The Confessors' Club

by Jack Fredrickson

  She stirred her drink for a long minute, and I took a pull from the bottle of de-carbed beer. It tasted like it had been run through something alive, perhaps hooved, to get the carbohydrates out.

  She removed the cocktail stick, its cherry still impaled, and set it on the napkin. ‘I’ve told my father to hire you,’ she said.

  ‘Whoa,’ I said, understanding why she’d played too long with her drink. I set down the bottle of carb-less beer residue. ‘Me, work for your father?’

  Wendell Phelps was no admirer of mine. We’d never talked face-to-face, but we’d argued plenty on the phone after his daughter had been abducted. His arrogance, along with my stupidity, had almost gotten her killed.

  ‘Actually we’ve discussed it several times. No, that’s wrong. I’ve brought it up several times.’

  ‘What, exactly?’

  ‘He’s hired bodyguards.’

  ‘A deranged shareholder or some nut pissed about his electric bill?’

  ‘He won’t say.’

  ‘The business pages say he’s taking heat because of all the service outages. The governor and the mayor are pushing him for equipment upgrades, but the big shareholders don’t want him to spend the money. It’s a real tussle.’

  I reached for the low-carb but quickly stopped my hand; drinking more might stick the taste to my tongue permanently. ‘I also heard his stock price dropped. People have lost money. Maybe some cranky shareholder got wiped out.’

  ‘He said it was nothing like that.’

  ‘What then?’

  She shook her head. ‘He won’t say, other than he hired an investigator to take care of it. The man found out nothing, apparently. My father looks old, Dek; old and afraid and weak.’

  ‘Could that have something to do with his new wife?’ Long a widower, Wendell’s recent marriage lingered only briefly on the society pages before descending into the gossip blogs. The most charitable of them said the bride was charmingly eccentric.

  ‘You’re wondering whether she’s driven him into becoming delusional? I don’t think so. His fear is real.’

  ‘Cops?’

  ‘He hasn’t gone to them.’

  ‘What is it with rich people, so afraid of going to the police?’ A bomb-wielding extortionist had assaulted the mega-rich homeowners in Crystal Waters, yet none of her neighbors wanted to call the cops. At least not until people started getting blown up.

  ‘He said he’d talk to you.’

  ‘Because if he didn’t, you’d hire me yourself, and then he’d lose control of what I learned?’

  She smiled a little. ‘Of course.’

  ‘No doubt he pointed out I’m a lightweight as far as investigators go, that I research records for lawyers, chase down accident information for insurance companies. I don’t do life or death.’

  ‘You did, for me.’

  ‘I got you kidnapped.’

  ‘Talk to him, Dek. Reassure me he’s having some sort of small mental lapse. Tell me he’s just feeling too many ordinary pressures.’

  I smiled then, too, because ultimately that was what I always did with Amanda. Our salads came, and we smiled through them as well. Our awkwardness was disappearing.

  After the play, she told me I’d slept through another magnificent performance. That was too close to old times, too.

  THREE

  Wendell Phelps’s house, stone clad and slate roofed, loomed high, a dark fortress on the bluffs above Lake Michigan. To the south, the Chicago skyline was a blur in the gloom of the late March sky, as though it were a backdrop painted pale and inconsequential to make the magnificent mansion stand out even more. Down below, past the closely mowed lawn and the terrace of tightly trimmed yews, the lake lapped at the edge of the raked beach, gray and vaguely restless.

  One of the doors in the five-car garage was open, exposing the tail end of what I knew was Wendell’s old black Mercedes and, alongside it, the lighter-colored fender of something inexpensively American, likely belonging to a live-in housekeeper. I drove past the garage and stopped behind a dark brown Nissan pickup truck.

  A young woman in her early twenties, wearing a brown sweatshirt that matched the truck, was picking shredded yellow flowers out of the concrete urns at the base of the front steps. Large money bought that; fresh flowers before spring. I got out of the Jeep and smiled at the girl, one tradesperson to another.

  ‘Pigs,’ she said, jamming the ruined blooms into a paper yard-waste bag.

  ‘Ah, but they pay the bills,’ I said, and walked up the stairs to the massive walnut door.

  Amanda told me once that state senators, mayors and business leaders had been summoned to this house, but the only visitor who’d not been made to wait at the door like a pizza driver was the mop-headed former governor of Illinois, now doing prison time out west. Go figure, she’d said, laughing.

  An unremarkable man answered the door. Not tall, not short; not dark haired, not blond; not young and certainly not old. Right down to the faint gray stripes in his bland blue suit, he was indistinct, an average man, a medium all around. The best ones are like that: mediums all around. They don’t get noticed in a crowd. Only the slight bulge in his suit, under the left arm, gave him away. He was one of the bodyguards Amanda had mentioned, and he was packing.

  I showed him my driver’s license. ‘Dek Elstrom to see Mr Phelps.’

  ‘You’re expected.’ He pulled the door open all the way.

  The foyer was dark, lit only by four small wall sconces. It was only after I’d followed him halfway across what seemed like a football field of black-and-white tile that I realized the walls were paneled in walnut as thick as the front door. That the head of Chicago’s largest electric company was wasting none of the company product at home might have come from frugality. Or it could have come from fear.

  The bodyguard knocked on a door, stepped aside, and motioned for me to enter. I went into a library as dim as the foyer. The curtains were drawn. The only light came from a yellow glass lamp on the desk in front of the curtains.

  ‘Mr Elstrom,’ Wendell Phelps said, rising from behind the lamp.

  I’d seen his face in the business news and, of course, in the oil portrait I’d cut to make a Halloween mask in the last drunken days of my marriage. Those pictures were of a younger and more relaxed man. As he came closer, I saw lines deeper than any sixty-three-year-old should have. He wore golf clothes – yellow slacks to match the lamp, and a green knit shirt with a crocodile on it – as though he were about to go hit a bucket of balls in his foyer. The croc’s mouth was open, which fit with what I knew of Wendell Phelps.

  ‘Mr Phelps,’ I said.

  We sat on opposing sofas without shaking hands. A tan envelope lay on the low plank table between us. The only other thing on the table was a small framed photograph of a little girl holding a blue balloon. The picture might have been of Amanda, but it was too small to tell in such dim light.

  ‘What has Amanda told you?’ he asked.

  ‘She said you hired bodyguards, one of which I saw for myself, and that you retained an investigator, who learned nothing.’

  ‘We speak in confidence, you and I? You do not report back to Amanda?’

  ‘So long as you’re the client, and not her.’

  He frowned at the reminder of his daughter’s threat, and pushed the tan envelope an inch toward me. ‘There have already been three murders.’ His hand shook a little as he lifted it from the envelope.

  There were three letter-sized sheets in the envelope. I held them up to catch the faint light from the desk. They were photocopies of obituaries from the Chicago Tribune, the big, quarter-page kind that ran with photographs when someone important died. Each of the three dead men had been prominent in Chicago business. The first had died of a heart attack the previous October, the second from cancer two months later, in December. The most recent had been the victim of a hit-and-run in February, just the month before. None of the obituaries implied murder. I slipped the three sheets back into the
envelope and set it on the table.

  ‘They were murdered,’ he said.

  ‘Did your investigator tell you this, or is this a hunch?’

  ‘That man was ineffective, and I try never to rely on hunches.’

  ‘Two deaths from illness, the third from a hit-and-run. Not the stuff of foul play.’

  ‘They were CEOs of major corporations.’

  His eyes seemed steady; his focus appeared good. Yet he seemed to be speaking gibbered paranoia.

  ‘CEOs die just like ordinary people,’ I said.

  ‘They were murdered,’ he said again.

  ‘Because they were CEOs?’

  ‘Don’t patronize me, Elstrom.’ He turned around to look at the heavy curtains. A thin sliver of light, half the width of a pencil, shone where the two fabric panels did not quite meet. He got up and went to pull them together.

  ‘Yes,’ he said, remaining by the curtains as though worried they’d open again on their own. ‘I believe they were killed because they were CEOs.’

  I stood then, and walked to the desk. Another tiny picture frame had caught my eye. ‘For what motive?’ I asked, picking up the photo.

  It was the same as the one on the plank table: a little girl holding a blue balloon. I wondered whether it was the only childhood photo he had of Amanda.

  ‘I’m hiring you to find that out,’ he said.

  ‘To keep your daughter from nosing into it?’

  ‘She need not worry about this.’

  ‘A plot to kill major business executives would surely interest the brass of the Chicago Police Department. They’ll investigate for free.’

  ‘A man with my links to the business community would lose credibility if such accusations were seen as unsubstantiated, or worse, just plain crazy. The effect on my shareholders would be disastrous. Gather sufficient information, Elstrom, and then I’ll go to the police.’

  He handed me a folded check from the pocket of his golf shirt. It was for two thousand dollars.

  It was too big a retainer to indulge what seemed like a rich man’s delusion, and it was more than I’d made in the last two months. I put the check in my pocket.

  He reached to pinch the seam in the curtains, though no light was coming through. Whatever the man’s tensions were, they were very real to him. I took the manila envelope and showed myself out into the hall. The Medium Man was waiting, and together we made footstep echoes across the marble to the front door.

  The flower girl had almost finished replacing the shredded yellow blossoms with vibrant, dark red blooms. I winked at her as I came down the concrete stairs.

  She frowned. ‘Pigs,’ she said.

  FOUR

  The Bohemian’s offices are on the top floor of a ten-story rehabbed yellow brick factory on the west side of Chicago. The ancient wrought-iron elevator doors opened right into the reception area. Earnest-looking bond and stock-fund salespeople, wearing good suits and carrying thin attachés, sat on the green leather wing chairs and sofas, studying the proposals they were about to pitch to the Bohemian’s staff of financial advisors. I crossed the red oriental carpet to the black walnut reception desk.

  ‘Dek Elstrom, wondering if I might have a moment of Mr Chernek’s time.’

  The receptionist was new, a tanned brunette at least a decade shy of murmuring the word ‘Botox.’ She flashed a perfect white smile. ‘Do you have an appointment, Mr Elstrom?’

  I shook my head. ‘If you would just ask?’

  ‘Certainly, sir.’ She pushed a button on her telephone console and said my name with a question mark into the thin mouthpiece of her headset.

  Behind me, I thought I heard the uneasy shifting of good wool. The tailored suits had sensed a sudden intrusion of polyester. Though my blue blazer, with but the merest hint of mustard on the left cuff, had a forty-five per cent wool content, a blend is a blend, and was as out of place in that reception area as a bongo drummer at a chamber recital. Even the grandfather clock in the corner seemed to stop ticking, anticipating my swift dispatch.

  Buffy, the Bohemian’s frozen-faced, helmet-haired assistant, materialized in less than a minute to hold the door open for me. And a woman in one of the green leather chairs behind me sighed.

  In a different life, I couldn’t have gotten into Anton Chernek’s offices to wash the windows. He’s an advisor – a consigliere to Chicago’s most prominent families, the ones whose names adorn the city’s museums and parks, endow its philanthropies, and attend its most fashionable events. I imagined his financial counseling was straightforward enough – the usual recommendations on blue- chip stocks, bonds, mutual funds and such – but it’s his role as the go-to guy for other, touchier concerns that defines his real value to the city’s ruling elite. When a problem arises that cannot be handled traditionally – a divorce arising from the gamier appetites of human behavior; a scion caught cheating at a prestigious university; an embezzlement within a family firm – the rich summon the Bohemian. He is wise and he is discreet. He makes problems go away quietly, with smiling assurances, packets of cash and, if need be, swift retribution.

  We first met when he accompanied Amanda’s lawyers to our divorce settlement conference. He’d liked that I’d brought no lawyer and no demands. Months later, he hired me to uncover who’d begun blowing up houses in Amanda’s gated community. The case got more gnarly when Chernek was accused of embezzling from his clients. The charge was false, but he was publicly humiliated, and that cost him most of his staff and, for a time, many of his clients.

  I knew about false accusations, so I didn’t pile on. I kept on reporting to him as though nothing had happened. He never forgot that, or the fact that I never hit him up for freebie financial advice about how to manage the 250 dollars I’d rat-holed in a passbook savings account.

  ‘Vuh-lo-dek,’ he boomed from behind his carved desk, stretching the two syllables into three. I’m named for my grandfather, a handle that charmed the Bohemian the first time we met. He’s been the only one. Not even an animal used to extract carbohydrates from beer should be named Vlodek.

  I sat in one of the burgundy leather guest chairs. The Bohemian was around sixty, and a big man, just shy of my six feet two. Today he wore a pale yellow, spread-collar shirt with a figured navy tie that perfectly matched the color of the custom coat hanging on his antique mahogany coat rack. His teeth gleamed; his tan glowed. Not a single combed-back silver hair was out of place.

  ‘You’re prospering, Anton,’ I said.

  ‘Times are fine, Vlodek. And you?’

  ‘Improving.’ I handed him Wendell Phelps’s tan envelope. ‘I’m interested in these three men.’

  He removed the photocopies. He might well have been on retainer with the men whose obituaries he was now reading, but his face betrayed nothing. The Bohemian respected confidences, even with the dead.

  ‘Fine businessmen, in the heavy cream,’ he said, looking up. ‘Right up at the top with your ex-father-in-law.’ He leaned forward slightly. ‘Why do their deaths interest you?’

  ‘A client is wondering if anything about those deaths was overlooked.’

  He nodded, respecting my need to maintain confidentiality. ‘How may I help?’

  ‘How well did you know these men?’

  He eased back in his chair. ‘Two of them quite well. The third, Grant Carson, the one who got killed by a car last month, I’d met only at social functions.’

  ‘Have there been rumors about their deaths?’

  ‘None that I’ve heard. It was no surprise that Benno Barberi died of a heart attack last October. His friends knew he had a bad heart,’ he said. ‘Jim Whitman’s death last December came after a long illness, also as the Tribune said. That’s true enough, as far as it goes, but technically his was a suicide. Jim was dying, and he swallowed all his painkillers at one time. The papers had the decency not to print that, though it’s widely known. As for Carson’s hit-and-run, you’ll have to check with the police. They haven’t found the driver, but I don�
�t believe they saw it as anything other than a tragic accident.’ He slipped the papers back into the envel-ope. ‘How is Wendell Phelps, Vlodek?’ His smile had become sly, venturing a guess about who had hired me.

  I gave back just enough of a grin to keep him wondering. ‘How many men in Chicago are like these three?’

  ‘Of their stature in business? Off the top of my head, I’d say perhaps fifty.’

  ‘May I have a list?’

  The Bohemian’s eyes worked to get behind my own. ‘You’ll keep me apprised?’ Meaning that I’d alert him to anyone I thought might be in trouble. Client safety was always his major concern.

  ‘Of course.’ It was a necessary quid pro quo.

  ‘I’ll email names,’ he said.

  FIVE

  Traffic was backed up solid on the outbound expressway. No matter the years of supposed improvements, the Eisenhower is almost always a crawl. In my darker moments, I let myself think a secret cabal of oil and communications executives engineered it that way, to trap drivers into burning up expensive gallons of gasoline while raging on their phones, burning up cell-plan minutes. Like my Goodman Theater imaginings, it’s baloney – a poor man’s cranky fantasy and flimsy as a cobweb – but ever since the Jeep’s radio got boosted, it’s given my mind something to mull when I’m stuck on the Ike.

  I wondered if that sort of paranoia got notched up inside Wendell Phelps. The Tribune had seen nothing suspicious in the deaths of Barberi and Whitman, nor had they reported Carson’s death as anything more sinister than a typical hit-and-run. More calming was the Bohemian’s ear. It was finely tuned, and he kept it pressed to the ground, yet nothing about the three deaths had tripped his sensors. Likely enough, Wendell Phelps had given me nothing more than a dark delusion, except his came with the money to pursue it. Me, I had to get stuck in traffic, sucking auto exhaust, to indulge mine.

  I got back to Rivertown as the dying sun began turning the turret’s rough limestone blocks into a hundred soft shades of yellow, orange, and red. My narrow five story cylinder is always beautiful at sunset, with its shadows and fiery colors, marked hard here and there with the black stripes of the slit windows, but it can be melancholy then as well, a slim monument in dying light to a dead man’s dead dream. The turret was my grandfather’s fantasy. A small-time bootlegger with big-time plans, he built it as the first of four that were to connect with stone walls to form a grand castle on the bank of the Willahock River. The one turret was all he got built. He died broke, leaving behind only a corner of his dream.