Jack Fredrickson
The Confessors' Club
The fifth book in the Dek Ekstrom Mystery series, 2015
For Jack R. Fredrickson
My guide, my dad
ACKNOWLEDGMENTS
The whole gang – Patrick Riley, Missy Lyda, Eric Frisch, Mary Anne Bigane and Joe Bigane – slogged through the early drafts of this one, criticizing, counseling, supporting. As always, I’m grateful.
Thanks, too, to the ever-patient Sara Porter of Severn House for managing this book, and me, with grace and aplomb.
First, and last, thank you, Susan. Again. For it all.
The gold Rolex Day-Date on his wrist had cost eleven thousand dollars. It was still keeping perfect time, but that would be expected. It was water resistant to a depth far greater than the shallows at the marsh end of the small lake. And it had been engineered to run on the faintest of movements: 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 man who need make only subtle gestures – a wealthy man, a man of nuance.
He had dressed well. His gray gabardine trousers were of the finest wool, light for the warming spring. His white shirt was cut to precise specification, sent over from Jermyn Street in London. His shoes were English as well, lace-up brogues polished by a houseman to a high gloss.
His attire had not fared as well as the wristwatch. The press had gone from the trousers and soft, milky flesh protruded where the water reeds had abraded the wool. The shirt was now a putrid green, mucked by the moss at the shore. And the shoes had puckered and blistered, since even the finest of leathers, no matter how well oiled, are not meant to withstand even partial submersion.
His face, of course, had suffered the worst of it. The part of the forehead closest to the bullet hole had gone, nibbled away in tiny bites by the sunny fish and microscopic urchins that worked the shore of the small lake.
His eyes, though, still commanded. They remained as clear and direct as they’d been in life, demanding that notice be taken, witness be made, to the truth of the horror they had seen.
ONE
Amanda called me two days before what would have been our fifth wedding anniversary.
‘Happy almost anniver-’ I said, before I slammed my mouth shut on words that bubbled up from nowhere. I hoped.
My remembering had caught her off guard, too. ‘Dek, how sweet of you,’ she said, after an awkward beat. Then, ‘I’d like to have dinner.’
We hadn’t spoken in months. ‘Surely not to celebrate?’ I asked.
‘Our divorce?’ She managed a little laugh. ‘Of course not.’
‘I’m good all next week, after Monday.’
‘Business has come back so well you’re not available until then?’
I hesitated for an awkward moment of my own. ‘I’m headed out of town.’
‘Not business, then,’ she said.
‘A mini-vacation.’
‘Today?’ She knew I’d never taken a vacation in my life.
‘Not for a couple of days.’
She paused, then said, ‘How about tonight? It’s important.’
I paused too, but only for a second. ‘I’ll pick you up. You’re still on Chicago’s tony Lake Shore Drive?’
‘Did you get shock absorbers yet?’
‘They diminish the aged Jeep experience.’
‘I’ll meet you at Petterino’s,’ she said. ‘Afterwards, we’ll go to the theater. My subscription tickets are for tonight.’
It was going to be like old times, for whatever reason.
‘A play afterward?’ I managed. ‘Surely you remember that’s over my head.’
‘See you at Petterino’s at six.’ Her voice softened. ‘And Dek?’
‘Ma’am?’
‘Little is over your head.’
Little was over Jenny’s head as well, though her calling ten minutes after I’d clicked off with Amanda could only have been coincidence.
‘I can’t wait to show you Fisherman’s Wharf,’ she said.
It was going to be our first time together since she had taken the San Francisco television job eight months earlier. They’d been long months, those eight, and we were set to celebrate the wonder of making our new relationship work at such a long distance.
‘Picturesque, is it?’
‘Just your cup of Twinkies,’ she said.
‘Real and authentic, old-time San Francisco?’
‘You can get a picture of Elvis on black velvet to hang above your table saw.’
‘Black velvet would also nicely complement the white plastic of the lawn chairs,’ I said, of the turret’s first-floor conversational grouping. ‘I’m also in need of a really wide refrigerator magnet, maybe of the Golden Gate Bridge.’ The avocado-colored refrig-erator I’d found in an alley was rusting from the inside out, and I was looking to slow the loss of semi-cold air.
‘I’ve got four days off, time enough to take care of all your needs.’ She laughed, hanging up, leaving me with the promise of unspoken naughtiness.
And grateful that I hadn’t had the chance to tell her I was having dinner with my ex-wife that evening.
TWO
I’ve always suspected that a malevolent chicken farmer designed the Goodman Theater complex in downtown Chicago. It’s set up like a poultry processing plant. Petterino’s is on the corner, a high-glitz restaurant of hooded table candles and deeply cushioned chairs. Good food, big prices. Petterino’s is for the plumping and the plucking.
The theater connects through an interior doorway so that patrons, overfed and softly sweating, can be shepherded straight to their seats without being aroused by fresh outside air. Amanda always insisted that the Goodman offers mainstream productions, but to me the plays were confusing. And that, I used to say, is the point. Dulled by overeating at Petterino’s, staggering straight into the dim plush of the theater, folks are further numbed by droning actors saying things that make no sense. The audience slips from stupor into sleep; it’s the poultry man’s intent. The Goodman is for the lulling.
Two hours later, the audience is jolted awake by the smattering of applause at the final curtain. Groggy, now disoriented by the sudden noise and lights, they’re herded across the street to the garage, where they’re made to wait in lines to pay a credit card machine that mumbles nonsensical instructions in an adenoidal, digitized voice, then funneled into other lines for a chance to push their way into one of the two overcrowded elevators. By the time they reach their cars, they’re dripping sweat, their eyes bright with the need for escape. But the final chaos is yet to come. The automobile exit lanes all merge into one, and the flow quickly becomes choked, an impacted drain, backed up all the way to the roof. Trapped, frantic at the stoppage, the drivers whimper and slap at their horns, but the sudden, overwhelming noise only enrages them further. Control vanishes; it’s every chicken for himself. They gun their engines, aim recklessly at imagined hair-width gaps in the line. Fenders crumple, voices scream. It is at this moment that they welcome death. The garage is for the slaughter.
And somewhere, unseen, the poultry farmer laughs.
To me, it is not amazing that people pay great sums to do this. What shocks is that they subscribe to do it several times a year.
Petterino’s was crowded with pre-show diners. Amanda, now one of Chicago’s wealthiest socialites, had been provided a quiet table in the corner. As she’d said on the phone, she wanted to talk.
I hadn’t seen her since I’d dropped her into the welcoming arms of her father, his small army of heavily armed security men and, pacing in front of them all like a silvered peacock, her impeccably attired, suitably affluent new beau.