CHAPTER 13.

I called Duggan after Jennifer pulled away.

“Nice note,” he said, right off.

“It didn’t get me a meeting with your client, Sweetie Fairbairn.”

He covered the mouthpiece of his phone. A minute later, Sweetie Fairbairn came on the line.

“Thank you for your note, Mr. Elstrom.” Her voice was soft, tentative.

“Thank you for a lovely party.”

“What put you onto me?”

“You didn’t question me enough about my relationship with Amanda.”

“Can you drop by?”

I told her I could, and would, and pointed the Jeep toward the Gold Coast.

*   *   *

It must have been a fine day for bargains—perhaps thousand-dollar shoes were being dumped for nine hundred—because Michigan Avenue was packed solid with shoppers. Great throngs of them choked the sidewalks and the crosswalks, swinging bright bags filled with things sure to improve their lives.

A different valet was on duty at the Wilbur Wright. This one came right over to take the Jeep, but his narrowed eyes betrayed his concern that I’d be hunting under the floor mats for a quarter to tip him when I came out.

Again, a guard stood by Sweetie’s private elevator. The previous evening, I’d wondered if the elevator guard had been hired special for the party—to keep out riffraff, or perhaps to quell a riot, should the swells spill down from the penthouse, ginned up, and start spoon-flicking bits of caviar at guests in the lobby. Those thoughts had disappeared when I’d gotten upstairs. There’d been more guards, too many more for ordinary security, in the penthouse. Sweetie Fairbairn had mysteries. What I couldn’t figure was why those mysteries needed full-time protection.

I gave the guard my driver’s license before he could ask. He took a careful look at the beaming face I’d presented to the Illinois secretary of state’s photographer, before the secretary of state had become governor and then gone on to prison, and announced my arrival into a small walkie-talkie.

Timothy Duggan’s frown was waiting up in the foyer.

“You’re something, Elstrom,” he said.

“I, too, marvel at myself.”

He told me to sit on an orange velvet settee just inside the living room. I supposed that was so he could keep an eye on both the elevator and myself.

I looked around the room. Just the night before, it had been filled with a hundred rich people, drinking and chewing. Yet now every piece of furniture—the two dozen sofas, settees, and chairs, all upholstered in sunny summertime yellows, greens, and oranges—along with the endless expanse of beige carpet, appeared spotless. I could not spy the slightest pink remain of cocktail weenie or black speck of caviar anywhere. Either rich people were very careful chewers, or someone had come along with a Shop-Vac, much as I did to clean my clothes.

“Are you terribly angry with me, Mr. Elstrom?” Sweetie Fairbairn asked softly.

I hadn’t heard her enter. She looked wan. As she took my arm, I had the suspicion that Sweetie Fairbairn wasn’t guiding me toward the hall so much as she was hanging on to me, for support.

“Not yet, but there’s still time.”

“Yes,” she said.

We went into the kitchen. It, too, was large, obviously outfitted to feed as many people as the living room could hold. There were two stainless steel refrigerators, a gas stove with many burners and ovens that looked like an antique but probably wasn’t, and several long counters. The four dainty white chairs set at a small table in the corner looked like an afterthought, incongruous in such a large room.

She walked to a cabinet. “Wine, Mr. Elstrom?”

“I try to avoid it.” I saw no need to add that I’d had whiskey in my coffee that morning.

“Good idea.” She took out a bottle and poured three inches into a glass on the counter.

“You have guards on staff?” I asked.

“None on staff. Tim hires them, as needed.” She walked us to the table. “In fact, I no longer have any live-in help.”

“Neither do I,” I said, to be sociable.

Her eyes widened for only a second, until she realized I was having her on. She offered a faint smile. “Most of my life was spent being the help, not having it,” she said.

Part of me wanted to like her for that, as I had for the Velveeta and her tacky office with its crummy furniture and worn postcard of a covered bridge. First, though, I needed to know she wasn’t a killer.

We sat across from each other, in the strong light of a low overhead fixture. Just like on the previous night, her age was impossible to determine, even in the bright light. She could have been forty, she could have been fifty.

She noticed my scrutiny. “Fifty-eight,” she said.

“Wow,” I said.

“Wow for not looking that old? Or wow for not looking that young?”

“Wow for your ability to read minds.”

“Excellent, and very diplomatic.” She took a slow sip of wine and asked, “Was the clown murdered, Mr. Elstrom?”

“His name was James Stitts—”

“I know that. Was he murdered?”

“It would be tough to prove, but yes.”

Her hand shook, just a little, as she set down the glass. “You’re certain?”

I told her the safety rope had been cut, its severed end taken away. It was information she’d paid for.

Her face had paled. “Murder, no doubt.”

“Stitts’s widow said it was a woman who’d hired her husband to go up on that roof. She came to their home in a chauffeured limousine.” I watched her face.

“The woman was blond, of course?”

“Bea Stitts couldn’t see inside the car.”

“She was blond, Mr. Elstrom. That detail would not have been overlooked.”

“You’re being set up?”

She put her hands on the arms of her chair and pushed herself up like she weighed a thousand pounds. “Thank you, Mr. Elstrom.”

I didn’t get up. “You’re being blackmailed?”

She started out of the kitchen as though she hadn’t heard me. I’d been dismissed. I got up and followed her across the living room because there was nothing else to do.

Duggan already had the elevator door open.

Sweetie Fairbairn turned around and walked away.

I went into the elevator. The door closed, and I was sent descending.

I thought, then, of an old comedian’s slurred, confused retort in a drunk-at-a-tavern routine. “I’ve been thrown out of better places than this,” the drunk had bragged, looking around confused but proud, as he’d been tossed onto the sidewalk.

I doubted I’d ever been tossed from classier digs.

Still, I was as confused as the drunk, not at all sure what had just happened.