Hunting Sweetie Rose : A Mystery (9781429950879) Read online

  For Lori and for Jack

  ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

  Patrick Riley, Mary Anne Bigane, Joe Bigane, Eric Frisch, Missy Lyda, India Cooper, and Marcia Markland tried their best to remove the muck from the manuscript.

  Susan did too, as she does with everything that matters in my life.

  What remains is solely my fault.

  CONTENTS

  Title Page

  Dedication

  Acknowledgments

  Prologue

  Chapter 1

  Chapter 2

  Chapter 3

  Chapter 4

  Chapter 5

  Chapter 6

  Chapter 7

  Chapter 8

  Chapter 9

  Chapter 10

  Chapter 11

  Chapter 12

  Chapter 13

  Chapter 14

  Chapter 15

  Chapter 16

  Chapter 17

  Chapter 18

  Chapter 19

  Chapter 20

  Chapter 21

  Chapter 22

  Chapter 23

  Chapter 24

  Chapter 25

  Chapter 26

  Chapter 27

  Chapter 28

  Chapter 29

  Chapter 30

  Chapter 31

  Chapter 32

  Chapter 33

  Chapter 34

  Chapter 35

  Chapter 36

  Chapter 37

  Chapter 38

  Chapter 39

  Chapter 40

  Chapter 41

  Chapter 42

  Chapter 43

  Chapter 44

  Chapter 45

  Chapter 46

  Chapter 47

  Chapter 48

  Chapter 49

  Chapter 50

  Chapter 51

  Chapter 52

  Chapter 53

  Chapter 54

  Chapter 55

  Chapter 56

  Chapter 57

  Chapter 58

  Chapter 59

  Chapter 60

  Chapter 61

  Chapter 62

  Chapter 63

  Chapter 64

  Chapter 65

  Chapter 66

  Chapter 67

  Chapter 68

  Chapter 69

  Chapter 70

  Chapter 71

  Chapter 72

  Also by Jack Fredrickson

  Copyright

  PROLOGUE

  The Argus-Observer was the only Chicago newspaper that dared run the pictures of the clown going off the roof, screaming.

  It happened at the start of the evening scramble, that time when floors and floors of appropriate business attires are let out to charge Union Station for trains southwest to Willow Springs, west to Brookfield, or north to Glenview, Deerfield, and points richer beyond.

  Waves of hurrying heads turned up to laugh at the daredevil clown—red-nosed, orange-haired, dressed in huge green dots—prancing antic atop the old Rettinger Hardware Supply building. Dozens paused longer, to snap a cell phone picture, new proof of their wacky, rush hour lives.

  Until 4:41, when it went wrong.

  The first of the Argus-Observer photos showed the daredevil clown with his left hand outstretched, waving at the commuters five stories below. His right hand was raised high, clutching a bouquet of red, blue, and yellow balloons. It would have been a happy summertime photo, a clown cavorting high against the blue of a summertime sky.

  Except for the rope.

  It was supposed to be taut behind him, tethering him as he leaned out to thrill the crowd.

  It wasn’t. It had started to fall, a limp, worthless tail. Anchoring nothing.

  The middle picture, shot just a second later, captured the instant the clown pitched out past the point of return. He’d started to twist, to look back at the roof. His big red and white clown-mouth still smiled, because it was painted on that way, but now there was a dark hole in the middle of it, the start of a scream.

  The last photograph showed him plummeting, upside down, arms out, grabbing at the air. The balloons had escaped his pink glove. Only the rope, loose and useless, was following him down.

  The Argus-Observer ran no more of the photos. Not even that raunchiest of scandal sheets had the stomach to print the ones of him lying crushed and leaking on the sidewalk.

  Nor did they even think to call it murder.

  CHAPTER 1.

  Two weeks later, late one afternoon, I was standing outside Rivertown’s city hall, about to watch another clown—this one relentlessly alive—being hauled away by earnest young men in dark suits.

  I’d been drawn across the lawn by the arrival of a Channel 8 News van. Nothing at Rivertown’s municipal offices had ever interested the press before. The corruption there is pathetic in its cheesiness, not nearly as dramatic as the big-scale shenanigans in Chicago, just to the east. So whatever it was that had finally drawn the newsies was enough to interest me. I scrambled down the long ladder, capped my paint, and hoofed it across the broad lawn that separates my turret from city hall.

  I got there just as a young woman got out of the van. She was dark-haired, slim, and taut of skin and sweater. I watched her from twenty feet away, a crowd of one, as she smoothed the wrinkles from her black skirt and touched at the matching luster of her hair.

  I no longer recognized most of Chicago’s field reporters. The local television stations were purging their stock, replacing crinkled, mostly male veterans with unmarked females. Some of the new ones looked and sounded young enough to be on work-study rotations from the local journalism schools.

  Not so the one who’d gotten out of the van. She was young, but not college-young, and on television, she came across smart, way past school-smart. It didn’t hurt, either, that she was one of the best-looking women in Chicago news. Up from weekend weather, she was now doing small features, but I imagined her bosses had her pegged for a local anchor slot. She was a comer, someone to watch. She was Jennifer Gale.

  Her cameraman, a burly fellow with a scruffy beard and a Taste of Chicago T-shirt, shouldered a video camera and motioned to her to step into the frame he was making of the front entrance of city hall. He squinted through the viewfinder, nodded, and she began speaking into a handheld microphone.

  “I’m here in Rivertown, just west of Chicago, where today Elvis Derbil, building and zoning commissioner, is being arrested for unlawfully relabeling and selling thousands of bottles of out-of-code Italian salad dressing. Allegedly, the labels were falsified not only to redate the stale product but also to disguise its true fat and caloric content. Commissioner Derbil, a longtime Rivertown employee, is a nephew of the mayor.”

  The cameraman nodded, and she stopped speaking. For two or three moments, nobody moved. Not Jennifer Gale, who stood fixed in the shot that had been set up. Not the cameraman, hefting what looked to be a heavy camera. Not me, the crowd.

  Then the front door of city hall opened and two dark-suited young men marched Elvis Derbil outside.

  They had him handcuffed, the current fashion for parading a white-collar perp past a television camera. Except Elvis’s collar wasn’t white. It was a purple plaid, which contrasted arrestingly with his green denim jeans and turquoise-studded brown cowboy boots. I could only hope that Elvis had not been tipped about his arrest. To think otherwise, that he’d deliberately chosen those colors for his day on television news, would have been unkind.

  Microphone raised, Jennifer Gale charged the trio. “Mr. Derbil, did you alter labels to resell stale-dated salad oil?”

  Elvis gave her a yellow-toothed grin, bu
t he’d pointed it a foot below her chin. Elvis never shrank from looking like a fool.

  When he didn’t answer, she aimed her microphone at the suit closest to her. “Are more arrests pending?”

  The young man shook off the question and hurried ahead to open the door of the black Impala parked at the curb. I turned to watch the suit that stayed with Elvis. As I’d hoped, he was raising his hand to protect the top of Elvis’s head as he nudged him down onto the backseat.

  This part would be especially wonderful.

  It was. The young man’s hand made contact, and suddenly his face contorted as if he’d just palmed steaming roadkill.

  Mercifully, I’d never had to touch Elvis’s head, but I’d long been familiar with its sheen and could imagine its stickiness. Back in high school, Elvis had greased the sprouts atop his narrow head with Vaseline, slick jelly that made his hair and the tops of his ears glisten like newly lubricated machinery. Speculation had it then that any insect landing on Elvis’s head would dissolve in the petrochemical ooze before Elvis could think to scratch.

  Years later, when my own life had dissolved and I retreated back to Rivertown, I had to go to Elvis, now Rivertown’s building and zoning commissioner, for an occupancy permit to live in the turret, and I saw that the years had not been kind to the top of his head. His forehead had retreated substantially, forcing him to abandon petroleum jelly for a scented hair spray, which he used to starch his cowering hairline up into a kind of wall, halfway back on his scalp. Like his beloved Vaseline, the spray had gloss, so he was able to maintain a sheen. Gone, though, was the mixed mechanical smell of grease and whatever had perished in it. Elvis now smelled of coconut, freshly shredded. It was that sticky, coconut-smelling residue that the young suit had just palmed.

  Furious at what was now on his skin, the young man slammed the door on Elvis and spun, holding up his hand as though wounded. His eyes were wild and darting, desperate for a place to wipe his palm and fingers. His eyes found the grass. He began to kneel. Then he stopped, for he’d suddenly realized that Jennifer Gale and her cameraman might still be running tape, not ten feet away. Straightening up, he mimed a ludicrous nonchalance as he walked around to get in the passenger’s side of the car.

  The Impala sped away, but I expected it wouldn’t speed long. My money was on a screeching stop at the nearest gas station, for the sticky-palmed young man to make a fast, one-handed dip into the windshield wash.

  Jennifer Gale finished her concluding remarks and handed her microphone back to the cameraman. As he headed for the van, she smiled at me and walked over.

  I noticed fine lines around her eyes, and a couple more, the good kind, from laughing, around her mouth.

  “I saw you get off the ladder. You work for the city?” She pointed at the turret behind me.

  “I live there.”

  She frowned. “That’s a city landmark. It’s on their letterhead. They let you live there?”

  “My grandfather built it. I inherited it.”

  Her eyes told me she didn’t believe me. “Interesting. Are you surprised about Elvis Derbil?”

  “Nothing about Elvis surprises me.”

  I was surprised, though. Altering salad oil labels required ingenuity, and that wasn’t Elvis. He was a subterranean operator, a minion directed to trade zoning and building permits for cash. Beyond that, he wouldn’t move without instruction.

  She turned to look behind her, at city hall. “I suppose your grandfather built that, too?”

  I was used to the question. City hall was built of the same stones as the turret.

  “They appropriated my grandfather’s pile of limestone and most of his land at the end of World War II. They didn’t want the turret.”

  After another glance at the turret, she made a show of studying my paint-splattered jeans and torn T-shirt. “Are you eccentric?”

  “Only until I get enough money to act normal. Why?”

  She pointed to the turret behind me. “Because I’m wondering if you use a chauffeur.” A smile played at the nice faint lines on her face.

  I turned. A long black Lincoln limousine was parked behind my Jeep, and a liveried chauffeur, in full gray uniform with a black-visored hat to match, was knocking on my timbered door.

  Never at a loss for snappy repartee, I said, “I use him for odd jobs, fetching pizzas, picking up my other pair of jeans from the laundry.” I wished her luck in unraveling the greasy strands of Rivertown and headed for the turret.

  “Until tonight, at nine,” she called after me.

  “I never miss the news,” I called back.

  CHAPTER 2.

  “Mr. Vlodek Elstrom?” the chauffeur asked as I walked up.

  When I nodded, he nodded, but at someone in the car’s backseat. The door opened, and a tall man, thickset enough to have played professional football thirty years earlier, got out. He stuck out his hand. “Tim Duggan,” he said. “Let’s go down and look at the river.”

  His suit coat was cut wider than he was. He was carrying, probably in a belt holster.

  “This is all very dramatic,” I said.

  He made a smile that didn’t move his cheeks. “I just like rivers.”

  We walked down to the Willahock. For a minute, we said nothing, just rocked on our heels and watched empty motor oil quarts and opaque milk jugs frolic inside the half-submerged tires and tree limbs at the opposite bank.

  “You keep your side of the river clean,” he said.

  “I try to do one moral thing a day.”

  “I understand you do investigations.”

  “From whom do you understand this?”

  “Here and there. The newspapers, too, some time back.”

  “I try to avoid the newspapers,” I said.

  He nodded. He understood that, too.

  “I’m not licensed,” I said. “Mostly I do insurance work, examine accident scenes, research court records.”

  I left out that, for a time, I’d also written an advice column, masquerading as a woman, for a freebie supermarket rag masquerading as a newspaper. I’d quit that some months before, because the column was making me too aware of the kinds of minds that were loose across America.

  “You hear about that clown that went off the roof a couple of weeks ago?” he asked.

  I looked at his broad, tough face. “There was only a single paragraph in the Tribune. They called it a tragic accident.”

  “The Argus-Observer was the only one that gave it any real play. The story pretty much disappeared.”

  “I don’t read the Argus-Observer.”

  He made another smile. “So I would imagine.”

  For sure, he’d checked me out.

  “What is it you want, Mr. Duggan?”

  “What do you charge?”

  “It depends on how forthcoming my clients are.” I was developing an aversion to Duggan’s cementlike demeanor. “For standard stuff, photographing accident scenes, running down records, I’m reasonable. For others, I bill premium—two hundred dollars an hour.”

  It was a laugh. It had been a long while since I’d billed anybody for much of anything. Thanks, in huge part, to the Argus-Observer.

  “I’d like you to look into that clown’s death.” He took a white envelope from his suit jacket. Holding it out, he said, “There’s two thousand dollars in there.”

  “Do you represent the building’s owners?”

  He gave that a noncommittal shrug.

  “You’d do better going to the police, get their information,” I said.

  “I’m looking for discretion.”

  Something itched on my face. I touched my cheek, and a small piece of caulk fell off.

  He noticed. He raised the envelope higher.

  It was enough. I took his envelope, and we started up the hill to the street.

  “How will I get in touch with you?” I asked, at the limousine.

  He handed me a business card. It read, TIMOTHY DUGGAN. SECURITY.

  “You do secur
ity for the building?” I asked.

  “If your billing exceeds the two thousand, let me know.” He got in the car.

  Unlimited budget. Limousine. A cash offering. He wasn’t my typical client, not even before my life collapsed.

  As he was driven away, I pulled out my cell phone and called a man I’d once done a favor for. He worked for the State of Illinois and had nothing to do with vehicle licenses, but he had access to the database. It’s like that in Illinois government; everybody has access to everything. It’s why so many of the state’s workers, right up to the recent governors, retire in prison.

  My contact put me on hold, came back in a minute. “The limousine is registered to Prestige Vehicles, in Chicago,” he said.

  “Leased?”

  “Most likely. You’re wasting your time. Those outfits don’t disclose information. Some of their clients are pretending rich, and don’t want it known they get carted around in leased cars.”

  “Me, I own what I drive,” I said.

  “You still driving that heap of a Jeep?” He chuckled, proud of his rhyme.

  “I just put fresh duct tape across the rips in the side windows. It looks almost new.”

  “Newly slashed, you mean.” He hung up before I could brag that I’d primed the rust spots in the same shade of gray as the tape.

  I went into the turret and onto the Internet. Google, that collector of all lint, had a dozen Timothy Duggans in Illinois. One was an actor, another owned a restaurant, a third coached high school soccer. None ran a security firm. Duggan’s operation must have been small, and very private. He worked at not getting noticed.

  I then keyed in “Clown, fall, Chicago.” The first listings belonged to the major newspaper Web sites. The Tribune, Sun-Times, Reader, and Southtown Star all had carried the story, two weeks before. Each had given it a bare few sentences, seeing the death as an obvious accident or, unmentioned, a possible suicide. None had updated the story since.

  I scrolled down the screen to the Argus-Observer’s site and saw the three photos they’d run. A clown dancing, a clown tipping, a clown dropping.

  Just that morning, they’d updated. John Keller, the bastard who wrote a two-inch-wide column called “Keller’s Korner,” had posted one of his trademark teasers: DIVING CLOWN? WHY DON’T COPPERS COP?