The Confessors' Club

SEVENTY-TWO

I’d killed.

I’d snapped Canty’s neck with my crutch; his back with my knee. With time, I’d feel something more about that. For now, all I felt was numb.

After being re-stitched and re-bedded for the rest of the night at the clinic, Amanda was allowed to return me to the ski resort the next afternoon. However clumsily I’d walk-hobbled before, I was now bound to a motorized wheelchair, since I could only use my right hand. The resort manager’s niece had moved us into a nice, wheelchair-accessible two-bedroom suite, just off the lobby. No charge for the upgrade or the motorized wheelchair, the niece said, though I was sure she would have been happier if she’d been allowed to tow me to the top of the highest ski run and push me over the back edge. I’d brought horror to the log resort. After cutting the resort’s power and telephone landlines, Canty had beaten her aunt senseless before taking her master key.

Amanda and I slept well enough, separately. I supposed she was as unsettled as I by our close proximity, and how easily some of the old mannerisms and rituals we’d shared in marriage wanted to return. But she had much bigger worries, waiting for word of her father. There had been no news, either from the local sheriff, or from the cops in Chicago reporting a body found stuffed in a stolen car.

And we slept safe. Sheriff’s deputies from two surrounding counties, supplemented by a special detachment of two armed special agents from the IRS, were now staying at the resort. I quickly grew fond of the deputies; they brought doughnuts, freshly fried and often topped with sprinkles.

Krantz’s special agents, though, were another matter. They were a grim-faced pair, dispatched ostensibly to be vigilant, but more likely sent for what they might overhear. Krantz’s frustration with me was growing exponentially. He was certain I knew plenty, but without Wendell around to squeeze, and nothing otherwise to link me to Eugene Small, Arthur Lamm or the Carson payout, he’d resorted to posting the two agents to hang around the lodge and pretend they weren’t listening.

I’d found their bugs right away, one stuck under my nightstand, another stuck under Amanda’s. I was tempted to reposition them on either sides of the toilet, to offer a stereophonic listening experience, but I left them where I’d found them. Amanda and I made sure to never discuss anything of substance in our small suite, for I was certain Krantz had planted more bugs.

The waiting drove Leo nuts, too, back in Rivertown. He enlisted Endora, no stranger from her modeling days to changing her look, to rent a car and look down the street where I’d abandoned the small Ford, while he rode ducked down in back. He then called me from an unfamiliar number.

‘Burner phone,’ he whispered. ‘Forty bucks at Walmart. I’ll toss it after this call.’

‘But you called me on my regular phone,’ I said, wanting to laugh for the first time since Canty.

‘The eagle has flown,’ he murmured.

Meaning the small Ford was gone. I could only marvel that Chicago’s car thieves were as strong-stomached as its gang murderers. They’d boosted the car, likely stripped it, and with luck, turned it into a recyclable steel cube, albeit one that was slightly leaking.

Amanda said nothing of it. Or much about anything else. She left early each of the next three mornings to check on the sheriff’s search plans for the day. After that, I think she just drove, or stopped somewhere. I never asked, and she never offered. She expressed no rage at her father, or at the world, or at me. She ate next to nothing, and I think slept little. Her hands trembled almost continuously. It was like that, waiting.

Krantz took a room at the lodge. He visited my mouth, in the wheelchair, in the lobby, twice a day in hope the new meds I’d been given had relaxed it enough to offer up more of what he was sure I knew.

‘Where’s Phelps?’ he asked right off on the first, second and third mornings and afternoons after I’d killed Canty.

‘The television news says Lamm has left the country,’ I said, each time.

‘Did I tell you the receptionist at Second Securities remembers you?’

‘The one who couldn’t remember her nail polish, or where she’d left a key?’

‘I’ll be bringing her in to look at you through a mirror.’

‘No need. I went there, but I didn’t break in, Krantz. I walked in through the front door.’

‘Spewing some cocked-up story about being an inspector. You didn’t say anything about that when we first spoke at the clinic. Withholding information from a federal investigation is prosecutable.’

‘Meds,’ I said. ‘They made me forgetful.’

And so it went for those three mornings and three nights. Then, very early on the fourth day, the sheriff called to give Amanda directions to a tiny lake.

We packed what little we had and went out to the Escalade. I got behind the wheel. The stitches in my arm were holding, and the new fissures in my torn leg ligaments were healing. It was not a day for Amanda to drive.

‘The sheriff will let you leave, afterward?’ she asked, after we’d gone a mile.

‘He termed what I’d done to Herman Canty “justifiable.” I might not even have to come up for the inquest.’

‘And Krantz?’

‘He said he’ll arrest me in Chicago.’

‘He was kidding?’

‘Krantz has difficulty with humor.’

‘That low-carb business,’ she said, struggling, looking straight ahead. No one should ever be required to be strong enough to look at someone fished dead from a lake.

Parked on the dirt road leading to the water were two county cruisers, Krantz’s black Crown Victoria, an ambulance and the county medical examiner’s van. The sheriff walked over, opened my door and leaned in. ‘Mr Elstrom can handle this, Ms Phelps.’

‘Yes, but who has ever been able to handle Mr Elstrom?’ Her voice was surprisingly calm, forcing the new joke. She remained seated.

The sheriff had a high-wheeled off-road vehicle brought up and a paramedic got in with us. It was a rough five-minute drive through tall weeds to the edge of a small lake.

‘No one ever comes to this lake, because they can’t get to it,’ the sheriff said. ‘It’s more like a retention pond that fills when there’s been a lot of rain, and only then does it connect with the lakes to the north.’

They helped me stand, and we walked, of a fashion, to the shore. By then I was sweating.

They had them face down; two bodies on two tarps dragged from the edge of the lake, covered with other tarps. The paramedic bent to pull back the one covering the corpse closest to me.

Wanda screamed back at me in silent rigor.

‘Not that one, you idiot,’ the sheriff yelled at the paramedic. Then, to me, ‘She knew too much, and with a million dollars, Canty must have figured he could afford better.’

The paramedic moved to uncover the body lying past Wanda.

I’m not good with ruined corpses. To buy time for a few deep breaths, I focused on the watch on his wrist. A Rolex with that much gold cost more than ten thousand dollars, and it looked to still be keeping perfect time. I supposed that would be expected. Certainly it was water resistant to a depth far greater than the shallows at the raw end of the small lake, and the gentle lapping of the water through the rushes was more than enough to engage the self-winding mechanism. It was a gentleman’s wristwatch, designed for a wealthy man, a man of nuance, a man who need make only subtle gestures, even in death.

He had dressed well, his last day. His gray gabardine trousers were of the finest wool, light for the warm temperatures. Looking for identification, they’d turned back the label on his white shirt. It was from Pink’s, on Jermyn Street in London. The shoes, I knew from Amanda, were English, too: lace-up broughams of sturdy leather that would have once held a high polish.

The clothes and shoes, of course, had not fared as well as the wristwatch. The press had gone from the trousers, and here and there tiny bits of milky flesh protruded where the wool had been abraded by the barky texture of the water reeds. The shirt was now a putrid green, mossed and dirtied by the muck at the shore. And the leather of his shoes had puckered and blistered, for even the finest of leathers, no matter how well oiled, are not meant to withstand submersion.

They turned him over. That part of his face closest to the bullet hole was gone, nibbled away in tiny bites by the sunny fish and microscopic urchins that worked the shore of the small lake.

I nodded and the paramedic covered him again.

‘They were both shot somewhere else, then dumped in this lake by someone in a boat.’ Krantz had come up to join us.

‘An orange rowboat, recently bailed out,’ I said.

The sheriff looked at me and nodded. ‘Canty, in Lamm’s boat,’ he said.

The medical examiner held out two spent bullets for the sheriff to see. ‘We’ll have them tested,’ he said, ‘but they’re the same caliber as those we found in Bales, and in…’ He gestured toward me, the meat that had also caught a bullet from Canty’s gun.

‘Canty, for sure,’ the sheriff said.

‘Can you identify time of death?’ I asked the medical examiner, to be certain.

Krantz looked sharply at me.

‘Actually, yes, for both,’ the medical examiner said.

And then I turned on my crutches, and started the slow walk back down the pressed tracks we’d just made, alone. No one had thought to offer to help me back. And that was good. I needed to understand all I’d just heard. And all I now believed.

At the car, I slid my crutches in back, and got in behind the wheel.

Amanda said nothing, the gold flecks in her eyes impossible to see behind the tears.

‘Time to go back to Chicago,’ I said.

‘Do not start the car,’ she said.