‘I’ve been reassigned,’ he said. ‘It’s part of my training. I’m now working drug investigations on the North Side.’
‘Who takes over this case?’
‘I’ve passed my file on to Homicide, but there’s no heat on it. They don’t see the deaths as murders. They won’t follow up.’ He reached into his jacket pocket for a white envelope. ‘I’ve now got access to snitch money. In this case, twelve hundred dollars.’ He slid the envelope across the table. ‘Use it to work confidentially. Report only to me. Find Arthur Lamm. He travels in the same circles as did the dead men. He’s got to be the key to everything.’
As perhaps was Wendell, but Delray had the decency to leave that unsaid.
‘You didn’t go back far enough with Whitman’s calendars,’ Delray went on. ‘I had his secretary pull two more of his appointment calendars. Four years ago, Whitman wrote “C. Club” on two of those special Tuesday nights.’
‘That’s not much more help.’
He nudged the envelope closer to me. ‘Check it out.’
‘Is it legal, you paying me?’
‘Requisitioning money for one purpose, and using it for another?’ He laughed. ‘Hardly, but as far as you’re concerned, it’s expense reimbursement. You don’t know I’ve been reassigned.’
‘If I can prove Jim Whitman was killed, and not a suicide, I’ll be a rich man.’
‘So Debbie Goring said. This money will help you find that out quicker.’
‘What’s in this for you, if you’ve been transferred?’
‘I’ll be seen as riding in on a white horse to save Chicago’s most prominent people. My career will be made.’
I admired the kid’s candor, but I suspected he was holding something back. ‘What aren’t you telling me about Arthur Lamm?’
‘Nothing. He’s disappeared, and he hasn’t shown up dead. For now, that’s enough to make him a suspect.’
‘Why would he kill?’
‘Let’s find him and ask.’
‘And we do that by first finding the C. Club?’
‘It’s our only lead.’
The kid had a point.
We ate our burgers and talked of Chicago politics. When we got up to leave, I pushed the envelope back toward him. Technically, or maybe not, Wendell was still my client, and Amanda was my first obligation. I couldn’t split my allegiances.
I told him Debbie Goring was going to make me rich.
It seemed reasonable at the time.
THIRTY-TWO
I trolled the Internet the next morning for anything that smacked of a ‘C. Club’ in Chicago and its surrounds. Google spit up a thousand organizations such as the University of Chicago Alumni Association and a curling club that met in the northern suburbs to sweep brooms fast on ice. None looked like they needed to meet in secret.
I then widened my search by including all organizations that began with the letter ‘C.’ Eleven thousand names popped up, including a women’s rugby club in England and an outfit claiming to own the world’s largest catsup bottle. Narrowing these down to only those in Chicago didn’t help.
Finally, I searched the public donor lists of Chicago’s premier civic, charitable and social organizations. Barberi, Whitman, Carson, Lamm and Wendell Phelps had all supported the Union League, the Standard, the Boys’ Clubs of Chicago, the Metropolitan YMCA and a dozen others. It was to be expected. They’d traveled in the same do-gooding circles. I switched off my computer. Delray’s lead had been a bust.
I knew a Fed in the city. He didn’t think much of me because we had history, but I called him anyway and asked my question. He said he could give me five minutes of his time, in precisely one hour, but only in person, in his lobby. He wanted me to fight traffic to ask a question which he might or might not answer. That was understandable, too. Time does not heal all wounds.
I thought about bumpers to bumpers and the impossibility of making it downtown in one hour, which was probably his intent, and I hustled to take the train. As it clattered along, I looked out the window, remembering when Leo and I were in high school and rode downtown, headed for un-chewable, two-dollar steak lunches served up with a spotted, hard potato and a piece of toast smeared with something the approximate color of butter. We’d cracked wise on those rides, at the colors and sizes of the clothes hanging on the lines behind the three-flats, sharing our stunted, sophomoric witticisms with those other passengers who’d not thought to bring earplugs, ear buds or whole buckets of water in which to submerge their heads.
I saw no clotheslines on this trip; basement dryers must be everywhere by now. Nonetheless, my faith in adolescent boys remained. They’d always ride trains, and they’d always find ways to embarrass themselves in public.
Agent Till’s offices were on Canal Street. He was an investigator at Alcohol, Tobacco and Firearms. He’d threatened to prosecute me one autumn for withholding information he considered vital to wrapping up a case. He’d been half right – I was withholding – but the information wasn’t crucial. The case closed fine without it. Still, we both knew he’d been charitable in letting me skate unpunished.
He came down to the lobby, walked to the granite bench by the window where I was sitting. He was a short, wiry man in his fifties with the wizened, creased face and hunched shoulders of a career investigator. Every time I’d seen him in the past, he’d been wearing a brown suit. Today was no different.
‘Five minutes,’ he said, by way of an opening pleasantry. He remained standing.
‘You appear to be brimming with good health.’ The last time I’d seen him, he’d complained about the healthy food his wife was forcing upon him.
‘Cut the crap.’
I stood up so I’d be taller than he was. ‘I need information.’
‘Me, too,’ he said, still touchy about that previous autumn.
‘Have you heard anything about an investigation of Arthur Lamm?’
‘The insurance guy?’
‘Yes.’
He shook his head. ‘ATF is not investigating him.’
‘I think the IRS is.’
‘I wouldn’t know about them.’
‘Could you find out what’s going on, and where they think he is?’
‘Sure.’
‘Will you find out?’
‘Will you tell me what I’ve wanted to know for too many years?’ he asked.
‘The case is closed.’
‘It doesn’t matter.’
‘No,’ I said.
He smiled and suggested I do something that, were it even physiologically possible, I would never do in the lobby of a government building, particularly on a bench by a window where passersby could see.
Chuckling, he walked past the guard and disappeared into an elevator, and I headed back to a train not due to depart for another hour.
THIRTY-THREE
The outbound train was a midday plodder that stopped at every crossing on its way west. I could have used the time to review what I’d learned about the men in the heavy cream – the three who died, the fourth who’d gone missing, and the fifth, my ex-father-in-law, whose evasiveness clung to everything, blurring it like thick, black smoke – except I’d learned nothing. So mostly, I looked out the window and let my mind drift back to old times, when laundry was hung on lines and semi-chewable steaks could be served up with rock-hard potatoes and yellowed toast for two bucks.
A black Chevrolet Impala, the kind of car Federal agents drive, was parked a few yards past the turret. There was nobody inside. It didn’t matter; I knew who it was. Such a car parked outside my turret was like old times, too.
I headed into the kitchen to rummage in the cardboard box where I keep my dry food. For lunch, I had the choice between Cinnamon Toast Crunch, which I usually ate dry, or peanut butter, which I usually ate sticky. Sparks of culinary creativity, borne of financial deprivation, fired into my skull. I put two scoops of peanut butter into a plastic cup, shook in ten of the little sugared cereal squares, grabbed a plastic spoon, and went down to the river.