The Confessors' Club

by Jack Fredrickson

  ‘We don’t know. He had a cell phone. He didn’t use it.’

  ‘What about paint from the car that hit Carson?’

  ‘No sample was recovered from his body or the smashed-back driver’s door. Don’t trust what you see on TV. Paint doesn’t always transfer. Plus, the point of impact could have been glass or stainless or chrome-plated steel, or the car could have had one of those front-end bra things.’

  ‘One of those vinyl covers yuppies used to put on the fronts of their BMWs to protect against stone dings?’

  ‘You still see one, now and again,’ he said, ‘though most everybody knows they do their own damage, flapping against the paint. All I’m saying is there are all sorts of reasons why paint doesn’t transfer.’

  ‘The cops played it by the book, sent out alerts to body shops?’

  ‘Ideally, but there again, those bulletins work mostly on television. Hit-and-run drivers are ordinary people who freak out. They panic, stick the car in the garage and don’t open the door for anything. After a day or two of dry puking and no sleep, they get the idea to dump the car in a bad neighborhood with its keys in the ignition and report it stolen. It almost always works; the car gets boosted and stripped. Hit-and-run cars never get brought to legitimate body shops.’

  ‘Where did Carson have dinner?’

  ‘Somewhere north, I suppose, near where he was killed. He lives up that way, in Lincoln Park. The payout’s being processed, Elstrom. The case is dead.’

  I called the Bohemian. ‘Any news on Arthur Lamm?’

  ‘Perhaps there’s been much ado about nothing. He has a camp somewhere up in the piney woods of Wisconsin. He does the real outdoors stuff: small boat, small tent, eating what he catches swimming in the water or crawling on the ground.’ The Bohemian’s tone of disgust made it sound like Lamm dined on roadkill. ‘Anyway, Arthur has some guy who stops in from time to time to check on the place. He said one of Arthur’s boats is missing.’

  ‘Meaning Lamm is off somewhere camping.’

  He offered up a chuckle that sounded forced. ‘I might be imagining evil everywhere, in my old age.’

  I asked if he could put me close to people who knew Barberi and Whitman.

  ‘I’m not just imagining, Vlodek?’

  ‘I like to be thorough.’

  ‘I’ll call you back.’

  He did, in fifteen minutes. ‘Anne Barberi is at home. You can go right over.’

  ‘You told her what I’m looking into?’

  ‘Here’s the odd part: I didn’t have time. She interrupted, saying she’d receive you immediately. She’s anxious to talk.’

  EIGHT

  Anne Barberi lived at the Stanford Arms, a tall, upscale gray brick-and-granite building across from the Lincoln Park Zoo. While the upper floors surely provided magnificent vistas of Lake Michigan, I imagined the lower apartments occasionally offered troubling views of coupling chimpanzees, and suspected that those units were equipped with electrified, fast-closing drapes. Even when living the good life along Chicago’s Gold Coast, the rich had to be vigilant.

  A parking valet leaning against a Mercedes straightened up with a pained look on his face, likely soured by the clatter of my arrival. I thought about pulling in to give him a closer blast of my rusted exhaust, but the thrill wouldn’t have been worth the parking charge. I drove on, found a spot on a street four blocks over, and hoofed back.

  The lobby was enormous, dark and deserted except for two potted palms and two potted elderly ladies, slumped in peach-colored velvet wing chairs, sipping fruited whiskies. The oily-haired man behind the oak reception counter scanned my khakis, blue button-down shirt and blazer like he was looking for resale shop tags.

  ‘Dek Elstrom to see Mrs Barberi,’ I said to the oiled man.

  ‘Photo identification, sir?’

  I gave him my driver’s license. As he studied it, and then me, the corners of his mouth turned down, as if he were wondering whether the blue shirt in the photo was the same one I was wearing. Such was wealth, I wanted to tell him. Even I didn’t know; I had three.

  ‘A moment, sir,’ the man said, handing back my license. He picked up the phone, tapped three digits and said my name. Nodding, he hung up. ‘Mrs Barberi is expecting you.’

  I turned and almost ran into a burly fellow who had noiselessly slipped up behind me.

  ‘Mr Reeves will show you to the elevator,’ the oiled man said.

  He meant Mr Reeves would show me only to the elevator, and nowhere else. We walked to the farthest of the three sets of polished brass elevator doors and Mr Reeves pressed the button. I stepped in and the doors closed before I could ask which floor was Anne Barberi’s.

  There was no need. The elevator panel had only one button, and it was not numbered. After a short whir and the merest tug of gravity, the doors opened directly into a rose-colored, marble-floored foyer. A gray-haired woman wearing a lavender knit suit stood waiting. Likely enough, she hadn’t strung the jumbo pearls around her wrinkled neck from a kit.

  ‘I’m Anne Barberi,’ she said, extending a hand that was as firm and in command as her voice. I followed her to a small sitting room. She sat on a hardwood ladder-back chair; I sat on a rock hard, brocaded settee. Freshly cut yellow flowers sat just as stiff between us, on a black-lacquered table.

  ‘Mr Chernek tells me you have questions concerning my husband’s death,’ she said.

  ‘I’m afraid they’re not very specific.’

  ‘At whose behest are you conducting your inquiry?’

  I’d considered inventing a lie, but decided simply to stonewall to protect Wendell’s identity. Truths are always easier to remember than lies. ‘One of your husband’s associates,’ I said.

  ‘Within Barberi Holdings?’

  ‘No.’

  ‘Fair enough, for now.’ She folded her hands in her lap.

  ‘I understand Mr Barberi had a long history of heart disease,’ I said.

  ‘For twenty years, he’d been careful, monitoring his cholesterol, exercising under supervision, watching his diet. At work, he chose very able assistants, young men and women who could shoulder much of the stress. My husband was cautious with his heart, Mr Elstrom, which is why I am interested in what you are doing.’

  ‘I’m merely gathering facts, for now.’

  She studied me for a moment, realized I wasn’t going to offer more, and went on. ‘As I said, Benno kept a tight lid on the pressures of his job. Until the night he died, when he lost control. He came home from a dinner furious, literally trembling because he was so upset. I tried to get him to sit and tell me what had happened, but he would not. He went into his study, and a few minutes later, I heard him shouting into the phone.’ She looked down at her hands. She’d clenched them so tight the knuckles had whitened. Pulling them apart, she looked up. ‘I found him in there the next morning, slumped over his desk.’

  ‘Do you have any idea who he’d called?’

  ‘I assumed one of his subordinates, but I really don’t know.’

  ‘No one thought to question what set him off?’

  ‘Come to think of it, no.’

  ‘Can we find out?’

  ‘Surely you’re not sensing something deliberate, are you?’

  ‘I like to check everything out.’

  ‘His secretary might be able to help.’ She reached for the phone next to the vase and dialed a number. ‘Anne, Joan. Fine, fine,’ she said, brushing away the obligatory questions about her well-being. ‘I’ve asked a friend, a Mr Elstrom, to find out something for me. I want to know with whom Benno was speaking on the phone, the night he died. It was about some matter that upset him greatly.’ She paused to listen, then said, ‘I’ll tell Mr Elstrom you’ll call him to set up an appointment.’ She read the number from the business card I’d given her, then hung up.

  ‘Joan was Benno’s secretary for years,’ she said. ‘She knows things she’ll never tell me, but she’s always been loyal to Benno. And unlike me, she did think to inquire
with whom Benno was speaking the night he passed away. He’d set up a conference call with two of his subordinates. She’ll make them available to you.’

  She walked me into the foyer and pushed the elevator button. ‘It was not like Benno to allow himself to become so upset, Mr Elstrom. I won’t ask again what you’re pursuing, but I expect the courtesy of a report when you’re done.’

  I said I’d tell her what I could, when I could. As I stepped into the elevator, it seemed likeliest that Benno Barberi had simply lost control as accidentally as had the driver of the freak passing car that had smacked Grant Carson. But as the elevator descended, I imagined I heard the Bohemian’s voice intermingled in the soft whine of the motor, whispering urgently about the certainty of percentages. And by the time the door opened, I almost knocked over the burly Mr Reeves in my haste to get out. I hurried across the tomb-like foyer, silent except for the ancient ladies gently snoring beside their drained whiskies, and out into the daylight.

  I called the Bohemian from the sidewalk. ‘Any luck on getting someone close to Whitman to talk to me?’

  ‘He was a widower. I left a message, and your cell number, for his daughter, Debbie Goring.’

  ‘She’ll call soon?’

  ‘My God, Vlodek, do I detect urgency?’

  ‘I don’t know.’

  ‘You’ve seen Anne Barberi?’

  ‘I just left her.’

  ‘And?’

  ‘Call Debbie Goring again.’

  NINE

  I was stuck waiting for the Bohemian to set up a call from Whitman’s daughter, Debbie Goring. I could do it pacing the planks at the turret, or I could indulge in the illusion of exercise at the Rivertown Heath Center. I chose illusion.

  The health center is a stained, yellowish brick pile that used to be a YMCA, back when young people came to work in Rivertown’s factories and needed rooms, and running was considered exercise instead of a means of fleeing the police. Nowadays, the health center still has a running track and exercise equipment, and it still offers rooms, though now the equipment is rusted and the rooms are occupied by down-and-out drinkers working only half-heartedly to stay alive.

  I knew those foul-smelling, dimly lit rooms. After being flushed, drunk, out of Amanda’s gated community, I spent the night at the health center, as vacant-eyed as any of the grizzlies who puddled the upstairs halls. Waking the next morning in a room still damp from the pine-scented cleaner used to mask the death of its previous occupant, I looked up and recognized rock bottom. I moved into the turret, clear-eyed for the first time in weeks, and began inching my way back to life.

  I still come to the health club. The exercise doesn’t hurt, and the sting of pine-scented cleaner in my eyes and nose is a fine reminder not to slip that far again.

  I eased over the potholes and parked in my usual spot next to the doorless Buick. As always, the lot was empty except for a half-dozen thumpers – high-school-age toughs in training – leaning against the husks of several other abandoned cars. I made a show of leaving my door unlocked. There was no sense in making them rip the duct tape from my plastic side curtains only to see that the seats had already been slashed and the radio boosted from the dash.

  Downstairs, I changed into my red shorts and blue Cubs T-shirt quietly, pretending not to disturb the towel attendant pretending to sleep at the counter. Authentically, he was even drooling on the short pile of stained towels. Nobody minded; nobody dared use them. As with the Jeep, I left my locker door unlocked. The attendant need not dull his bolt cutters only to see I’d not left my wallet or keys inside.

  Normally, raucous laughter from the exercise floor echoed down into the stairwell – chatter from the men in their sixties and seventies, retired from jobs that no longer existed, who came not to exercise but to laugh and sigh and share old stories. Not so today. The stairs to the exercise floor were eerily silent.

  I understood when I got to the top. The regulars were all there – Dusty, Nick, Frankie and the others – roosting as usual on the rusted fitness machines like crows on felled trees. But that day, nobody was joking. They were staring across the exercise floor.

  ‘Purr,’ Dusty said softly.

  ‘Doo,’ Frankie murmured, almost worshipfully.

  The others nodded, staring, just as transfixed as Dusty and Frankie. Big, yellow-toothed grins split their wrinkled faces.

  Across the floor was a woman. She was no ordinary woman. She was a big woman, a jaw-droppingly huge woman, the biggest woman I’d ever seen. She was at least six-foot eight and three hundred pounds, but she packed no fat. Every ounce of her was perfectly proportioned, solid and muscular. And she was beautiful, with golden skin and long, dark hair. She was stretching and bending with the grace of a tiny ballerina, curving her body in such lazy, perfectly fluid motions that I could only imagine what long-smoldering embers were being fanned into a full blaze in the minds of the exercise room regulars.

  She turned, so that her back was towards us.

  ‘Purr,’ Dusty said.

  ‘Doo,’ Frankie added.

  The Amazonian goddess wore black collegiate exercise shorts, emblazoned with the university’s name in yellow letters across the rump. Those kind of printed shorts are designed with a gap in the middle letters, to allow the fabric in the center to curve into the cleft of the buttocks, yet still be read as one word. But her shorts, probably a man’s double extra-large, were stretched so taut that the name read as two distinct words: ‘PUR’ and ‘DUE’.

  I left the old men to the frenzy of their imaginations and ran laps.

  Amanda called my cell phone that evening. ‘Still in town?’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘Is that worrisome?’

  ‘Tying up little loose ends, is all.’

  ‘My father said you stopped by.’

  ‘Yesterday.’

  ‘How come you didn’t then call right away to say he’s delusional?’

  ‘I’m trying to be thorough, dot my “t”s, cross my “i”s.’

  ‘Don’t dodge with cheap humor.’

  ‘I report to your father, not to you.’

  She took a breath. ‘You think there’s something to his fears?’

  ‘Probably not.’

  ‘Now I am worried.’

  ‘Don’t be. There are just a couple of wrinkles I want to check out.’

  ‘Wrinkles?’

  Too late, I realized she remembered my hot word. A wrinkle was my slang for something troubling enough to require being checked thoroughly.

  I tried to joke. ‘The older I get the more I’m like an aging beauty queen. Even the smallest wrinkles demand more attention than they’re worth.’

  She let it go because she knew I wouldn’t say more. We tried other, smaller talk but it was stilted, like the stuff of two people passing time, sharing a cab. After another moment, I invented an excuse to get off the phone. She didn’t try to find an excuse to stop me.

  I supposed that, too, was a wrinkle.

  TEN

  Benno Barberi’s secretary called just before nine the next morning. I’d been up since five, varnishing wood trim for the third-floor closet and thinking about men dead in the heavy cream. She asked if I could meet with Barberi’s two assis-tants at one o’clock. I said that was convenient. She said fine.

  Barberi Holdings, Inc. was headquartered north of Chicago, in a concrete building sunk low, like a bunker, into the rolling close-cut grass alongside the Tri-State Toll Road. The interior was just as hard – concrete walls and a blue quarry tile floor. The receptionist took my name and motioned me to wait on one of the immense, curved white leather sofas. As I sat, my left blazer sleeve grazed the sofa cushion. And stuck. I tugged it free and turned it for a look. A smashed drop of varnish sparkled next to the spot of yellow mustard I’d forgotten to rub off.

  I draped my sticky left arm high on the back of the sofa and used my right hand to leaf through a Forbes magazine. The issue featured the 400 wealthiest people on the planet. Their brief bi
ographies were disappointing. None of them had made their fortunes rehabbing architectural oddities.

  A young man named Brad came for me after five minutes. He wore a blue suit and had an impeccable haircut. He brought me to a small conference room where another young man, this one named Jason, stood waiting. He also looked to have recently visited Brad’s barber. His blue suit was the identical shade of Brad’s, as was my blazer. But mine, I guessed, was the only one sporting a shiny speck of varnish and the merest blush of yellow mustard.

  We sat at the round table and Brad began. ‘We understand Mrs Barberi is interested in the problem we discussed with Mr Barberi the night he died?’

  ‘She told me her husband took great care to control stress, yet that evening he came home very upset about something. She thinks that triggered his fatal heart attack.’

  Jason spoke. ‘Mr Barberi called me at home; I conferenced in Brad. Mr Barberi was worried someone was making a play for equity in the company’s stock.’

  ‘Isn’t Barberi Holdings a publicly traded company?’ I asked. ‘Can’t anyone buy its stock?’

  Jason’s gaze had dropped to the sleeve of my blazer. He’d spotted the varnish, or perhaps the mustard. For a second he seemed to struggle to raise his eyes to focus again on my face. ‘How technical do you want me to be?’

  ‘A short answer will do.’

  ‘Yes, BH is a publicly held corporation. Anyone can buy its stock. The night Mr Barberi died, he learned that a company he’d never heard of had acquired an insurance policy on his life. He was afraid the insurance payout would be used to acquire BH stock when he died.’

  ‘And gain control of the company?’

  ‘Hardly.’ Jason’s eyes had begun to stray again, down to my sleeve, but he stopped them cold and looked back up. ‘It would take many, many such insurance policies for that. Still, it was an agitation, and he wanted us to look into the matter.’

  ‘Look into what, exactly?’

  ‘He wanted us to find out who had taken out the policy.’