The Confessors' Club

SIX

I woke at five-thirty in the morning, remembering the Bohemian’s anxiety about percentages too much to go back to sleep. I put on jeans, a sweatshirt and my Nikes and, stepping around the duffel that lay on the floor, still to be packed for California, I went downstairs.

The Bohemian wasn’t having a good night either. He’d emailed me his list two hours earlier.

I printed his list, put on my pea coat and took a travel mug of yesterday’s cold coffee up the stairs and then the ladders to the fifth floor and the roof. I like to believe I think best on top of the turret. Even when I don’t, the dawn likely as not serves up a spectacular sunrise, and that’s a good enough reason to go up on any roof at the end of the dark. I leaned against the balustrade, sipped coffee and looked out across the spit of land at Rivertown, waiting for the cold caffeine and the chilled, pre-dawn air to rouse me from a sleep that never much was.

The town was softly shutting down. The tonks along Thompson Avenue were switching off their flickering neon lights, discharging their last, hardiest customers into the night. The slow-walking girls who smiled into the headlights of the slow-cruising gentlemen were shuffling away too, alone at last. And from somewhere down by the river, the sound of shattering glass rose above the rasping staccato of automobile tires hitting the rub strips on the tollway; a trembling hand had let go of an empty pint. Rivertown was twitching itself to sleep.

The thin hint of orange rising over Lake Michigan was bright enough to read what the Bohemian had sent. He’d drawn a simple grid, labeled it ‘H.C.’ for Heavy Cream – a wit, that Bohemian, even when troubled. On the left side of the sheet he’d listed the sixteen primo shakers of Chicago in alphabetical order. Across the page he’d made columns for the criteria he’d used to select them: business affiliations, political access, social and civic relationships. He’d assigned letter grades for each person, for each category, like a report card. Almost all of the boxes were filled with an ‘A.’

All but two on the list were men. The Bohemian’s Chicago, that world of vast money coupled to political and social influence, was still very much a boys’ club. The names seemed vaguely familiar in the way that names captioned under society news photographs often seem familiar. Yet if asked, I couldn’t have said what most of the primos in the heavy cream had done to achieve their prominence. My own world existed farther down, in the muck stuck to the bottom of what was Chicagoland.

The Bohemian had put asterisks next to the names of Barberi, Carson and Whitman. In the middle of the page, next to the name of the missing Arthur Lamm, he’d first drawn a question mark, then added an asterisk.

Asterisk meant death. It was those four asterisks, those four names out of sixteen, which had kept the Bohemian up in the night.

It was the fifth person on the list, four lines below Arthur Lamm’s, who had put me in a trick bag: Wendell Phelps. For that, I now hated the son of a bitch even more than before.

My history with the man was limited. I’d called Wendell’s office right after Amanda and I married, thinking it reasonable to introduce myself as the man who’d wed the daughter he hadn’t seen in years – and maybe become a hero to my new wife, by effecting a reconciliation between the two.

I never got past the secretary to his secretary. No matter, I thought; there would be time to try again later.

There wasn’t. I was soon implicated in a fake evidence scheme, having erroneously authenticated cleverly doctored checks in a high-profile insurance fraud trial. My name flashed dark across the front pages of Chicago’s newspapers, there not for the notoriety of the trial, or my sloppiness, but because I was Wendell Phelps’s son-in-law. I was soon found to be innocent, but I was guilty of being stupid – and of being Wendell’s son-in-law. The publicity vaporized my credibility and killed my records research business. Unmoored, I poured alcohol on my self-pity. I blamed Wendell for my notoriety and found that so satisfying that, with the logic of someone totally lost to alcohol, I spread that blame to Amanda for being my link to him. No matter that she’d been estranged from her father for years. In my twisted, liquored logic, she was a most convenient target, and that was enough for me.

It was too much for Amanda. She filed for divorce and I got flushed out of her gated community – appropriately enough, on Halloween – unmasked as a fool.

I crawled back to Rivertown, the town I thought I’d escaped years before, and into the rat-infested turret I’d inherited from another failed man, my grandfather. Amanda fled to Europe, because she had no good place to go either. As I sobered up, I blamed Wendell Phelps for that, too. No matter that I’d trashed his daughter’s life; he could have descended from his executive suite to help undo the damage I’d done.

Amanda and Wendell later reconciled, so much so that he enticed Amanda to quit her jobs writing art books and teaching at the Art Institute to join his utilities conglomerate.

He and I had never had need for reconciling anything. We were done, and that was fine for us both.

Except now he was bringing new breath to old furies. If I misplayed his case, investigated what were delusions too seriously, the press might get wind of it and trigger his public humiliation. Worse, if the Bohemian’s fears of percentages were accurate and there really was a murderer out there, targeting Wendell and his ilk, my misplaying the case could get people killed.

Damn the man, Wendell Phelps.

By now, the glow of sunrise had risen above the massive dark shapes of Chicago to touch the top of the turret. Mine is the tallest building in Rivertown, a modest attainment in a town of abandoned factories, huddled bungalows and deserted storefronts. The only grand building in town, a city hall of long terraces, expansive private offices and tiny public rooms, was still in the darkness behind me. It, too, had been built of my grandfather’s limestone, but later, by corrupt city managers who saw no shame in seizing most of his widow’s land and all of its great pile of unused stone blocks. But those lizards couldn’t take the sun, nor change the fact that it always lit the turret first every day. I took satisfaction in that.

I crossed the roof to look down at the river. The sunrise would soon light the butchered, two-limbed ash, causing it to cast a dark, jagged ‘V’ west along the river path. The shadow would look like a giant, crooked-fingered hex, a Greek moutza of contempt, thrust directly at Rivertown’s corrupt city hall. I took satisfaction in that, too.

Likely enough, there would be no satisfaction in the direction I was now heading.

Damn the man, Wendell Phelps.