“It would have attracted too much attention, sitting idle. His killer took it, abandoned it elsewhere so it wouldn’t attract attention, sitting there unused.”
“You’ll call Plinnit?” She was teasing, settling us down.
“He’ll be delighted I’m still venturing where I don’t belong.”
“You do that, don’t you?”
I wondered whether she was thinking about me, in Fill’s trailer, or us, later, in that one supercharged moment at the side of the road.
I decided I was better off not wondering about anything, for a time.
A small white Toyota was idling with its parking lights on in front of the turret. This Toyota was much older, and not nearly as environmentally correct as Jennifer’s. I knew it, of course, like I knew the short dark hair, and then the eyes and the lips on the head that turned around to look at the back window at the approaching headlamps.
“I’ll call you tomorrow,” I said, pulling the Prius to a stop well short of the white Toyota.
“We’re still a hundred feet away,” Jennifer said.
“Close enough,” I said.
I got out; Jennifer slid over and made a U-turn to go back down the short road.
I watched her taillights turn onto Thompson Avenue as I walked to the white car.
Amanda cut the engine and hand-cranked down the window on the driver’s side. I liked that she kept the old crank-window Toyota. It was a remnant of her former life.
“You’re here,” I said.
“I didn’t even think the car would start, it’s been so long.” She dabbed at her eyes with a tissue. “I’ve been sitting here for two hours, feeling bad about my father, you, Richard, me, getting sidetracked, charities, what I’ve given, what my father took.” She tried a smile. “The damned publicity is probably going to wreck everything I maybe didn’t want to do anyway.”
I reached in and touched her cheek to stop the torrent of words. “Come in. We can have coffee and Ho Hos.”
“I don’t know that I should,” she said, more slowly.
“I have Cheerios, if you prefer,” I said, cracking wise as cheerily as I could, so soon after picking the pocket of a dead man.
“I didn’t mean that.”
“Why did you drive out?”
“You weren’t answering your phones.” She was looking ahead, at the great stone shadow that was city hall. “And when I got here, I saw your Jeep parked up on your lawn…”
“You shouldn’t have worried.”
“I didn’t. I saw the fire lane sign, knew that parking on the lawn was your way of dealing with that.”
“I am resourceful,” I said.
“I was the one who told Sweetie about you in the first place, and now-”
“Only because she asked about me, when she began checking you out.” I opened her door. “Cheerios are good. They lower cholesterol.”
The skin around her eyes crinkled. Not a lot, but enough. “What girl could refuse such an enticement?”
Inside the turret, she stopped in mock amazement. “Same plastic chairs, same table saw. Why, this place looks no different than the last time I was here.”
“Which was months ago.”
She turned, surprised.
“Really, it’s been that long,” I said. “Anyway, the work has gone on upstairs.”
Up in the kitchen, she went to touch one of the cabinets I’d built. “You do have a talent, Dek.” Then she put a finger on the table I’d fashioned from scrap plywood, and sat on one of the curb-treasure lawn chairs I’d dragged home a dozen garbage days before. “But your furnishing skills…”
I went to make coffee.
“What about those Cheerios?” she asked, when I set down our mugs.
I reached behind me for the box.
“Milk?” she asked.
“I don’t have any milk.”
“Then what do you do with the Cheerios?”
“You’ll notice the box has not been opened. Just looking at the cholesterol claims on the box while I eat breakfast makes me feel healthy.”
“What have you been eating for breakfast?”
“Ho Hos lately, but I’ll move on.”
“I remember.”
For a time, we talked about my rehabbing the turret, because that was safe.
“I’m still hoping my zoning will get changed,” I said.
“When Elvis Derbil goes to prison?”
“Jennifer thinks that’s a long way off.”
“Jennifer?”
“Jennifer Gale. I told you about her,” I said. “She just dropped me off. She got interested in Rivertown because of Elvis, and wanted to do a story on my zoning. I didn’t want any press…” I slowed down. I was talking too much, and too fast. “I cut a deal with her. No references to you or to your father.”
“It’s all right, Dek. That night at Rokie’s, you told me you met her.”
“Yes. She finds this small, surviving bastion of old-time, iron-fisted corrup-”
“You’ve become friends?”
“I’m a source.” Everything that was spilling out of my mouth was still coming out too frothy, too light. Too forced. “She can do me a lot of good, if she gets my zoning changed.”
“That’s not her main interest, though, is it Dek?”
“Sweetie Fairbairn is every reporter’s interest, right now,” I said, not pausing to wonder what Amanda really meant, “but later, a little sunlight on Rivertown could lead to better times for me.” I took a sip of coffee, and a bigger step. “You mentioned a Richard, out in the car.”
She looked away, at the cabinets above where a stove would one day go. “Richard’s someone I’ve met.”
“You’ve become friends?” Only when the words were out did I realize my words mimicked hers.
“He attends the same functions I do, serves on the same boards. He’s third-generation money, like me. His father founded Illinois General Insurance.”
“And he’s president of his own commodities trading firm,” I said.
She raised an eyebrow.
“Your pictures have been in the paper, Amanda. Together.”
“Dek, we haven’t…”
“He’s polished, successful; he understands your world. He’s not some goof huddled in a turret.”
She set down her coffee, looked at something, or nothing, across the hall. “Who could have known?” she asked softly.
“You mean Sweetie Fairbairn, or something more?”
“I think Sweetie Fairbairn, for now.” She checked her watch, suddenly brisk. “Meeting, tomorrow morning at seven.”
We went down the stairs. Every step rang the old wrought iron like a knell for the dead, or maybe for us. I didn’t know.
Outside, I held her door. She looked up from inside the car. “Who’s going to come out of this all right, Dek?”
I didn’t answer. I didn’t know.
CHAPTER 30.
The stench of Andrew Fill’s tin trailer was thick in my nose when I woke in the dark the next morning. I told myself the stench wasn’t real anymore.
The flies, though, had been real. As had the money.
I took coffee up to the roof to tell myself that again, and to reason with the stars.
It had been the flies and the money that had awakened me. That’s what the night had distilled everything into: flies and money. There’d been too many flies, working too long, in Andrew Fill’s trailer. There’d been too much money, an embezzled half-million dollars, that seemed to have been nowhere in his life.
Too many flies; too much money.
I looked out at Rivertown in the dark, but I was seeing the inside of a stinking trailer. Andrew Fill would have ripened fast, in the heat of that trailer. He would have drawn hundreds of flies the first day, then hundreds and hundreds more as the days went on. By the fast glance I’d managed at the rough gouges in his face, the flies had been excavating for quite some time. It would have taken them weeks to get that deep into his skin.
He’d been dead quite a while.
Then there was the money. According to George Koros, Fill had begun paying it back. I couldn’t understand the time repayment plan; Fill should have paid it all back in one lump, been done with the fear of being prosecuted. Or he should have run. A half-million dollars would have taken him thousands of miles farther, to better destinations than a tin trailer in the muck back of the dunes.