The Confessors' Club

by Jack Fredrickson

We tiptoed down the basement stairs, not speaking as we passed the cartons of Leo’s old school books, the spindly little plastic tree they stuck on the television at Christmas, and the model train tracks we’d screwed on green-painted plywood when we were kids.

  His office didn’t have a door, just a roughed-in opening to unpainted drywall, bare concrete and mismatched filing cabinets in black, gray, tan and orange. He set the planner upside down on the light table and pulled over the long-armed Luxo magnifying light.

  ‘Sale stickers,’ he said, pointing to two little red tags stuck to the cardboard back. ‘One for four dollars, then one for two dollars.’

  ‘As I said, Small was a repo man who grabbed furniture and cars. He didn’t need such a large calendar until the very end of January, or perhaps the beginning of February, when he had to keep track of lots of pairs of initials, and lots of billable hours for Wendell. By then, calendars were on sale.’

  ‘Excellent, for such a modest mind,’ he said. He turned the calendar right side up and began examining February’s sheet through the magnifying lens of the Luxo. I sat in the sprung overstuffed chair that had been his father’s favorite up to the moment he’d died in it. For all his flippancy, for all his finger-clicking, hipster mannerisms and outrageous clothes, Leo Brumsky was recognized as one of the best ferrets in the country when it came to examining historical documents and pieces of art.

  He worked slowly, examining each inch of the February sheet, saying nothing. After thirty minutes, he switched to a stronger lens on the Luxo and bent down again. ‘Who’s R.B.?’ he finally asked, straightening up after he’d spent another twenty minutes on the marked-up quarter of the March page. ‘Those initials appear most frequently, always appended to other initials.’

  ‘Look at which sets of initials they’re always closest to.’

  ‘A.L.’s. I already noticed. Arthur Lamm?’

  ‘I’m thinking Small hired R.B. to tail Lamm so that Small could tail the others.’

  He switched off the Luxo. ‘If Small indeed worked for Wendell, then only two people know what Small learned,’ he said.

  ‘R.B,’ I said, because it was easiest.

  ‘And Wendell Phelps,’ he said.

  FORTY-FOUR

  I called Wendell’s home as I pulled away from Leo’s. The woman who answered had a Latin accent. She said he wasn’t home.

  ‘Call him on his cell phone. This is urgent.’

  ‘He not to be disturbed.’

  ‘Delores, then. Is she home?’

  ‘She with her pigs.’ She pronounced it ‘peegs.’

  ‘I need to talk to Wendell now.’

  ‘No.’

  ‘You’re going to lose your job.’ It was the cheapest of false threats, and remarkably ineffective. She hung up on me.

  I called Amanda. ‘I need to speak to your father.’

  ‘What’s going on? What have you learned?’

  ‘A couple of small things.’

  Her voice got scared in an instant. ‘What small things?’

  ‘Damn it, Amanda. Your father is still my client.’

  ‘He’s playing golf.’

  ‘Where?’

  ‘Crest Hills, north of the city. I think he teed off at ten o’clock. He switches his phone off when he’s out there, so your best bet is to catch him in the bar, afterward.’

  She started to ask a question. I told her I had to run.

  Better she worried about what I didn’t say than about what I did.

  I’d passed by Crest Hills Country Club several times in the past, seen the colorfully clad players driving slowly in electric carts as their white-uniformed caddies followed on foot. Though the golf bags were in the carts, I supposed course rules required that every player be tended by someone to replant the huge chunks of turf that golfers launch when flailing at such little balls, though the folks hustling behind might be better termed gardeners rather than caddies. I’d heard it cost half a million dollars to join Crest Hills, plus tens of thousands more each year for dues and fees. If I’m ever that rich, I’ll go dig holes for free in a prairie somewhere, and spend the money instead on employing a world-class pastry chef.

  I drove through the stone arches and parked in the lot adjacent to the white stucco clubhouse. The bar, a room of dark paneling with a wall of glass facing the course, was in back. Wendell sat at a table with three other men who were all drinking clear drinks made with sparkling cubes of ice and slices of preternaturally green lime. He wore a lavender shirt and pale blue trousers, and had a yellow bucket hat tilted back on his head. His colorful clothes and sun-pinked skin combined to remind me of an Easter egg.

  Oddly, I got right to him. There were no security men hulking anywhere in sight.

  ‘Mr Elstrom,’ he said, frowning but not surprised. One of his secretaries, or even Amanda, must have given him a heads-up that I’d be rolling in. He didn’t stand, or extend his hand.

  The other three men at the table were also dressed in country-club pastels. Together, the entire foursome suggested a giant basket of jovial, decorated eggs. They turned to Wendell, expecting to be introduced. Wendell said nothing.

  ‘Dek Elstrom,’ I said to them. ‘I’m here to repossess Mr Phelps’s car.’

  That popped Wendell from his chair to grab my elbow and hustle me outside through a service door.

  ‘Was that necessary?’ Most satisfyingly, his face had gotten darker under the pink.

  ‘Tell me about the Confessors’ Club.’

  ‘I don’t know that club.’

  ‘How about you and I have a glance at your day planner? If you attended other engagements on the second Tuesdays of even-numbered months, I’ll back off.’

  The red beneath the pink darkened even more.

  ‘Or you can tell me about Eugene Small,’ I went on, after he said nothing.

  ‘Ineffective,’ he said.

  ‘Particularly now that he’s dead?’

  I watched his face, looking for change, but it stayed tight, in control. He knew.

  ‘Small’s office got tossed,’ I said. ‘If it wasn’t you, then someone else took one of the invoices he sent to clients. I think that person also took a file. I’m guessing both had your name on them.’

  Surprise hit his face, but it could have been shock, or fear. He said nothing.

  ‘Do you understand, Wendell? Someone has now linked you to Small, and what he knew. Maybe what he knew got him killed. Maybe it will get you killed.’

  ‘Let this alone,’ he said.

  ‘Where are your guards? I breezed right in.’

  ‘Unnecessary.’

  ‘Unnecessary because you now know your friend Arthur Lamm’s been behind the killings? Or unnecessary because he’s gone into hiding?’

  ‘Don’t be a fool,’ he said, but his voice was wavering.

  ‘Did you send Whitman’s daughter that anonymous hundred grand from guilt, or are you hoping she’ll drop her interest in her father’s murder?’

  ‘You’re fired, Elstrom,’ he said, starting to turn.

  ‘You already did that. When did you first suspect Lamm was behind the killings?’

  His back stiffened as he headed toward the clubhouse.

  ‘The cops have discovered that third floor,’ I called after him.

  He stopped cold and turned, confusion on his face now. ‘What the hell are you talking about?’

  ‘The room with all the recording equipment, in the house on Delaware Street. Were you listening, too?’

  The pink had drained away from his face. I’d gut-punched him with something he didn’t know. He headed into the clubhouse, walking jerky-legged, like he’d just torn a ligament. Or ten.

  I let him go. He was no ordinary ex-client. He was Amanda’s father.

  I walked back to the Jeep. For a time I sat behind the wheel, drained too. And wishing that somehow I’d managed to fly to San Francisco, and lost my cell phone on the way, before Amanda had ever thought to call me about her father.

  Time
passed. Then, ten or fifteen minutes later, loud laughter came from the portico of the clubhouse. Wendell’s three fellow colorful eggs were coming out. He lagged several paces behind them, shuffling like a ninety-year-old man. He reached in his pocket, came out with keys and fingered a remote lock.

  His car chirped and flashed its headlights.

  I knew Wendell drove a vintage Mercedes. Not today. The car he got into wasn’t expensive. It was a medium-priced sedan, the kind of car that retirees, merchants and countless thousands of other ordinary people drive.

  It was older and tan, the one I’d seen in Wendell’s garage the day I’d first gone up to speak with him. The kind of car that had swerved in front of me on South Michigan Avenue, wanting to trigger that memory.

  The kind with holes on the side, the kind Mrs Johnson had seen Jim Whitman coming home in the night he’d been murdered. A Buick.

  Wendell Phelps had driven Jim Whitman home the night Whitman was murdered.

  FORTY-FIVE

  Monday: the day before the Confessors’ Club was to reconvene.

  I woke at six, light on sleep but heavy with what I knew should be done.

  I should pull photos of Buicks with portholes from the Internet and forward them to Mrs Johnson to identify – for me to then forward to the police – the precise model and year of car that had driven Whitman home. The cops would then run a list of all such Buicks, in tan, registered in the Chicagoland area. Even if the car was titled to some corporate entity, some enterprising young cop – perhaps Delray, perhaps not – would probe deeper, and link Wendell to the Buick, and from there to Jim Whitman.

  This I did not do.

  I should call Delray again, in hope of getting him and not his voice mail, to tell him of a mysterious associate of Small’s whose initials were R.B., someone who might know important things about the secret meetings of the men in the heavy cream. It was a useful lead, one that should be tracked down before the cops converged to watch the Confessors meet the following night.

  This, at least, I tried to do, several times, but each time I got Delray’s voice mail. Finally, I called the main number of the Chicago Police Department. ‘Delray Delmar, please.’

  ‘Which department?’ a woman said.

  ‘Special Projects.’

  She hesitated, then said, ‘Hold please.’

  She came back on a moment later. ‘We have no department named Special Projects.’

  ‘He reports to the deputy chief.’

  ‘You mean deputy superintendent?’

  ‘Sure.’

  ‘Which one?’

  ‘There’s more than one?’

  ‘Of course.’

  ‘I don’t know.’

  ‘Hold please.’ This time she didn’t come back for three minutes. ‘Officer Delmar is in Traffic, but he’s on leave.’

  She transferred me to Traffic, and I asked the crusty voice that answered how I could contact Delray.

  ‘You a friend?’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘You’re a friend, and you don’t know he’s on leave?’

  A thousand charged needles began prickling the top of my head, thinking he’d been hurt. ‘What’s he on leave for?’

  ‘Look, pal, if you’re a friend, ask the family.’ There was a question now in his cop voice. He hung up.

  I called the main police number again, asked to be transferred to Traffic. Luckily a different voice, young and female, answered. ‘I’m from Haggarty and Dunn, jams and jellies out of Napa, California?’ I said. ‘Someone, a Mr Delray Delmar, gave this phone number when he placed an order. I can’t read the delivery instructions. What time will he be in?’

  ‘This has to do with police work?’

  ‘No, ma’am. This has to do with a gift he wants to send.’

  ‘We don’t give out home phone numbers.’

  ‘I should leave a message with you?’

  ‘What the hell, call St Agnes in Chicago.’

  None of it made sense. Delray had said nothing about working in Traffic; he’d just been reassigned to Narcotics on the north side. More troubling, he was now in the hospital. And that might have meant he hadn’t tipped Homicide about the upcoming meeting at the Confessors’ Club.

  A new spring storm had raged up suddenly outside. I ran out to the Jeep through rain drops hurling down as big as nickels. The Eisenhower was the most direct route to St Agnes, but the sewers built to drain the expressway were collapsing, like so many in Chicago, and had begun clogging up, stopping traffic in monstrous puddles whenever it rained. I sped as best as I could through the side streets, blowing through stop signs, running the red lights. It took an hour to make what should have been a thirty-minute trip.

  The kindly lady at the hospital’s front desk said it was too soon for visiting hours. I asked for Delray’s room number, said I wanted to send him flowers. She smiled and said he was in 518, and that he was fortunate to have such a considerate friend.

  I went out the main door, came back in through the hall from Emergency, and took the elevator up.

  A pushcart holding breakfast plates under stainless steel covers was outside 518. Above it, the slip-in name holder by the door read ‘Delmar, D.’ I peeked in. The bed closest to the door was empty. A woman in a yellow uniform was by the window bed, taking a plate from a rolling table. The occupant of the bed was concealed behind the curtain. I smiled at her when she came out. She didn’t smile back. I went in.

  ‘Delray—’ I began, but stopped when I got past the curtain. The man in the hospital bed eating scrambled eggs was at least fifty years old, and had gray hair.

  ‘Sorry; wrong room,’ I said, and started to back out.

  ‘I’m Delray,’ he said in a surprisingly robust voice.

  I moved forward to the edge of the curtain. ‘Delray Delmar?’

  He nodded.

  ‘Chicago police?’

  ‘Twenty-eight years,’ he said.

  ‘I’m looking for your son.’ There was nothing else to think.

  The man set down his fork. ‘No son; just two daughters. What’s this about?’

  I turned and walked out of the room. At the nurses’ station, I said I was the old man’s nephew in as steady a voice as I could manage. ‘I just learned about my uncle’s condition. How long has he been here?’

  The nurse checked a chart. ‘His bypass surgery was last week, but there were complications. His lungs started—’

  ‘He’s lucid?’

  ‘Of course. No problems with that …’

  I walked away before she could finish, on legs that felt like they weren’t mine.

  Outside St Agnes, the rain had stopped, but the sky had gotten even darker, as if it too knew that hell was coming to Delaware Street tomorrow and that all the notecards I’d made in my head had been reshuffled and thrown into the wind. The air felt too heavy to breathe. I walked across the street to the garage and leaned against a cold concrete column. Delray Delmar, the boy cop, was no cop. The kid was a fraud and maybe a killer.

  I called the IRS. A sweet voice said Krantz wasn’t in. I asked if I could speak with anybody who was working on the Arthur Lamm case. Sweet Voice said she couldn’t confirm which cases the IRS was working on. I said bullshit. She asked if I would leave a number and I said I damned well would, that the matter was extremely urgent.

  I hurried to the Jeep, but made it only a block before the sky opened up again. The earlier rain had filled the sewers. The new downpour was now turning the streets to rivers, the intersections to lakes. Worse, every form of road cholesterol had come out to clog my way, from distracted, pokey drivers too intent on cell phones to the truly timid, frozen by the deluge and waiting, I supposed, for a white-bearded man in robes to part the waters and show them the way to the ark. I swore at every damned one of them, cut up an alley, across another, and finally got free several blocks later.

  I pulled into a gas station and called the IRS again. This time I insisted on speaking with someone who worked directly with Krantz. A
man took the call, said Krantz was in Washington. Hell was coming down, I told him; Krantz had to call me. The man said Krantz was in meetings.

  ‘There’s a murderer out there, maybe two!’ I yelled. I hung up, realizing I’d sounded too deranged to warrant pulling Krantz out of any meeting.

  The rain had slowed to a drizzle by the time I got back to the turret. I walked down to the river, to have one last think at what seemed to be my only remaining option.

  The Willahock agreed. It was angry, kicking up white spray over the banks and onto the crumbling riverwalk. Lightning lit the sky to the west, promising another storm, and the wind snapped hard at the two-armed ash. The ground around the tree was littered with young, green leaves, dead now forever. I didn’t need the leaves to tell me the world had turned into a dark tempest, and that the kid cop imposter, and Arthur Lamm and his caretaker, Canty – and R.B., whoever he was – were swirling right in the middle of its dark heart. It was four-thirty. Barely twenty-four hours remained before the Confessors were set to meet the next evening, when another of them might be killed. And Agent Krantz, the only person I could hope to trust, was too busy in meetings to call me.

  I phoned the bastard who’d trashed my life.

  ‘John Keller,’ the voice said.

  ‘This is Dek Elstrom.’

  He gave me a contemptuous sigh. ‘Listen, Elstrom, you gotta put this behind—’

  I cut him off. ‘I’m not drunk this time, calling to rant about how you shafted me in your columns. I’ve got a story, maybe the biggest story you’ll ever get. It’s ideal for you, Keller, because I can’t prove any of it. You’re going to have to go with speculation. But you like that, Keller. All I ask is that you lead with it in tomorrow’s column – “details to follow,” your usual crap.’

  ‘I’ll listen,’ he said.

  ‘You better do more than that, or people are going to die.’

  FORTY-SIX

  Tuesday morning. Confessors’ Club day.

  All night, one storm after another had thundered through Rivertown, pounding the ground, roiling the river. I wouldn’t have slept much anyway, not the night before the Confessors were to gather.