The Confessors' Club

FORTY-TWO

I bent to look at the jamb. Orange chewing gum had been pressed into the recess to prevent the bolt from sliding shut. Someone wanted easy access for a return visit.

Small’s desk was old scratched oak, littered with papers, a Starbucks cup, and a tipped over Dunkin’ Donuts box. The green vinyl on the desk chair was cracked; the red vinyl visitor’s chair held an old blue IBM Selectric typewriter. A half-dozen cardboard file boxes lay in a ragged row on the floor near the wall.

I sat at the desk. The green desk chair had been dished by a substantial man, and groaned as I reached to move away the Starbucks cup that still stank of the cream, dried now, that Small must have used to keep his weight and cholesterol up. One doughnut remained in the tipped Dunkin’ twelve-pack. It was sprinkled with coconut and somewhat intact, missing one human-sized bite and a few hundred smaller rodent nicks. Probably a few mice or rats were anticipating coming back to finish it, as had Eugene Small, I supposed.

The papers scattered next to the black phone were copies of invoices sent to furniture stores and used-car dealerships. Someone had pawed through them.

I re-sorted them into numerical order, reading as I went. Eugene Small had been a small-time repo man, grabbing back patio furniture and reclining chairs when he couldn’t get work repossessing cars. The invoices charged flat rates, three hundred for a car, fifty for a sofa, and twenty-five for a patio set.

One invoice was missing from the sequence. Judging by the dates of the invoices preceding and succeeding, it had been dated around the first of March, a few days before Small was killed. It seemed likely that the man who’d jammed gum into the office door lock thought that particular invoice was worth taking.

There was nothing in the desk drawers except a stapler, a full box of red-capped ballpoint pens boosted from an Econo-lodge, and a small pad of note paper with a trucking company logo on it.

I scooted the chair to the ragged row of file cartons. Most of the folders had been used several times, their tabs erased and re-lettered in pencil. That they’d been jammed roughly into the cardboard boxes might have meant simply that Small was a slob, except they were not in alphabetical order. Likely they’d been hurriedly searched and jammed back by someone who knew Small was never again going to return to his office.

There was no file for the Confessors’ Club, no file for Arthur Lamm or any of the dead men. Most especially, there was no file for Wendell Phelps. I felt no relief at that. I was certain Small was the detective Wendell had hired. Whoever had searched Small’s office knew that now, too.

I stood up, went to the closet. Four wire hangers dangled empty on a rod. An enormous pilled polyester cardigan sweater hung on a fifth. It smelled of gin and sweat and, like the worn, reused files in the cardboard boxes and the empty desk, was another marker of a guy who’d haunted the poorer alleys of town, grabbing back unpaid-for used cars and discount furniture.

A guy who might have stepped out of his league and into the path of someone killing in the heavy cream.

I’d seen enough of nothing to be sure I’d seen enough. The office had been looted.

I paused at the desk on the way to the door. I don’t like creatures that scurry, and saw no point in making their dinner easy. I dropped the foul smelling Starbucks cup and the remains of the coconut doughnut into the trash basket and was about to toss in the stained, crumb-littered paper desk-top calendar when I noticed its corners. The top sheet, January’s, was blank – nothing had been written on it. But the pad’s corners were creased from being turned up. I shook the candy sprinkles into the wastebasket and flipped to February’s page.

For a big man, Eugene Small wrote tiny; the little numbers and initials scribbled inside the squares beneath the coffee rings were almost indecipherable. Only the dollar sign at the top of the sheet was big. He’d retraced it so many times that the tip of his black ballpoint had cut through the paper. I flipped to the next page.

He’d filled the first days of March with tiny numbers and initials, too. They stopped on March 8. Small had been killed the next day.

Many of the initials matched the Bohemian’s list of those in the heavy cream. One pair of initials – A.L. – appeared most of all. Arthur Lamm.

Something rustled inside the closet. It was feeding time at the rat ranch. I grabbed the desk calendar and left.

I called Delray when I got outside but again got his voice mail. ‘Eugene Small’s office was tossed,’ I said. There was more to say, but I’d say it when he called me back.

Small’s intruder, likely his killer, had missed something important.