People are honest. People want to trust. They want to trust working Joes most of all. Getting past the buzz lock in Fill’s building was simply a matter of setting my ladder, a tray, and a half-empty paint can in the foyer until an older man opened the door to come out.
“Hold the door for you?” the well-meaning soul asked.
“Thank you,” I said, all paint-splattered appreciation. I stepped inside with the paint can. “Thanks again.”
The paint and I rode the elevator to the third floor and walked down to Fill’s apartment. My hunch that the building’s contractor had been as chintzy with the locks as he was with the mailboxes didn’t matter. Andrew Fill’s door pushed open at the first touch of my Discover card.
“Mr. Fill?” I called from inside, after I shut the door.
Only a smell came back at me, thick and cloying from being shut up in an apartment.
Dead meat.
I took out my cell phone and called Leo in the Jeep. He was watching for anyone who looked like the picture of Andrew Fill I’d printed off the Internet.
“Something smells bad in the apartment,” I said.
“How bad?”
“Dead bad. Take my painting stuff from the foyer, put it back in the Jeep. We might be leaving in a hurry.”
With my cell phone still on, I took another few steps into the apartment. “Mr. Fill?” I said again, louder this time.
Still no answer. The bad smell was stronger.
Ahead lay the living room. It looked undisturbed. I took a right at the corridor and walked down to what looked like two bedrooms and a bathroom. The smell got weaker the farther down the hall I got.
Both bedrooms were neat, the beds made. No clothes were lying about. The bathroom was immaculate.
Only the kitchen remained. Where the smell was coming from.
I walked in, expecting to see a thin man dead on the floor. He wasn’t there. Only a roast was, on the counter, rotting next to two peeled and molding potatoes.
Nothing else.
“You broke in on a roast?”
Leo cackled like a crazed jaybird when I got in behind the wheel. I wanted to laugh, too, but the stench of the rotted meat was still too strong in my nose.
“You don’t understand,” I said. “The guy’s apartment was absolutely neat as a pin. Nothing was out of place. He even puts his toothpaste in a drawer.”
“Maybe to keep it from smelling like the roast.” He started laughing again.
“A man as neat as Andrew Fill would never leave a roast out.”
“Depends on how much money he absconded with.”
“Or whether he was abducted. Remember, the door was unlocked.”
“What now?” he asked.
“I go see what people don’t want to say about this.”
CHAPTER 18.
Leo said that working out of Endora’s cubicle for the rest of the morning would be preferable to hanging around the backyard of his bungalow, waiting for Ma and her friends to finally exhaust themselves. I dropped him across the street from the Newberry Library.
I called Koros as Leo walked inside.
“How much money did Andrew Fill steal?”
“I’m not authorized to tell you, Mr. Elstrom. Approval has to come from Ms. Fairbairn.”
“Call her.”
“I’ll get back to you.”
“I’m fifteen minutes from your office.”
“No need,” he said quickly. “I’ll call you right back.”
I shut off the engine to wait for a more forthcoming attitude.
He called back ten minutes later. “I don’t understand. She always answers her cell phone.”
He didn’t know about the powder room fire. Sweetie Fairbairn might very well have been huddled somewhere, not talking to anybody.
“I’ll take the responsibility for what you tell me about Andrew Fill.”
“I don’t know…”
“Fill’s mail is piling up.”
Koros’s voice rose. “He’s left town?”
“There’s more: He left a roast out to spoil.”
Koros laughed. It was forced. “Are you kidding with me, Mr. Elstrom?”
“Andrew Fill is a fussy housekeeper, neat in every regard. He left a roast and two potatoes out, to spoil. Which they’ve been doing, for some weeks.”
“You know this how?”
“He may be in hiding. He may be dead.”
He sucked air. “Andrew’s alive. He must be alive.”
“Why?”
“Because he’s been paying-”
“Paying what?”
“Paying back what he took, as I told you.”
“How much so far?”
“Twenty-one thousand-but he’s late, and he’s stopped answering his phone. I’ve been calling every day for the past two weeks. The voice mail is full. He’s not answering anyone.”
“How much money did he take?”
“A lot,” he hedged.
“How much?”
“Four hundred and eighty-five thousand dollars.”
“That’s enough to go far away.”
“This is my fault.”
“His disappearance?”
“The money. I was overseeing the Symposium’s checking account. The disbursements looked so regular; travel and meals and lodging for the guests the Symposium board invited.”
“Not legit?”
“The bills were very legitimate, and Andrew purportedly withdrew funds from the cash account to pay them in full. Secretly, though, he’d set up a dozen credit card accounts, and arranged to use those to pay only minimums against the invoices. He kept the rest of the cash he withdrew.”
“I don’t understand why Ms. Fairbairn wouldn’t go after a man who stole almost a half-million dollars.”
“There would be the personal embarrassment, of course. Technically, she was his boss. Worse for her, though, was that she worried her friends would stop donating to charities she was involved with. So she repaid the fund on her own-and remember, Andrew has started to pay it back.” He cleared his throat. “Until he stopped answering his phone.”
“When did he stop answering, exactly?”
“Like I said, a couple of weeks ago, maybe longer. I thought he had to go somewhere, out of the country perhaps, to get the rest of it. I wasn’t alarmed; he was paying back. But lately…”
“You’re very trusting, Mr. Koros.”
“I had no idea he’d stop repaying, and I certainly did not know he was sending threatening letters, or whatever. Look, I’m not a fool, Mr. Elstrom. I should have kept better tabs on that account. But really, all I did was make sure the account was properly funded and reconciled every month. As for Sweetie, if she said no to punishing Andrew, then it was not my place to disagree.”
George Koros had answers for everything.
I drove the few blocks north to Oak Street, to see if Sweetie said they were true.
There was no guard outside the private elevator in the Wilbur Wright. I expected the elevator to be locked out, if Sweetie wasn’t home, but the doors opened as soon as I pressed the button.
The motors whirred, the elevator went up. Five seconds later, the door opened into the penthouse.
There was no guard in the foyer, either.
I walked into the living room. I suppose I first saw the familiar soft yellow silk on the walls, and the greens and yellows and oranges on the sofas and chairs, all of the colors made bright by the sun streaming in the windows.
I know I saw the sun glinting off the small ring of keys dropped on the beige carpet. It had a large fob with the letters S and F.
Mostly, what I saw was red. Lots of it, spilling out of the square suit of the bodyguard lying facedown on the pale carpet, wet and glistening in the sunlight.
I saw it, too, smeared, darker, on the arms and on the front of the dress of Sweetie Fairbairn.
CHAPTER 19.
We stood in Sweetie’s kitchen.
“Tell me again, Elstrom. Beginning in the hall downstairs.” The man in charge, a lieutenant named Plinnit, was tall like me, and packing twenty pounds too many, also like me. He’d come with another detective and two uniforms seven minutes after I’d called. Rich people got fast service, even in crime.