The Confessors' Club

by Jack Fredrickson

  Somehow, I kept moving. An hour and a half later, I got to the used-to-be gas station across from the Dairy Queen.

  Both service bay doors were open. A man wearing dark blue coveralls straightened up from the front bumper of a rusting green Chrysler minivan to eyeball the blood, dirt and bits of bark and leaf shreds that clung to my skin and wet clothes.

  ‘Jesus, mister,’ he said. He was young, in his early twenties.

  ‘I had an accident,’ I said.

  ‘I guessed that already,’ he said, grinning.

  ‘I’ve got a car with flat tires in one of the fire lanes off County M. I need you to go out and fix the tires.’

  He cleared his throat. I would have too, if I’d been confronted with someone bloody and slimed head to toe with lake muck and compost. ‘Is the car in the water?’

  ‘No.’

  ‘Then how did you get so—?’

  I took out my wallet, extracted the bills, damp and stuck together like a thin sheaf of steamed cabbage, and peeled off a fifty. I laid it on the van’s fender. ‘It’s real money, just wet.’

  He looked at the limp bill, then back at me. ‘How many tires are punctured?’

  ‘I don’t know. I’d gone for a walk. When I came back to the car, at least two of the tires were flat.’ I peeled off another fifty, pasted it next to the first one. ‘Do you have a gun?’

  ‘I hunt,’ he said.

  ‘The second fifty is for you to bring it along.’

  He looked at my clothes and then at the two fifties, and then he shrugged. A hundred was a hundred, no matter that it was offered by a crazy man demanding he bring along a gun. He unpeeled the two fifties, went into the office, and came back with a shotgun. We got into his dented, powder-blue tow truck.

  ‘You up here on vacation?’ he asked as we rumbled down the road.

  ‘I came to see Arthur Lamm.’

  He laughed. ‘I guess everybody knows him, leastways his car. Drives a hundred thousand dollars’ worth of Mercedes Benz.’

  ‘Seen him lately?’

  He shook his head. ‘There’s a story going around that someone in Chicago reported him missing to the sheriff, but Herman Canty says that’s nuts, that Lamm’s just gone camping. On the other hand, that Mercedes has supposedly been sitting idle, collecting bird drops, out at Lamm’s camp for quite some time.’

  ‘Do you know Herman well?’

  ‘Nobody knows Herman well, except maybe Wanda at Loons’ Rest.’

  ‘Herman drives a nice new truck.’

  ‘Noticed that, huh?’ he asked, a wide grin on his face. ‘Herman ain’t never worked much, yet here he is, driving an expensive machine. Somebody must have died for him to afford a rig like that.’

  He came to a full stop at the bridge on County M. Shifting into low, he eased the truck onto the timber planks like he was rolling it onto eggs. ‘One of those fifties is for risking this bridge,’ he said, as the loose old wood shuddered beneath us.

  We got to the fire lane a couple of minutes later and bounced up to the Porsche.

  ‘I’ll be damned.’ The tow driver made a show of looking at me with new respect. ‘I’m sorry, mister; I didn’t figure you for a Porsche.’

  I picked a fleck of leaf off my shirt and flicked it out the window. ‘Understandable,’ I said.

  I stayed in the truck when he got out. He walked over to the driver’s side rear wheel and squatted down. Pulling out a pocket knife, he picked at something stuck to the side of the tire, then got up, and moved around the car, bending to flick at each tire with his knife.

  He came back to my side of the truck, smiling. ‘No need for my gun.’ He opened his palm, showing me four bits of twigs. ‘You been pranked, is all. All four tires. Kids jammed these into your valves to let the air out. I’ll have you on your way in no time at all.’

  He started the compressor on the truck bed and uncoiled a long hose. Moving around the Porsche, he inflated each of the tires.

  I got out, but had to lean quickly against the door. My legs were still rubber.

  He gestured at my filthy wet clothes. ‘Be a shame to sit like that in such a nice car.’

  ‘I’m going back to the Loons’ Rest to get cleaned up.’

  ‘I probably owe you some change, mister,’ he said, coiling the hose. ‘This wasn’t a hundred-dollar job.’

  ‘It was a bargain,’ I said, as much for the company of his gun as it was to fix my tires.

  ‘Fair enough, then,’ he said, climbing into his truck.

  I led us out of the woods and we drove back to town. As he turned into his old station, I gave him a wave and continued down to Loons’. The parking lot was just as empty as when I’d checked out that morning. I grabbed my duffel from the trunk.

  Wanda frowned as the bells inside the door danced.

  ‘I need to get cleaned up. I’ll pay for another night, though I’ll only be a half-hour.’

  ‘We’re full up.’

  I stared at her for a couple of seconds before I pointed a finger at the empty parking lot outside. ‘There’s nobody here.’

  ‘They’re out sightseeing.’ She looked away from me, and out the window at the parking lot. She wasn’t just being deliberately rude; there was something in her eyes. Fear, maybe.

  ‘And I suppose it’s your friend Herman leading them around, in that new pickup truck I’ve been seeing absolutely everywhere?’

  She kept looking out the window, as though waiting for someone to pull in. ‘Full up,’ she said.

  It had been no kid with twigs and a gun back in those woods. It had been Herman. I was being warned.

  ‘Tell that son of a bitch I’ll see him again,’ I said at the door.

  It was true enough.

  THIRTY-ONE

  I drove several hours, almost to Milwaukee, before my subconscious quit tensing for bullets whizzing past my ear.

  An enormous truck stop just north of the city had showers and a dour-looking cashier who expressed no surprise when I asked to use the showers. I rewarded him with a much fresher smelling me when I emerged in changed clothes, looking and smelling like the Porsche driver I might have been, had I learned more lucrative career skills. I bought paper towels, leather cleaner, carpet shampoo and, as a particularly elegant touch, a three-pack of little air fresheners that looked like flattened pine trees and smelled like urinal cakes. I scrubbed and patted and daubed the driver’s side of the Porsche’s interior in the parking lot. An hour later, satisfied that the car’s interior would heal, given time, air and prayer, I took my little three-pine forest on the road.

  I called Delray Delmar’s cell phone when I got to the Illinois state line. There was truck noise in his background. I had to shout to ask him where he was.

  ‘In my office,’ he yelled. ‘Lousy office. Trucks outside. Let’s meet tonight.’ He named a restaurant we both knew, five miles southwest of Rivertown.

  I would have shouted back that any place at all would have been fine, so long as it wasn’t in Wisconsin, but I didn’t have the strength.

  Since it was dark when I set out from the turret, I figured I could head over to Leo’s, leave his keys under the mat and switch the Porsche for my Jeep unnoticed before I went to the restaurant. I’d gone over the interior once more after I got back to the turret, even rubbed the three little pine trees together to release more of the fresh, Wisconsin urinal cake smell before throwing them out. As a provenance specialist for high-end auction houses, Leo made his living searching for small inconsistencies, but I was hoping that he wouldn’t go into the car until the next day, when the carpet might be dry and the lingering scent of the tiny flat pines had eradicated any last lake muck smell. I parked the Porsche in front of his mother’s bungalow, found my own key under the Jeep’s mat, and was gone like a bandit in less than thirty seconds.

  The notion that I’d pulled off the switch unnoticed lasted barely fifteen minutes.

  ‘Did a bear pee in my Porsche?’ Leo demanded when I answered my phone.


  ‘Does it smell like a bear peed in your Porsche?’ I countered, trying to sound offended.

  ‘My car looks and smells like a bus station men’s room. The floor is wet and it stinks of urinal cakes.’

  ‘There you have it, then,’ I offered, smooth as greased glass. ‘Bears don’t use bus station restrooms, even in Wisconsin.’

  ‘What the hell are you talking about?’ was all he could finally sputter, and even that took a number of seconds.

  By then I’d gotten to the restaurant, a dark, beef and brew place. I told him I’d call him tomorrow, and added he ought to lock the Porsche’s doors, in case any bears had followed me south.

  ‘Nasty bites,’ Delray observed as I slid into the booth in the corner farthest from the door.

  I’d daubed clear ointment every place that itched, and I glistened like the sidewalks of Bent Lake at nightfall. ‘Wisconsin offers more than just cheese,’ I said.

  Our waitress came and we ordered beer and cheeseburgers. As she started to walk away, I called out, telling her to hold the cheddar. I’d had enough of the notion of that.

  Delray grinned. ‘What did Wisconsin offer you, exactly?’

  ‘No more than you learned up there,’ I said, testing to see how much he’d reveal.

  His expression didn’t change. ‘Tell me anyway.’

  I told him about Arthur Lamm’s car, seemingly abandoned at his camp; Herman and his shiny new truck; an orange row boat that should have been bailed out; the Porsche’s deliberately deflated tires. And I told him about getting shot at.

  ‘Shot at, but not getting shot?’ he asked.

  ‘I’ve come to realize the difference.’

  ‘You were being run off.’

  ‘It worked.’

  ‘I’ll bet. But it was a cheesy way of doing it …’

  I groaned.

  ‘Forgive the pun,’ he said. ‘You’re guessing the shooter was Herman?’

  ‘He was nearby.’

  Our burgers came. Delray squirted a massive glob of yellow mustard on his fries, as I remembered kids did in high school. ‘The question is why Herman wanted to run you off,’ he said.

  ‘So I wouldn’t find Arthur Lamm.’

  ‘Maybe, or maybe not,’ he said, playing with a smile.

  ‘Herman Canty need not have worried,’ I said, not understanding. ‘Too many lakes; too many trees. Even with an army and a fleet of boats searching for him, Lamm might be able to stay hidden up there for years, if he didn’t go to Canada.’

  ‘Think harder. Go back a little, consider what else Herman might have been up to.’

  ‘After Lamm’s Chicago people called, the sheriff started looking him. It was Herman who remembered Lamm always went camping this time of—’ I stopped, remembering a thought I’d had, talking with the Bohemian.

  ‘Do you see?’ Delray asked.

  ‘Herman established that Lamm is up there, when perhaps he’s not up there at all.’

  ‘Herman wasn’t afraid of what you’d find, but rather what you wouldn’t find.’

  ‘No Lamm,’ I said.

  ‘Exactly. Herman could have driven the Mercedes up there, let it sit until Lamm’s people in Chicago thought to report him missing, at which time Herman says it’s all a false alarm, that Lamm’s out camping on one of the million lakes around there.’

  ‘When in reality, Lamm didn’t go up there at all,’ I said.

  ‘The truck’s the proof,’ he said.

  ‘The truck’s the pay. Herman got rewarded with a shiny new truck.’

  ‘I’ve been reassigned,’ he said. ‘It’s part of my training. I’m now working drug investigations on the North Side.’

  ‘Who takes over this case?’

  ‘I’ve passed my file on to Homicide, but there’s no heat on it. They don’t see the deaths as murders. They won’t follow up.’ He reached into his jacket pocket for a white envelope. ‘I’ve now got access to snitch money. In this case, twelve hundred dollars.’ He slid the envelope across the table. ‘Use it to work confidentially. Report only to me. Find Arthur Lamm. He travels in the same circles as did the dead men. He’s got to be the key to everything.’

  As perhaps was Wendell, but Delray had the decency to leave that unsaid.

  ‘You didn’t go back far enough with Whitman’s calendars,’ Delray went on. ‘I had his secretary pull two more of his appointment calendars. Four years ago, Whitman wrote “C. Club” on two of those special Tuesday nights.’

  ‘That’s not much more help.’

  He nudged the envelope closer to me. ‘Check it out.’

  ‘Is it legal, you paying me?’

  ‘Requisitioning money for one purpose, and using it for another?’ He laughed. ‘Hardly, but as far as you’re concerned, it’s expense reimbursement. You don’t know I’ve been reassigned.’

  ‘If I can prove Jim Whitman was killed, and not a suicide, I’ll be a rich man.’

  ‘So Debbie Goring said. This money will help you find that out quicker.’

  ‘What’s in this for you, if you’ve been transferred?’

  ‘I’ll be seen as riding in on a white horse to save Chicago’s most prominent people. My career will be made.’

  I admired the kid’s candor, but I suspected he was holding something back. ‘What aren’t you telling me about Arthur Lamm?’

  ‘Nothing. He’s disappeared, and he hasn’t shown up dead. For now, that’s enough to make him a suspect.’

  ‘Why would he kill?’

  ‘Let’s find him and ask.’

  ‘And we do that by first finding the C. Club?’

  ‘It’s our only lead.’

  The kid had a point.

  We ate our burgers and talked of Chicago politics. When we got up to leave, I pushed the envelope back toward him. Technically, or maybe not, Wendell was still my client, and Amanda was my first obligation. I couldn’t split my allegiances.

  I told him Debbie Goring was going to make me rich.

  It seemed reasonable at the time.

  THIRTY-TWO

  I trolled the Internet the next morning for anything that smacked of a ‘C. Club’ in Chicago and its surrounds. Google spit up a thousand organizations such as the University of Chicago Alumni Association and a curling club that met in the northern suburbs to sweep brooms fast on ice. None looked like they needed to meet in secret.

  I then widened my search by including all organizations that began with the letter ‘C.’ Eleven thousand names popped up, including a women’s rugby club in England and an outfit claiming to own the world’s largest catsup bottle. Narrowing these down to only those in Chicago didn’t help.

  Finally, I searched the public donor lists of Chicago’s premier civic, charitable and social organizations. Barberi, Whitman, Carson, Lamm and Wendell Phelps had all supported the Union League, the Standard, the Boys’ Clubs of Chicago, the Metropolitan YMCA and a dozen others. It was to be expected. They’d traveled in the same do-gooding circles. I switched off my computer. Delray’s lead had been a bust.

  I knew a Fed in the city. He didn’t think much of me because we had history, but I called him anyway and asked my question. He said he could give me five minutes of his time, in precisely one hour, but only in person, in his lobby. He wanted me to fight traffic to ask a question which he might or might not answer. That was understandable, too. Time does not heal all wounds.

  I thought about bumpers to bumpers and the impossibility of making it downtown in one hour, which was probably his intent, and I hustled to take the train. As it clattered along, I looked out the window, remembering when Leo and I were in high school and rode downtown, headed for un-chewable, two-dollar steak lunches served up with a spotted, hard potato and a piece of toast smeared with something the approximate color of butter. We’d cracked wise on those rides, at the colors and sizes of the clothes hanging on the lines behind the three-flats, sharing our stunted, sophomoric witticisms with those other passengers who’d not thought to bring earplugs, ear buds or
whole buckets of water in which to submerge their heads.

  I saw no clotheslines on this trip; basement dryers must be everywhere by now. Nonetheless, my faith in adolescent boys remained. They’d always ride trains, and they’d always find ways to embarrass themselves in public.

  Agent Till’s offices were on Canal Street. He was an investigator at Alcohol, Tobacco and Firearms. He’d threatened to prosecute me one autumn for withholding information he considered vital to wrapping up a case. He’d been half right – I was withholding – but the information wasn’t crucial. The case closed fine without it. Still, we both knew he’d been charitable in letting me skate unpunished.

  He came down to the lobby, walked to the granite bench by the window where I was sitting. He was a short, wiry man in his fifties with the wizened, creased face and hunched shoulders of a career investigator. Every time I’d seen him in the past, he’d been wearing a brown suit. Today was no different.

  ‘Five minutes,’ he said, by way of an opening pleasantry. He remained standing.

  ‘You appear to be brimming with good health.’ The last time I’d seen him, he’d complained about the healthy food his wife was forcing upon him.

  ‘Cut the crap.’

  I stood up so I’d be taller than he was. ‘I need information.’

  ‘Me, too,’ he said, still touchy about that previous autumn.

  ‘Have you heard anything about an investigation of Arthur Lamm?’

  ‘The insurance guy?’

  ‘Yes.’

  He shook his head. ‘ATF is not investigating him.’

  ‘I think the IRS is.’

  ‘I wouldn’t know about them.’

  ‘Could you find out what’s going on, and where they think he is?’

  ‘Sure.’

  ‘Will you find out?’

  ‘Will you tell me what I’ve wanted to know for too many years?’ he asked.

  ‘The case is closed.’

  ‘It doesn’t matter.’

  ‘No,’ I said.

  He smiled and suggested I do something that, were it even physiologically possible, I would never do in the lobby of a government building, particularly on a bench by a window where passersby could see.