The Confessors' Club

FORTY-THREE

I studied the calendar for an hour back at the turret, and then I called Leo.

‘I’ve broken and entered twice more since we last spoke,’ I said.

He groaned. ‘As skillfully as you did at Arthur Lamm’s agency?’

‘Even stealthier.’ I told him about Arthur Lamm, and the recording equipment Delray and I had found at the Confessors’ Club. And then I told him about Eugene Small.

‘You think Small got killed because he was working for Wendell?’ he asked.

‘Everything else the man did was small-time repo, not worth being killed over. I need you to look at something of significance.’

He said he was headed downtown to Endora’s, but always liked being delayed for significance. He told me to come right over.

Light showed from the window of his basement office. I tapped the glass six times with the toe of my shoe – three taps, a pause, then three more, our code since seventh grade – and went to sit on the front steps. He came to open the door a minute later, wearing a huge blaze-orange T-shirt with a black deer head on it, the sort a 300-pound hunter would wear on a warm autumn day. Pressing his index finger to his lips to let me know Ma was still asleep – Saturday night was late-night dirty-movie night on her favorite cable channel, and she often didn’t stagger to bed until almost dawn – he led me through the front room to the kitchen.

Leo poured coffee into Walgreen’s mugs and we sat at the kitchen table. I placed Eugene Small’s calendar between us and flipped past the blank January sheet to February, littered with small markings and the enormous dollar sign, traced and retraced, at the top. I pointed to a small, almost microscopic ‘W.P.,’ with an equally small huge dollar amount written next to it: ‘$5,900.’ I told Leo of the one invoice copy that was missing from the small pile on Small’s desk.

He laid his finger on the tiny markings. ‘These are Eugene Small’s billable hours?’

‘And surveillance record.’

‘You think the missing invoice was Small’s copy of one he sent to Wendell for fifty-nine hundred?’

‘It’s a good guess.’

‘Why would someone want to take the invoice?’

I pointed again to the most obvious mark on February’s page, the enormous dollar sign inked over and again, so obsessively that the pen had almost torn through the page. ‘I’m worried someone else besides Small sees big bucks in going after Wendell.’

‘Blackmail, over what Small learned about the Confessors’ Club?’

I could only nod.

Leo picked up the calendar. ‘Let’s put this under better light before we draw too many stupid conclusions.’

We tiptoed down the basement stairs, not speaking as we passed the cartons of Leo’s old school books, the spindly little plastic tree they stuck on the television at Christmas, and the model train tracks we’d screwed on green-painted plywood when we were kids.

His office didn’t have a door, just a roughed-in opening to unpainted drywall, bare concrete and mismatched filing cabinets in black, gray, tan and orange. He set the planner upside down on the light table and pulled over the long-armed Luxo magnifying light.

‘Sale stickers,’ he said, pointing to two little red tags stuck to the cardboard back. ‘One for four dollars, then one for two dollars.’

‘As I said, Small was a repo man who grabbed furniture and cars. He didn’t need such a large calendar until the very end of January, or perhaps the beginning of February, when he had to keep track of lots of pairs of initials, and lots of billable hours for Wendell. By then, calendars were on sale.’

‘Excellent, for such a modest mind,’ he said. He turned the calendar right side up and began examining February’s sheet through the magnifying lens of the Luxo. I sat in the sprung overstuffed chair that had been his father’s favorite up to the moment he’d died in it. For all his flippancy, for all his finger-clicking, hipster mannerisms and outrageous clothes, Leo Brumsky was recognized as one of the best ferrets in the country when it came to examining historical documents and pieces of art.

He worked slowly, examining each inch of the February sheet, saying nothing. After thirty minutes, he switched to a stronger lens on the Luxo and bent down again. ‘Who’s R.B.?’ he finally asked, straightening up after he’d spent another twenty minutes on the marked-up quarter of the March page. ‘Those initials appear most frequently, always appended to other initials.’

‘Look at which sets of initials they’re always closest to.’

‘A.L.’s. I already noticed. Arthur Lamm?’

‘I’m thinking Small hired R.B. to tail Lamm so that Small could tail the others.’

He switched off the Luxo. ‘If Small indeed worked for Wendell, then only two people know what Small learned,’ he said.

‘R.B,’ I said, because it was easiest.

‘And Wendell Phelps,’ he said.