The Confessors' Club

SIXTY-SEVEN

Amanda and I met for breakfast at ten the next morning. The dining room was empty except for us, a pitcher of milk, a Thermos of coffee, and several little boxes of barely sweetened, nutritious, thoroughly uninteresting cereal.

‘My room is charmingly ancient,’ I said, chattering light. ‘Real porcelain handles on the pedestal sink, cast-iron bed stand and a scratched maple dresser. Still, this place is quiet as a tomb, optimal for sleeping.’

She poured us coffee. ‘What time did you and Leo get in this morning?’

‘How did you know?’

She shrugged, trying to grin. ‘Your rusted muffler is quite distinctive. I heard it start up ten minutes after we checked in. At first I thought it might be Leo, moving it to park in back, but when I looked out, I couldn’t see it anywhere. It wasn’t hard to guess that he might have driven off, or who’d gone with him. The only question is why you didn’t take the Escalade.’

‘We were being clever, and worried you’d go out to the Cadillac for something. Seeing the Jeep gone, you’d simply assume Leo was off in search of doughnuts.’

‘Why did you go back if there was no chance for a peek in the trunk?’

‘Eliminate a link.’

She touched my wrist. She realized I’d gone to separate Wendell from Lamm, if only a little, if Wendell had even been there at all.

‘The other scenario is no better.’ I told her about the orange rowboat I’d seen, bailed out and bobbing high on the water at Lamm’s camp.

‘It’s why I’m waiting up here. I’m expecting he could be in a lake,’ she said, looking away.

Her eyes were clear; her chin was raised. In that instant, I could see the chief executive she was destined to be. ‘My father drove Jim Whitman home,’ she said.

‘I take that as proof of his innocence. Your father is not stupid. As I told you before, he wouldn’t have risked driving Whitman if he’d had any part in killing him.’

‘You’re sure?’

‘As much as I’m sure Whitman’s death shocked your father into hiring Eugene Small at the end of January.’

‘Two weeks later, Carson got killed.’

‘And Eugene Small was murdered two weeks after that. It made your father frantic.’

‘Richie Bales killed Small?’

‘I told Krantz it was either Bales, looking to get Small out of the way so he could extort money from Lamm; Lamm himself, because Small had learned too much; or Canty, on Lamm’s orders. Each had motive.’

‘Why did my father come up here?’

‘I told Krantz that either Krantz’s threat to prosecute him for Lamm’s crimes sent him into a rage, to come up and confront his false friend, or Richie Bales got to him, still posing as a cop, demanding your father come up on one pretext or another, perhaps to help Bales locate Lamm.

‘There’s no chance my father is still alive?’

The soft way she was asking sent my mind back to the small photos I’d seen in Wendell’s study, of the little girl she’d been, clutching a small cluster of blue balloons. The balloons would have soon gone away; there was never any helping that. Just like there was no way of helping her much now.

She said she was anxious to drive back to Bent Lake, to track down the sheriff. It was more likely she wanted to be alone, to prepare herself for a call from the sheriff. As I hobbled to walk her to the lobby door, we heard the resort manager yelling from a private office. ‘I don’t care where the hell he is. You tell him to get out here now with glass and new locks.’ A desk phone was then banged down in anger.

‘Tell the sheriff about that bailed-out rowboat,’ I said by the front door, ‘though he’s already searching the lakes for Canty.’

‘What’s worse, Dek? Finding my father in a car, or in a lake?’

I shook my head. There could never be an answer to that.