The Confessors' Club

TWENTY-TWO

‘My father fired you.’ Amanda spoke slowly over the phone, each word precise, distinct, and under control. I knew that control. She was furious.

‘Apparently.’

‘He told me you’d made no progress, you’d pocketed his two-thousand-dollar retainer without doing anything but mewing around a little bit, and dusted him off by telling him to go to the police.’

‘Mewing? Like a cat? He said I was mewing?’

‘Don’t evade. What is he up to?’

‘Actually, I’ve made out a check for his refund.’

‘Don’t parse my words, either. What’s all this about: the bodyguards, the secrecy? Is his life in danger?’

I’d had an inspiration, driving home from Kutz’s. ‘I want to deliver the refund in person. I’m certain he won’t take my call, or see me at his office.’

‘You want me to set up a confrontation without telling me what’s going on?’

‘He’s still my client.’

‘I ask again: is his life in danger?’

‘Get me in front of him, Amanda. If I learn he’s in real trouble, I will violate his trust and tell you.’

It was enough, for the moment. She said she’d get back to me.

I crossed the second floor, headed to see how my freshly re-hung cabinet was faring, when the lid on the front door mail slot clanked. I’d installed one that was extra-large, anticipating improved times, but even the junk mailers didn’t yet think me worthy. Today though, my mail slot clanked. Mail had come. I clanked, too, beating down the wrought-iron stairs.

It was Jenny’s small something, sent in a padded envelope. I ripped it open. An untied purple bowtie was inside, with a note that read, ‘It’s not so much the look that’s sought, but rather the demonstration of proficiency.’

It was a nudge, aimed with a joke, and so quintessentially, marvelously Jenny.

I’d never tied a bowtie. That was the laugh, and the nudge, because she knew I’d wrestle with learning to tie the thing, and think of her every second I was doing it. And I would, along with thinking about my aborted trip to San Francisco and the phone call I’d fumbled just a few hours earlier.

I took my bowtie upstairs. The cabinet I’d straightened was listing. Not much, just a few degrees, and surely no more than the smoke stacks on the Titanic had tipped in the first minutes following its collision with the iceberg. I set down the tie and spent the next hour trying to correct the cabinet, but no amount of shimming, leveling, and shaving got it to hang right.

Amanda called. ‘We’re having barbecue tonight with my father, at five.’

‘That’s early,’ I said.

‘With the pig lady,’ she said. It was rough, especially for Amanda.

‘You mean his wife?’

‘Second wife,’ she said.

I knew that, of course. It had been in the papers. Wendell, a long-time widower, had married after Amanda and I divorced.

‘You’ll have time to tell me everything as we drive up there,’ she said. ‘Everything.’

Amanda was waiting beneath the portico of her lakeside condominium building. She wore exquisitely fitted jeans and a burgundy top that didn’t pull all the fire from her eyes. She flashed the rest of it at me as she slid onto the passenger’s seat. ‘I don’t like cagy.’

‘For the time being, I have to respect your father’s confidence,’ I said as I pulled onto Lake Shore Drive.

She gave my invariable khakis and blue shirt the usual quick glance, but lingered at my neck. Her voice softened. ‘A bow tie, and purple?’

‘Shock and awe.’ It had taken me an hour practicing with downloaded instructions to achieve the partially crumpled mess around my neck.

‘You want my father to be shocked and awed by your tie, or by what you’re going to say?’

I didn’t want to say I’d worn the tie to keep reminding myself of who’d sent it, and I didn’t want to tell her of the accusations I was going to lay on Wendell, so I said nothing.

She fingered the wires sticking out of the hole in the dashboard where the radio had been. ‘You used to have a Mercedes,’ she said.

‘Bought used,’ I said.

‘And such very nice clothes.’

‘Fortunes wane.’

‘Perhaps, but you gave your clothes away, right after we split up. Including that nice camel-hair sport coat I bought you for your birthday…’ Her voice trailed off.

It was old detritus, and it was accurate. And it was useful, because it beat discussing what her father hadn’t told me about Barberi, Whitman and Carson.

‘I’d gotten to living a little too fancy,’ I said. ‘Jettisoning the duds and the car seemed a reasonable way to simplify my life.’

‘Along with going to live in a turret?’

‘You are demeaning my castle?’

‘You have to admit, there’s something monastic about your life… the turret, the lack of variety in clothing, this…’ She bent back one of the wires sticking out from the dash, and turned to me. ‘Was I part of all your clutter, Dek? Was I too fancy?’

‘Too fancy?’ I repeated, startled. ‘You’ve never been too fancy, Amanda.’

It might have been from the rapid turns in the road, but she’d leaned closer before shifting away. ‘Your new bow tie is a promising addition to your wardrobe,’ she said. ‘What prompted you to buy it?’

‘It was a gift…’ I stopped, though my abrupt silence spilled the rest of it.

‘Ah… the newswoman.’ Then, ‘What are you going to ask my father?’ she asked, leaning more toward her door and safer talk.

Or more dangerous, depending. ‘I’m going to ask him about Wendell Phelps.’

She turned to look at me. ‘What the hell?’

‘I’m going to ask him if he fired his previous investigator using the same baloney he gave me.’

I told her I wanted to talk to Wendell before I said anything more, and we fell into silence as she mulled, and I mulled, things each of us didn’t understand about Wendell and perhaps, less than fleetingly, about ourselves. I tried to fill the quiet by shifting more than was necessary, working through the rush-hour traffic up Lake Shore Drive to Sheridan Road, through Evanston, Wilmette, and Winnetka. With every mile, the homes got grander and set back farther from the road. By the time we got to Lake Forest, most of the estates were invisible.

I turned right onto Red Leaf Road and followed it as it curved along the shore of Lake Michigan. As I rounded the last turn, brake lights flashed ahead as cars slowed to turn through Wendell’s stone pillars.

Amanda inhaled sharply. ‘He didn’t tell me he was having a party. I’m wearing jeans, for God’s sake.’

‘Nice jeans, though,’ I said. ‘And of course, I’m wearing a purple bow tie.’

She didn’t laugh.

We passed a bush that looked like it had been ripped in half.

‘Pigs,’ she said. Earlier, she’d referred to her father’s new wife as a pig lady, but now, apparently, she was including Wendell in her contempt.

I followed a black Mercedes sedan into the long driveway and coasted to a stop. Four more dark Mercedes were ahead of the one in front of us. At the head of the line, several blue-jacketed parking valets were waiting for a uniformed security guard to check invitations. It took ten minutes for the guard to get to us.

Amanda leaned across me and spoke through the rip in my side curtain. ‘I’m Amanda Phelps. I’ve brought a guest.’

I found myself holding my breath. Her body weight, so easily pressed against me, felt like the best of our old times.

The private cop’s list of invited guests had small photos alongside the names. He peered in at her. ‘I’m sorry, Ms Phelps, we don’t have your guest listed.’

‘I’m Mr Phelps’s daughter. That’s sufficient.’

The private cop looked a little too long at the gray primed section behind the driver’s side door before asking for my driver’s license. Amanda had to straighten up so I could reach for my wallet. I handed out my license, and the guard stepped back to speak into his two-way radio.

‘Obviously I didn’t tell my father you’d be coming along,’ she said to me.

I gestured toward the guard reporting my arrival. ‘There goes my shock and awe.’

‘Maybe not. My father hasn’t yet seen your purple bow tie.’

Behind us, expensive automobile engines revved loud and impatient. Finally, the radio crackled and the guard motioned for one of the valets to come over. ‘Thank you,’ the private cop said, handing back my license.

‘Don’t let anybody paint over that primer,’ I told the valet as I got out, pointing at the gray patch behind the driver’s door. He nodded gravely, probably thinking it was a sign of great wealth to have the confidence to drive up in such a heap, particularly wearing a purple bow tie.

A big man was waiting for us by the front walk, his suit coat bulging from a gun. He motioned for Amanda and me to follow him along the flagstone path around the south side of the house. Wendell had sent him out fast when he learned Amanda had brought a most unwanted guest.

A huge red-and-white striped tent had been set up on the lawn. A four-piece combo was playing gentle jazz on the stone terrace as a hundred people, holding champagne flutes, swayed to the music and made appropriate rich people noises. The unseasonably warm weather had held, and the men wore pastel jackets, the women, pastel dresses. All the guests seemed to be tanned, from Palm Beach or Palm Springs or wherever the palms were where they wintered when Chicago got slushy. I supposed I stood out, because I don’t get tanned until summer, and even then it comes mottled with spots of white wherever bits of caulk and paint had blocked the sun from my skin.

I looked around for Wendell. Three more men in ill-fitting, too-square suits stood fairly close together at one end of the terrace. Wendell stood in the approximate middle of them, talking with a small group of people. I started to head over but the big man blocked my way. ‘Mr Phelps is busy.’

‘Not for his daughter,’ Amanda said.

‘Mr Phelps suggested later,’ the big man said.

Wendell had allowed me in, only to box me in.

Amanda was about to head for her father when a bell sounded from a few hundred feet away. The jazz group stopped playing in mid-riff.

‘Delores’s new baby,’ a woman with impossibly white teeth said to Amanda. Delores was the name of Wendell’s second wife.

The crowd began to move as a herd toward the far side of the lawn. I looked toward the tent. Wendell had gone.

I grabbed two flutes of champagne from a passing waiter. ‘Delores’s new baby?’ I whispered to Amanda, handing her one. ‘You’ve become a half-sister?’

I’d expected a glare. Instead, Amanda gave me a faint smile and we followed the crowd.