The Confessors' Club

by Jack Fredrickson

  I pushed myself out of the La-Z-Boy and went to feel under the card table.

  It was just a little bump, a tiny piece of plastic no bigger than a nickel stuck to the underside. I left it alone.

  The agent had also gone into the kitchen. The second little bump was stuck beneath a cabinet. I spent the next hour searching the second floor. I found no more.

  Two bumps; two bugs. Krantz had been listening to what I’d said on the phone, mostly talking to Leo, but also to Amanda and Debbie Goring. I hadn’t said it much, but I’d said it enough: The Confessors’ Club, second Tuesdays, even-numbered months. No doubt I’d said other things, too.

  I wanted to run down to the river and drown the little bugs, but that would tip Krantz that he’d been discovered, and might prompt him to pick me up to sweat me harder. Better to leave his bugs alone, so Krantz would leave me alone, in hopes he’d hear more.

  I thought about spending the afternoon working in the kitchen, trying to soothe my nerves with working wood. But I didn’t have the calm for that.

  I called Gaylord Rikk from outside.

  FIFTY-TWO

  ‘You said you were going to help us recapture our payout,’ he said.

  ‘I’ve got a new lead, but I have to know where the money went.’

  ‘I’ve been reading between the lines in the papers, Elstrom, and watching television. You’re thick in the middle of everything, yet you tell me nothing.’

  ‘Did Arthur Lamm write the policy on Carson?’

  ‘Lamm’s agency is huge. He writes a lot of the people we insure. Give me other names, so I can see if we got screwed over with them, too, and maybe I’ll tell you a little more about Carson’s policy.’

  ‘Benno Barberi, James Whitman.’

  I heard his fingers typing at a keyboard. ‘No go on both.’

  Lamm had spread the policies around, to avoid attracting attention. ‘The check on Carson has gone out?’

  ‘Some days ago.’

  ‘Who was the beneficiary?’

  ‘A guy from Chicago PD called just an hour ago, asking the same thing.’

  ‘The police, and not the IRS?’

  ‘The police. Now you. The IRS will be next. Sometimes it takes the Feds longer, is all.’

  ‘Did the cop leave a name?’

  ‘Come to think, no,’ he said. ‘Just some guy, younger.’

  ‘You knew to stonewall him, didn’t you, Gaylord? You didn’t give him the beneficiary?’

  ‘I told him that information was confidential, like I’m telling you. He said he’d get a subpoena over, but I’m doubtful.’

  ‘He was no cop, but maybe you already figured that.’

  ‘Damn right I did, just like I’m trying to figure your motives this very moment. Why do you need the name of the Carson beneficiary?’ he asked.

  ‘I want to see who’s collected on running Carson down. You’d look dumb, Gaylord, if you blew a chance to recover the payout.’

  ‘Meaning what?’

  ‘Meaning you let an opportunity slip by to stop the Carson check.’

  ‘We’re an insurance company. We can’t go grabbing back checks because there’s an insinuation of a crime.’

  ‘Not even from the killer?’

  ‘Oh, hell, Elstrom, I don’t want to know anything more,’ he said, speaking fast now. ‘It was a two-million-dollar term life policy, payable to a Second Securities Corporation.’ He gave me an address on North Milwaukee Avenue in Chicago.

  ‘Thank you, Gaylord.’

  ‘Up yours,’ he said.

  Jenny called me as I headed to that north part of the city.

  ‘Though a most interesting story out of Chicago has gone national,’ she said, ‘and I’ve been on intimate terms with the man at the center of it …’ She faked a cough. ‘And I’ve been anticipating becoming even more intimate …’ She let her voice trail away.

  ‘I’ll tell you almost all of what’s new,’ I said, and did.

  ‘What about Wendell Phelps?’

  ‘I don’t know the truth about Wendell.’

  ‘Do you know your truth about Amanda?’ She wasn’t asking about the case.

  ‘I think so,’ I said, but it might have been after a hesitation.

  ‘You’re still coming to San Francisco?’

  ‘Soon,’ I said, but I wondered how long it would take to know the truth about that as well.

  FIFTY-THREE

  I blew past the place twice before I saw the tiny numbers. They were tarnished, almost invisible on a dark brick building wedged between a dry cleaner’s and a quick loan place that had gone out of business. I parked around the corner on a residential side street and walked back.

  A rusting bracket looked to have once held a barber pole, and the front window next to it had been filled in with glass blocks. The front door was full glass except for the mail slot cut into the metal scuff plate at the bottom. There was no name anywhere, or anything else that made it look like the legitimate recipient of a two-million-dollar insurance payout. I went in.

  A young girl, nineteen or twenty, was talking to a glitter-encrusted cell phone that lay on a small wood desk. She was chewing spearmint gum and painting the nails on her right hand with silver glitter that matched the phone, the sequins on her black sweater and the sparkle of the silver studs piercing her ears, nose, and one cheek. Even her dark hair had been dusted with silvery specks. I didn’t imagine all that sparkle was problematic during the day, but come nightfall, any driver catching her million glints in his headlights would likely be blinded and driven off the road.

  She had no computer, no typewriter, no papers, and no desk phone. The walls were also blank, except for a closed door in the wall behind her.

  Her thick eyelashes rose and then sagged, probably from their own caked weight, as I sat on a ripped vinyl chair and smiled.

  ‘I’ll call you back, Arnold,’ she said, releasing more spearmint into the air. Mindful of her wet nails, she touched a button on her cell phone with only the tip of a glistening little finger.

  ‘Can I help you, sir?’

  ‘I’m here to see Mr Lamm.’

  ‘I’m sorry. We have no …’ She’d already forgotten the name.

  ‘Lamm.’

  ‘Like in “Mary Had A Little—?”’ She ground harder at the spearmint gum, working the thought.

  ‘No. L–A–M–M.’

  She shook her head, confused. As she did, she caught sight of her wet right nails, still suspended like pincers splayed up in the air. She laid them down carefully, nails up, on the surface of her desk.

  I replaced my smile with an officious frown. ‘This is Second Securities Corporation?’

  ‘Just a minute.’ With her left forefinger, she hooked open the center drawer of her desk, read something, and said, ‘Yes, this is Second Securities Corporation.’

  ‘I’m with the Department of Verification,’ I said, trying to intone like Tan-tone did on the news at noon. ‘My office set up an appointment with Mr Lamm.’

  ‘I’m sorry, sir—’

  ‘Sorry won’t cut it.’ I stood to loom over the poor girl. ‘If Lamm thinks he can avoid this, he is sadly mistaken.’

  ‘I don’t know Mr Lamm,’ she said, her chair scraping back on the tile floor as I made for the door behind her.

  The faintest of foul smells came as I reached to turn the door knob. It was locked.

  ‘What’s back there?’

  ‘A garage full of rats, I’m thinking. Some alive, some dead.’ Her voice, frightened, had shot up an octave.

  ‘Where’s Lamm?’ I demanded, louder than was necessary.

  A tear began descending in a black rivulet. ‘I don’t know any kind of lamb. My ma never cooked it. I’m just supposed to sit here and take in the mail and not look at it and put it in the desk.’ She tugged at a right-side drawer handle, mindless now of her wet nails, and pulled it open. It was stuffed with flyers and catalogues. ‘Somebody comes by at night to pick it up.’

  I reached
past her, grabbed a handful. All of it looked to be junk: grocery flyers, ads for cosmetic dentists, sales at a tire discounter. There were no first-class business envelopes in the pile.

  ‘This looks like more than a day’s worth,’ I said, handing it back.

  She took it, sniffling. ‘They must be on vacation. They haven’t been by for a few days.’

  ‘I have to get in back,’ I said.

  My cell phone rang. I pulled it out.

  ‘Dek?’ It was Amanda. Her voice was high pitched, almost shrill. ‘An Agent Krantz—’

  ‘Department of Verification,’ I said officiously, for the glitter girl’s benefit.

  ‘Dek, he says—’

  ‘Hold please,’ I said, cutting her off again. I nodded curtly to the glitter girl and started for the front door. ‘Tell Lamm I’ll be back. He can’t hide forever.’

  ‘Tell him yourself,’ she sniffled behind me. ‘I haven’t been paid in over a week, and I don’t need this shit.’

  I strode out, pompous and erect, a bully. And sure of the obvious: Second Securities was a front, a mail drop, a place set up only to receive an insurance payout.

  I clicked Amanda back on. ‘Sorry; I was role playing.’

  ‘An Agent Krantz just phoned …’ More words came, but they were muffled, indistinct, lost to the traffic rumbling along Milwaukee Avenue.

  ‘Yell, Amanda,’ I shouted.

  ‘He says my father’s going to jail!’ she screamed.

  FIFTY-FOUR

  Amanda’s condo tower is for the very rich. She’d called down to the guards in the lobby, and one of them whisked me right into an elevator. Amanda was waiting for me in the hallway outside her door.

  ‘I just don’t know what’s going on,’ she said, ‘but I figured I better get away from the office in case Krantz showed up.

  ‘Your father is stonewalling everybody.’

  ‘But why?’

  ‘Arthur Lamm is his best friend?’

  She nodded.

  ‘I just came from Second Securities, a mail drop Lamm set up to receive insurance payouts like the Carson check. There was a girl there, a receptionist, who doesn’t do anything except wait for the mail and put it in a desk drawer. I don’t like the set-up; it’s crooked. I’ll go back after dark for a more thorough look around.’

  ‘You think this has to do with my father?’

  ‘I think I’d like to know how close he is to Arthur Lamm.’

  ‘Let’s go to Second Securities now,’ she said.

  ‘The girl will still be there. I’ll go alone, tonight.’

  I didn’t want Amanda along. My mind, or rather my nose, had slipped back to that noxious smell coming from behind the locked door at Second Securities. It could have been rats. It could have been something else.

  She stood up, grabbed her purse and her cell phone. ‘I have a plan for her.’

  There was no mistaking the resolution on her face.

  ‘Good deal,’ I said.

  Thirty minutes later I sat in the Jeep, waiting. I’d parked at the edge of a drugstore lot, mostly hidden but angled for a good view of Second Securities across the street. Amanda had gotten out a block away, so she could walk up to the drugstore alone.

  Amanda came out of the drugstore. With her back turned to the building across the street, she stopped at the trash receptacle on the sidewalk to thumb off the price stickers before dropping the lipsticks into the small case she’d brought. When she was done, she turned and, without a glance at me, crossed Milwaukee Avenue. It wasn’t a sophisticated plan, but we didn’t have time for sophistication: she was selling cosmetics, door-to-door, and anxious to hire an assistant, even a gum-chewing, glittered-up assistant, right on the spot.

  She pulled the door handle at Second Securities, and stopped. It was locked. She pressed close against the glass to peer in and began knocking. After a moment she started to turn away, but as she did her purse fell out of her hand, spilling its contents against the door. Making a gesture of disgust, she knelt down, her back to the sidewalk, the street, and me. She took an incredibly long time to pick up her things. Finally she stood up, and walked down Milwaukee. I started the Jeep and followed her around to a side street.

  ‘Nobody home,’ she said, getting in. She was perspiring lightly.

  ‘Let’s drive around, check for a back door.’ I started to pull away from the curb.

  She held her hand out. ‘We’ll use the front door, like we were invited.’

  I hit the brakes. In her hand was a key.

  ‘I got lucky,’ she said. ‘I saw the key through the glass, lying on the floor. There’s a mail slot at the bottom of the door. It took me forever to fish it out.’

  ‘I scared the girl away,’ I said.

  ‘Enough for her to drop the key back inside the mail slot before she took off.’

  ‘You wait in the Jeep while I go inside.’

  ‘We’ll go together,’ she said.

  ‘Let’s check around back first.’ I drove around to the alley. There was a dented, gray steel garage door at the rear of Second Securities. I jumped out quickly and gave the handle a tug. The door was locked from the inside.

  ‘Likely enough, the garage is full of rats,’ I said as I got back in the Jeep.

  ‘I don’t care. We’re going in together,’ she said.

  Remembering what had appeared to be a solid interior door leading to the garage in back, I drove to a Home Depot we’d passed a mile down Milwaukee Avenue and bought a short jimmy bar, a sixteen-ounce claw hammer and, after a second’s consideration, a pair of thin work gloves for her, a pair of thicker yellow rubber gloves for me. I wasn’t only thinking fingerprints; I was recalling smell.

  I parked on the side street. Amanda put the Home Depot things in her purse and we marched up to Second Securities like we had an appointment. A turn of the glitter girl’s key and we were in.

  The place still smelled of her spearmint chewing gum and cheap perfume, but the other smell – the dead smell – had grown stronger in the hours that the place had been shut up.

  Amanda sniffed the air. ‘What is that?’ she whispered.

  ‘Rats, as I told you,’ I said. After a moment’s hesitation, I switched on the overhead fluorescents and pointed to the desk. ‘Sit at the desk like you belong and search every inch inside for an envelope with a check in it, even behind the drawers. Try to keep your hands out of sight because I want you to keep your gloves on. If anybody comes in, say your friend asked you to fill in for the day.’

  I didn’t expect Amanda would find anything; Lamm would have grabbed the Carson check by now. But I wanted her away from whatever wasn’t right in back.

  I took the hammer, gloves and pry bar from her purse.

  ‘Maybe I should first go with you, to the back, to help you …’ She stopped as I shook my head. She didn’t want to follow that smell, not really. She put on the thin gloves I’d bought for her.

  I pulled on my own gloves and went to the door.

  I slipped the jimmy bar between the door and the jamb, just above the lock, and struck it with the hammer. The solid-core door splintered around the lock at the fourth blow, releasing the scent of hell.

  Behind me, Amanda caught her breath. ‘Oh, Dek, that’s not rats.’

  I pushed open the ruined door. Enough light filtered in from the office to show a car shape at the center of the garage. I found the light switch and closed the door behind me. The overhead fluorescent fixture buzzed, sputtered and caught.

  The car was several years old, a small, white two-door Ford made faintly green by the fluorescent light. It was filthy, except for the crumpled front fender that was strangely dulled.

  I walked up to it. Fine scratches crisscrossed the damaged fender. Someone had flattened the car’s finish with steel wool. Likely, I thought, to remove Grant Carson’s blood.

  The car’s doors were locked, and it had no license plates, no temporary dealer tag or windshield parking stickers. It could have been bought for cas
h in a bad neighborhood, or simply stolen.

  The garage was stuffy and hot from being closed up. Trying to breathe in only through my mouth, I pressed against the glass to look inside. The interior appeared empty. Whatever was fouling the air wasn’t coming from the passenger compartment.

  I turned away from the car and swung the hammer backwards, exploding the driver’s side window into a million tiny green-edged bits. I opened the door and was brushing some of the glass off the seat when Amanda stepped into the garage. She’d heard the shattering glass.

  ‘Dek?’

  ‘Go back. If anybody comes, keep them in front.’

  She didn’t argue.

  The dead smell was worse inside the car. A key was in the ignition. I took it out and went around to the back. The key didn’t work the trunk. I leaned back into the car, replaced the key in the ignition, and searched beneath the seats, under the floor mats and in the glove box. There was no second key, nor any interior trunk release.

  I slid out. The trunk seam was narrow. Jimmying the bar into it only slightly bent the lid. I’d have to go in through the back seat to see what was dead in the trunk.

  I climbed in behind the driver’s seat and began hacking at the back of the rear seat with the claw end of the hammer. The vinyl upholstery came away in chunks, still attached to its foam padding. The rank smell of death came at me stronger with each new blow, sticking thick in my throat and nose. I whacked faster at the seat back; I wouldn’t be able to stay in the car much longer.

  The last of the upholstered seatback tore away, but the metal springs behind it wouldn’t budge. They’d been fastened tight with a pneumatic wrench on an assembly line.

  I swung blindly at the rear shelf now, crazed by the ever stronger foulness rising from the trunk. The fiberboard dented and at last split apart. I ripped at the pieces, threw them out of the car, and reached down into the trunk.

  I touched cold metal, ribbed and hard. Reaching past it, I found something just as cold, but not quite as hard, wrapped in thick plastic. My gut twisted. It was what I knew I’d find. Rigor.

  I pulled my hand back, felt again the cold metal. It was a case of some sort, wedged between the seat back and the corpse. I found the handle and tugged it through the hole where the rear shelf had been. It was an aluminum metal briefcase. I dropped it on the front passenger seat and stuck my hand back into the hole.