The Confessors' Club

by Jack Fredrickson

  I walked down to the river to count leaves. When I’d moved to the turret on the first of a November several years before, out of money and out of hope, the spindly purple ash growing alongside the water had already turned its expected autumn purple color and seemed healthy enough. The next July, after a normal spring, it suddenly shed its leaves. By then, that summer had already gone bad. My records research business was struggling to survive and I was trapped in a seemingly hopeless bomb and extortion case that I could not puzzle through. I took the hollow clacking noise the dying ash’s branches made, in the wind, in the night, as one more sign the world wasn’t spinning right.

  I didn’t need new signs of bad times. When the next new spring came and the other trees along the Willahock began budding and my ash still resembled nothing but upright kindling, I went out with a pole saw. Better to cut it down than to suffer its death rattle in the night any longer.

  I started at the top, sawing and pulling, until all of its brittle upper branches lay on the ground. But as I reset the ladder to cut off one of its two main limbs, I spotted the tiniest tendril of green, no longer than an inchworm, protruding from the bark. I don’t know trees but I know trying, and I left that ash as I’d butchered it: a dinosaur-sized wishbone, thrust upright in defiance against the sky.

  Several years had passed since then, and it was still slow going for me, and for the ash. Yet once again, in this new spring, the tree was unfurling tiny new leaves like little flags of hope. It was only the end of March, too soon to know how many would come, but I kept count as I had in previous springs, as an act of faith. That night, a fresh sprout brought the new spring’s total up to twenty-six.

  I take my positive omens wherever I can find them.

  I spent two hours on the Internet that evening and found nothing to counter what the Trib and the Bohemian’s ear had concluded. There had been nothing premeditated about the deaths of Benno Barberi, Jim Whitman or Grant Carson. Still, I planned to give the deaths a long, last mull on the plane west to San Francisco the next day, before calling Wendell to tell him I’d be refunding almost all of his money. Though with that, painfully, would go my hopes to replace my leaking refrigerator.

  I took a flashlight into the kitchen, laid it in the refrigerator, shut the door and turned off the lights. A pinpoint sparkled next to where the handle was coming loose; air was leaking out there. As I’d told Jenny, such a small rust-through would be easily contained by a Golden Gate Bridge refrigerator magnet.

  Happy times – seeing Jenny, and acquiring a magnet – seemed just around the corner as I reclined in the electric-blue La-Z-Boy, also salvaged from an alley, to watch the start of the ten o’clock news.

  And then the Bohemian called.

  His voice did not resonate with its usual optimism. ‘I started on the list of names at six o’clock. It was fairly straightforward to establish who our prominent businesspeople are, and I was done by seven o’clock. There are forty-six,’ he said, then paused. ‘No,’ he corrected, ‘there were forty-six, before the three deaths.’

  ‘This afternoon you guessed fifty. Pretty close, Anton.’

  ‘Life is not so much about numbers as it is about percentages, Vlodek. That’s why the three deaths are troubling.’

  I shifted the La-Z-Boy to full upright and silenced the four-inch television balanced on my lap. ‘Percentages?’

  ‘Three is too many.’

  ‘Two of the three were men in their sixties, and ill,’ I said. ‘The third was fifty-five, not that it matters, and the victim of a hit-and- run. All three deaths seem easily explainable.’

  ‘Remember the heavy cream?’

  ‘You said all three were among the top fifty business people in Chicago.’

  ‘I misspoke. I meant to use the term more narrowly, to define Barberi, Whitman and Carson as being among the very top of the city’s leaders, in the heaviest of the cream, so to speak.’

  ‘I don’t understand.’

  ‘I just told you there were forty-six top-flight business leaders in Chicago, right?’

  ‘With Barberi, Whitman, and Carson among them.’

  ‘The forty-six was a simple ranking of business prominence. I then filtered that list to include only those individuals prominent in civic, political and charitable endeavors as well.’

  ‘Only those are in the heavy cream,’ I said.

  ‘Exactly. I got down to sixteen names.’

  ‘Of which three are now dead?’

  ‘That’s troubling. Nineteen per cent of the most influential people in Chicago – three of only sixteen – died in the last four months. Mathematically, that’s beyond reason.’

  Anton Chernek never indulged false alarm. He was too level-headed, too grounded. And almost always too well informed.

  ‘I’ll say again, Anton: two were older and ill. The third, Carson, got whacked by a passing car.’

  ‘Yes, and I was inclined to accept it as an anomaly, an explainable oddity.’

  ‘Exactly—’

  He cut me off. ‘Arthur Lamm has gone missing.’

  ‘Arthur Lamm, as in head of Lamm Enterprises?’ Lamm headed a conglomerate of real estate sales, management, and insurance brokerages. He was very prominent: a political player and a close friend of the mayor. There was no doubt he was in the heavy cream.

  ‘A vice-president of his insurance company told me he’s not called in for four days. Do you see what this means?’

  I barely heard his voice. My mind was forming the word that I knew he wanted.

  ‘Vlodek?’ he asked after a minute.

  ‘Percentages,’ I said, giving it to him.

  ‘Arthur’s only fifty-one and, from all accounts, he’s in peak condition. A marathoner, in fact. If he’s met a bad end, he increases your list to four out of sixteen.’

  ‘That’s twenty-five per cent.’

  He murmured something about emailing me his list of names in the morning and hung up.

  I needed fresher air in which to think. I went outside to sit on the bench by the river. A small speck lay on the ground, almost colorless in the pale white light of the lamp along the crumbling asphalt river walk.

  It was one of the would-be leaves from the purple ash, curled up, stillborn and dry.

  Sometimes I don’t like omens at all.

  SIX

  I woke at five-thirty in the morning, remembering the Bohemian’s anxiety about percentages too much to go back to sleep. I put on jeans, a sweatshirt and my Nikes and, stepping around the duffel that lay on the floor, still to be packed for California, I went downstairs.

  The Bohemian wasn’t having a good night either. He’d emailed me his list two hours earlier.

  I printed his list, put on my pea coat and took a travel mug of yesterday’s cold coffee up the stairs and then the ladders to the fifth floor and the roof. I like to believe I think best on top of the turret. Even when I don’t, the dawn likely as not serves up a spectacular sunrise, and that’s a good enough reason to go up on any roof at the end of the dark. I leaned against the balustrade, sipped coffee and looked out across the spit of land at Rivertown, waiting for the cold caffeine and the chilled, pre-dawn air to rouse me from a sleep that never much was.

  The town was softly shutting down. The tonks along Thompson Avenue were switching off their flickering neon lights, discharging their last, hardiest customers into the night. The slow-walking girls who smiled into the headlights of the slow-cruising gentlemen were shuffling away too, alone at last. And from somewhere down by the river, the sound of shattering glass rose above the rasping staccato of automobile tires hitting the rub strips on the tollway; a trembling hand had let go of an empty pint. Rivertown was twitching itself to sleep.

  The thin hint of orange rising over Lake Michigan was bright enough to read what the Bohemian had sent. He’d drawn a simple grid, labeled it ‘H.C.’ for Heavy Cream – a wit, that Bohemian, even when troubled. On the left side of the sheet he’d listed the sixteen primo shakers of Chicago in alphabeti
cal order. Across the page he’d made columns for the criteria he’d used to select them: business affiliations, political access, social and civic relationships. He’d assigned letter grades for each person, for each category, like a report card. Almost all of the boxes were filled with an ‘A.’

  All but two on the list were men. The Bohemian’s Chicago, that world of vast money coupled to political and social influence, was still very much a boys’ club. The names seemed vaguely familiar in the way that names captioned under society news photographs often seem familiar. Yet if asked, I couldn’t have said what most of the primos in the heavy cream had done to achieve their prominence. My own world existed farther down, in the muck stuck to the bottom of what was Chicagoland.

  The Bohemian had put asterisks next to the names of Barberi, Carson and Whitman. In the middle of the page, next to the name of the missing Arthur Lamm, he’d first drawn a question mark, then added an asterisk.

  Asterisk meant death. It was those four asterisks, those four names out of sixteen, which had kept the Bohemian up in the night.

  It was the fifth person on the list, four lines below Arthur Lamm’s, who had put me in a trick bag: Wendell Phelps. For that, I now hated the son of a bitch even more than before.

  My history with the man was limited. I’d called Wendell’s office right after Amanda and I married, thinking it reasonable to introduce myself as the man who’d wed the daughter he hadn’t seen in years – and maybe become a hero to my new wife, by effecting a reconciliation between the two.

  I never got past the secretary to his secretary. No matter, I thought; there would be time to try again later.

  There wasn’t. I was soon implicated in a fake evidence scheme, having erroneously authenticated cleverly doctored checks in a high-profile insurance fraud trial. My name flashed dark across the front pages of Chicago’s newspapers, there not for the notoriety of the trial, or my sloppiness, but because I was Wendell Phelps’s son-in-law. I was soon found to be innocent, but I was guilty of being stupid – and of being Wendell’s son-in-law. The publicity vaporized my credibility and killed my records research business. Unmoored, I poured alcohol on my self-pity. I blamed Wendell for my notoriety and found that so satisfying that, with the logic of someone totally lost to alcohol, I spread that blame to Amanda for being my link to him. No matter that she’d been estranged from her father for years. In my twisted, liquored logic, she was a most convenient target, and that was enough for me.

  It was too much for Amanda. She filed for divorce and I got flushed out of her gated community – appropriately enough, on Halloween – unmasked as a fool.

  I crawled back to Rivertown, the town I thought I’d escaped years before, and into the rat-infested turret I’d inherited from another failed man, my grandfather. Amanda fled to Europe, because she had no good place to go either. As I sobered up, I blamed Wendell Phelps for that, too. No matter that I’d trashed his daughter’s life; he could have descended from his executive suite to help undo the damage I’d done.

  Amanda and Wendell later reconciled, so much so that he enticed Amanda to quit her jobs writing art books and teaching at the Art Institute to join his utilities conglomerate.

  He and I had never had need for reconciling anything. We were done, and that was fine for us both.

  Except now he was bringing new breath to old furies. If I misplayed his case, investigated what were delusions too seriously, the press might get wind of it and trigger his public humiliation. Worse, if the Bohemian’s fears of percentages were accurate and there really was a murderer out there, targeting Wendell and his ilk, my misplaying the case could get people killed.

  Damn the man, Wendell Phelps.

  By now, the glow of sunrise had risen above the massive dark shapes of Chicago to touch the top of the turret. Mine is the tallest building in Rivertown, a modest attainment in a town of abandoned factories, huddled bungalows and deserted storefronts. The only grand building in town, a city hall of long terraces, expansive private offices and tiny public rooms, was still in the darkness behind me. It, too, had been built of my grandfather’s limestone, but later, by corrupt city managers who saw no shame in seizing most of his widow’s land and all of its great pile of unused stone blocks. But those lizards couldn’t take the sun, nor change the fact that it always lit the turret first every day. I took satisfaction in that.

  I crossed the roof to look down at the river. The sunrise would soon light the butchered, two-limbed ash, causing it to cast a dark, jagged ‘V’ west along the river path. The shadow would look like a giant, crooked-fingered hex, a Greek moutza of contempt, thrust directly at Rivertown’s corrupt city hall. I took satisfaction in that, too.

  Likely enough, there would be no satisfaction in the direction I was now heading.

  Damn the man, Wendell Phelps.

  SEVEN

  News of Arthur Lamm’s disappearance had not yet hit the Internet, so I searched for more information on Grant Carson’s hit-and-run, the most recent of the deaths in the heavy cream. There was plenty of speculation over the impact his passing would have on his international conglomerate, but there were very few facts surrounding the hit-and-run, and no suspicion that his death had been premeditated murder.

  On a day in early February, just after midnight, Grant Carson had pulled his Lincoln Town Car sharply to a curb, got out and was struck by a passing car. He was thrown twenty feet and died instantly. The police noted that by all appearances it had been an accident: Carson had stepped out of his car without checking for oncoming traffic; a car had struck him. Panicked, the driver sped away. The police were seeking anyone who might have witnessed the accident.

  I phoned a dozen of my insurance company contacts to learn who’d carried policies on Carson’s life. I wasn’t interested in beneficiary information; I was hoping an insurance company’s private investigation had yielded more than the few facts the cops had released. It was the kind of work I used to do often, before I got tangled up in scandal. I struck gold nowhere, but got promises that others would ask around.

  By now it was eight o’clock in the morning in California. I called Jenny. ‘I’ve got a job,’ I said.

  ‘A trip-canceling job?’

  ‘More like a trip-rescheduling job.’

  ‘It’s life or death, this case?’

  ‘I’m fearing that.’

  ‘What aren’t you telling me?’ Her newswoman’s antennae had picked up words I’d not used.

  ‘Amanda’s father is the client.’

  ‘And Amanda – she’s involved, too?’

  ‘Only to have steered me to her father. I’m working for him.’

  ‘We were going to have such an amazing four days,’ she said, dropping her voice.

  ‘I know.’

  ‘An amazingly lustful four days,’ she said, whispering now.

  ‘Oh, how I’d hoped …’ I said.

  ‘Oh, how I hope you’d hoped,’ she whispered one last time, and hung up.

  Mercifully, in the next instant I got a call to change the direction of my thwarted naughty thoughts. It was from Gaylord Rikk. He worked for one of Carson’s insurers.

  ‘What’s your interest?’ he asked.

  ‘One of Carson’s rich friends asked me to follow up to see if anything new has been uncovered,’ I said, trying for casual.

  ‘Ask the cops.’

  ‘I will. What’s the status of your investigation?’

  ‘There is none. We’ve closed our file.’

  ‘So soon?’

  ‘It’s been over a month. The police have no leads.’

  ‘The area where Carson got hit is upscale, full of nightlife. It was only midnight. Surely someone saw something.’

  ‘Only midnight,’ Rikk agreed, ‘in a late-night district that’s full of Starbucks, young bucks and sweet girls.’

  ‘Nobody was headed home after a late last purple cocktail or out walking a designer dog?’

  He gave me the sort of long sigh one gives an idiot. ‘Rem
ember a few years ago, some young woman hit a homeless guy with her car, knocked him up over her hood and half through the windshield?’

  ‘Everyone remembers that.’

  ‘She drove all the way home with the guy stuck, head first, through her windshield. That was at midnight, too, when there were other cars on the road and people out walking. She pulled into her garage with the poor bastard still alive, his head and upper body leaking fluids into her car. He pleaded with her to get him help. Nope. She left him as he was and went into the house – though at the trial she assured the judge she did come out several times to apologize profusely to the guy for ruining his day, or whatever.’

  It was the kind of thing I thought about, up on the roof in the middle of the night. ‘The guy finally bled out.’

  ‘The point is that she drove through town with the guy’s ass sticking out of her windshield, and nobody reported anything. She got caught only when she asked a few friends over to help remove the body. It was one of them who called the cops.’

  ‘Was is mechanical difficulty that forced Carson to the curb, or was he drunk?’

  ‘Neither. No mechanical problems, other than a right front wheel bent from hitting the curb. His blood alcohol was under the limit. He wasn’t drunk.’

  ‘You think he was forced over?’

  ‘And got out mad to confront another driver who’d stopped, or just to inspect his car for damage? Possible scenarios, both of them.’

  ‘Why get out at all? If his car was not drivable, why not call AAA or someone else for help?’