“I don’t suppose you ever caught a hint of her maiden name?”
He smiled. “I never got a hint about her real first name, either.”
I wished for a small board at that instant, something to strike the side of my thick, unthinking head. “‘Sweetie’ was just a nickname?”
He gave me a pitying look and said, as though to a child, “No mother names her kid ‘Sweetie.’ It was what Silas called her, and that was good enough for us.”
He had another gin and tonic, I had another Coke, and we went over all of it again, but he’d gotten it all out the first time. There’d never been much to know about Sweetie Fairbairn.
I called the Bohemian from the Arrow Way parking lot.
“You had a productive conversation with Gillman Tripp?” he asked.
“Yes, but it’s led to more questions. Can you find out the factories Silas Fairbairn owned?”
“There weren’t very many, as I recall. They made wiring harnesses for cars and trucks. Hold on.”
He came back in five minutes. “Only three plants, Vlodek. One in Florida, one in Tennessee, and one in Missouri.” He named towns I’d never heard of. “Rural operations. Cheap labor. Farm wives, mostly, pulling wires around posts nailed to big sheets of plywood. Silas sold them the year before he died.”
“Are they still in operation?”
“I have no idea. You can call to verify that.”
“Thank you.”
“Stay out of the news, Vlodek.”
I called Jenny when I got back to the turret.
“Nothing yet on her background, Dek. I spent two hours online at the newspaper archives, and then I called around to the people who used to do celebrity columns when newspapers still had money for such things. Everybody on the social ladder in Chicago knows her, but nobody seems to know about her, at least not of her life before she married Silas. That’s unusual, for someone as prominent as Sweetie Fairbairn.”
“One of Silas’s old golfing buddies originally thought she might have been embarrassed over her origins.”
“Originally?”
“He came around to another conclusion.”
“That she deliberately obscured her past?”
“Bingo,” I said.
CHAPTER 36.
Before I’d gone to bed the previous night, the Internet told me that all three Fairbairn Wire and Cable assembly plants were still making wiring harnesses for automobiles, trucks, and appliances.
By ten o’clock the next morning, a FedEx driver had delivered an overnight envelope containing the Visa card George Koros said he’d send along.
By twelve o’clock, I knew, from the telephone, that none of the Fairbairn plants was big enough to have a full-fledged human resources department, that each relied on a single clerk to do the personnel work. None of the three clerks had been working for Fairbairn Wire back when Sweetie might have been there, which I guessed was at least ten years before, but each of the clerks had just learned, through the twin miracles of gossip grapevines and cable television news, that Silas’s widow had disappeared, up in Chicago, following the murder of her bodyguard. None of the clerks had ever heard of Silas befriending any woman in their plant, and each supposed that if such a thing had happened, everyone in town would have known about one of their own striking it rich.
So, by noon, I was done, smacked flat against a dead end.
And I was out of Ho Hos.
The Ho Hos I could do something about. I went outside and took the wood trays of flowers off the Jeep’s hood, top, and spare tire. Using the flowers to convert the Jeep into a multitiered lawn planter had worked so far-Benny Fittle had issued me no tickets-but the victory was temporary; a lizard was surely at work drafting a new lawn decoration code, specifically prohibiting the use of red Jeeps. For now, though, my potted, planted Jeep represented a victory and, as such, deserved to be celebrated. With Ho Hos.
I headed east, toward the supermarket, but then responsibility slapped a sudden, shocking hand against me and forced me to do something I hadn’t done in a month. I took a hard left turn and bobbed onto the cratered parking lot of the Rivertown Health Center. Dropping the transmission into first gear, as one would to navigate the surface of the moon, I eased the Jeep over the potholes to my usual spot next to the doorless Buick that had rested there for decades. There would be Ho Hos-but first there must be exercise.
It was midday. There were still a few hours before the thumpers, Rivertown’s least-evolved grade of criminal, would arrive. Delinquents from the high schools, and in some cases the grammar schools, thumpers were trainees, interns of a sort. They came to the health center parking lot to study at the studded boots of the more hardened scumbags who congregated at dusk to sell their powders, plan their burglaries, and decide which automobiles might offer the most reward from disassembly that night.
I made sure both of the Jeep’s doors were unlocked, so that even the most untutored of an early-bird hoodlum could see that the radio had already been ripped out, grabbed the gym bag I keep in the backseat, and went in.
I changed into my gym duds under the supposedly dozing eye of the locker room attendant. I never bring a lock to dull his bolt cutters, and always take my wallet and keys with me. Still, I’m sure he always does a fast search of my locker before he returns to his nap, if only as a matter of self-respect.
Frankie was roosting on a broken exercise cycle upstairs, regaling Dusty, Nick, and the other retirees with the same jokes he’d been telling since the factories used to pulse in Rivertown. Dusty, Nick, and the others never waited for Frankie’s last line to begin laughing. They knew the jokes. What counted were the words and the laughs from their pasts, reminders of times when their knees were steady and the backs of their hands hadn’t yet darkened from enlarging veins and spreading spots of brown. They waved me over. I shook my head. I had to run.
I’d built up a high sweat when, thirty minutes later, my cell phone rang. It was Miss Logsdon, one of the personnel clerks I’d talked to earlier that day. She worked at the Fairbairn assembly plant in Whitaker Springs, Missouri.
“I believe I’ve found someone you might be interested in speaking with, Mr. Elstrom. One of our longer-term employees told me of a woman who used to work here a number of years ago. Her name is Linda Coombs.”
I leaned against a wall, trying to not pant like a St. Bernard. “She remembers someone Silas Fairbairn had a relationship with?”
“Unfortunately, I don’t know what Ms. Coombs remembers. All our employee remembers is that Linda Coombs once said that Silas Fairbairn was involved with a woman from Whitaker Springs. Our employee doesn’t think the woman’s name was Sweetie, though.”
“Do you have a phone number for Linda Coombs?”
“Ms. Coombs has no phone, and lives on the outskirts of town. I don’t have the names of any of her neighbors, and I don’t want to intrude on anyone’s privacy. I’m afraid you’ll have to arrange a visit if you want your questions answered.”
I thanked her and hung up. My breathing had slowed. Certainly, the news justified suspension of any further exercise. I headed for the showers, my mind firing thoughts of an airplane trip and an expedition-sized bag of Ho Hos.
I called the bankcard company from the turret, to activate Koros’s Visa, and the nice lady asked if I wanted to activate the ATM feature as well. I said you betcha, real fast, and logged on to their Web site to provide a PIN. Two hours later, just to be confusing, I’d stopped at four ATMs on my way to Midway Airport and withdrawn the two-thousand-dollar maximum that was available for the month. Koros would get receipts, and an accurate accounting of my expenses, but he wasn’t going to find out where I was searching for Sweetie Fairbairn until I’d finished.