“Wow,” I said.
“Wow for not looking that old? Or wow for not looking that young?”
“Wow for your ability to read minds.”
“Excellent, and very diplomatic.” She took a slow sip of wine and asked, “Was the clown murdered, Mr. Elstrom?”
“His name was James Stitts-”
“I know that. Was he murdered?”
“It would be tough to prove, but yes.”
Her hand shook, just a little, as she set down the glass. “You’re certain?”
I told her the safety rope had been cut, its severed end taken away. It was information she’d paid for.
Her face had paled. “Murder, no doubt.”
“Stitts’s widow said it was a woman who’d hired her husband to go up on that roof. She came to their home in a chauffeured limousine.” I watched her face.
“The woman was blond, of course?”
“Bea Stitts couldn’t see inside the car.”
“She was blond, Mr. Elstrom. That detail would not have been overlooked.”
“You’re being set up?”
She put her hands on the arms of her chair and pushed herself up like she weighed a thousand pounds. “Thank you, Mr. Elstrom.”
I didn’t get up. “You’re being blackmailed?”
She started out of the kitchen as though she hadn’t heard me. I’d been dismissed. I got up and followed her across the living room because there was nothing else to do.
Duggan already had the elevator door open.
Sweetie Fairbairn turned around and walked away.
I went into the elevator. The door closed, and I was sent descending.
I thought, then, of an old comedian’s slurred, confused retort in a drunk-at-a-tavern routine. “I’ve been thrown out of better places than this,” the drunk had bragged, looking around confused but proud, as he’d been tossed onto the sidewalk.
I doubted I’d ever been tossed from classier digs.
Still, I was as confused as the drunk, not at all sure what had just happened.
CHAPTER 14.
Amanda surprised me later with a call. “You doing anything this evening?” Her voice sounded small.
“Nothing I like.”
“Dinner?”
“You told me last night you were booked up until the next millennium, or at least until our date next week.”
“I canceled for tonight. I’m craving simplicity.”
“So you thought of me.”
She laughed. It wasn’t much of a laugh, but it offered promise.
“Actually, we have something to celebrate. You must have impressed Sweetie Fairbairn. She called, asked very few questions about the children’s wing at Memorial Hospital, and then said she’d be sending a donation. She hinted it might be larger than what we’d discussed.”
“What time?”
“I’m thinking around eight.”
“No, I meant what time did Sweetie call?”
“An hour ago. Why?”
“Did she mention me?”
“Mention you? What’s going on, Dek?”
“Our trattoria, at eight?” I asked, sidestepping.
“Somewhere else.” She named Rokie’s, a barbecue sandwich place nestled next to a forest preserve, northwest of the city. We’d been there once, after a movie or something. It had no history for us.
History or not, it was a start. Or maybe a restart. Whatever it was, I decided to think of it as progress.
Amanda was already there, waiting in her white Toyota at the far corner of the lot. I pulled up alongside and got out.
“Shall I slip the maître d’ a twenty for a table away from the window?” When we’d last been there, we’d laughed about the grease on the windows.
She gave me a hug. “I’m thinking al fresco.” She pointed at the row of picnic tables across the parking lot.
It was a nice night. It would be fine.
I went in and got two beefs, two Cokes, an order of fries, and one squirt bottle of barbecue sauce to color our lips and chins the shade of congealed blood.
“This is a wonderful surprise,” I said when I got back to the table.
“I needed a night.”
“You can have more than one.”
“I know.” She reached across the table to put her hand on mine for a moment. “I know that a lot.”
I ripped open the bag, handed her a beef, and spread the fries between us. The beefs were good; the fries were good; squirting everything with barbecue sauce was superb.
“Ever get back to the Art Institute?” I asked after I’d gotten my hands sufficiently sticky. The Art Institute was where Amanda used to spend her time, teaching and writing. When she wasn’t sleeping. Or with me. Or both.
Her face became guarded. “I gave up my last class a month ago.”
“Do you miss it?” I asked it casually. I’d told myself, driving over, that I wouldn’t push against her new life.
“That’s the thing, Dek. I don’t know. Every time I start thinking about the way I’d been living, one thing keeps coming up: selfishness.”
“You taught. You wrote. You lived a frugal, almost ascetic life.”
“With eleven million dollars’ worth of art hanging on my walls.”
“And hardly anything on your floor.” That had been true both in the gated community and in the high-rise on Lake Shore Drive where she’d moved after the houses in her neighborhood began exploding. Her income from her art books and her teaching had always gone to pay for insurance and a secure habitat for the art, not stuff to walk or sit or lie down on.
“You do understand?” she asked.
“Sure,” I said, smiling like I meant it.
Her chin rose, just a touch. She knew well that I didn’t understand, not really.
“Here’s what else I think I understand,” I said. “We’re more alike than I used to believe, in that we’re both orphans, of a sort. Except your father didn’t take off, like my mother. Now you’ve been given a second chance to connect with him.”
“At his instigation.”
“Yes, and for that, he is to be applauded. I also think, if given the opportunity, I’d jump at the chance to connect with my mother, or the Norwegian who supposedly was my father.”
Her face was still guarded. She wasn’t accepting what I was trying to blithely pass across the table as a change in my attitude.
“Sweetie Fairbairn,” she said, steering to a safer harbor. “You had a good time?”
“I always enjoy mingling with swells on the tops of buildings. The elevation does something for my appetite.”
“Appetite or not, you did well. As I said earlier, she was all business this afternoon. She’s seriously interested in helping the children’s wing.”
“After I told her you and I never had shared a checkbook.”
She laughed, just like old times. “Strange, though,” she said. “I’ve been told Sweetie likes to start out slow with new charities. Ten, twenty thousand dollars, usually. This afternoon, though, she hinted at a donation approaching a hundred thousand.”
“How did she sound?”
She shot me a quizzical look. “All business, as I said. Why did you ask if she’d mentioned you?”
The newspaper photos of Amanda and the silver-topped jokester came back at me. She’d appeared happy, in her element. Or maybe it had been something more. She might have become close enough to the commodities man to trade confidences.
The thought cut, that I might have to guard information around Amanda.
“Vanity,” I said. “I like to be remembered.”
Her face changed. She recognized the brush-off.
“Well, whatever it was, I hadn’t anticipated hearing from her for some time. You helped, Dek.”
I wondered, then, if we were at Rokie’s because she felt she owed me, for not screwing up at Sweetie Fairbairn’s the previous evening.
We made small talk. She asked about Leo, and about Endora. I asked more about the children’s wing. We talked about my working on the turret, and whether Rivertown would ever become upscale enough for me to make a buck on my rehabbing.