The Confessors' Club

by Jack Fredrickson

  ‘You never know,’ I invented. ‘Maybe he was fed something that disoriented him, made him step out in front of traffic.’

  ‘And we could sue the restaurant or his dinner companions to recover our payout? You think he was murdered? For what purpose?’

  ‘I don’t know,’ I said.

  ‘You’re reaching.’ He yawned, and added, ‘As well as holding back.’

  ‘I’m wondering if someone was with Carson, in the car.’ I said, thinking specifically of the man in the tan Buick who drove Whitman home.

  ‘Listen, Elstrom, asking these questions helps us only if the passenger was wealthy, had a hand in forcing Carson in front of the kill car, and we could sue to recover. We discussed all this. Vehicular homicides are too chancy. There are better ways to kill.’

  ‘That’s what any right-thinking person would think. That’s what makes it a clever way to murder.’

  ‘Give me a motive.’

  ‘I don’t have one.’

  ‘There were no witnesses, remember? Even if you found a motive, we can’t prove anything.’

  ‘At least find out where Carson went, before he got killed.’

  ‘If I call our investigator, will you leave me alone?’

  ‘If you will also check Grant Carson’s appointment books for the last two years, to see if he went to that same place on the second Tuesday evenings of every even-numbered month.’

  That woke him up. ‘What the hell do you know that you’re not telling me?’ he shouted.

  ‘Help me here, Rikk.’

  ‘How can I rationalize asking for his calendars?’

  ‘With creativity.’

  ‘You’re nuts, Elstrom,’ he said, and hung up.

  I called Leo after I’d gotten on the tollway, southbound. ‘You said you’re buying lunch?’

  ‘Yes, but I’m dieting.’

  Leo’s metabolism runs as fast as his intellect. There’d been no change in his 140 pounds since high school. ‘You’re porking up?’ I asked anyway.

  ‘A pound and a half since Christmas.’

  ‘I can achieve that with a lone raspberry Danish.’

  ‘So I noticed on my front stoop, very recently. See you at Kutz’s.’

  I’d saved the worst call for last. I thumbed on my cell phone directory and clicked Amanda’s number. ‘Hey, sorry I haven’t been returning your calls,’ I said. ‘I’ve been swamped …’

  Her voice was barely audible in the headset I’d bought cheap at the Discount Den. Then again, I was surrounded by trucks.

  ‘I can’t hear you,’ I yelled, speeding up to get clear of the trucks.

  ‘Do you miss me?’ she shouted.

  ‘Like there’ll be no tomorrow, Amanda,’ I screamed, joking, at last getting free of the trucks.

  ‘Jenny,’ the voice yelled, horribly clear. ‘Jenny Galecki.’

  ‘Ah,’ I said, hearing too perfectly. For sure, jackasses should not be issued speed-dial features, or thumbs, or headsets. Or mouths.

  ‘Talking with Amanda, are we?’ she asked.

  ‘It’s that case involving her father that I told you about,’ I said, fighting the urge to say I wasn’t lying.

  ‘Did you get my little package?’ There was frost in the words that I couldn’t blame on the cheap headset.

  ‘Package? No.’

  ‘I sent you a little something, to keep you thinking of me. It seemed funny at the time.’ She clicked off.

  In the eight months since Jenny went west, we sometimes went weeks without speaking. Still, an hour didn’t pass where I didn’t think of her, hoping an hour hadn’t passed where she hadn’t thought of me. And somehow San Francisco seemed closer.

  Now I’d messed things for sure by fumbling my mention of Amanda. San Francisco felt like it had moved to another continent.

  The phone rang again as I got off the tollway. ‘Listen, Jenny—’

  ‘Damn you, Elstrom,’ Gaylord Rikk corrected. It had only been twenty minutes since we’d spoken. I ripped the headset off and pressed the phone to my ear, in clear violation of Illinois law.

  ‘That seems to have already happened.’

  ‘I got intrigued, but only because I’m bored. In some disgusting way, you liven up my dreary existence.’

  ‘You’ve got something?’ I asked.

  ‘It only took two phone calls. Turns out our people did ask where Carson had gone, the night he was killed. No one seemed to know, not his wife or his secretary, and we dropped it because it didn’t seem relevant. So …’ He lingered in silent smugness, waiting.

  ‘So?’ I asked, accepting the cue.

  He dropped his voice, a secret agent for sure. ‘I called Carson’s secretary, saying I was tidying up the last of our paperwork, and needed to know where he’d been that night. She said she already told the police she didn’t know, which I knew.’

  ‘And?’ I asked, anxious. He’d learned something.

  ‘Nothing,’ he said.

  ‘You struck out?’

  ‘No, I mean Carson had nothing written on his calendar for that evening.’

  ‘I don’t suppose—’

  ‘I caught your drift earlier,’ he said. ‘I schmoozed. Carson’s secretary had his appointment books, five years’ worth, right at her desk.’

  ‘And?’

  ‘Nothing was written in for any of those Tuesday evenings.’

  ‘You’re sure?’

  ‘Why do you sound so excited?’

  ‘I’ll tell you in a minute.’

  ‘His secretary thought it was unusual because he was always busy at night. But she double-checked because I was so persuasive. Nothing had been penciled in for any of those evenings. And that, to her, is inconceivable.’

  It was inconceivable to me as well, almost.

  ‘Tell me how this is going to help me sue the beneficiary, Elstrom,’ he said.

  ‘Who is the beneficiary?’

  ‘I can’t divulge the entity.’

  ‘Entity? The beneficiary wasn’t family?’

  ‘I’m sure Carson had multiple policies. We only carried one of them, and the beneficiary wasn’t family. It was an organization, a company. Tell me how you’re going to help us.’

  I told him I’d call him when I learned more, and clicked him away, but not before I heard him swear.

  I swore, too, at the bulb flickering stronger in the back of my brain. Grant Carson had been careful to make no notation of where he’d been off to, those Tuesday nights. As had Benno Barberi. Jim Whitman had noted them in his appointment books only with the letter ‘C.’ Whatever those three men had been doing, they were doing it secretly, and they were doing it together.

  Right down to getting killed, one after the other.

  TWENTY-ONE

  I skidded to a dusty stop across the few stones left on Kutz’s gravel lot with what I thought was considerable élan.

  Leo was waiting in his Porsche. The top was down, but he’d parked in the shade under the overpass, and he wore an oversized red straw hat that, even without its tightly knotted blue chinstrap, would have looked ridiculous. Thought it was months before the burning rays of summer, Leo was careful; his pale skin burns like an infant’s.

  ‘So elegant, your driving finesse,’ he said.

  ‘I know the words to that bit of music you’re listening to,’ I said, through the newly exposed rip in my side curtain. Another curl of Discount Den duct tape had let go on the tollway.

  ‘They’re called lyrics, you boor, but Jobim didn’t use them in this song.’

  He was listening to a piece of Brazilian bossa nova that, for once, I recognized. I didn’t know its name, but it was smooth and flowing and getting a lot of play as background in a television laxative commercial.

  ‘No more pressure,’ I began singing, warbling with the same solemnity as the singer on TV.

  He sighed, shut off the player, and got out of the car.

  We walked up to the peeling wood trailer. Young Kutz glowered at us through the tiny orde
r window. Young Kutz is young in name only; he’s on the wrong side of eighty, and had been glowering from his trailer long before Leo and I started coming in grammar school.

  ‘Hiya, Mr Kutz,’ Leo said.

  ‘What’s it today, twerp?’

  Leo stretched up to his full five foot six inches so he could line his eyes along the counter. ‘The usual six pups, cheese fries, and Big Swallow root beer, of course.’

  ‘I thought you were dieting,’ I said.

  ‘The trick is to chew slowly, thereby atomizing all the fat calories before swallowing.’

  ‘For sure you’ll drop that nettlesome pound and a half.’ I added my one dog and small diet to his order, gave Leo eight singles – Kutz’s prices were an outrage, given the quality of the food – and went around to the back of the trailer.

  The lunch rush was over and empty picnic tables were everywhere. The snow was long gone, and it hadn’t rained at all in March, yet incredibly, I found a table that was almost half free of pigeon droppings.

  Leo noticed when he came with the food. ‘Partially dropless – nice,’ he said, setting down the flimsy tray of hotdogs, fries and drinks with a careful, soft sliding motion of his hands and forearms. Kutz uses ultra-thin plastic trays because they’re likely to flex and be dropped, resulting in re-orders as well as queasy pigeons, which then results in excessively spotted tables.

  As always, we ate silently for the first minutes, savoring the truck exhaust drifting down from the overpass mingling with the steam we imagined might be rising from our barely lukewarm hot dogs. They were the exact smells of our youth, nostalgia at its purest. Rumor had it Kutz had never changed the hot dog water in all the years he worked the trailer. No need, he’d supposedly once said: grease floats and ends up on the product, to be consumed by customers or pigeons – depending. That meant the hot dogs Leo and I were now eating might have been cooked in part of the very water Kutz used when we were kids. Nostalgia doesn’t get any purer than that.

  ‘You may now tap the power of my formidable brain,’ Leo said, after his third hot dog. ‘How’s the case?’

  I told him that Barberi, Whitman and Carson had all died on, or right after, the second Tuesdays of even-numbered months.

  He slammed the brakes on the sagging cheese fry he was about to propel into his mouth. When I dare eat Kutz’s cheese fries, I use a plastic spoon because the yellowish substance he says is cheese quickly dissolves potato fiber, rendering them too limp for me to hold. Not Leo. He regards Kutz’s cheese fries as among life’s worthiest adversaries, and while still in high school, mastered the art of arcing them into his mouth with his fingers. He says it’s a matter of wrist speed and pride.

  Now, all that was forgotten. The cheese fry slid from his fingers to drop, with a soft, gelatinous slap, back into its cardboard tray. ‘What have you made of that?’

  ‘Each of the three men took pains to obscure their whereabouts those nights.’ I told him of the ‘C’ notations in Whitman’s desk diary.

  ‘They were together, at this “C” place,’ he said.

  ‘Until they started dying, one by one.’

  ‘What’s premeditated and sinister in a heart attack, an understandable suicide and a random hit-and-run?’

  ‘What if the first and second deaths came from administered overdoses, and the hit and run was deliberate? Barberi came home highly agitated over some insurance concern, but he’d learned to handle stress. A dose of something might have sent his heart into overdrive, but we’ll never know; he was cremated. We do know Whitman ingested too many pills, and right now we know there was no good reason for him to go outside his home to get them. If Whitman was murdered, then it’s likely Carson was murdered too, pushed in front of an oncoming car.’

  ‘To what end?’

  ‘I don’t know.’

  ‘Does Wendell have any thoughts on motive?’

  ‘He fired me.’

  The eyebrows came together and stuck, shocked. ‘Surely not for a lack of progress.’

  ‘His whole attitude has changed. Instead of being intrigued by my suspicions, Wendell became combative and swatted every one of them away.’

  ‘What did he say about those mysterious “C” notations in Whitman’s calendar?’

  ‘No curiosity there, either.’

  ‘He knows what they mean,’ he said.

  ‘He spent those Tuesday evenings with Barberi, Whitman and Carson,’ I said, ‘and I’ll bet he knows who drove Whitman home.’

  ‘You’ve gotten too close,’ Leo said.

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘What’s next?’ he asked.

  ‘Arthur Lamm.’

  Leo shook his head, confused. ‘The real-estate biggie?’

  ‘He’s gone missing, though it might be because the IRS is investigating him.’ I told him what the Bohemian had learned.

  ‘What if he didn’t take off?’

  ‘Then twenty-five per cent of the biggest shots in Chicago have just been murdered.’

  TWENTY-TWO

  ‘My father fired you.’ Amanda spoke slowly over the phone, each word precise, distinct, and under control. I knew that control. She was furious.

  ‘Apparently.’

  ‘He told me you’d made no progress, you’d pocketed his two-thousand-dollar retainer without doing anything but mewing around a little bit, and dusted him off by telling him to go to the police.’

  ‘Mewing? Like a cat? He said I was mewing?’

  ‘Don’t evade. What is he up to?’

  ‘Actually, I’ve made out a check for his refund.’

  ‘Don’t parse my words, either. What’s all this about: the bodyguards, the secrecy? Is his life in danger?’

  I’d had an inspiration, driving home from Kutz’s. ‘I want to deliver the refund in person. I’m certain he won’t take my call, or see me at his office.’

  ‘You want me to set up a confrontation without telling me what’s going on?’

  ‘He’s still my client.’

  ‘I ask again: is his life in danger?’

  ‘Get me in front of him, Amanda. If I learn he’s in real trouble, I will violate his trust and tell you.’

  It was enough, for the moment. She said she’d get back to me.

  I crossed the second floor, headed to see how my freshly re-hung cabinet was faring, when the lid on the front door mail slot clanked. I’d installed one that was extra-large, anticipating improved times, but even the junk mailers didn’t yet think me worthy. Today though, my mail slot clanked. Mail had come. I clanked, too, beating down the wrought-iron stairs.

  It was Jenny’s small something, sent in a padded envelope. I ripped it open. An untied purple bowtie was inside, with a note that read, ‘It’s not so much the look that’s sought, but rather the demonstration of proficiency.’

  It was a nudge, aimed with a joke, and so quintessentially, marvelously Jenny.

  I’d never tied a bowtie. That was the laugh, and the nudge, because she knew I’d wrestle with learning to tie the thing, and think of her every second I was doing it. And I would, along with thinking about my aborted trip to San Francisco and the phone call I’d fumbled just a few hours earlier.

  I took my bowtie upstairs. The cabinet I’d straightened was listing. Not much, just a few degrees, and surely no more than the smoke stacks on the Titanic had tipped in the first minutes following its collision with the iceberg. I set down the tie and spent the next hour trying to correct the cabinet, but no amount of shimming, leveling, and shaving got it to hang right.

  Amanda called. ‘We’re having barbecue tonight with my father, at five.’

  ‘That’s early,’ I said.

  ‘With the pig lady,’ she said. It was rough, especially for Amanda.

  ‘You mean his wife?’

  ‘Second wife,’ she said.

  I knew that, of course. It had been in the papers. Wendell, a long-time widower, had married after Amanda and I divorced.

  ‘You’ll have time to tell me everything as w
e drive up there,’ she said. ‘Everything.’

  Amanda was waiting beneath the portico of her lakeside condominium building. She wore exquisitely fitted jeans and a burgundy top that didn’t pull all the fire from her eyes. She flashed the rest of it at me as she slid onto the passenger’s seat. ‘I don’t like cagy.’

  ‘For the time being, I have to respect your father’s confidence,’ I said as I pulled onto Lake Shore Drive.

  She gave my invariable khakis and blue shirt the usual quick glance, but lingered at my neck. Her voice softened. ‘A bow tie, and purple?’

  ‘Shock and awe.’ It had taken me an hour practicing with downloaded instructions to achieve the partially crumpled mess around my neck.

  ‘You want my father to be shocked and awed by your tie, or by what you’re going to say?’

  I didn’t want to say I’d worn the tie to keep reminding myself of who’d sent it, and I didn’t want to tell her of the accusations I was going to lay on Wendell, so I said nothing.

  She fingered the wires sticking out of the hole in the dashboard where the radio had been. ‘You used to have a Mercedes,’ she said.

  ‘Bought used,’ I said.

  ‘And such very nice clothes.’

  ‘Fortunes wane.’

  ‘Perhaps, but you gave your clothes away, right after we split up. Including that nice camel-hair sport coat I bought you for your birthday …’ Her voice trailed off.

  It was old detritus, and it was accurate. And it was useful, because it beat discussing what her father hadn’t told me about Barberi, Whitman and Carson.

  ‘I’d gotten to living a little too fancy,’ I said. ‘Jettisoning the duds and the car seemed a reasonable way to simplify my life.’

  ‘Along with going to live in a turret?’

  ‘You are demeaning my castle?’

  ‘You have to admit, there’s something monastic about your life … the turret, the lack of variety in clothing, this …’ She bent back one of the wires sticking out from the dash, and turned to me. ‘Was I part of all your clutter, Dek? Was I too fancy?’

  ‘Too fancy?’ I repeated, startled. ‘You’ve never been too fancy, Amanda.’

  It might have been from the rapid turns in the road, but she’d leaned closer before shifting away. ‘Your new bow tie is a promising addition to your wardrobe,’ she said. ‘What prompted you to buy it?’