Hunting Sweetie Rose : A Mystery (9781429950879) Read Online Free

green trousers, obnoxiously bright even through the double filters of the truck and turret windows. It was Leo, in bloom. I went out, set my toolbox in the truck bed, and got in.
    â€œWhere the hell are we going?” I asked, by way of a greeting.
    His thick, bushy eyebrows cavorted on his narrow bald head like overcaffeinated caterpillars. “I’ve had a flash of genius. We’re off to get fitness equipment, for Ma.”
    He is five foot six and weighs the same one-forty he did in high school. Also like in high school, he lives with his mother in her brown brick bungalow in Rivertown because she won’t consider living anywhere else.
    His expertise is in establishing provenance. The big auction houses in Chicago and on both coasts pay him in excess of a half-million dollars a year to establish the lineage of the pieces they offer to their bidders. For Christie’s, Sotheby’s, and the others, he wears Armani suits selected by his girlfriend, Endora, an exotic onetime model and current researcher at the Newberry Library. For me and his other friends, he selects duds from the back rack at the Discount Den, Rivertown’s retailer of odd lots of hardware, appliances, canned goods, and occasionally clothing that no one but Leo wants.
    As he headed toward Thompson Avenue, Rivertown’s seedy adult playground, I studied the day’s ensemble. Regrettably, I’d seen the lime green pants before, as I had the black-and-white saddle shoes. The shirt, however, was new. It was no ordinary tropic yellow. It was covered—or perhaps more accurately, infested—with multilegged insects, the color of blood. Like all of his casual shirts, he’d purchased it in double extra large. He won’t admit it, but I believe he buys them wretchedly oversized so he can crawl into them without unbuttoning them first.
    â€œFitness equipment, for Ma?” I asked.
    â€œYou’ve got a client?”
    It wasn’t like Leo to dodge any question, but I went along. “A security guy came by in a limousine yesterday. He hired me to look into the death of the clown that went off the Rettinger building.”
    He looked over. “It wasn’t an accident, like the paper said?”
    â€œHe didn’t say what he thought. Nor whether he’s inquiring on his own or for somebody else.”
    â€œA negligence liability issue for the building’s owners?”
    â€œThat’s what I would have thought, but there’s something else.” I told him about the door on the roof. “It should have been marked by the rope pulling away. I’m waiting for a cop to call, to tell me what they’re thinking.” I turned on the seat. “So, fitness equipment, for Ma?”
    â€œA healthier body can lead to a healthier mind.” His eyes stayed fixed on the road.
    For years, Ma Brumsky—a low-slung, gray-haired babushka who favors catalog housedresses and furry slippers—had run a proper Polish, fish-on-Fridays Catholic home. She played bingo at the church, knitted for charity, and had other Polish ladies—all but one widows like her—over for cards every eighth Saturday evening. Other than tippling at Leo’s whiskey, and stealing the occasional coffee cup or silverware setting for two when Leo took her out to dinner, the woman had led an exemplary life.
    Until Leo bought her a big-screen television.
    It loomed in their front room, taller even than the high-backed sofa Ma had kept pristine for decades under a succession of clear plastic slipcovers. With its side speakers, the set was almost as wide, too.
    It wasn’t the size and the sound of the new TV that took over Ma’s life, though; it was the adventure it summoned. For, after a week, possibly two, of marveling at how her regular shows—the soaps, the realities, the cop dramas, even the shopping channel—had been transformed by being quadrupled in size, Ma Brumsky ventured toward newer