The Confessors' Club

FIVE

Traffic was backed up solid on the outbound expressway. No matter the years of supposed improvements, the Eisenhower is almost always a crawl. In my darker moments, I let myself think a secret cabal of oil and communications executives engineered it that way, to trap drivers into burning up expensive gallons of gasoline while raging on their phones, burning up cell-plan minutes. Like my Goodman Theater imaginings, it’s baloney – a poor man’s cranky fantasy and flimsy as a cobweb – but ever since the Jeep’s radio got boosted, it’s given my mind something to mull when I’m stuck on the Ike.

I wondered if that sort of paranoia got notched up inside Wendell Phelps. The Tribune had seen nothing suspicious in the deaths of Barberi and Whitman, nor had they reported Carson’s death as anything more sinister than a typical hit-and-run. More calming was the Bohemian’s ear. It was finely tuned, and he kept it pressed to the ground, yet nothing about the three deaths had tripped his sensors. Likely enough, Wendell Phelps had given me nothing more than a dark delusion, except his came with the money to pursue it. Me, I had to get stuck in traffic, sucking auto exhaust, to indulge mine.

I got back to Rivertown as the dying sun began turning the turret’s rough limestone blocks into a hundred soft shades of yellow, orange, and red. My narrow five story cylinder is always beautiful at sunset, with its shadows and fiery colors, marked hard here and there with the black stripes of the slit windows, but it can be melancholy then as well, a slim monument in dying light to a dead man’s dead dream. The turret was my grandfather’s fantasy. A small-time bootlegger with big-time plans, he built it as the first of four that were to connect with stone walls to form a grand castle on the bank of the Willahock River. The one turret was all he got built. He died broke, leaving behind only a corner of his dream.

I walked down to the river to count leaves. When I’d moved to the turret on the first of a November several years before, out of money and out of hope, the spindly purple ash growing alongside the water had already turned its expected autumn purple color and seemed healthy enough. The next July, after a normal spring, it suddenly shed its leaves. By then, that summer had already gone bad. My records research business was struggling to survive and I was trapped in a seemingly hopeless bomb and extortion case that I could not puzzle through. I took the hollow clacking noise the dying ash’s branches made, in the wind, in the night, as one more sign the world wasn’t spinning right.

I didn’t need new signs of bad times. When the next new spring came and the other trees along the Willahock began budding and my ash still resembled nothing but upright kindling, I went out with a pole saw. Better to cut it down than to suffer its death rattle in the night any longer.

I started at the top, sawing and pulling, until all of its brittle upper branches lay on the ground. But as I reset the ladder to cut off one of its two main limbs, I spotted the tiniest tendril of green, no longer than an inchworm, protruding from the bark. I don’t know trees but I know trying, and I left that ash as I’d butchered it: a dinosaur-sized wishbone, thrust upright in defiance against the sky.

Several years had passed since then, and it was still slow going for me, and for the ash. Yet once again, in this new spring, the tree was unfurling tiny new leaves like little flags of hope. It was only the end of March, too soon to know how many would come, but I kept count as I had in previous springs, as an act of faith. That night, a fresh sprout brought the new spring’s total up to twenty-six.

I take my positive omens wherever I can find them.

I spent two hours on the Internet that evening and found nothing to counter what the Trib and the Bohemian’s ear had concluded. There had been nothing premeditated about the deaths of Benno Barberi, Jim Whitman or Grant Carson. Still, I planned to give the deaths a long, last mull on the plane west to San Francisco the next day, before calling Wendell to tell him I’d be refunding almost all of his money. Though with that, painfully, would go my hopes to replace my leaking refrigerator.

I took a flashlight into the kitchen, laid it in the refrigerator, shut the door and turned off the lights. A pinpoint sparkled next to where the handle was coming loose; air was leaking out there. As I’d told Jenny, such a small rust-through would be easily contained by a Golden Gate Bridge refrigerator magnet.

Happy times – seeing Jenny, and acquiring a magnet – seemed just around the corner as I reclined in the electric-blue La-Z-Boy, also salvaged from an alley, to watch the start of the ten o’clock news.

And then the Bohemian called.

His voice did not resonate with its usual optimism. ‘I started on the list of names at six o’clock. It was fairly straightforward to establish who our prominent businesspeople are, and I was done by seven o’clock. There are forty-six,’ he said, then paused. ‘No,’ he corrected, ‘there were forty-six, before the three deaths.’

‘This afternoon you guessed fifty. Pretty close, Anton.’

‘Life is not so much about numbers as it is about percentages, Vlodek. That’s why the three deaths are troubling.’

I shifted the La-Z-Boy to full upright and silenced the four-inch television balanced on my lap. ‘Percentages?’

‘Three is too many.’

‘Two of the three were men in their sixties, and ill,’ I said. ‘The third was fifty-five, not that it matters, and the victim of a hit-and- run. All three deaths seem easily explainable.’

‘Remember the heavy cream?’

‘You said all three were among the top fifty business people in Chicago.’

‘I misspoke. I meant to use the term more narrowly, to define Barberi, Whitman and Carson as being among the very top of the city’s leaders, in the heaviest of the cream, so to speak.’

‘I don’t understand.’

‘I just told you there were forty-six top-flight business leaders in Chicago, right?’

‘With Barberi, Whitman, and Carson among them.’

‘The forty-six was a simple ranking of business prominence. I then filtered that list to include only those individuals prominent in civic, political and charitable endeavors as well.’

‘Only those are in the heavy cream,’ I said.

‘Exactly. I got down to sixteen names.’

‘Of which three are now dead?’

‘That’s troubling. Nineteen per cent of the most influential people in Chicago – three of only sixteen – died in the last four months. Mathematically, that’s beyond reason.’

Anton Chernek never indulged false alarm. He was too level-headed, too grounded. And almost always too well informed.

‘I’ll say again, Anton: two were older and ill. The third, Carson, got whacked by a passing car.’

‘Yes, and I was inclined to accept it as an anomaly, an explainable oddity.’

‘Exactly-’

He cut me off. ‘Arthur Lamm has gone missing.’

‘Arthur Lamm, as in head of Lamm Enterprises?’ Lamm headed a conglomerate of real estate sales, management, and insurance brokerages. He was very prominent: a political player and a close friend of the mayor. There was no doubt he was in the heavy cream.

‘A vice-president of his insurance company told me he’s not called in for four days. Do you see what this means?’

I barely heard his voice. My mind was forming the word that I knew he wanted.

‘Vlodek?’ he asked after a minute.

‘Percentages,’ I said, giving it to him.

‘Arthur’s only fifty-one and, from all accounts, he’s in peak condition. A marathoner, in fact. If he’s met a bad end, he increases your list to four out of sixteen.’

‘That’s twenty-five per cent.’

He murmured something about emailing me his list of names in the morning and hung up.

I needed fresher air in which to think. I went outside to sit on the bench by the river. A small speck lay on the ground, almost colorless in the pale white light of the lamp along the crumbling asphalt river walk.

It was one of the would-be leaves from the purple ash, curled up, stillborn and dry.

Sometimes I don’t like omens at all.