The Confessors' Club

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.

Chuckling, he walked past the guard and disappeared into an elevator, and I headed back to a train not due to depart for another hour.