They walked, and I hobbled, to the registration desk. The lobby was deserted.
‘You said three rooms for tonight, then two for the next week?’ the desk clerk asked.
From old habit, Amanda hesitated. So did I. So did Leo.
‘That’s correct: three for tonight, then two,’ she said.
‘As I told you on the phone, I can only do coffee, cold cereal and milk in the morning,’ the desk clerk said. ‘Our handyman goes home at three. After that, I’m the only one here until the next morning.’ She smiled at me. ‘You’ll have the run of the place,’ she said to me, offering a joke about my crutches.
Amanda said we’d manage. She and Leo were given rooms down the long hall, in the new wing. The desk clerk gave me a room just four doors past the lobby, saying it had been fitted with thick grab handles and wider doors should a wheelchair become necessary, of which she had two, right on the premises.
The desk clerk handed us old-fashioned, square steel keys. I walked, of a fashion, the few steps to my room. Leo went ahead, as if to go into his room.
‘You’ll sleep?’ Amanda asked.
‘I’ve been well medicated,’ I said, offering a yawn as proof. I unlocked my door and went in.
I waited a minute, then stuck my head out. The hall was empty. The door to the back parking lot was only a few feet away.
Leo had pulled the Jeep around to the back. He pushed open the passenger door; I put in my crutches and got in.
‘Que?’ he asked in Spanish. It is a language he does not know.
‘Pronto,’ I responded in kind, sounding every bit as fluent as him.
SIXTY-SIX
‘I’m here merely to shift your gears; I get that,’ he said after we’d driven a dozen miles in silence. ‘You’re sure you’ll be able to drive the little Ford?’
‘It’s got an automatic transmission. No shifting.’
I repeated what I’d outlined quickly in front of the clinic while we waited for Amanda. ‘Total turnaround time will be less than twelve hours, most of it in darkness.’
‘Except the last few, when I cart you back to the ski resort in broad daylight.’
‘We alibi each other. We went out to hunt up doughnuts.’
‘What about cell tower pings? I saw on TV that cell phones can place people at a site of perpetration.’
‘Perpetration?’ I asked. ‘That’s a stretch of a word, even for you.’
‘Don’t obfuscate. You didn’t think of that little detail, did you?’
‘I’ve only got tonight to perpetrate.’ I told him where I wanted to be picked up so we wouldn’t have to use our phones and risk being identified as perpetrators. Still, he handed his over and I removed the batteries from both our phones.
He reached to rattle the key in the Jeep’s ashtray. ‘This time, remember to leave the key on the floor,’ he said.
I took it out and put it in my pocket. ‘I hope I’ll feel it was a good thing I didn’t, the last time,’ I said.
‘How did Canty get in after you’d been there?’
‘Or Delray?’
‘Or Delray,’ he agreed.
‘They must have used Lamm’s key,’ I think I mumbled, before I fell asleep.
Five hours later, Leo tapped my neck. Thanks to the lingering meds, I’d slept all the way down to Chicago. He’d stopped around the corner from Second Securities. I grabbed the yellow gloves from the back, planted my crutches on the asphalt, and slid out of the Jeep.
‘Wondering about surveillance cameras?’ he asked.
‘I have to risk them,’ I said, pulling my knit hat low and tugging up the collar on my pea coat. ‘Krantz will probably have his search warrant later this morning.’
I slipped on the gloves and started down the short half-block to Milwaukee Avenue. I hobbled more than I walked, and scraped along more than I hobbled. Ligaments in both legs were torn, and it would be some time before I got the hang of the crutches.
The middle of the block was dark, and I kept my head down as I unlocked the door, but I didn’t imagine Krantz would have any difficulty identifying me from surveillance photos, if any were being taken. Men on crutches aren’t often out in the middle of the night.
The scent of the glitter girl’s cheap perfume and spearmint gum had gone; the place now smelled only of the stench I’d set free when I’d cut through the dead man’s plastic shroud. I locked the door behind me and dropped the key to the floor. I wouldn’t be going out that way.
I went through the door I’d splintered and into the garage. The smell of death was so thick it stuck to the back of my throat like rotten paste. I pushed what was left of the door closed behind me.
I needed a fast, clear look. I switched on the overhead fluorescents. The car sat in the center of the garage, rank and dented, exactly as I’d left it. I switched off the lights, crutch-walked across the garage to the overhead door’s power switch and raised the door. Moonlight flooded into the garage.
I hobbled back to the car, slipped in, twisted the key I’d left in the ignition and backed out into the alley.
I wanted badly to speed away; a corpse was rotting in ripped plastic just three feet from my head. But an open door would draw cops too soon, and I was clutching at the faint hope that time would dissipate the smell before Krantz showed up with his search warrants. I got out, reached in to push the door button, got back in the car and drove to the end of the alley.
Leo was waiting around the corner, as we’d agreed. He must have been crazed with worry as he followed me deeper into the city. I was driving the Carson kill car, with someone else’s body in the trunk.
He stayed well back when I turned off and parked on a side street in a run-down neighborhood on Chicago’s west side. It was the middle of the night but I knew there were a hundred eyes on me, and him. It couldn’t be helped. What I was doing was done often enough, on those blocks. I shut off the engine and left the key in the ignition. Leo shot forward, I got in, and he drove us west to the tollway north to Wisconsin.
He told me to unzip my side curtain as he did the same. I’d brought the stink of the death in that small Ford with me. After a few minutes I started shivering, from the cold and from worry that I’d left some trace of my DNA behind.
‘What’s wrong with you?’ he asked.
‘My DNA.’
‘I’ve always worried about that, too,’ he said.
SIXTY-SEVEN
Amanda and I met for breakfast at ten the next morning. The dining room was empty except for us, a pitcher of milk, a Thermos of coffee, and several little boxes of barely sweetened, nutritious, thoroughly uninteresting cereal.
‘My room is charmingly ancient,’ I said, chattering light. ‘Real porcelain handles on the pedestal sink, cast-iron bed stand and a scratched maple dresser. Still, this place is quiet as a tomb, optimal for sleeping.’
She poured us coffee. ‘What time did you and Leo get in this morning?’
‘How did you know?’
She shrugged, trying to grin. ‘Your rusted muffler is quite distinctive. I heard it start up ten minutes after we checked in. At first I thought it might be Leo, moving it to park in back, but when I looked out, I couldn’t see it anywhere. It wasn’t hard to guess that he might have driven off, or who’d gone with him. The only question is why you didn’t take the Escalade.’
‘We were being clever, and worried you’d go out to the Cadillac for something. Seeing the Jeep gone, you’d simply assume Leo was off in search of doughnuts.’
‘Why did you go back if there was no chance for a peek in the trunk?’
‘Eliminate a link.’
She touched my wrist. She realized I’d gone to separate Wendell from Lamm, if only a little, if Wendell had even been there at all.
‘The other scenario is no better.’ I told her about the orange rowboat I’d seen, bailed out and bobbing high on the water at Lamm’s camp.
‘It’s why I’m waiting up here. I’m expecting he could be in a lake,’ she said, looking away.
> Her eyes were clear; her chin was raised. In that instant, I could see the chief executive she was destined to be. ‘My father drove Jim Whitman home,’ she said.
‘I take that as proof of his innocence. Your father is not stupid. As I told you before, he wouldn’t have risked driving Whitman if he’d had any part in killing him.’
‘You’re sure?’
‘As much as I’m sure Whitman’s death shocked your father into hiring Eugene Small at the end of January.’
‘Two weeks later, Carson got killed.’
‘And Eugene Small was murdered two weeks after that. It made your father frantic.’
‘Richie Bales killed Small?’
‘I told Krantz it was either Bales, looking to get Small out of the way so he could extort money from Lamm; Lamm himself, because Small had learned too much; or Canty, on Lamm’s orders. Each had motive.’
‘Why did my father come up here?’
‘I told Krantz that either Krantz’s threat to prosecute him for Lamm’s crimes sent him into a rage, to come up and confront his false friend, or Richie Bales got to him, still posing as a cop, demanding your father come up on one pretext or another, perhaps to help Bales locate Lamm.
‘There’s no chance my father is still alive?’
The soft way she was asking sent my mind back to the small photos I’d seen in Wendell’s study, of the little girl she’d been, clutching a small cluster of blue balloons. The balloons would have soon gone away; there was never any helping that. Just like there was no way of helping her much now.
She said she was anxious to drive back to Bent Lake, to track down the sheriff. It was more likely she wanted to be alone, to prepare herself for a call from the sheriff. As I hobbled to walk her to the lobby door, we heard the resort manager yelling from a private office. ‘I don’t care where the hell he is. You tell him to get out here now with glass and new locks.’ A desk phone was then banged down in anger.
‘Tell the sheriff about that bailed-out rowboat,’ I said by the front door, ‘though he’s already searching the lakes for Canty.’
‘What’s worse, Dek? Finding my father in a car, or in a lake?’
I shook my head. There could never be an answer to that.
SIXTY-EIGHT
Leo found me at twelve-thirty in the lobby, eating unsweetened Cheerios, dry, and watching television. There had been no report of a corpse being discovered in a car in Chicago, nor on the websites I’d snagged on my cell phone. Then again, it had been that kind of neighborhood.
He curled a forefinger for me to stand up, and went to the front desk to check out. ‘Excellent beds you have here; I can’t remember the last time I slept a solid twelve hours,’ he said, as though he hadn’t just done a round trip to Chicago to partake in the felonious transport of a corpse.
‘You hear anything last night?’ the resort manager asked. It was the same question she’d asked me, after Amanda left.
‘I was out cold for twelve hours,’ he said again. ‘What happened?’
‘Damned kids, looking for booze. They broke in the kitchen door.’
‘Did they get away with much?’
She shook her head. ‘That’s just it: I can’t see where anything was taken, other than maybe a box of crackers and a jar of peanut butter. Damn, dumb bored kids, looking for a thrill.’
Outside, I said to Leo, ‘Clever, you saying that about being asleep for the whole night. Twice.’
‘Cleverness is one of my many middle names,’ he said.
‘Amanda heard us leave.’
‘Let’s hope the desk lady did not,’ he said, cleverness draining from his face. Then, ‘No news?’
‘Nothing on television or on the Internet.’
‘I checked the Internet, too, after I went out to the Escalade earlier. No word of a car being found, boosted and stripped, with a body in the trunk.’
We went outside. ‘Don’t blow a tire; you’re driving with no spare,’ I said, peering into the back as he climbed into the Jeep. He’d put the Jeep’s spare in the back, and covered it with my yellow rain poncho.
‘Caution is another of my middle names,’ he said, and took off for Chicago.
I called Jenny from the terrace.
‘Leo had implied your vocal chords were healthy enough to call before now,’ she said.
‘It’s been hectic.’
‘Yes, that story,’ she said. ‘Tell me.’
‘It’s unresolved, and potentially damaging.’
‘You’re worried about Amanda?’ she asked.
‘And her father.’
‘Where are you exactly?’
‘A ski resort in the piney woods of Wisconsin.’
‘Alone?’
‘Amanda’s here. Leo just left.’
‘I’m going to be so proud to not ask the next question.’
‘Separate rooms,’ I said.
‘This is so like high school.’
‘You rented rooms in high school?’
Jenny laughed before the newswoman, never far away, took over again. ‘Give me something for the future.’
I told her all of it.
‘The wires out of Chicago have barely scratched the surface of this,’ she said when I was done.
‘I need you to watch those wires.’
‘For a stolen car found stripped, with a body in the trunk.’
‘With luck, they’ll find it today, and then we’ll know.’
‘Are we still talking about you coming to San Francisco sometime?’
‘Seafood on the Wharf.’
‘There could be that,’ she said, hanging up and leaving me to wonder why I’d ever want to waste time going to the Wharf.
SIXTY-NINE
Amanda got back just before dark, red-eyed and hollow-cheeked. She’d been gone eight hours, but she said it seemed she’d been gone twenty. We sat at the bar in the deserted, dark lounge and had drinks – a whiskey and water for her, a med-friendly ginger ale for me – that the resort manager had come in to make for us.
Amanda had brought two bags. One was plastic, and contained a loaf of rye bread, a jar of Dijon mustard and an orange brick of Wisconsin’s official sustenance, cheddar cheese. The other bag was paper, and well worn. She’d ducked into an antique store that displayed used books in the window, and bought a collection of poems by somebody I’d never heard of, a guide to making soups, and a history of World Wars One and Two condensed into one hundred pages. She tried a big smile as she took out the last book, an old British mystery novel that she said was written when sexual activity was described with vague movements of eyebrows and fluttering hands, though she promised to take that one away if it set my own eyebrows and hands to twitching.
‘How rough was your day?’ I asked.
‘Too many lakes,’ she said.
‘Maybe moving the car was dumb.’
‘No; it was risky, and daring, and I love you for it.’ Then, likely realizing she’d said something she didn’t mean to say, she added, ‘I called my office every hour. I said only that my father was up here and might have gotten stranded on one of the small lakes. Of course, they’ve been watching the news …’
‘Not unusual. Most people in Chicago are following the Confessors’ Club story.’
‘No one said anything, but it would be impossible for them not to assume my father’s caught up in all of that.’
We tried making jokes about what I might learn from the books she’d bought but mostly we just made silence.
Agent Krantz found us at eight o’clock, lapsed into sitting stiffly at the bar like two strangers on a train. He had to perch on the other side of Amanda because I’d taken the stool at the end of the bar so I could lean against the wall. The manager came in and Krantz ordered a low-carb beer. It figured.
‘I assumed you’d gone back to Chicago,’ I said, by way of an enthusiastic greeting.
‘I promised we’d talk again today, and I didn’t want to disappoint,’ he said, taking a pull at the beer and no
t grimacing. ‘There have been developments.’
Amanda glanced sharply at him.
‘No news about your father, I’m afraid,’ Krantz said quickly.
‘Herman Canty?’ I asked.
‘Nor him, either, though the sheriff’s people did find a note that Canty’s girlfriend, a Wanda something, taped to the door at the Loons’ Rest. It said she was off on an adventure of some sort.’
‘That’s a development for sure,’ I said, agreeably.
‘Except Canty’s truck was found parked on a side street.’
‘In plain view?’
He nodded.
‘Wow,’ I said. ‘There’s been some ace sleuthing done.’
Undeterred, he said, ‘One of those tool bin things is bolted inside the truck bed, behind the rear window. Want to guess what was in it?’
‘Not tools,’ I said, ‘because people around here say Canty never did much.’
‘There was a freshly packed duffel bag inside. Our Mr Canty was planning a trip.’
‘With the lovely Wanda, as her note said?’
‘Could be, or not could be. That is the question.’
I groaned, but said nothing to spoil the taste of his low-carb beer.
‘There was a fresh set of tire tracks in the fire lane closest to Lamm’s camp, made by tires almost bald of tread,’ he said. ‘Jeep tires, just like yours, Elstrom. And just a few feet away, we found evidence that someone had been digging at the base of a tree.’
‘I told you I got trussed up in Lamm’s cottage. The fire lane was where I parked. As for the digging, there are beavers and raccoons up here.’
‘One of my men had a peek inside your Jeep earlier this morning.’
‘I’ve been meaning to clean out all those hamburger wrappers.’
‘Why is your spare tire inside, instead of mounted on the bracket on the back?’
‘It’s out of air,’ I said.
‘And why was the hood warm?’
Amanda inhaled sharply, but stared straight ahead.
‘From the sun,’ I said, patting the crutches I’d leaned against the wall. ‘Obviously I can’t drive.’
He leaned forward so he see could more directly past Amanda. ‘My warrant came through to search Second Securities.’
The Confessors' Club Page 26
