The Confessors' Club

TWENTY-ONE

I skidded to a dusty stop across the few stones left on Kutz’s gravel lot with what I thought was considerable élan.

Leo was waiting in his Porsche. The top was down, but he’d parked in the shade under the overpass, and he wore an oversized red straw hat that, even without its tightly knotted blue chinstrap, would have looked ridiculous. Thought it was months before the burning rays of summer, Leo was careful; his pale skin burns like an infant’s.

‘So elegant, your driving finesse,’ he said.

‘I know the words to that bit of music you’re listening to,’ I said, through the newly exposed rip in my side curtain. Another curl of Discount Den duct tape had let go on the tollway.

‘They’re called lyrics, you boor, but Jobim didn’t use them in this song.’

He was listening to a piece of Brazilian bossa nova that, for once, I recognized. I didn’t know its name, but it was smooth and flowing and getting a lot of play as background in a television laxative commercial.

‘No more pressure,’ I began singing, warbling with the same solemnity as the singer on TV.

He sighed, shut off the player, and got out of the car.

We walked up to the peeling wood trailer. Young Kutz glowered at us through the tiny order window. Young Kutz is young in name only; he’s on the wrong side of eighty, and had been glowering from his trailer long before Leo and I started coming in grammar school.

‘Hiya, Mr Kutz,’ Leo said.

‘What’s it today, twerp?’

Leo stretched up to his full five foot six inches so he could line his eyes along the counter. ‘The usual six pups, cheese fries, and Big Swallow root beer, of course.’

‘I thought you were dieting,’ I said.

‘The trick is to chew slowly, thereby atomizing all the fat calories before swallowing.’

‘For sure you’ll drop that nettlesome pound and a half.’ I added my one dog and small diet to his order, gave Leo eight singles – Kutz’s prices were an outrage, given the quality of the food – and went around to the back of the trailer.

The lunch rush was over and empty picnic tables were everywhere. The snow was long gone, and it hadn’t rained at all in March, yet incredibly, I found a table that was almost half free of pigeon droppings.

Leo noticed when he came with the food. ‘Partially dropless – nice,’ he said, setting down the flimsy tray of hotdogs, fries and drinks with a careful, soft sliding motion of his hands and forearms. Kutz uses ultra-thin plastic trays because they’re likely to flex and be dropped, resulting in re-orders as well as queasy pigeons, which then results in excessively spotted tables.

As always, we ate silently for the first minutes, savoring the truck exhaust drifting down from the overpass mingling with the steam we imagined might be rising from our barely lukewarm hot dogs. They were the exact smells of our youth, nostalgia at its purest. Rumor had it Kutz had never changed the hot dog water in all the years he worked the trailer. No need, he’d supposedly once said: grease floats and ends up on the product, to be consumed by customers or pigeons – depending. That meant the hot dogs Leo and I were now eating might have been cooked in part of the very water Kutz used when we were kids. Nostalgia doesn’t get any purer than that.

‘You may now tap the power of my formidable brain,’ Leo said, after his third hot dog. ‘How’s the case?’

I told him that Barberi, Whitman and Carson had all died on, or right after, the second Tuesdays of even-numbered months.

He slammed the brakes on the sagging cheese fry he was about to propel into his mouth. When I dare eat Kutz’s cheese fries, I use a plastic spoon because the yellowish substance he says is cheese quickly dissolves potato fiber, rendering them too limp for me to hold. Not Leo. He regards Kutz’s cheese fries as among life’s worthiest adversaries, and while still in high school, mastered the art of arcing them into his mouth with his fingers. He says it’s a matter of wrist speed and pride.

Now, all that was forgotten. The cheese fry slid from his fingers to drop, with a soft, gelatinous slap, back into its cardboard tray. ‘What have you made of that?’

‘Each of the three men took pains to obscure their whereabouts those nights.’ I told him of the ‘C’ notations in Whitman’s desk diary.

‘They were together, at this “C” place,’ he said.

‘Until they started dying, one by one.’

‘What’s premeditated and sinister in a heart attack, an understandable suicide and a random hit-and-run?’

‘What if the first and second deaths came from administered overdoses, and the hit and run was deliberate? Barberi came home highly agitated over some insurance concern, but he’d learned to handle stress. A dose of something might have sent his heart into overdrive, but we’ll never know; he was cremated. We do know Whitman ingested too many pills, and right now we know there was no good reason for him to go outside his home to get them. If Whitman was murdered, then it’s likely Carson was murdered too, pushed in front of an oncoming car.’

‘To what end?’

‘I don’t know.’

‘Does Wendell have any thoughts on motive?’

‘He fired me.’

The eyebrows came together and stuck, shocked. ‘Surely not for a lack of progress.’

‘His whole attitude has changed. Instead of being intrigued by my suspicions, Wendell became combative and swatted every one of them away.’

‘What did he say about those mysterious “C” notations in Whitman’s calendar?’

‘No curiosity there, either.’

‘He knows what they mean,’ he said.

‘He spent those Tuesday evenings with Barberi, Whitman and Carson,’ I said, ‘and I’ll bet he knows who drove Whitman home.’

‘You’ve gotten too close,’ Leo said.

‘Yes.’

‘What’s next?’ he asked.

‘Arthur Lamm.’

Leo shook his head, confused. ‘The real-estate biggie?’

‘He’s gone missing, though it might be because the IRS is investigating him.’ I told him what the Bohemian had learned.

‘What if he didn’t take off?’

‘Then twenty-five per cent of the biggest shots in Chicago have just been murdered.’