Jack Fredrickson
Hunting Sweetie Rose
The third book in the Dek Ekstrom Mystery series, 2012
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.
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, but 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.