“I don’t see Sweetie Fairbairn using a knife, Lieutenant.”
“Did Norton know you, Elstrom?”
“As I told you, I was there, several times. He would have known me by sight.”
“Why did Sweetie Fairbairn hire you?” Plinnit asked, and asked again. It was what he most wanted to know. Each time, my refusal to answer that question signaled the end of the round, that we were going to start it all again.
“Ask her, Lieutenant,” I said each time.
So it went, around and around and around, each of us unyielding, as the afternoon changed into evening, and the evening changed into night.
Until, at midnight, I asked, “Do I call my lawyer?”
He surprised me.
“You can do it from home,” he said.
There was no offer of a ride back to my Jeep. I didn’t protest. I was desperate enough for free air to walk until I could find a cab. I went out the front door of the station house.
Into the sudden glare of television camera lights.
The reporters behind them started shouting.
“Vlodek Elstrom! Will you be charged with the murder of Sweetie Fairbairn?” the loudest of them yelled.
Plinnit had probably tipped them I’d be coming out, a little extra pressure from a cop who’d spent his evening not believing most of what I was saying.
I remembered those kinds of reporter noises, those kinds of shouted questions that could be edited into something else entirely. My livelihood, my Amanda, my future; I’d lost everything in that same kind of din.
I smiled, I waved. I walked swiftly away, into the darkest street I could see. When I was sure that none of the cameramen had been able to keep up, I ran like I was being chased by the hounds of hell, until I couldn’t run anymore. Then I walked, chest heaving, gulping air, for six more blocks, or maybe ten. Finally, a cab slowed. He looked me over, real slow, said he’d need cash up front before he’d drive me the few blocks north of the river, to the parking lot close to the Wilbur Wright, where I’d left the Jeep.
There were television lights at the hotel, too. Waiting for news of Sweetie Fairbairn, dead or alive.
I stayed close to the buildings and moved up enough to hear the personalities and their crews talking about what they didn’t know.
“She’s got to come back, right?” and “Someone said she killed all of them,” and “Some guy named Elstrom has been arrested.”
Then someone called out, “Hey! You! With the clothes!”
A videocam light swung onto me, followed by another. I didn’t understand. It didn’t matter. I ran down to the parking lot, stuffed cash-I didn’t know how much-into the hand of the late-night attendant, and fired up the Jeep. I was almost out of the lot when one of the newsies thought to step in front of me. I revved the engine. He blinked once, twice, must have seen that I wasn’t blinking once, or twice. He jumped aside.
By then, a silver sedan-another newsman-had pulled up to block the exit onto the street. I drove onto the sidewalk, almost striking an elderly pair of late-night strollers into the next life. Bouncing over the curb, I gunned the Jeep down Oak Street. I ran a red light at the next intersection and turned left. I shot a glance into the rearview mirror. I’d lost the silver sedan.
Suddenly, my whole body started to shake. Squeezing the steering wheel to keep the Jeep in control, I drove east, to Lake Shore Drive, then south, paralleling the lake. Newspeople would be at the turret, too. Some would have even remembered the way, from the last time, during the Evangeline Wilts trial. The old can was going to be pried open; the worms were going to dance in the glare of the lights again. That long-ago man who’d been thought to have falsified evidence-accused in big print, exonerated in small-was going to be back bigger than ever. Pressure would build. Plinnit would have to act. I’d have to be charged.
No turret, not yet.
I drove past the turn to the expressway to Rivertown.
CHAPTER 21.
I spent the rest of the night in the Jeep, parked at the back of the Bohemian’s building. Surprisingly, I slept until a garbage truck came to empty the Dumpster. It was eight forty-five. The Bohemian’s black Mercedes sedan was in the lot.
His receptionist, a sweet-looking brunette that I would have remembered if I’d been thinking clearly, must have remembered me, because she didn’t scream when I walked right through the cluster of startled people parked in the green leather chairs in the lobby and went into the inner offices and past the cubicles. Outside the Bohemian’s office, helmet-haired Buffy didn’t scream, either. Then again, expressing emotion was not her way.
The Bohemian’s door was closed. I opened it. He was sitting with two pale, powdered elderly women, no doubt talking about matters of money.
“Jesus Christ, Vlodek,” he said, calmly enough.
It was then that I looked down and saw I was covered with dried blood, from helping Sweetie Fairbairn get up from the body of the dead guard.
“I need your help, Anton,” I said, perhaps unnecessarily.
The elderly ladies had gone even paler under their caked rouge. Unhealthy-looking white powder ridges now raked their wrinkled, unnaturally reddened skin.
“Vlodek, may I have Buffy take you to a conference room, perhaps get you some coffee?”
I must have nodded, because the grim-faced secretary instantly touched my elbow.
She took me to a conference room I’d been in once before, back when houses had started exploding in Amanda’s old gated neighborhood. I remembered the room because of the English hunting print hanging on the wall. I’d been hired to investigate the explosions, and the dogs in the picture, their noses confidently on the ground, had taunted me with their sureness. They knew what they were hunting; I did not.
Like now.
The door opened and the Bohemian came in, carrying two dainty cups of coffee on saucers pinched between his thick thumbs and forefingers. Overrouged ladies love dainty china. He set the cups on the table and sat down.
Taking a fresh yellow pad of lined paper from the stack on the side table, he uncapped an enormous antique fountain pen. “Now, Vlodek, tell me how you soiled your shirt.”
“You’ve not read the papers, or listened to the radio?”
“I prefer Bach on my drive in.” He turned to the laptop computer on the sideboard and brought up the Tribune Web site. I could read the headline from the other side of the table: SOCIALITE PHILANTHROPIST MISSING. BODYGUARD FOUND MURDERED.
He scrolled down the text, reading silently and making notes. When he had the gist of it, he turned back to me. “You’re a celebrity.”
I laughed, after a fashion, and told him all of it, beginning with the arrival of the party invitation, and ending with my arrival at his parking lot just a few hours earlier. He was now my lawyer, the one who must keep the hounds away.
When I leaned back, exhausted into silence, he studied my clothes. “Thirty-six-inch waist, Vlodek?”
“Perhaps no longer.”
“Thirty-eight, then,” he said, standing up. “Drink coffee. Read the computer if you must. Do not communicate with anyone.” He left the room.
I don’t know that I thought about much of anything while I waited. Telling everything to the Bohemian had drained my mind-relieved me, at least temporarily, of custody of the mess of loose ends that dangled from the disaster that was Sweetie Fairbairn.
Buffy knocked on the door an hour later, came in, and set a box on the table. “Clothes,” she said and left. I opened the box. Inside were khaki trousers, but in a softer twill than I’d ever owned. The blue button-down shirt beneath them was softer as well, and had better stitching than what I kept crumpled in the turret. I changed, then put the bloodstained trousers and shirt in the box. The Bohemian would keep them protected, but inaccessible to anyone from a police evidence unit, with or without the proper paperwork.