The Confessors' Club

by Jack Fredrickson

  ‘Even though such an individual could do no damage?’

  Jason looked at Brad. Brad shook his head. ‘It’s complicated,’ Jason said.

  ‘You’re thinking I won’t understand business talk?’ I said, too fast. It was the Rivertown chip that occasionally throbs on my shoulder, reacting to two condescending, over-barbered MBAs. I smiled like I was making a little joke, to cover it.

  ‘Anyone who acquires stock can have a voice at the annual shareholders’ meeting,’ Jason said. ‘Someone who owns a large block can have a louder voice, and that can be disruptive.’

  Brad cleared his throat. ‘It’s pointless, now.’

  ‘Because Mr Barberi is dead?’

  Brad nodded.

  ‘Mrs Barberi will not be pleased if I come back empty-handed, so I’ll ask again: Did you look into the company that took out the policy on Barberi?’

  Jason said, ‘As Brad said, it was pointless. Mr Barberi was dead.’

  They both stood up. They were concerned about their own futures, not the king. The king was dead; long live the king. And I was an inconsequential interloper with varnish and mustard on his jacket. They walked me to the lobby, went through the charade of telling me to call anytime with more questions, and breezed me out into the sunshine.

  Before getting into the Jeep, I took off my blazer to lay it on the back seat to dry. As I opened the door, I happened to look back at the building. Brad, or perhaps it was Jason, was standing in one of the windows at the side of the lobby, watching me.

  Or perhaps it was neither, but another well-barbered MBA, taking an innocent look outside. The place must have been lousy with them.

  Then again, that was probably just Rivertown talking.

  ELEVEN

  There were two messages from Wendell on my cell phone. I returned neither. I hadn’t learned enough to dismiss his suspicions outright, or enough to interest any cop.

  I called the Bohemian. ‘Arthur Lamm?’

  ‘No news might be good news, if he’s simply out in the woods, eating insects. Debbie Goring?’

  ‘No news is irritating news. She hasn’t called.’ Then, ‘How common is it for a company to insure the life of the CEO of another company?’

  ‘It’s done sometimes when a shareholder makes a big investment in the CEO’s company. The loss of a chief executive can be catastrophic to the investment, hence the insurance policy.’

  ‘Is the CEO, whose life is being insured, notified when a policy is taken out on him?’

  ‘Almost certainly, because medical history and perhaps even an actual physical will be required. Plus, CEOs are always in touch with their big shareholders. They need their support at shareholder meetings. Where are you going with this, Vlodek?’

  ‘I have no idea.’

  ‘Do you want me to call Debbie Goring again?’

  ‘No. Give me her address. I’ll stop by.’

  Debbie Goring lived in Prospect Park, a few miles east of O’Hare airport. Hers was a beige bi-level in an older mix of ranch houses and other bi-levels.

  A green Ford Taurus station wagon with its tailgate up was parked in her driveway. A short, squarish, dark-haired woman in blue Levis and a plain black T-shirt was pulling grocery bags out of the back of the car. The T-shirt wasn’t long enough to cover the death’s head skull tattoo on her lower spine. I parked the Jeep in the street and walked up.

  ‘Debbie Goring?’ I said.

  She straightened up, a grocery bag in each arm, and turned around. Most of her was in her early forties, but the skin around her eyes was deeply wrinkled, as though she’d spent sixty years squinting distrustfully at the world.

  ‘Unless you’re from the Illinois Lottery, bringing a check for a million dollars, she’s not home.’ Her voice was raspy from too many cigarettes.

  ‘I’m Dek Elstrom,’ I said. ‘I’m not from the lottery.’

  ‘No shit,’ she said.

  ‘An associate of mine, Anton Chernek—’

  She cut me off. ‘I’ve gotten Chernek’s messages. I’m not interested in talking to any more insurance bastards.’

  ‘I’m not an insurance bastard.’

  ‘What then?’

  ‘A freelance bastard, with questions about your father’s death. Can I help with the bags?’

  She hefted the bags closer to her chest and started to walk towards the front door. Tops of four cereal boxes – two Cheerios, two Cinnamon Toast Crunch – protruded out of the brown bags. Oats and sugar seemed a sensible mix; she must have been a sensible woman. ‘Adios,’ she called over her shoulder.

  ‘I’m serious about investigating your father’s death.’

  She stopped and turned around, hugging the bags. ‘For who?’

  ‘I can’t tell you, but it’s not for an insurance company.’

  She lifted her chin. ‘My father was murdered.’

  I held out my arms for one of the grocery bags.

  She shook her head. ‘There’s another bag in the car, and two gallons of milk. And slam the back lid.’

  I went back for the bag and the gallons, closed the tailgate and followed her to the front door.

  She led me through a living room that smelled faintly of old cigarette smoke. Pictures in gold frames of her with two young boys were on a spinet piano against the wall. ‘My boys are six and ten,’ she said as we walked into the kitchen. I set the milk and the last of the groceries on the counter and stood by the door as she put them away.

  Without asking if I wanted any, she poured coffee into two yellow mugs, nuked them for twenty seconds and, after turning on the kitchen exhaust fan, brought them to the table. She lit a Camel from a crumpled pack and dropped the match in a cheap black plastic ashtray. ‘When I heard Chernek’s messages on my answering machine, I thought, “I’m not doing this crap anymore.”’

  ‘What crap?’

  ‘Trying to get deaf people to listen.’

  ‘About your father being murdered?’

  She blew smoke towards the exhaust fan. ‘I was in an abusive marriage, Mr Elstrom. My husband took off, leaving me dead broke. My father bought me this house, so I would have a place to raise my sons. He was a very wealthy man, but he expected me to make my own way in the world.’

  ‘Yet he bought you this house,’ I said.

  ‘He drew the line at his grandsons doing without.’ She took a long pull on the Camel. ‘My father had pancreatic cancer; he knew he was dying for quite a while. He had plenty of time to get his affairs in order. He’d arranged for his stocks to be donated to various charitable causes in which he was involved, and had just finished cataloguing his art collection for museums. That, too, is set to be donated.’

  ‘Nothing for you?’

  ‘Not true.’ Her face was defiant. ‘Insurance was for me. He told me he had a two-million-dollar life insurance policy, naming me as sole beneficiary.’

  ‘He died from painkillers,’ I said.

  Her eyes tightened, daring me to say the word.

  ‘Suicide,’ I said.

  She stubbed out her cigarette. ‘No payout for suicide.’

  ‘Bad pain can make anyone desperate for relief.’

  ‘I was his only child. We didn’t get along great, but he adored his grandsons. If he’d been in the kind of pain where he needed to end his life, he would have changed his other bequests to make sure I got money for my sons.’

  ‘Still, sometimes pain—’

  ‘Please,’ she said, lighting another Camel. ‘His pain was being managed. He went to the office every day, kept up his schedule. For him to come home and swallow a bottle of pills is too much to believe.’

  ‘What do you know about the day he died?’

  ‘I was told he got to the office about ten in the morning, looked at his mail, and went out to lunch with his attorney. He had nothing pressing because, by this time, my father had shifted his responsibilities to others within the firm. Like I said, he had plenty of time to take care of things.’

  ‘Time enough
to make sure there would be money for his grandsons.’

  ‘You got it. After lunch, he talked briefly to a few of his managers about small things and was driven home about three o’clock.’

  ‘Your father had a chauffeur?’

  ‘A hired driver was on standby for the last months, in case his pills made him woozy.’

  ‘And when he got home that day?’

  ‘He took a nap. According to Mrs Johnson, his housekeeper, he got up at six, watched the news as he got dressed to go out to one of his dinners. He left about seven.’

  ‘Do you know where he went?’

  ‘No.’

  ‘What time did he get home?’

  ‘Eleven-thirty, according to Mrs Johnson. And then he went into his study and died, still in his evening clothes.’

  ‘Not in bed?’ It was a wrinkle. I’d always assumed pill swallowers laid down, for the wait.

  She’d caught the question behind my eyes. ‘At his desk,’ she said, a little too loudly.

  ‘There was no note?’

  ‘A pill bottle in his pocket doesn’t have to mean suicide,’ she said. ‘He didn’t even pause to take off his suit jacket, if the bullshit is to be believed.’

  ‘A medical examiner must have conducted an investigation.’

  She stabbed the ashtray with the Camel. ‘Haven’t you been listening? What the hell kind of person sits at his damned desk, writes no note, and swallows pills knowing his adored grandsons won’t get one damned dime?’

  I asked if she knew the name of Whitman’s chauffer.

  ‘We can get it from Mrs Johnson.’ She looked at the clock on the wall. ‘I have to pick up my boys from school,’ she said. ‘Be here tomorrow morning at eleven. I’ll take you to her. She’ll tell you about my father and my boys.’

  At the front door, she said, ‘I’ll give you a hundred thousand dollars if you can prove it wasn’t suicide.’

  ‘I already have a client,’ I said, ethical purity spilling from my mouth like gospel washed in Listerine.

  ‘So you said. And just who the hell is that?’

  I shrugged.

  She smiled, softening the wrinkles at her eyes. ‘Tomorrow morning, eleven o’clock. Mrs Johnson will tell you.’

  I walked to the Jeep morally intact, true to my first responsibility, my client Wendell Phelps.

  And all the way to Rivertown, I fantasized about what I could do with a hundred grand.

  TWELVE

  The next morning, before heading off to meet Debbie Goring, I drove across Thompson Avenue to Leo Brumsky’s house. Leo has been my friend since grammar school. He is brilliant, and eccentric. He makes upwards of five hundred thousand dollars a year authenticating items for the big auction houses in New York, Chicago and LA; he drives Porsche roadsters that get jettisoned at the ten-thousand-mile mark; he wears designer suits when he must, and he dates a beautiful research librarian who is younger and taller but has the same genius IQ. All that could fit him into a rare, high social niche except he lives with his mother in her brown brick bungalow. He has an aversion to anything smelling of social snobbery, and buys his casual clothes at the Discount Den, a place where thirty bucks acquires a whole outfit, so long as one is not picky about color, style or size. Since Leo is barely five feet six inches tall, and weighs a spare one-forty, his casual attire is invariably several sizes too big, and makes him look like a malnourished dwarf with an oversized pale bald head, wearing someone else’s clothes.

  He is the smartest person I know, but more importantly that morning, Leo knew the art market in Chicago. Likely enough, he knew of Jim Whitman.

  I noticed the black BMW as soon as I pulled away from the turret. It was parked on the short road that leads from my street to the dingy string of honky-tonks, hock shops and liquor stores that is Thompson Avenue. It was one of the smaller BMWs, the sort junior pretenders drive until they can afford one of the more dramatic models.

  A car parked on the stub road was no oddity after dark; lots of johns looking to enjoy fast, last-of-the-night bargains often linger in that exact spot. Never, though, had I seen a car parked there in sunlight.

  Odder still was the speed with which the driver’s head slid from view, as if it belonged to someone who did not want to be seen watching me.

  I did not continue on toward Leo’s. I swung left on Thompson and headed east toward Chicago. The BMW appeared in the rear-view mirror two times, hanging far back, but by the time I got to the health center lot and parked next to the doorless Buick, it seemed to be gone.

  Still, to be certain, I went straight into the exercise room. It was too early for Dusty and Frankie and the rest of the regulars to be roosting; too early for the Amazonian Pur Due to be stretching her magnificent bulk as well. Except for one poor soul in stained street clothes sleeping on the barbell press bench, I was alone. I walked to the window that looked out over Thompson Avenue and watched for fifteen minutes. No black BMW came into sight. I gave it up and motored over to Leo’s.

  His yellow Porsche roadster was parked out at the curb, meaning not only that he was home but that likely he’d already been out. And that might mean, if the fates had properly aligned, that he’d been to the Polish bakery.

  I walked up the cement stairs. One of the front windows was open a crack, and the sound of people stage-whispering lustful things came through the screen. I pushed the doorbell button twice, trying to time it between the moans coming from Ma Brumsky’s softly erotic cable television program.

  ‘Yah?’ the old woman’s voice shouted above the fast breathing.

  ‘It’s Dek, Mrs Brumsky,’ I yelled.

  ‘Who?’

  ‘Dek Elstrom!’ I screamed. Leo’s mother has known me ever since her son brought me home, like a stray cat, in seventh grade.

  She thumped the floor with her cane, almost in time with the thumping coming from the television. Leo’s office is in the basement. ‘Leo, the UPS man is here,’ she yelled above the TV voices.

  A moment later, the sound of footfalls came through the window screen, the front door opened and an assault of bright colors appeared behind the screen door. Today’s rayon Hawaiian shirt was a medley of chartreuse palm fronds and yellow parrots. It was shiny and huge and hung in folds down his scrawny chest, sagging the parrots into something more closely resembling snakes.

  ‘You working for UPS now?’ Leo grinned.

  ‘You’ve been to the bakery?’

  ‘Nothing wrong with your sniffer.’ He opened the door and stuck his head out. ‘And it’s warm enough for the stoop,’ he said, and disappeared back into the dark of the bungalow.

  He came out a moment later with a long white waxed bag and two cups of coffee in scratched porcelain mugs. The mugs had been scratched even before Ma Brumsky swiped them from the lunch counter at Walgreen’s. When we were twelve, Leo had told me, proudly, that all of his mother’s plates, cups and silverware came from Walgreen’s. I told him I’d figured that out already, since everything had ‘Walgreen’s’ etched on its handles or imprinted into its porcelain. I didn’t mention what he had yet to figure out, that Ma had swiped it all on lunch breaks when she worked downtown, before he was born. Nobody wants to think of his mother staggering away from a drug store lunch counter with a purse full of dirty dinnerware.

  Leo knelt so I could take a mug, and then sat down. He slid an end of the raspberry coffee cake out of the bag, pulled a steak knife from the front pocket of blue knit pants that coordinated not at all with the blinding chartreuse rayon, and cut me a slice.

  ‘This coffee cake cost more than your shirt,’ I said, eyeing the half-sleeve that drooped almost to his wrist. It wasn’t even good chartreuse. It reminded me of stomach contents, perhaps de-carbed.

  ‘I should hope so,’ he said. ‘I wouldn’t put a shirt like this in my mouth.’

  For a minute, we ate coffee cake and looked at the row of brown bungalows across the street, every one identical to his, like we’d done a thousand times since we were kids.

>   ‘I drove by your place yesterday afternoon,’ he said, carving me another slice. ‘The Jeep was gone, and the turret was locked up as it should have been, since you’re supposed to be in San Francisco, indulging fancies with the luscious Jennifer Gale.’

  ‘I’m working on a job,’ I said.

  ‘Must be important, if you dusted off Jenny.’

  ‘Wendell Phelps.’

  Leo raised his eyebrows. Most of the time, the dark fur above his brown eyes languishes in boredom. But when he laughs, or his enormous intellect charges at something, his eyebrows come alive and cavort like crazed caterpillars across the pale skin of his forehead. The caterpillars danced with abandon now, frenzied with curiosity.

  ‘Yes, I finally spoke to the great man, face to face.’ I cut myself a third piece of coffee cake. Chicago is known for its wind; one must maintain ballast.

  ‘He called you?’

  ‘Amanda was the one who called.’

  ‘You cancelled Jenny for Amanda?’ He liked Amanda and he’d liked us together just as much as he now liked the prospect of Jenny and me together.

  ‘Postponed, not cancelled.’

  ‘I haven’t seen Amanda in the papers lately, with that commodities trader, Rudolph,’ he said.

  ‘She didn’t seem to want to talk about him, other than to say he’s in Russia, investigating opportunities.’

  ‘Did you mention Jenny?’

  ‘I didn’t need to. Amanda had seen the photo of us at that network correspondents’ dinner.’

  ‘The one where you’re wearing that cheap, too-small rented tux?’ He laughed.

  ‘I should have tried it on at the rental place. Anyway, Amanda and I are strictly business now.’

  ‘Where did you meet her? Someplace dimly lit?’ The eyebrows waited, poised high on his forehead.

  ‘Petterino’s, and then the Goodman for a play.’

  ‘Just like old times.’

  ‘Wendell thinks somebody is trying to kill him.’

  ‘Jeez.’

  ‘Amanda is hoping her father is simply stressed, imagining things.’

  ‘But you don’t.’ He didn’t ask it; he said it. Since we were kids, Leo could see into my head like he was looking through glass.