Hunting Sweetie Rose : A Mystery (9781429950879) (4 page)

“They're too close together,” I said.

“They can't really kick high.”

I chewed my lower lip. “What about that one?” I asked, when my breathing had steadied. One of the poles was set farther apart from the others.

“Mrs. Roshiska's. She needs a walker.”

That did it. I howled all the way up the stairs, across the yard, and into the truck. I was still laughing when he threw me out in front of the turret.

*   *   *

A Lieutenant Jawarski called at six fifteen that evening.

“I was told you had questions regarding the death of James Stitts.” His words were clipped, impatient. The Bohemian's clout must have come down hot from someone important.

“James Stitts was the clown?”

“You don't even know his name?”

“Actually, I have very few questions.”

“Insurance questions?”

“Any doubt as to cause of death?” I asked, sidestepping.

Jaworski took a minute, evaluating my obvious evasion.

“Lousy Boy Scouting,” he said, finally. He must have decided I wasn't worth more anger.

“Pardon me?”

“Mr. Stitts never learned his knots. He tied his safety rope around the door on the roof. The knot came loose, the rope came away, down he went. Simple carelessness. Death by poor knotting.”

“You checked the rope?”

“Brand-new, no frays. He tied a lousy knot, was all.”

“And you checked the door?”

“Solid enough to hold a rope. Nothing gave way.”

“What was he doing up there?” I asked.

“For Christ's sake, Elstrom.”

“An advertising stunt?”

“Must have been. Stitts did birthday parties, car dealerships, store openings. Lots of balloons. His wife said he got two or three gigs a month.”

“What was he trying to advertise, up on that roof?”

“How the hell would I know that?”

“By what he left behind.”

“He left nothing behind.”

Not even a mark of a rope pulling off a door, but that observation I owed to Timothy Duggan, not to a cop.

“So you don't know who hired him?” I asked instead.

Jawarski paused. “What does that have to do with insurance?”

“Routine, for the file.”

“I told you, I don't know what he was pushing,” Jaworski said.

“You asked his wife?”

“Sure,” he said, after enough hesitation to mean he hadn't.

“Now you're at a dead end?”

“Not a dead end, damn it. The man's rope came loose, and he fell.” He took a breath. “Now, if that's all…”

“What does John Keller know that you don't, Lieutenant?”

He hung up before I could anger him further.

CHAPTER 5.

The online death notice, at the
Tribune,
said James Stitts loved being a clown. It also said he loved his wife, Bea, and their two children. It did not mention that he loved working in human resources, which he did full-time, for a large suburban firm.

He'd lived in Arlington Heights, northwest of Chicago, in a beige split-level home on a cul-de-sac. A kid's red bike lay on the blacktop driveway, in front of a silver minivan. I got there at nine o'clock the next morning.

A dark-haired woman in her midthirties answered my knock at the front door. She wore no makeup, had only smudges under her eyes.

“This has to do with James's insurance?” she asked, after she'd studied my card.

“I'm not with his insurance company, and there are no irregularities with his policy, as far as I know. I'm just pulling together some general information.”

“For who?”

I thought of the lies I could offer. I skipped them all. “For someone who wants to know exactly how he died.”

“For who?”

“I don't know. I got hired by a security firm to look into your husband's death.”

“The condo owners in that hardware building, then, worried about a lawsuit?”

“I don't know.”

She considered that for a minute and then opened the screen door. “Let's talk in the kitchen.”

She led me through a living room strewn with electronic game controls, a basketball, and one small Nike high-top half hidden under a chair. It was a room for kids and play. Except now, a boy's small dark sport coat also lay tossed across the back of a chair, a clip-on necktie dangling from its pocket. Funeral clothes.

She waved at the mess as we walked through. “I've had my hands full since James died, and I don't have the heart to yell at the kids to pick up.”

She poured coffee into yellow mugs, and we sat at an oak pedestal table.

“The police said his death was an accident,” she said. “They said the rope he used to anchor himself became undone, and he fell from the roof.”

Her eyes locked onto mine, perhaps challenging me to accept it as truth.

“No chance it was…?” I stopped to hide behind a sip of coffee, because I didn't have the guts to finish the question.

“Suicide? No way in hell.”

“Accident, then, for sure?”

She said nothing but kept her eyes hot on me.

“No way in hell, either?” I asked, after a moment. It was why she'd let me in the door. I wondered then if she'd been the one who'd fed the nugget to Keller about the cops giving up too soon on the case.

“What could the person who sent you here think, Mr. Elstrom?”

“I would imagine that person, like me, like you, wants more facts.”

“James's insurance company, must be.”

“Most insurers are straight up. I don't think one would hire me blind.”

“James's life insurance company is holding off, saying he was engaged in a high-risk activity. They might not pay on the policy.”

“They can do that, if their insured person routinely engages in something high risk, something they wouldn't ordinarily cover.”

“James was a careful man. He wouldn't have tied a poor knot. He wouldn't even start his car until his seat belt was fastened.”

“Did he perform that way often?”

“At the edge of a roof? Never. I told you, he was not a risk taker. He did it this time because the money was good.” Her eyes were still defiant. “He knew how to tie a damned knot. He practiced a dozen times on the rope he bought.”

“How good was the money?”

“One thousand dollars, for two performances. Each was to be done on a different rooftop. He got paid half up front.”

“Who hired him?”

“I don't know who she was.”

“She?”

“Some woman who had big plans. She told him she wanted to build a buzz, generate some interest. The first performance was to be spontaneous, no product brochures, no bullhorn, just a clown dancing, downtown, on a roof during rush hour. She thought the newspapers would love the mystery of why he was up there, maybe enough to publicize the second performance. Then she could advertise the hell out of it, and all kinds of people would show up, curious, and she could capitalize on whatever she was selling.”

“You have no idea what that was?”

“No. She just told James to find two rooftops downtown that were low enough to be seen from the street, and get things rolling.”

“Do you think James knew her name?”

“If he did, he never said. She was a secretive lady. She paid cash.”

“Do you know where she worked?”

She gestured out past the living room.

“She came here?”

“In a limousine. Had a chauffeur all dolled up in a gray suit, gray cap.”

“What did she look like?”

“I couldn't see her, for the dark-tinted windows.” She shrugged. “Just rich, I suppose. Everybody looks rich in a limo.”

I finished the last of my coffee. I still thought it possible she'd been the one who'd tipped Keller, to fight off any talk of her husband committing suicide, but it was just as likely she hadn't heard yet about the column at all. She would, though, from a neighbor, a friend, or some mere acquaintance with a nose. I didn't envy her that.

I drove away thinking about limousines. My world is not filled with long dark cars. My only encounters with them had been to dodge them, with Amanda, when we'd been crossing the street, in front of the Goodman Theater or Symphony Center, downtown in Chicago.

Yet now two of them had driven into my life. The first was Duggan's, two days before. Now, a second, one that had brought a woman to hire James Stitts to dance on a roof.

Maybe to hire him to die.

CHAPTER 6.

The responsible thing to do, when I got back to the turret, was to report to Duggan.

To tell him the cops liked Stitts's death as an accident from a poorly knotted rope and that they saw no reason to investigate further, especially not if that might lead to a suicide finding that would null an insurance payout to a widow.

To tell him, too, that Stitts's widow was having none of that. Her husband had been a careful man, meticulous enough to practice knotting his new rope until he'd gotten it right. Nor was there any chance the man was suicidal.

I'd tell him I was with the widow on both counts. The door had not been marked, abraded by a poorly tied rope pulling away. It had been no accident.

Just like it had been no suicide. The
Argus-Observer
photographs showed Stitts had been at the edge of the roof when the rope began to fall behind him; he was too far away from its other end to have untied it himself.

Not an accident; not a suicide. Someone at the other end had loosened the rope.

Likely as not, Timothy Duggan already suspected that—and that, I wanted to think through.

So I made no call. I retreated instead to what I often do, when too much is banging around too loudly in my head. I cut wood.

Cutting, sanding, and staining allow me a degree of mental drift. Busying my hands sometimes calms whatever is loose in my brain.

Not that afternoon. After three hours, all I'd finished was six pieces of ceiling trim. None had been accompanied by any mental breakthrough.

Then I cut one piece too short. It looked all right, at first. When I held it up to the kitchen ceiling, though, I saw it was an inch too short.

That snapped my lazing brain back to the door on the roof of the Rettinger building, and to how a rope could come loose without leaving a mark.

Lieutenant Jaworski said the rope appeared to be in excellent shape. That there'd been no rips or frays supported his conclusion that the knot had simply worked itself loose.

I called Bea Stitts. “Just a small detail, ma'am: That rope your husband practiced knotting, then brought to the Rettinger building? You said it was new?”

“Brand-new. He bought it at the True Value here in Arlington Heights. Is that important?”

“I like to be thorough.” I hung up before she could ask anything else.

The man who answered the phone at the True Value sounded proud of their selection. They stocked rope in three different thicknesses, he said. Each came in ten-, twenty-five-, and fifty-foot lengths.

Calling Lieutenant Jaworski, to ask about the length of Stitts's rope, would excite him into asking why I wanted to know. I was not ready to discuss what was still a small, but growing, burr in the blanket under my brain.

I called Jennifer Gale at Channel 8. The receptionist took a message. Jennifer called back in ten minutes. She remembered me. I told her what I needed.

“Why do you need them?”

“A liability issue.”

“Insurance? You're working for the building owners?”

“I don't know for sure. I got hired by an intermediary.” It could have been true.

“Odd, though, that you of all people would get hired to check that clown's death.”

“I don't just paint windows,” I said, trying to sound mildly offended. “My primary business is insurance investigation.”

“Of course it is,” she said soothingly, as though wishing I were nearby so she could pat me on the head.

She thought for a moment and then said, “You'll have to trade for them. You have something I need, as well.”

The dim little red warning bulb in my mind flickered. “What might that be?” I asked, as if I didn't know.

“Background on your zoning story. I've done a little research. You really do own that turret. Yet it's zoned as a municipal structure.”

“A television story on me will rile the lizards that run the town. They might never change my zoning to residential, which means I might never unload this place.”

“The exposure might make them change your zoning back to residential.”

Her logic was at least as good as mine, maybe even better.

“Background for now, nothing for broadcast until I approve?” I asked.

She said that sounded fine, for the time being, and told me she'd see what she could do.

*   *   *

That evening, Jennifer Gale did a piece on the horrors of living rich. A new resident of an upscale golf course subdivision, having plunked down a number of millions for a mansion along the fourth fairway, became enraged by the frequency with which wildly hit golf balls were striking his dream home. Finally, after yet another ball had ricocheted off his plate glass, the mansion owner's fuse had fried. He charged out, waving a pellet gun to scare the golfer, who was now on the property, searching for his ball. As luck had it, though, the mansion owner slipped on a spot made slick by a number of visiting geese. Falling, he accidentally discharged his gun. The pellet hit a goose. The golfer ran away, unharmed. Not so the goose. It died. A bird-loving neighbor saw it all and called the police, who arrested the mansion owner, now smeared and reeking and glistening, for killing the goose.

Jennifer Gale reported it all with a straight face.

It was a laugh, and it was not. When it was over, I played with my television for another few minutes, switching channels with no real interest. Finally I shut it off, worn down once again by what wasn't on TV.