He came in after another twenty minutes. “John Peet will represent you,” he said, naming the best-known criminal defense lawyer in Chicago. Peet had just finished successfully defending a young third wife accused of murdering her eighty-eight-year-old husband. It had been a sensational trial. Their sex life wasn’t brought up, such as it might have been, but the woman’s tennis pro lover was, as was the hundred million dollars she stood to inherit. Slam dunk; drumroll, please. Everyone thought she’d be convicted. Except John Peet. Who got her off.
“John is making calls, Vlodek. We’ll stay in this room until he tells us what to do next.”
We’d barely begun to force conversation-something about the fountain pens he loved to restore, I think-when the phone rang. The Bohemian picked it up and listened. “Of course I’ll be co-counsel,” he said, after a few moments. I took that to mean he’d guarantee payment of Peet’s fee. Then, “Yes. I have them in a box, here… I see… That explains why they didn’t take them. Very encouraging, John.” He handed the phone to me.
“Mr. Elstrom,” Peet began. “Good news, of a sort. The police don’t like you for the shooting.”
“Shooting?” I asked, confused. “They said stabbing.”
“Actually, Lieutenant Plinnit told me he was very careful not to say either. They also let you go on believing and saying, at least for a while, that the murdered guard you thought was stabbed was Timothy Duggan. Not exhibiting knowledge of either the means of the murder or the identity of the victim saved your bacon, so to speak. For now, they’re willing to think you walked in on something, nothing more. Still, you’re a material witness. They’re after what you know and have not said. We must be cautious. Other than Anton, don’t talk to anyone about this. That means, doubly, do not talk to the press. Eat at home, Mr. Elstrom. Do not answer your door to friends or strangers. If the police come for you again, don’t utter a syllable until I arrive.”
“Are we doing better, Vlodek?” The Bohemian, that ever-effective fixer, asked after I hung up the phone.
I told him I truly desired that to be true.
CHAPTER 22.
I told myself that my second bout with bad fame was going to be easier than the first. The Evangeline Wilts trial had erased my business, my marriage, and my custom of wintering indoors with sufficient heat. This time, I didn’t have those to lose.
I told myself all these things quite literally-actually speaking the words aloud as I drove toward Rivertown. Feeling free to talk aloud to oneself, anywhere, anytime, without drawing a startled glance is an often-overlooked benefit of the cell phone era.
Used to be, people crossed the street to avoid someone who was moving lips, making sounds, saying words to nobody at all. No longer. Cell phones and earpiece microphones have unchained mankind, not just the lunatics. Nowadays, anyone can chatter on, seemingly to no one at all. Nobody cares, nobody stares; it’s assumed the talker is merely on the phone.
I once stood next to a young man, nineteen or twenty, in the cookie section of a grocery store. He kept saying, “I love you,” over and over, to a shelf of gingersnaps. True, he was wearing an earpiece, but I did not see an actual phone. He could well have been addressing a beloved, or he could have been murmuring to the gingersnaps. Or, perhaps, they were one and the same. There is no longer any sure way of telling.
Leaving the Bohemian’s that morning, I was appreciative of all that. I owned no cell phone earpiece, but I had lots to say, and I was in a fury to get it out. I’d failed to unravel any of the mysteries of Sweetie Fairbairn, I told the windshield, and for that her life might now be in danger. As the only person of interest so far, I would become Target One for the press, and that would endanger, maybe even destroy, Amanda’s attempt at a new life, along with any hope I had of being part of it. On and on I raged, upshifting and downshifting along the expressway, a man alone in a Jeep, frothing at the mess he’d made. The windshield accepted it all, saying nothing, judging nothing. No one, in any adjacent car, paid me any mind at all.
It was therapeutic. By the time I left the expressway, I was calm enough to stop at a supermarket for the microwavable nutrition and petrified sugary products I’d need to hunker down with while the world tried on my fit as a murder suspect and waited for more news of Sweetie Fairbairn.
Ten minutes later, turning off Thompson Avenue, I slammed to a stop.
The press had come, as I’d expected-but they’d been blocked by City of Rivertown sawhorses, well before the left turn to the turret and city hall. There was no police cruiser minding the barricade, just an orange Ford Maverick, more rust than paint, angled in the middle of the street. Against its hood, intimately close to the box of doughnuts beside him, rested Benny Fittle.
Benny was a second or third cousin of a village clerk. Normally he was seen in denim cutoffs and a rock band T-shirt, cheeks inflated by something crème filled, writing parking tickets along Thompson Avenue. The lizards valued Benny for his speed; he rarely slowed to squint at the meters to see if they’d expired.
This day, though, he’d been stuffed into a cop’s uniform, to enforce the barricade.
Protecting me from the press was laudable. And incomprehensible.
I looked past the newsmen, past the spit of land. Something fluttered slowly from a second-floor window of the turret. It was a bedsheet. It pictured a bottle, but the lettering was too far away to read.
Below the sheet moved two bright, multicolored shapes of tangerine and chartreuse and neon yellow. One was small, thin, and topped with an oval of pale, bald flesh that, from a distance, looked like a huge egg. The other was a foot taller, thinner, and topped with luxuriant short brown hair.
Leo and Endora had taken control of the turret. Whatever they’d hung from the second-floor window had stirred the lizards to set up a barricade to keep back the press.
I turned the Jeep around, hoping its cross-taped, milky plastic side windows would obscure my face long enough to escape being photographed, and sped away. I parked four blocks down, alongside the river, and came back low along the weed-choked crumbles of the river walk.
When I got to the back of the turret, I edged forward, staying in the shadows.
“Leo,” I called softly.
“Hark, Princess,” he said. “Do you hear something?”
“Might it be the master of the turret?” she asked, laughing.
“It might, and a dim master is he. Anyone else would realize the press is too far away to hear, and would not deign to whisper.”
Despite the hailstorm of crap that had come down on me in the last twenty-four hours, I started to smile. I remembered using the word “deign” with Leo-and I knew that, like every time I got to talking too fancy, he was now going to come down on me as hard as the hailstorm.
“Deign?” Endora said, in a stage voice. “Deign, with no brain?”
“’Tis insane, to deign with no brain,” Leo answered.
“For the pain of the deign will remain,” Endora rhymed back.
It was too much. Both were good enough with words to go on for hours. I carried my paper bags of food into the sunshine and looked up at what fluttered from the turret.
It was brilliant.
Leo’s grin widened his pale, bald head. “It was I who hung the banner that made the City of Rivertown banish the press from your door.”
“It was I who conceived and drew it,” Endora said.
Then they both laughed, two kids showing off mega IQs.
The sheet hanging large above the front door featured a bottle of salad dressing, label side out. Beneath the bottle it read, YOU CAN’T ALWAYS BELIEVE WHAT YOU READ.
“The lizards freaked,” Leo said.