The Confessors' Club

TWENTY-SEVEN

‘I’m in real need of caffeine,’ I said to gray-skinned Wanda as I looked around the motel office for the coffee maker. It was six-thirty the next morning.

‘DQ,’ she said.

I pasted on the best smile I could offer to such a creature. ‘You don’t have coffee for guests?’

‘DQ does egg sandwiches. You could have a whole breakfast.’

‘With ice cream, just the thing for a cold morning.’ I turned for the door.

‘You checking out?’

‘I’ll be gone by the end of the morning. Check-out is noon?’

‘Eight-thirty in season.’

I looked out the window. The Porsche was the only car parked on the gravel lot.

‘I imagine you need to hustle to get rooms ready for the next onslaught of visitors,’ I said.

‘Eight-thirty,’ she said.

‘I’ll leave the key in the room for when you come to make sure I didn’t steal either the towel or the hole in the middle of it.’

‘Illinoyance,’ she muttered as I went outside.

‘Cheesehead,’ I muttered back, but likely she hadn’t heard me, since I’d already slammed the door.

A truck shot from a parking space down the street and sped away. The truck was shiny and blue and I was fairly certain it was the one I’d seen in Loons’ lot the previous evening, which meant it belonged to Herman Canty, Lamm’s caretaker. If the rumors were true, that he spent his nights at the frigid Loons’ Rest, curled beside the gray-faced Wanda, the man was entitled to whatever haste he needed to get away.

I drove down to the DQ. It was closed, though the sign said it was supposed to have opened at six, almost an hour earlier. I wasn’t going to wait for someone to show up. I was anxious to speed out of that town, too. Besides, risking a launch of coffee in Leo’s meticulously maintained Porsche, as I so often did in my Jeep, was unthinkable. I drove on.

Fifteen minutes later, in the sheriff’s office, I regretted not waiting at the DQ. A massive caffeine-withdrawal headache had blossomed, and was pulsing along in perfect rhythm with the slow, doubting drone of the deputy sitting with his feet up on a brown steel desk.

‘Tell me again why you’re interested in Mr Lamm.’ The man’s tan shirt was stretched taut across his ample stomach, as though he’d often visited the DQ in Bent Lake.

‘He invited me up for some fishing.’

His face was too red, too early in the year, to have come from the sun, and I guessed that his shirt might have been tightened more from beer than soft-serve ice cream. He craned his neck to look outside the window at the Porsche. ‘Don’t see gear,’ he said, like he could see inside the trunk along with being able to smell a lie.

‘Arthur said I could use his.’

The deputy sighed and shifted in the chair. ‘Nobody seems to know where Mr Lamm has gotten himself to. People from his office in Chicago called up to report him missing. I sent two guys out for a day in a boat, and even hired a Cessna for an hour, but we found no sight of him. Then that damned fool Herman Canty up and says Lamm likes to go camping around this time of year. Wish to hell he’d spoke up before we hired a plane.’

‘Lamm’s family says it’s normal for him to be camping for so long?’

‘He’s divorced, no kids. Ex-wife’s out in California, and doesn’t much give a damn. She got an annuity out of him instead of monthly income.’

‘I heard a Chicago cop was up here looking for him.’

‘Some kid, I heard, but he didn’t bother to check in with me.’

‘Lamm doesn’t have a cell phone?’

‘I tried. His was switched off.’

‘How would I find Herman Canty?’

‘Hard to say, especially now that he’s getting about in that fancy new truck.’ The deputy tilted forward to sit upright. ‘You want to ask him about fishing?’

‘I want to ask him about Lamm.’

‘Herman will tell you Lamm’s out fishing for muskies,’ he said. ‘Ever fish for muskies?’

‘No.’

‘Then what are you fishing for up here, Mr Elstrom?’ he asked.

‘Something I can sink a hook into, I suppose,’ I said, and left.