The ME hasn’t issued his final report, but it was the day before yesterday. We’ve been looking for you ever since. Your ex-wife said she didn’t know where you were.”
“I was here, in Hadlow.”
“Beyond you possessing the gun we think killed George Koros, we found a credit card statement lying next to his head,” he said, ignoring my alibi. “He’d pulled it off his online account. It shows you’ve been making substantial cash withdrawals against his card.”
“He sent me that card. I used it for traveling cash, to get to Missouri, then up here.”
“To find Sweetie Fairbairn?”
“Yes.”
Plinnit wasn’t taking notes. He knew I didn’t kill George Koros.
“So what have you found?” he asked.
“A concrete Indian chief.”
He frowned.
“And, of course, someone with a gun,” I added.
“Rosemary Taylor’s sister’s cottage is what you found, Elstrom. Remember Rosemary Taylor, the girl who became Sweetie Fairbairn?”
“The truck,” I said. “Ellie Ball told you about the truck.”
“Uh-huh, and the copies of yearbook photographs she found in it. She contacted the high school. They said you’d stopped by. I looked at the photos. Sweetie Fairbairn, in high school, looked back.”
“Sweetie Fairbairn hasn’t been here for a long, long time.”
“Are you saying Darlene Taylor shot you and then beat you? A woman who, by most accounts, is small of stature and around sixty years old?”
When I didn’t respond, Leo said, “Dek’s never been good with women of any age, Lieutenant.”
Plinnit kept his eyes on me. “Did Darlene Taylor shoot you, Elstrom?”
“I can’t imagine.”
“For getting wise to her and Koros’s extortion of Sweetie Fairbairn?”
He’d learned a lot, none of which pointed to any wrongdoing by Sweetie Fairbairn. It was time to tell him more.
“That, and their murders of Andrew Fill and Robert Norton,” I said.
I told him I suspected that somehow Koros had discovered his old high school friend, Rosemary Taylor, living as Sweetie Fairbairn at the end of a rainbow in Chicago; that he convinced her to set him up with a monthly retainer and a fancy office on Wacker Drive; and that at some point, that hadn’t been enough. He killed Andrew Fill for a half-million dollars, but that wasn’t enough, either, not when there was so much more. So he brought down Sweetie’s struggling sister, Darlene, to help him with a crafty extortion plot, probably centered around getting Sweetie blamed for Fill’s and Norton’s deaths. She outfoxed them, though. She ran, but not before giving away most, if not all, of her money. It killed the plan. Darlene murdered Koros so there’d be no remaining witness to their plot, and ran back up to Hadlow to resume life in the slow lane, at least until she could ease away with what was left of the half million Koros had embezzled from the Midwest Arts Symposium.
The only things I left out were the clown and the woman in the limo who’d hired him. Those pointed too directly at Sweetie Fairbairn.
“Slinking back here, hoping nobody knew she’d even been away, she got a bonus: you, peeking in her kitchen window?” Plinnit asked when I was done.
“Why not? Koros had told her I’d been sniffing around. I was a loose end. She shot me, and tried to make it look like a self-inflicted wound. She figured on me bleeding out in the woods, perhaps clutching the gun that killed Koros.”
“You really think it was Darlene Taylor, a short, sixty-year-old woman, who shot and kicked the crap out of you in the woods?”
“She could have had help. There could have been two people.”
“Can you prove any of this?”
“Not a bit.”
“All I’m certain of is that you keep popping up where you shouldn’t be.” He treated himself to a false laugh. “Even up here, first thing you did was find the wrong side of the road, to run down a truckload of pigs.”
“You know I didn’t kill anybody. Not Andrew Fill, not Robert Norton, not George Koros.”
“Here’s all I need to prove for now, Elstrom: You were up here, with what we both believe is the weapon used to kill George Koros.”
“I have no motive.”
“He found out you were tapping his charge account. He got mad, said he was going to report you to the police.”
“Cash for airplane tickets.”
“Plus another ten grand for crashing your rental car. People get killed every day for a lot less.”
“Bullshit, Plinnit.”
“That’s what I think, too.” He started for the door. “Until I think otherwise, you and the bed are chained.” He walked out of the room.
CHAPTER 45.
Ellie Ball came to my room three hours after Plinnit left.
“You are?” she asked Leo, frowning at his outlandish blue rayon shirt.
He got up from the chair in the corner, not that it made much difference, height-wise.
“Mr. Elstrom’s adviser.”
“Not his lawyer, as you told Lieutenant Plinnit?”
“I said only that I was Mr. Elstrom’s representative, Madame Law Woman. I never directly lie to the police.”
She turned to me. “He must sit in with us?”
“Yes.”
She came to the side of the bed, unlocked my leg, and set the cuffs next to the chair she took. “I’ve spent quite a bit of time with Lieutenant Plinnit. He just got confirmation from his medical examiner: George Koros was killed when you were up here. That made him angry. He is on his way back to Chicago.”
“I’m free to go?”
“Depends on your doctors—and on me.”
“You?”
“I can think of charges: unlawful possession of a firearm, trespass at the Taylor place, and,” she said, smiling just a little, “there’s still the matter of your run-in with those pigs, even though it’s not my county.”
Leo spoke. “What about the attempted murder of Dek, here?”
She lowered her eyes to the shirt drooping on him. “How do you keep that so bright?”
He smiled, bisecting his pale, narrow, bald head with perfectly white teeth. “Plant food.”
“Who shot you?” she asked me.
“George Koros’s killer.”
“Don’t evade.”
“There’s only one person left with motive: Darlene Taylor.”
“A sixty-year-old woman shot and beat you?”
“The only thing I’m sure of is that Darlene’s involved deeply in this thing. Down in Chicago, she must have seen, like the cops would see, that I’d pulled cash from Koros’s credit card account. She knew I was on the move, tracking her sister. She also knew those withdrawals could point to me as Koros’s killer. She came back up here, hoping no one knew she had ever left. As I told Plinnit, I think she brought back a substantial amount of money that Koros had embezzled from Sweetie Fairbairn. I think she intended to wait things out a bit, maybe until I was arrested, before disappearing from Hadlow permanently.”
“Except you showed up at her place?”
“It must have been a shock, learning I was sniffing around her property, but then she saw I could be a bonus. She could shoot me with the gun that killed Koros, fire another round with my hand on it to put my prints on the handle, and leave me to bleed out in the woods. My death would look like a suicide, perhaps an act of remorse after killing Koros. The problem was, she couldn’t know that I’d already been up here for a while, and could prove I wasn’t in Chicago when Koros got shot. The finger’s going to come back to point at her. You’ve got to be vigilant. If she learns I have an alibi, she’ll run, if she hasn’t already.”
“She killed her sister’s guard and George Korozakis?” she asked. “Rosemary, too?”
“I’m hoping Sweetie’s alive, and
running.”
She said nothing for a moment. Then, “If you’re right, it’s a tragedy, all around. Folks say Georgie Korozakis and Darlene Taylor were quite an item, once upon a time.”
“Things can change people. Like the incident.”
A hardness flashed across her face, and then it was gone. “So you’re saying their romance got rekindled, all these years later?”
“For the love of money, this time.”
“I suppose.” Ellie Ball looked at the door. She was ready to leave. To be done with me.
“You know what I can’t figure, Sheriff?”
“What’s that?”
“Whether any of this ties back to that incident, when they were kids.”
I was right. Her face tensed again at the second mention of the incident. She stood up and started toward the door. “Have a safe journey back to Chicago, Mr. Elstrom.”
I’d struck a nerve with that random question about something that had happened long ago.
“Any thoughts as to why Darlene Taylor hung around that shack all those years, living in such squalor?” I asked her back.
“The doctor is going to release you today,” she said, without turning around. “Lieutenant Plinnit said he’d be happy to arrest you down in Chicago, if I don’t decide to charge you with something up here first. Best you leave town before I change my mind.”
“Haven’t you ever been curious why Darlene stayed on, after her sister Alta died? Don’t you want to know why someone would live out in that shack, for forty years?”
“There’s those of us who love Hadlow,” she said and stepped out into the hall.
CHAPTER 46.
I’d had much time to think, and to imagine, chained to my hospital bed.
Motives I understood. It was money, for Darlene and Koros. It was money, too, with Sweetie. She threw it away as she ran, to stop the killing.
Means, though, troubled me. I didn’t understand the clown.
I called Miss Mason from my wheelchair, out front, while a nurse assistant and I waited for Leo to bring around faster transportation.
“Did you talk to Darlene?” Miss Mason asked.
“I didn’t find her at home.”
“I heard you got shot.”
“Yes.” News like that would have traveled fast across Hadlow. “I’m still interested in that story Rosemary Taylor wrote in high school.”
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