The Confessors' Club

FORTY

There was a bar in a boutique hotel two blocks east of State Street. It was empty except for a bartender watching a television sitcom and two dozen chrome bowls of peanuts. Delray bought us squat tumblers of whiskey and ice, and though the place was deserted, carried them to the plush chairs in the back. I followed with two of the bowls of peanuts.

‘Paranoid about being seen committing a crime?’ I asked when we sat down, trying a joke.

He took a long sip of his whiskey. ‘I have to admit, it’s not my favorite thing to do.’

I took my own deep sip. Never before had the cold fire of whiskey tasted so good.

‘I’m getting used to it.’

‘What do you mean?’ he asked.

‘I got caught on a surveillance video last night; Lamm’s office. I had to tell some of what I knew.’

His face tensed as I told him about my morning at the movies with the IRS. ‘You’re sure you didn’t mention me?’

‘Positive.’

He relaxed back into his chair. ‘How close are they to finding Lamm?’

‘We weren’t sharing confidences. The conversation was mostly about me, looking stupid, though one of Krantz’s men stopped by later with Lamm’s appointments calendar. Lamm went to an address numbered sixty-six on those same Tuesday nights. That’s how I zeroed in on the clubhouse.’

‘The question is: who set up the recorders?’

‘Think about the purpose of those recorders,’ I said. ‘Likely someone was hoping to grab stock tips, or other insider information, by bugging the conversations going on in those private rooms.’

‘That doesn’t rule out any of them,’ Delray said. ‘They all would have had access to the clubhouse.’

‘Along the way, whoever bugged the rooms also learned who was vulnerable, health-wise, who had a condition or an illness.’

Delray leaned forward. ‘Benno Barberi’s heart condition,’ he said, seeing where I was headed.

‘And Jim Whitman’s cancer.’

‘Insurance,’ he said.

‘Barberi came home from the Confessors’ Club agitated that some anonymous someone had insured his life,’ I said. ‘Jim Whitman’s daughter had a different insurance concern: there was none that insured suicide.’

‘Unless?’ he asked, grinning, certain now.

‘Unless there was,’ I said. ‘Someone wrote a policy on Whitman’s life that Whitman knew nothing about.’

‘Like with Barberi?’

‘And like the policy taken out on Grant Carson that named some anonymous entity as beneficiary.’ I raised my glass in salute. ‘Insurance motives, three times over: Barberi, Whitman and Carson.’

‘Arthur Lamm.’

‘Arthur Lamm, the insurance man,’ I said. ‘He owned his own brokerage. He could fake his own medical exams, write his own policies, name his own beneficiaries. Smooth.’

‘Why risk murder? Lamm’s one of the wealthiest men in the city. Why dose Whitman with Gendarin at the December Confessors’ Club when all he had to do was wait to collect on the policy he wrote on the man’s life? And why risk pushing Carson out of a car?’ He swirled the ice cubes in his glass. His whiskey had gone.

I had no answer for that. I went to the bar and bought us another round. It was the first time I’d had a second drink since I’d been tossed out of Amanda’s gated community one sodden Halloween a few years earlier. That Halloween, though, I’d had a lot more than two whiskies.

‘How do we find Lamm?’ he asked when I came back.

‘Let Homicide find him. You’ve got enough to get them interested.’

‘Recording machines discovered during an illegal search? They’ll freak.’

‘Tell them to start by squeezing Canty. You do remember Canty, up in Wisconsin?’ Delray had to be the cop from Chicago the flannel shirts in the bar had told me about.

Delray grinned. ‘Yep,’ he mimicked.

‘Canty had to be the accomplice Lamm needed to kill Carson.’

He shook his head. ‘It isn’t enough to get Homicide involved.’

‘Then call Krantz, tell him you’ve got a hunch Lamm and the three dead men are linked to that graystone. They don’t need to know we went in. They’ll get search warrants; you’ll still be the hero.’

‘No,’ he said, staring into his drink. ‘I want to find Lamm myself.’

‘Career and ambition?’

‘Having a rabbi means I have to work doubly hard to prove myself.’ He looked up. ‘You’ve got to squeeze Wendell Phelps about Arthur Lamm. Phelps might know where Lamm is hiding.’

I had no illusions about keeping Wendell out of the investigation forever. Sooner or later, Delray or another cop would tumble on to the fact that Wendell had hired a private investigator to nose into the killings before he hired me to do the same thing. They’d pull out all the stops on Wendell, then, and squeeze out everything he knew.

But that time had not yet come. ‘That kills the deal for me, Delray,’ I said. ‘You wreck Wendell Phelps, you wreck me.’

‘Because of loyalty to your ex-wife?’

‘I put her in the newspapers once. I’m not going to do it again. I’ll call Krantz, give him a heads-up on the graystone.’

He stared at me for a long minute, judging whether I’d carry out the threat. He knew as well as I that the Feds always trumped local cops. They’d chase Delray and the homicide cops right off the case.

‘OK; no Phelps and no IRS, for now,’ he said, backing down. ‘I’ll go to Homicide, but my way, and on my time schedule.’

‘You don’t have a schedule anymore.’

‘What do you mean?’

‘Arthur Lamm might have another insurance policy we know nothing about. He might kill again.’ I took a last sip to finish my whiskey and stood up. ‘You’ve got seventy-two hours before the Confessors’ Club meets again,’ I said.