He hadn’t confirmed it all, but he’d confirmed enough.
“What are you thinking?” he asked, after I’d said nothing.
“A fifty-foot rope, wound and knotted around a thirty-inch door.”
“Subtract a little more than five feet for the loop, another two for a double knot? Leaves forty-three feet, exactly what I calculated.”
My mind jittered over the scenario. One second the rope was taut, securing the clown as he danced high at the edge of the roof. The next, it was falling behind him, cut away by someone hiding in the small rooftop hutch. Best of all, the unseen killer would have taken the evidence-the seven feet of rope that had been cut off-away with him.
Leo’s voice intruded from somewhere distant.
“It means a cut rope?” he was asking.
“It means murder,” I said.
CHAPTER 8.
I threatened Duggan from the Jeep. “I’ll come to your office, give you my report.”
“Tell me on the phone.”
“I need to report in person, to you…” I paused, then added, “And your client.”
“Impossible,” he snapped.
“Necessary,” I said.
“Tell me, damn it.”
“You mean like John Keller told you?”
It had been no coincidence that Duggan had hired me just a few hours after Keller’s taunt to the cops came out in the Argus-Observer. Keller had turned up the burner under the clown’s death, and Duggan’s client had felt the heat. Enough to send Duggan to hire me, that same day.
The question I wanted answered was why.
“You, and your client,” I repeated.
“This is unprofessional, Elstrom.”
“Damn right,” I agreed, affably enough.
He swore. “Hold for a minute.”
It wasn’t for a minute; it was for five. When he came back, it was only to say, “I’ll call you,” before he hung up.
Maybe he hadn’t gotten through to his client. That was fine; he’d already not said enough. He hadn’t asked the one question he should have, right off the bat. He hadn’t asked if the clown had been murdered.
He hadn’t asked, because he already knew.
A green Toyota Prius was parked at my curb when I got back to the turret. Jennifer Gale was parked on the bench down by the Willahock.
I didn’t recognize her at first. Gone was any trace of makeup. Gone were the on-camera clothes, and the well-tailored jeans she’d worn the evening before. This day, she wore a long-sleeved Chicago Bears jersey, baggy denims, and scuffed running shoes. Without makeup, the lines on her face were pronounced, and I adjusted her age upward by another five years. I thought that made her more beautiful.
“A newspaper reader,” she said, looking at the Argus-Observer I’d stopped for on the way home. “I thought you were all extinct.”
“I don’t subscribe, for fear of commitment. I buy from the box, once or twice a week, and then usually the Tribune.”
“Except today you bought the Argus-Observer.”
I sat down. The bench was not long, but it could provide sufficient distance between two people, if one of them remembers he loves the woman he’s used to sharing it with, even if she’s his ex-wife and has trouble returning his phone calls.
“You needn’t bother,” she said, tapping the Argus-Observer I’d set on the bench between us. “I already looked through it. There’s nothing new from Keller.”
She’d seen through the smoke I’d sent up about wanting the clown photos for an insurance matter.
“You just happened to be driving by?” I asked, thinking a diversion might be productive.
“Nice view, if they’d clean it up,” she said, of the containers and jugs bumping against their tire prisons.
“They did once. They hired high school kids to haul out all the debris. Then the lizards held a series of soirees, pitching the idea of a Rivertown Renaissance to developers.”
“I’ve seen those Renaissance banners on the light poles along Thompson Avenue. They’re tattered.” She grinned suddenly. “How perfectly medievaclass="underline" They need your turret for their Renaissance.”
“The developers never bought into the idea. Only the garbage came back.” I turned to look at her. “You didn’t come to enjoy the Willahock.”
“Driving by, I thought I’d stop in, see what I can learn about a death that everyone, except John Keller and you, thinks was a tragic accident.”
“I’m really supposed to accept that you were just driving by?”
“It would be convenient.”
Just like I hadn’t figured her for just driving by, I couldn’t figure her appearance. The two previous times I’d seen her, Jennifer Gale had been impeccably dressed and made up. Though both times had been for a camera-when Elvis had been arrested, and then, last night, immediately following her broadcast-I didn’t imagine she went anywhere without makeup, dressed in baggy, worn clothes. Unless, that morning, she was deliberately trying to avoid recognition.
“Trying for incognito this morning?” I asked.
“So, what did the photos show?” she asked, dodging.
“I just got them last night,” I said, dodging as well.
“Yes, and you told me you never sleep.”
I shrugged.
“OK,” she said. “Let’s talk more about you and Rivertown.”
“Nothing more to tell.”
“Rivertown has always been known as a harmlessly crooked little town. Run tightly by the same expanded family for decades. Word has always been that no one much minds, because the place is so small, and its greasy goings-on-the hookers, the gambling, the payoffs-never seemed to affect anyone outside the town limits. So I’m wondering why the mayor’s nephew, a dullard by all accounts, would now venture beyond the safety of those town limits.”
“You’re suggesting Elvis didn’t come up with this scheme on his own? I agree. Yet I don’t see the lizards risking scrutiny over something like salad oil.”
“You don’t like scrutiny, either, Mr. Elstrom,” she said after a moment.
I turned to watch the milk jugs dance with the oil containers.
“You used to have a tidy little business,” she went on, “researching, photographing, working for law firms and insurance companies. You married Amanda Phelps, daughter of Wendell, one of the biggest movers and shakers in Chicago. You moved into her mansion at Crystal Waters. You were living the golden life.”
“Every day was sunny, for sure.”
“Then you were accused of validating false evidence in the Evangeline Wilts trial.”
“I was duped. I was exonerated.”
“Yes, and fairly quickly, but only after being trashed by John Keller in the Argus-Observer, and that ruined you, of money and business. And perhaps of Amanda Phelps, because you brought dishonor to the doorstop of the powerful Wendell Phelps. She dumped you-”
“Actually, I dumped myself,” I cut in. “She just had me rolled out the door.”
“You returned to the town of your youth, to huddle in your grandfather’s turret.”
“Awaiting the Rivertown Renaissance.”
“At which time you can sell your turret for a princely sum?”
The banter was giving me a headache. “That’s the plan.”
“Except your turret is zoned as a municipal structure, even though you own it. Who would buy it, if it’s zoned only for city use?”
“Where’s this going?”
“Right back to Elvis Derbil, salad oil king and zoning commissioner. He’s got you under his greasy thumb. Your story will make a heck of a follow-up to the piece we ran on Derbil.”
“You’re not pushing for my little story, though.”
She smiled. She hadn’t come to follow up on Elvis; she was scratching for leverage, to find out what I knew about the clown.
“I’ll be more direct: You want to come with me to see the rope?” she asked.
“What?” I managed, but it was too late to play dumb.