The sketch artist, an instructor at the art school, finished a passable cartoon of Delray at four-thirty. Pawlowski and Wood took it and disappeared out the door without offering to give me a ride. I didn’t object. The Corner Bakery, where I was to meet Amanda, was just a few blocks away.
Jenny had called while I’d been inside. I returned her call once I got out.
‘A huge story is coming out of Chicago,’ she said, right off. ‘A secret society in a creepy old mansion, and dead rich guys exactly like your father-in-law.’
‘Ex-father-in-law,’ I corrected.
‘Is this the case you’re working?’ she asked fast, still in a rush.
‘I blew the whistle.’
‘You didn’t call me?’
‘You’re in San Francisco.’
‘This story is going national.’
‘Conflicting obligations,’ I said. ‘Old father-in-law.’
‘Ex-father-in-law,’ she corrected, laughing.
We were well. I told her everything, on deep background.
‘And Amanda? You’re protecting her, too?’ she asked, when I was done.
‘Of course.’
‘Are you wearing the purple bow tie I sent you?’
‘Not at this moment, but I’ll put it on when I get back to the turret.’
She said she had to take another call and that we were not done.
‘I hope so,’ I said.
I walked north. I wanted to feel good. I’d rung the alarm bell, alerted everybody to the danger up on Delaware Street. Cops would soon mobilize there, and every one of the Confessors, wherever they were, would be on guard from now on. Arthur Lamm might be on even greater guard, too, though for different reasons. I still couldn’t fathom why that exceedingly rich man would resort to killing for insurance money, if indeed he had. But that was for cop minds to determine, not mine.
With luck, too, the investigations would prove that Jim Whitman had been fed pills. And that might make Debbie Goring the recipient of some insurance proceeds, at last.
And some of that might trickle down on me, but it would feel like dirty rain. Wendell was playing too tight with Lamm. He’d driven Whitman home an hour or so before he died; he’d hired a private detective who’d gotten killed. Wendell’s secrets put a darkness over everything, and that might well envelope his daughter. Damn the man, Wendell Phelps.
Keller called. ‘I’m going to make you a star, Elstrom.’
‘I’m tapped out. You’ve gotten everything I’m going to give you.’
‘Who came knocking after this morning’s column?’
‘Ours was a one-shot deal. We’re done.’
‘You’re sure you won’t need me again?’
‘You’ll always bite at anything sleazy.’
‘The Chicago police?’
‘And the IRS,’ I said, folding like a paper tent.
‘Give me the agent-in-charge.’
‘Krantz.’
‘What’s with Wendell Phelps, your father-in-law?’
‘Ex-father-in-law,’ I corrected, ‘and he’s not involved.’
‘Wendell’s involved; his daughter Amanda is involved.’ He laughed, though it was more like a cackle.
‘You’re a bastard, Keller.’
‘Details to follow,’ he said, and hung up.
Amanda was waiting in the Corner Bakery at what had been our favorite table, farthest from the window counter, before we got married. She’d gotten me a roast beef sandwich on a jalapeño roll, a Diet Coke and a brownie – my dinner of choice, back in the day.
A copy of the morning’s Argus-Observer, opened to Keller’s column as Krantz’s had been at lunch, lay on the table next to her salad.
‘This unnamed “agent for a prominent businessman” is you?’ she asked as I sat down. Her voice was calm.
‘Should I eat the brownie first in case I have to run?’
She didn’t smile.
‘You’ve talked to your father?’ I asked.
‘Mostly he apologized for being absent when I was growing up.’
I touched the newspaper with my forefinger. ‘Your father is furious with me, but I had to sound an alarm before someone else died.’
‘That club.’
‘It needs to be exposed.’
‘My father has placed all voting authority of his common and preferred stock in my name. Worse, he’s begun transferring ownership of the stock itself to me as well. He says it’s in accordance with some tax plan his accountants and attorneys had long been planning to put in place, but I don’t believe him. He’s acting like a man about to die.’
I looked again at Keller’s column lying open, a battlefield I’d strung with landmines that even I couldn’t see. ‘It’s going to come out that your father is a friend of Lamm’s.’
‘I figured Arthur was Keller’s “insurance biggie.” How exactly is my father involved?’
‘I think your father belongs to what’s known as the Confessors’ Club, a group of wealthy, influential men. I think he hired Eugene Small to tail some of the other club members because he was afraid some of them were being targeted, like Barberi, Whitman and Carson had been. When Small got killed, your father got truly scared. He hired bodyguards. You noticed that anxiety, and pressured him to hire me. He agreed because he still wanted answers, and he could control my investigation. When he realized that Lamm, his closest friend, might be behind the killings, he fired me.’
‘My father went along with murder, Dek?’ The words came out of her mouth dry and hoarse.
‘I’m pretty sure your father drove Whitman home the night he died, which might not mean anything other than it was an act of a friend. I’m also pretty sure your father sent Debbie Goring a hundred thousand dollars anonymously, because she’d gotten none of her father’s life insurance.’ I tried a smile. ‘That seems like the act of a friend, too.’
She turned to look at a family at the next table. The little girl was putting a potato chip in her father’s hand.
‘I don’t understand any of this,’ she said. ‘What now?’
‘We hunker down and let the investigations run their course.’
She leaned back, pulled a tissue out of her purse, and dabbed at her eyes. ‘My father and I were estranged, and then we were not… I wonder if I know him.’
She didn’t ask any more questions, and I didn’t offer any more speculation. We ate a little, and talked of other things a little, and then she took a cab to her condo, and I hoofed it to the train station.
And both of us headed away remembering when our evenings didn’t end that way and we understood so very much more than we did that night.