Plinnit frowned and leaned back in his chair. “Sergeant Colfax here has some questions for you.”
“First off, you have the right to an attorney,” Colfax said.
“He has a high-priced big-gun lawyer in Chicago,” Plinnit said.
“Impressive. You want to call him?” Colfax gave me a minute to think as he made a show of studying my T-shirt and jeans. The bits of old paint and caulk were still dirty and damp from the gardening I’d done on my Jeep.
“Am I being charged with something?”
“Not at the moment.”
“Then I don’t need a lawyer,” I said.
“We’ve been informed you came to Mr. Andrew Fill’s residence today,” Colfax said.
“You were misinformed. Car trouble kept me mostly at home today.”
Colfax looked over at Plinnit.
Plinnit shrugged. “On the way here, we learned he bought a battery in Chicago sometime after noon. Then, it appears, he spent the rest of the day planting flowers on his Jeep.”
Colfax didn’t understand. “In his Jeep? He went somewhere, in a Jeep, to plant flowers?”
Plinnit spoke slowly. “No. On his Jeep. He spent the rest of the day decorating his vehicle with flowers.”
“You some sort of hippie?” Colfax asked me, distaste curling his lip.
“Power to the people, right on,” I said, recalling a line from an old Woodstock documentary. Power, too, to the little man sucking Pepsi down the hall, a ticking bomb-but I didn’t say that.
“A smart-ass?” Colfax asked Plinnit.
Plinnit grinned. “Oh my, yes.”
Colfax turned back to me. “Tell me about Andrew Fill.”
“George Koros, Sweetie Fairbairn’s employee, hired me to find him. Koros thinks Fill knows something about Sweetie’s disappearance, and told me Fill has a cottage near here. He wanted me to come out today, to interview Fill, but my battery died.”
“And this evening, you rode with these gentlemen all the way here without asking why?”
“When the good lieutenant here stopped by, suggesting a ride, I figured I’d get new information.”
Colfax looked at Plinnit and the gray man. “Why doesn’t this man Koros work with you, instead of this jerk?”
I answered for the detectives. “Mr. Koros thinks the police are spending too much time driving aimlessly, from state to state, instead of digging in to accomplish something.”
At that, Mr. Gray sat up straighter in his chair, but Plinnit stayed leaned back in his chair, grinning.
Colfax’s next question was predictable. “You know Andrew Fill?”
“We’ve never met. As I’m sure Lieutenant Plinnit has told you, the closest I got was to enter Fill’s apartment through an open door, illegally. I’m interested in talking to Fill, about whether he had motive to harm Sweetie Fairbairn.”
Colfax stared at me for an uncomfortable few seconds, then stood up and went out to the hall. I could hear him whispering to someone, but not what they were saying. After a minute, he came back. “Thank you, Mr. Elstrom,” he said, because apparently there was nothing else he could say.
“My turn,” I said, because it was expected. “Why was I brought here?”
Colfax ignored me, thanked Plinnit, and then led us out into the hall. The bike rider still sat on the bench, sipping Diet Pepsi.
Colfax gave it a last shot. “Excuse me, sir,” he said to the man.
The little man looked up. Colfax nodded toward me.
Again the Pepsi was lowered. This time the rider stood up to what was barely four and a half feet. He looked squarely into my eyes.
“Nope,” he said, after a long minute, and took another pull at the Pepsi.
“Why the short guy?” I asked Plinnit, when we got outside.
“He collects cans for recycling money, sleeps in his car. Colfax was hoping he’d seen someone out by the trailer park.”
“Seen me?”
“That was the hope,” he said.
“Why?” I asked, to further the charade. No one had yet mentioned that Andrew Fill was dead.
Plinnit didn’t answer. No matter.
It had been the best fifty dollars I’d ever spent.
We drove back pretty much as we’d come-in complete silence. I tried questions about Sweetie Fairbairn’s disappearance and Norton’s murder from the backseat, but those were met with grunts. Asking about Andrew Fill didn’t even get that.
When Mr. Gray pulled up in front of the turret, Plinnit got out with me. “You keep popping up, Elstrom,” he said.
“Like blossoms in summer?” I asked, gesturing at the Jeep horticulturally.
“Who’d call us anonymously, to say you were in Indiana today?”
“You won’t even tell me why that matters.”
“Andrew Fill was found burned to death, in a trailer, not far from that police station.”
“Then someone wants me blamed for that.”
“Who?”
“George Koros pointed me toward Andrew Fill. He insisted I go to Indiana today.”
“You don’t like Koros?” he asked.
“I don’t understand his relationship with Sweetie Fairbairn.”
“That’s it?”
“For now.”
He turned to get back in the car.
“Any idea where Sweetie Fairbairn comes from?” I asked.
“Hometown-wise, growing-up-wise?”
“Yes.”
“We haven’t focused on that.”
“That’s it?” I asked, when he said nothing more.
He smiled. “For now.”
It was too late to see if Jenny was reporting, but the ten o’clock broadcasts had just begun. Channel 5’s anchor, a smiley fellow with shellacked hair, led with the big news from Indiana: “A tantalizing new lead may have arisen in the missing Sweetie Fairbairn case. Acting on a tip, Indiana police today discovered Andrew Fill, a onetime employee of Ms. Fairbairn’s and someone long active in the arts in Chicago, dead in a house trailer fire. Fill was the director…”
I switched stations. Channel 2 was saying, “Andrew Fill, former head of the Midwest Arts Symposium, was found brutally…”
I turned off the little television, made tea, and took it up to the roof.
Rivertown was in its own full fire. Neon flashed up and down Thompson Avenue. Mixed in the usual cacophony of tonk tunes and the hysterical shrieks of lubricated people having Just Plain Fun were the rips and flashes of drunks getting a jump on the Fourth of July. Short bursts of firecrackers and cherry bombs were going off across the spit of land, sights and sounds of war on a bawdy street.
As I watched the tiny explosions, I let my mind nibble at the probability that George Koros was also trying to lay Sweetie Fairbairn’s disappearance, and maybe Norton’s murder, on me. He’d tried to send me to Indiana, to get caught sniffing around Andrew Fill’s trailer at the same time he’d tipped the police that I’d be there. He’d meant for me and the cops to collide, leading to more suspicions.
What I couldn’t understand was how that would benefit him.
Or how I could nail him for it.
I drank my tea, hummed along too loudly with the music from the tonks, and thought. By three in the morning, when the tonks quit serenading the night, when the last of the hookers had moaned and the last of the johns and the cherry bombs had exploded, I was sure of only a fraction of it.
The motive had to be money, as it so often is when people kill. Sweetie Fairbairn was a financial wellspring, Koros was a financial guy, and Andrew Fill was a sap. Koros worked Andrew Fill, except he worked him dead. He killed him, then manipulated him, missing, to take the blame for embezzling a half-million dollars.
None of that, though, explained killing James Stitts, or Robert Norton, or why Koros told me Fill had been paying the stolen money back.
None of it explained why Sweetie Fairbairn had run, either.
The tea had gone vile, and I’d gone cold. I climbed the ladders down to the fifth floor, then to the fourth. It was as I was going down the stairs to the third floor that I heard the noise from my would-be office on the second.