He started to shake his head.
“No, damn it. There’s no time left for musing and denying. Someone is coming at her.”
“She hired me to do security. That’s it.”
“You must have heard things.”
He thought for a minute. “One name, maybe: Andrew Fill.”
“Who’s Andrew Fill?”
“I think he used to work at one of her charities. All I know is that I heard Ms. Fairbairn asking one of her advisers about Fill. They were arguing, I think.”
“Who was the adviser?”
“A guy named Koros. I gather he stops by once in a blue moon. I don’t think he does much for Ms. Fairbairn.”
“The exact name?”
“George Koros. I think he’s got an office downtown.”
“Will he talk to me?”
“I’ll call him, tell him Ms. Fairbairn requested it.”
I left, without either of us seeing fit to wonder whether I’d been rehired.
CHAPTER 16.
G. K. Investment Management was on Upper Wacker Drive, on the fifth floor of a curved glass building that mimicked the bend in the Chicago River. A blond woman was leaving Koros’s office, going the other way, as I got off the elevator.
By the quality of the address, I expected a snappy receptionist and big leather chairs, like the Bohemian’s office. What I saw, when I pushed open the oak door, was something that would have shamed an insurance agent starting out in a strip mall. The reception room had a worn black two-seat sofa, a small wood desk that held only a telephone, and a lamp table piled with dog-eared old issues of Fortune and Forbes. The ceiling was decorated with a camera tucked behind a hanging plastic plant. A buzzer was mounted on the inner door frame. I smiled at the plant and pushed the button.
A dead bolt was electronically released, and the door to the inner office opened an inch. I pushed it all the way open and went in.
A gray-haired, thickset man got up from behind a desk. He wore a dark blue suit and a light blue tie, and a face that looked pained by my intrusion.
“Mr. Elstrom? George Koros. Nice to meet you,” he said, extending his hand.
The office was spacious, and had a view, through curved glass, of the river and the Merchandise Mart. Like the reception area, it was sparsely furnished, holding only a bare desk that was too small for the large room, a desk chair, and one guest chair. The furniture was old, and cheap for the room. A few weeks of the Wall Street Journal were stacked on the floor in one corner.
“Tim Duggan phoned, said Sweetie asked that I help you in any way I can,” he said as we sat. “I’m afraid he was quite vague.”
Duggan had seen fit to play cagey with Koros.
“Really a minor matter,” I lied, “having to do with an anonymous, upsetting note Ms. Fairbairn received. Mr. Duggan told me there’d been some difficulty with one of Ms. Fairbairn’s employees some time back?”
“I really don’t know…”
“Andrew Fill?”
“Ah, yes.”
“A bad act?”
“Hardly. Merely a young man who lost his way for a time.” Koros smiled. “Certainly not someone who’d send a threatening note.”
“Revenge, jealousy, anger, lust? What’s Fill’s problem?”
“None of those, Mr. Elstrom. He headed up the Midwest Arts Symposium, a group that Sweetie and her friends formed some years ago. They bring in writers, painters, photographers-all sorts of artists-every November for a series of free public lectures. It’s quite well known.”
He studied me then, for the uninformed cretin that I was. I could only shrug, cretinously, and ask, “And?”
“Sweetie and her fellow board members had him fired.”
“For what?”
“For some missing funds. Sweetie didn’t file charges. She suggested that if he repaid the money, he could leave quietly. He agreed.”
“Did Ms. Fairbairn do the actual suggesting?”
“She entrusted that to me.”
“A lot of money?”
“Enough.”
“When was he canned?”
“A couple of months ago. He has much to lose, if this matter ever becomes known. He could be prosecuted. I’m sure he means Ms. Fairbairn no harm.”
“I’d like to talk to him.”
Koros opened a side drawer, withdrew an address book, and wrote down Fill’s address for me.
“You’ll find he’s quite harmless,” he said.
“How long have you worked for Ms. Fairbairn?”
“I don’t do much work for her, I’m afraid. I merely manage checking accounts for a few of her charities. However, I’ve enjoyed Sweetie’s friendship for several years.”
“You can think of no one else who might bear a grudge against Ms. Fairbairn?”
“Even Andrew Fill is a stretch, Mr. Elstrom. He must have gotten in a jam; gambling, perhaps, or drugs. I can think of no one else.”
“Nobody?”
“Nobody at all,” he said.
Andrew Fill lived in an old building with black metal windows. It could have once been a factory or a warehouse and was built of Old Chicago Brick, that particular blend of yellowish, grayish, tannish bricks that line the sides and backs of most of the older factories and apartment buildings in the city. There’s lots of bland, vague ish in that long-ago blend of brick, except for the dark, burned ones. Those they call clinkers, and they’re in the mix, too, because in the years following the great fire, not even overbaked bricks got wasted rebuilding old Chicago, not when they could be used on the dark sides and backs of buildings where no one except the owners would see.
Still, it’s always those clinkers that draw the eye, because there’s nothing vague-nothing ish-about them. They look stronger and rougher than the others. They don’t fit in.
Fill didn’t respond to his buzzer. Judging by the amount of mass-mailed flyers piled on the tile floor beneath his little mail door, he hadn’t been around to answer his buzzer for quite some time.
Someone had saved a buck on the mailboxes. They were flimsy, made of cheap plated tin. The lid flexed enough to show a box stuffed with envelopes. I pinched two out. One was an electric bill. The other was an investment account check. Both had been mailed almost a month earlier.
They would have arrived about the time James Stitts was killed.
Andrew Fill could have gone away, perhaps on vacation, without thinking to put a hold on his mail. Nothing but an oversight, an act of forgetting.
Or those month-old pieces of mail could have been clinkers. Things that didn’t fit in.
I jammed Fill’s two envelopes back in his cheap tin mailbox and went out to the Jeep.
I called Duggan. “Andrew Fill took some money from one of Ms. Fairbairn’s charities, and then he might have taken off. His mail is piling up.”
“Did Koros have any other potentials?”
“He didn’t even see Fill as a likely suspect.”
“All right, then.”
“Any luck on finding out who set that fire?”
“The building manager has changed the locks on the doors that access the ladders to the roof.”
“That’s it? No further investigation?”
“Ms. Fairbairn wants no publicity.” He mumbled something about calling me later and clicked me away.
I was sure he would.
When pigs flew.
Amanda put the last nail into the day when she called that evening. “I’ve got to cancel for next week.”
“We haven’t even set a specific day yet. Now you’re saying you’re unavailable for the entire week?”
Mine was a thin protest, though. Yesterday’s evening at Rokie’s had been stilted, probably for reasons neither of us quite understood. We’d ended up with nothing to say to one another.
“A group of us are going to be working rather intensely on the Memorial Hospital project,” she offered.