‘Yes, but who has ever been able to handle Mr Elstrom?’ Her voice was surprisingly calm, forcing the new joke. She remained seated.
The sheriff had a high-wheeled off-road vehicle brought up and a paramedic got in with us. It was a rough five-minute drive through tall weeds to the edge of a small lake.
‘No one ever comes to this lake, because they can’t get to it,’ the sheriff said. ‘It’s more like a retention pond that fills when there’s been a lot of rain, and only then does it connect with the lakes to the north.’
They helped me stand, and we walked, of a fashion, to the shore. By then I was sweating.
They had them face down; two bodies on two tarps dragged from the edge of the lake, covered with other tarps. The paramedic bent to pull back the one covering the corpse closest to me.
Wanda screamed back at me in silent rigor.
‘Not that one, you idiot,’ the sheriff yelled at the paramedic. Then, to me, ‘She knew too much, and with a million dollars, Canty must have figured he could afford better.’
The paramedic moved to uncover the body lying past Wanda.
I’m not good with ruined corpses. To buy time for a few deep breaths, I focused on the watch on his wrist. A Rolex with that much gold cost more than ten thousand dollars, and it looked to still be keeping perfect time. I supposed that would be expected. Certainly it was water resistant to a depth far greater than the shallows at the raw end of the small lake, and the gentle lapping of the water through the rushes was more than enough to engage the self-winding mechanism. It was a gentleman’s wristwatch, designed for a wealthy man, a man of nuance, a man who need make only subtle gestures, even in death.
He had dressed well, his last day. His gray gabardine trousers were of the finest wool, light for the warm temperatures. Looking for identification, they’d turned back the label on his white shirt. It was from Pink’s, on Jermyn Street in London. The shoes, I knew from Amanda, were English, too: lace-up broughams of sturdy leather that would have once held a high polish.
The clothes and shoes, of course, had not fared as well as the wristwatch. The press had gone from the trousers, and here and there tiny bits of milky flesh protruded where the wool had been abraded by the barky texture of the water reeds. The shirt was now a putrid green, mossed and dirtied by the muck at the shore. And the leather of his shoes had puckered and blistered, for even the finest of leathers, no matter how well oiled, are not meant to withstand submersion.
They turned him over. That part of his face closest to the bullet hole was gone, nibbled away in tiny bites by the sunny fish and microscopic urchins that worked the shore of the small lake.
I nodded and the paramedic covered him again.
‘They were both shot somewhere else, then dumped in this lake by someone in a boat.’ Krantz had come up to join us.
‘An orange rowboat, recently bailed out,’ I said.
The sheriff looked at me and nodded. ‘Canty, in Lamm’s boat,’ he said.
The medical examiner held out two spent bullets for the sheriff to see. ‘We’ll have them tested,’ he said, ‘but they’re the same caliber as those we found in Bales, and in …’ He gestured toward me, the meat that had also caught a bullet from Canty’s gun.
‘Canty, for sure,’ the sheriff said.
‘Can you identify time of death?’ I asked the medical examiner, to be certain.
Krantz looked sharply at me.
‘Actually, yes, for both,’ the medical examiner said.
And then I turned on my crutches, and started the slow walk back down the pressed tracks we’d just made, alone. No one had thought to offer to help me back. And that was good. I needed to understand all I’d just heard. And all I now believed.
At the car, I slid my crutches in back, and got in behind the wheel.
Amanda said nothing, the gold flecks in her eyes impossible to see behind the tears.
‘Time to go back to Chicago,’ I said.
‘Do not start the car,’ she said.
SEVENTY-THREE
‘Tell me what happened up here, all of it, right now,’ Amanda said in a surprisingly strong voice. ‘In this, his last place.’
I let my hand fall away from the ignition switch. ‘He’s dead. One bullet.’
‘Who shot him?’
‘Canty. Delray was never a killer,’ I said, sure of that and most everything else, now.
‘From the beginning at Second Securities then, as best you see it.’
‘Canty must have driven Lamm down to Chicago to convert the Carson check to cash, and probably to help Lamm leave the country from there. Except Canty saw an opportunity to change his own life instead. He killed Lamm, stuffed him in the trunk of the Carson kill car along with the cash, and came back up here to erase the only other person who knew what he’d been up to.’
‘Wanda.’
‘Unfortunately for Canty, Richie Bales was up here by then, looking for Lamm. He surprised Canty, maybe as Canty was bailing the boat to take Wanda on her last ride, or maybe when Canty got back to the dock after disposing of her. Canty must have breathed a huge sigh of relief when Richie told him he wanted half the payout. Don’t forget, Canty still thought Richie was a cop, and saw him as one who could be bought off.’
‘So they drove down to Second Securities to split the money?’
‘Where, surprise, surprise, Canty saw the splintered door and the trashed car and thought the money had gone forever, and with it his hopes for getting out of the country a rich man. Richie, though, took a broader view.’
‘Meaning he saw how you could have learned through your insurance contracts that Second Securities was the Carson beneficiary, and gotten to the money ahead of them.’
‘And he saw how he could use your father to get that money back.’
‘All he had to do was lure my father up here to hold as hostage,’ she said.
‘I’ll bet checking your father’s phone records will show your father received a call from a burner phone just a few minutes before he left Lake Forest for work that Thursday morning. That would have been Richie, who your father still believed was a cop named Delray Delmar, telling him some of his and Arthur’s legal problems might go away if he’d come up to Bent Lake to talk to him and Arthur.’
‘Krantz had already frightened my father when he’d called for an appointment, threatening to prosecute him for Arthur’s crimes because my father owned half of Lamm’s agency.’
‘Between Krantz and Richie, it was enough to induce sudden panic in your father. He shot up to Bent Lake with no hesitation.’
‘When was my father killed?’
‘As soon as he arrived up here, according to the medical examiner’s timeline. They didn’t need to keep your father alive to lure me up here with the money.’
She looked out the window. ‘What could anyone have done?’ she asked.
It was the question I knew she would ask, and the one I most feared. I took a breath. ‘I wish I’d moved slower.’
She turned to look at me. ‘That Tuesday, Confessors’ Club day?’
‘No. The day before, Monday, when I’d been in such a rush to call Keller.’
‘You were in a panic; worried that Lamm would kill again the next night.’
‘I didn’t know Lamm was already dead, so I called Keller on Monday. On Tuesday morning, early, your father called me, furious. I got furious right back at him, saying he’d kept what he knew to himself for too long. He hung up on me before I could tell him that Delray Delmar was a fraud.’
‘Because if he’d known Richie was no cop, he never would have come up here?’
‘Yes.’
I waited for a moment and then for another, but there was nothing more to say. And so I started the engine and swung around to head back to Chicago.
Neither of us spoke the whole way down.
SEVENTY-FOUR
Debbie Goring came by a week after I’d gotten back from Wisconsin. It was eleven in the morning and I was on the benc
h by the river, watching Leo up in the purple ash. He was sawing off one of its main limbs. I’d come back from up north to find seven more leaves curled on the ground, but I fought the idea of cutting down the tree. There’d been too much death that spring.
She tossed a thick, letter-sized white envelope on the bench next to me and sat down. ‘I was expecting to hear from you,’ she rasped.
‘I was vacationing, up in Wisconsin.’
‘So I read in the newspapers. You got shot, pushed a killer off a bridge with your car and then snapped his neck and broke his back a few days later.’
‘The vacation brochures are right: there’s always plenty to do in Wisconsin.’
Debbie looked up at the ash. Leo, wearing an orange Sesame Street T-shirt, had begun hamming it up like a monkey, waving his bow saw at the front of the turret. Someone else had arrived.
‘What’s wrong with him?’ she asked.
‘His clothes, mostly.’
She turned back to me. ‘Even though I received that anonymous cashier’s check for a hundred grand—’
‘Wendell Phelps sent you that check, though it need never be proved,’ I interrupted.
‘Then it’s a shame, his death,’ she said. ‘Anyway, that check was a damned fine thing to receive, don’t get me wrong, but I was still bummed thinking no one would ever be prosecuted for killing my father,’ she said. ‘Then I heard about your little foray into the woods. Now, at least, it might become obvious that my father was murdered.’
‘It will never go to trial without Lamm. And Small and Richie Bales are dead.’
‘Arthur Lamm has escaped, scot-free?’
‘That’s what everyone is saying.’ Only Leo, Amanda and I knew that Arthur Lamm had escaped nothing. The Carson kill car had never been recovered, and by now I was daring to believe that it had been compressed to a small steel cube in a scrap yard friendly to car thieves, and that Lamm was on his way to becoming a doorknob spindle or perhaps part of a toaster.
She turned to look into my eyes. ‘Everybody’s saying also that Lamm escaped with a million dollars that’s missing from Grant Carson’s insurance.’ She lit a Camel and blew smoke at the Willahock.
Up in the ash, Leo was smiling down. Amanda had come around the side of the turret followed by a thickset man in a black suit. Wendell’s corporation had lost no time imposing a security detail on its new largest shareholder.
Amanda and I had not spoken one word since leaving Bent Lake, and when she dropped me at the turret, I was not sure she’d ever speak to me again.
‘I told myself that I’d have to live with Lamm’s permanent disappearance,’ Debbie went on, ‘but then, this morning, a messenger from a bonded delivery service brought me a box.’
Amanda glanced only briefly at me and went on talking up to Leo.
‘Want to guess what was in the box I got?’ Debbie asked behind a puff of smoke.
‘Flowers?’
‘Something that smells even better. Here, take a whiff.’ She picked up the envelope, opened the flap, and fanned the contents inside with her thumb.
I made a sniffing noise, but kept my eyes on Amanda. She’d opened a small rectangular box and was holding up its contents to show Leo, whose face had turned serious.
I turned back to Debbie. I couldn’t smell anything other than cigarette smoke.
‘Smells like a tire, doesn’t it?’ Debbie said.
‘Why would it smell like a tire?’
‘Look closely, Mr Elstrom. They even have little bits of rubber dust on them, like from the inside of a tire.’
‘Interesting,’ I said.
‘Got any idea why these might have been inside a tire?’
‘Not a clue.’ I pushed myself up to stand. I’d been off the crutches for three days, but that was more from temperament than prudence. I needed to walk, to take steps to get on with my life.
‘Me, neither.’ Debbie Goring flicked her cigarette butt in the river and stood up, too. ‘Two million in insurance was what I had coming, but a million cash, even smelling like the inside of a tire, made me a damn sight happier than when I first woke up.’ She reached for my wrist, slapped the thick white envelope into my hand and started to walk away.
‘Wait,’ I said. I looked closely into the envelope. There were eleven packets of currency inside. Fifty-five thousand dollars.
She came back. I extracted one packet – five thousand – and jammed it into my khakis. I held out the envelope to her.
She backed away. ‘No, no, Elstrom. Our deal was five per cent. You earned that, off the cashier’s check and the contents of this morning’s delivery.’
‘The papers mentioned an IRS agent named Krantz?’
She nodded.
‘He’d planned on making a big, career-boosting arrest of Arthur Lamm for income tax evasion. He’ll seize many of Lamm’s assets, but Krantz will be criticized for letting four million dollars get sent to Grand Cayman, where it can never be seized by the IRS. Krantz did recover a million dollars from Wendell Phelps’s Buick, but there’s no proof that it was the Carson payout, so he’ll never be able to seize that either.’
A huge grin lit up her face. ‘The newspapers are saying Lamm used the other half of that insurance money to get away. You saying you can’t always believe what you read in the papers?’
‘Krantz will hunt for that missing million for the rest of his days because he doubts that Lamm got away. He thinks I know something about that, and he’ll be watching me and my tax returns for years. If he finds me with money I can’t explain, he’ll redouble his efforts to nail me, along with anyone else he thinks might know something.’
‘Meaning me?’
‘Meaning anyone connected with the case that shows sudden signs of wealth.’ I pressed the envelope into her hands. ‘Be prudent, Debbie. Hide it all in a dozen places, trickle it out in small amounts over a lot of years, for clothes and tuition and a vacation every once in a while.’
‘As my father would have wanted.’
‘Yes.’
Her eyes got wet, and she stepped forward like she was going to kiss me. But reason took hold, and she turned. ‘You’re not half bad, Elstrom,’ she called back, as she disappeared around the front of the turret.
I started towards the ash, un-crutched but wobbling. Amanda met me halfway.
‘I noticed your spare tire is back on your Jeep,’ she said.
‘It just needed new air.’
‘I’ll bet. That happy woman was Debbie Goring?’ she asked.
‘She gave me five grand.’
‘How much did she want to give you?’
I looked up the hill, past the turret. A black limousine was idling at the curb. No doubt the driver was armed, just like the bodyguard who’d followed her down the hill and now stood a few vigilant steps away. Her new life had begun.
When I didn’t answer, she said, ‘I checked my father’s incoming calls. He got a call from a burner phone thirty minutes before he left for Bent Lake.’
‘Delray Delmar, the fake cop,’ I said. ‘Your father was a good man.’
‘You always find the good, don’t you, Dek?’
‘You’re going to do fine as a tycoon,’ I said.
‘There will be bumps. The Pig Lady’s lawyer called this morning, saying she’s going to sue for all of it. Otherwise, he said, she’s going to go hungry.’
‘Send her lettuce and tomatoes. Properly frugal, she can have BLTs for years.’
Amanda laughed at that, a good, long, healing laugh. She handed me the small white box.
A great creak came from the tree. Leo had stopped sawing.
‘How many leaves remain?’ she asked.
‘Six,’ I said, ‘per this morning’s count.’
‘You’re cutting off only one limb?’
‘It’s a minor setback, nothing terminal.’
Leo kicked the limb. We watched it fall. The tree, now with only one limb, looked like the hands on a clock, set at ten to six.
She
kissed me, maybe longer than she’d ever kissed me before.
I looked at the gold flecks in her eyes.
‘I need to accept that I never knew my father,’ she said.
‘You know enough.’
I walked with her, and the bodyguard behind us, up the hill.
‘That ash will survive, Dek?’ she asked, at the limo.
‘Perhaps stronger than before.’
The bodyguard opened the front passenger door.
‘Aren’t you going to open your gift?’ she asked.
I did.
She got in front, next to the driver. The guard closed her door, and got in back. In time, she’d learn to ride in back.
Her car pulled away, and in a minute it had disappeared. I looked down at the sunny-colored, yellow bow tie, wondering if it was more of a declaration than a gift, and thinking of my other bow tie, the purple one hanging on a nail in my almost-finished closet.
I started back down to the river, to look some more at the water and at Leo up in a tree, moving as best I could, one step at a time.
The Confessors' Club Page 28
