“You checked the rope?”
“Brand-new, no frays. He tied a lousy knot, was all.”
“And you checked the door?”
“Solid enough to hold a rope. Nothing gave way.”
“What was he doing up there?” I asked.
“For Christ’s sake, Elstrom.”
“An advertising stunt?”
“Must have been. Stitts did birthday parties, car dealerships, store openings. Lots of balloons. His wife said he got two or three gigs a month.”
“What was he trying to advertise, up on that roof?”
“How the hell would I know that?”
“By what he left behind.”
“He left nothing behind.”
Not even a mark of a rope pulling off a door, but that observation I owed to Timothy Duggan, not to a cop.
“So you don’t know who hired him?” I asked instead.
Jawarski paused. “What does that have to do with insurance?”
“Routine, for the file.”
“I told you, I don’t know what he was pushing,” Jaworski said.
“You asked his wife?”
“Sure,” he said, after enough hesitation to mean he hadn’t.
“Now you’re at a dead end?”
“Not a dead end, damn it. The man’s rope came loose, and he fell.” He took a breath. “Now, if that’s all…”
“What does John Keller know that you don’t, Lieutenant?”
He hung up before I could anger him further.
CHAPTER 5.
The online death notice, at the Tribune, said James Stitts loved being a clown. It also said he loved his wife, Bea, and their two children. It did not mention that he loved working in human resources, which he did full-time, for a large suburban firm.
He’d lived in Arlington Heights, northwest of Chicago, in a beige split-level home on a cul-de-sac. A kid’s red bike lay on the blacktop driveway, in front of a silver minivan. I got there at nine o’clock the next morning.
A dark-haired woman in her midthirties answered my knock at the front door. She wore no makeup, had only smudges under her eyes.
“This has to do with James’s insurance?” she asked, after she’d studied my card.
“I’m not with his insurance company, and there are no irregularities with his policy, as far as I know. I’m just pulling together some general information.”
“For who?”
I thought of the lies I could offer. I skipped them all. “For someone who wants to know exactly how he died.”
“For who?”
“I don’t know. I got hired by a security firm to look into your husband’s death.”
“The condo owners in that hardware building, then, worried about a lawsuit?”
“I don’t know.”
She considered that for a minute and then opened the screen door. “Let’s talk in the kitchen.”
She led me through a living room strewn with electronic game controls, a basketball, and one small Nike high-top half hidden under a chair. It was a room for kids and play. Except now, a boy’s small dark sport coat also lay tossed across the back of a chair, a clip-on necktie dangling from its pocket. Funeral clothes.
She waved at the mess as we walked through. “I’ve had my hands full since James died, and I don’t have the heart to yell at the kids to pick up.”
She poured coffee into yellow mugs, and we sat at an oak pedestal table.
“The police said his death was an accident,” she said. “They said the rope he used to anchor himself became undone, and he fell from the roof.”
Her eyes locked onto mine, perhaps challenging me to accept it as truth.
“No chance it was…?” I stopped to hide behind a sip of coffee, because I didn’t have the guts to finish the question.
“Suicide? No way in hell.”
“Accident, then, for sure?”
She said nothing but kept her eyes hot on me.
“No way in hell, either?” I asked, after a moment. It was why she’d let me in the door. I wondered then if she’d been the one who’d fed the nugget to Keller about the cops giving up too soon on the case.
“What could the person who sent you here think, Mr. Elstrom?”
“I would imagine that person, like me, like you, wants more facts.”
“James’s insurance company, must be.”
“Most insurers are straight up. I don’t think one would hire me blind.”
“James’s life insurance company is holding off, saying he was engaged in a high-risk activity. They might not pay on the policy.”
“They can do that, if their insured person routinely engages in something high risk, something they wouldn’t ordinarily cover.”
“James was a careful man. He wouldn’t have tied a poor knot. He wouldn’t even start his car until his seat belt was fastened.”
“Did he perform that way often?”
“At the edge of a roof? Never. I told you, he was not a risk taker. He did it this time because the money was good.” Her eyes were still defiant. “He knew how to tie a damned knot. He practiced a dozen times on the rope he bought.”
“How good was the money?”
“One thousand dollars, for two performances. Each was to be done on a different rooftop. He got paid half up front.”
“Who hired him?”
“I don’t know who she was.”
“She?”
“Some woman who had big plans. She told him she wanted to build a buzz, generate some interest. The first performance was to be spontaneous, no product brochures, no bullhorn, just a clown dancing, downtown, on a roof during rush hour. She thought the newspapers would love the mystery of why he was up there, maybe enough to publicize the second performance. Then she could advertise the hell out of it, and all kinds of people would show up, curious, and she could capitalize on whatever she was selling.”
“You have no idea what that was?”
“No. She just told James to find two rooftops downtown that were low enough to be seen from the street, and get things rolling.”
“Do you think James knew her name?”
“If he did, he never said. She was a secretive lady. She paid cash.”
“Do you know where she worked?”
She gestured out past the living room.
“She came here?”
“In a limousine. Had a chauffeur all dolled up in a gray suit, gray cap.”
“What did she look like?”
“I couldn’t see her, for the dark-tinted windows.” She shrugged. “Just rich, I suppose. Everybody looks rich in a limo.”
I finished the last of my coffee. I still thought it possible she’d been the one who’d tipped Keller, to fight off any talk of her husband committing suicide, but it was just as likely she hadn’t heard yet about the column at all. She would, though, from a neighbor, a friend, or some mere acquaintance with a nose. I didn’t envy her that.
I drove away thinking about limousines. My world is not filled with long dark cars. My only encounters with them had been to dodge them, with Amanda, when we’d been crossing the street, in front of the Goodman Theater or Symphony Center, downtown in Chicago.
Yet now two of them had driven into my life. The first was Duggan’s, two days before. Now, a second, one that had brought a woman to hire James Stitts to dance on a roof.
Maybe to hire him to die.
CHAPTER 6.
The responsible thing to do, when I got back to the turret, was to report to Duggan.
To tell him the cops liked Stitts’s death as an accident from a poorly knotted rope and that they saw no reason to investigate further, especially not if that might lead to a suicide finding that would null an insurance payout to a widow.
To tell him, too, that Stitts’s widow was having none of that. Her husband had been a careful man, meticulous enough to practice knotting his new rope until he’d gotten it right. Nor was there any chance the man was suicidal.
I’d tell him I was with the widow on both counts. The door had not been marked, abraded by a poorly tied rope pulling away. It had been no accident.