“Interesting collection of appliances.” she said, as Mr. Coffee burbled, sounding every bit as happy as Benny Fittle. “Sort of like a museum of what people used to have in their kitchens.”
“I’ve had them longer than I’d hoped. That avocado-colored refrigerator I got from an alley. The microwave I bought new, but dented. It might leak radiation, but we won’t know that for years.”
I poured coffee in travel mugs and capped them. “The roof?”
“Yes, please.”
I led us up two more flights of stairs, then up the ladder to the fifth floor.
“Why not stairs all the way?” she asked, as I went ahead, up the next ladder, to the roof.
“My grandfather’s thinking was not always clear.” I pushed open the trapdoor. “One of my aunts said he was going to distill up here and wanted to make sure he could drop a door on any charging police, then pull both ladders up to the roof with him.”
“Wouldn’t he then be trapped?”
“As I said, his thinking wasn’t always clear.”
“Wow,” she said, when she got up.
“Best view in town.” I leaned against the wall.
She worked her way around the roof, taking in the views from each direction.
“You think Andrew Fill could be in Indiana?” she asked, finally.
“I’d be surprised if he’s that close. The man’s got a half-million dollars, enough to run far away.”
“Maybe we’ll find a cottage abandoned like his apartment.”
“I think I should tell you about a development that might make you want to forget Indiana and head back to Channel 8. Sweetie Fairbairn wrote very big checks to several charities the same day she disappeared.”
“You know this how?”
“One of the recipients got a charitable donation that was way more than what she’d asked for. That person said two others also got substantially more than they requested. Sweetie gave away millions that last day, Jennifer.”
“How many millions, do you think?”
“Maybe most of what she had.”
“This recipient will verify what you’re telling me?”
“Off-limits,” I said.
“I figured as much,” she said, knowing who it was. She took out her cell phone and flipped it open. “Who else knows?”
“I don’t know, but it will get out today.”
Jennifer called her news director. After repeating what I’d told her, she nodded a couple of times, frowned, and hung up. “They’ll check it out.”
“That’s it? No on-air time for you?”
She shrugged. “Your tip is unsubstantiated; there’s no second source. The news business is changing. We got our news director cheap.”
“Indiana, then?”
“Indiana, for sure.”
We’d just gotten out the door when Leo rumbled up in his Porsche. The convertible top was down, the bossa nova was up. He turned off his CD player.
Across the street, Benny Fittle leaned his head out the side window.
“Jennifer, this specimen is Leo Brumsky. He is my friend.”
Below his summer standards of a wide-brimmed straw hat and big wraparound sunglasses, Leo wore a plum-colored Hawaiian shirt, forested with bright green palm trees that, amazingly, bore bright red apples. Jennifer laughed as she held out her hand.
“Run away with me to the south of France,” he said.
“Apples on a palm tree, Leo?” she asked.
“That’s artistic license, my dear. I wear only designers with expanded imaginations.”
“How much did you pay for the shirt?” I asked, to cut the crap.
“Because of the apples, only a dollar ninety-nine.” He extended his chest. Outside his spare 140 pounds, the XXL shirt didn’t move.
“We’re off on a trip,” I said.
Leo still hadn’t taken his eyes off Jennifer Gale. “You look…” He stopped.
“Older than I appear on television?”
“Even more newsworthy.” He fluffed out the front of his shirt and grinned, a letch covered with apple-laden palm trees. “There’s room in here for both of us.”
She laughed, charmed. Everyone is, with Leo.
He started to reach for the gear shifter, then stopped. “You do know your Jeep is on your lawn?” he asked me.
“Yes.”
He nodded, turned on the bossa nova, and gunned the Porsche back toward Thompson Avenue.
Benny Fittle withdrew his head.
Jennifer Gale and I set off to find Andrew Fill.
CHAPTER 28.
We took her Prius because, as she put it, she’d already experienced my Jeep.
“What do you want to talk about?” she asked, when we crossed into Indiana. We’d drifted into our own lulls once we left Rivertown.
“Not murder,” I said.
“That would be best.”
I turned, surprised, to look at her. “Why?”
“I want to show you I’m not all business, ever on the lookout for scoops to further my career.”
“Is that true?”
“Of course not, but it’s what I want to show.”
I laughed and turned back to look out the windshield. The expressway through western Indiana looked the same as when I’d last driven it, the roadside dotted as always with billboards advertising buxom females with come-hither pouts, welcoming gentlemen to stop at gentlemen’s clubs. Outside the Prius, inside the Prius, there seemed to be no place for a testosterone-revved man, on the outs with his girl, to rest his eyes.
So I spoke about murder. “The police would like me as a suspect.”
“For the guard’s murder?”
“Or for Sweetie’s disappearance.”
“They’ll take what they can get, to show progress,” she said. “The story is huge. A prominent socialite disappears, following a murder. Now comes word that she dumped most of her fortune on her way out the door? Big-time heater case for sure; lots of pressure on the police.” She looked over at me. “Do the cops suspect the link between Sweetie Fairbairn and the clown?”
“Because it was a blond woman in a limo who hired James Stitts? I don’t think they know about that yet.”
She got off the interstate a few miles west of Michigan City, picked up Route 12, and for several miles we followed the narrow blacktop as it curved under Lake Michigan. The old two-laner was tranquil and arched with trees, a road to take to a picnic on the beach, not to hunt down an embezzler.
Just before Beverly Shores, she turned left and drove along ancient streets that ran through marsh.
“I thought you said he was in the dunes.”
“These are the dunes,” she said, “just the wet section. According to my computer map, there’s a trailer park in here.”
“Exuberant mosquitoes, too, I would bet.”
We found the trailer park on a crumbling cross street, two dozen tired mobile homes hunkered down on flat tires and cinder blocks. There was no office, no directory at the entrance. Two rows of arched rural-style mailboxes had been screwed to a rack of two-by-fours. The red flags were up on a quarter of them. There was only one car around, a tan sedan parked down the road, well past the entrance.
Above the mailboxes, a faded sign read LAKE VISTA ESTATES. I double-checked the views toward the lake. Lake Michigan hadn’t been visible from that spot since the dunes were formed, some number of million years before. Then again, the sign might have referred to the stagnant green water that covered the acres of sodden tree stumps and cattails we’d just driven through.
Jennifer glided the Prius to a silent, electric halt. She reached for a sheaf of pink-colored leaflets from the backseat and handed half to me. They were flyers for a missing schnauzer, Wilma, and listed her age as six. The black-and-white photo showed she was adorable.
Jennifer grinned at my confusion. “This only works if the day’s mail has been delivered. I got the dog’s picture off the Internet. The contact name and phone numbers I made up. Take your time folding one into each mailbox.”