I sat behind the L-shaped secretarial desk closest to Lamm’s office, took my pen from my pocket and a yellow Post-it from the pad next to the phone, and pretended to write a note. I stopped to shake the pen like it was out of ink. It was more clever subterfuge, an excuse to riffle the top of the desk. There were phone directories, a dozen folders filled with insurance applications and a file of local restaurant takeout menus, but there were no pens on the desk. And there was no appointment book.
I opened desk drawers, one by one. There were files and note pads, envelopes and paperclips, but there was no appointment diary inside the desk either. There was, however, a pen. I used it to pretend to finish the note on the Post-it, stuck it to the FedEx envelope, and turned it upside down so the cleaning person, Bill, wouldn’t see I’d written nothing. Lamm’s secretary would throw out the FedEx envelope the next morning, thinking only that somebody had accidentally dropped it on her desk.
It had been a long shot, amateurish, and hadn’t yielded a thing about where Arthur Lamm spent six Tuesday nights a year. Nonetheless, I left his insurance agency warmed by the self-satisfied glow of a truly daring and clever sleuth.
THIRTY-FIVE
At seven-thirty the next morning I was lying in bed, admiring my half-built closet from across the room, when someone began banging on my door. I slipped on jeans and a sweatshirt and hustled down the stairs barefoot.
Two men in dark suits and even darker neckwear stood outside. The older one, about my age, held up a glossy plastic card. Next to his picture were the letters ‘IRS.’
‘Can you come with us, Mr Elstrom?’ he asked.
‘It’s Saturday morning,’ I said, almost giddy with admiration for Agent Till. He’d moved quickly to get his contacts at the IRS to meet with me about Arthur Lamm, even though it was the weekend. I ran upstairs, put on shoes, grabbed my pea coat and was out to their sedan in less than three minutes, ready to be enlightened.
The agents who’d been sent to drive me were close-mouthed. Heading to the expressway, I got only grunts in response to my questions. It was understandable; they were errand boys. Till must have arranged for me to meet with an agent-in-charge. I leaned back and looked out the window.
Halfway into the city, I spotted a tagger high up beneath one of the overpasses. Graffiti artists work silently and anonymously, usually too high up to ever be noticed. Perhaps like a killer preying in the heavy cream.
We got off at Wacker Drive, drove another few blocks and stopped in front of a black glass office building. The agent riding as a passenger got out, opened my door and walked me past the two uniformed guards in the lobby to the bank of elevators. We rode up to the eighteenth floor and went into a conference room that had no pictures on the wall.
‘I’ll be outside the door,’ the agent said.
‘I’m delighted to wait,’ I said.
The building’s ventilation system wasn’t on, probably since it was Saturday, and the conference room was humid and stuffy. Faintly gasping for air, left to stare at walls that had no pictures, anyone with even the mildest sense of claustrophobia would cop to lying on a tax return, just to get out of that room.
Five minutes later, the door opened and in walked two thin men, one in his thirties, one in his fifties. The younger man set a cardboard tray of three cups of black coffee on the table and sat down. He moved one of the cups toward me.
The fifty-something-year-old had a disc in his hand and a mix of patience and distaste on his face. ‘My name’s Krantz,’ he said, walking to a gray metal cart in the corner that held a player and a television. He turned on the television, slipped the disc into the player, and pushed the play button.
The video had been shot from a ceiling-mounted camera in the hall outside Lamm’s brokerage. A man wearing khaki pants and a blue button-down shirt, clutching a blue-and-white Federal Express envelope, came down the corridor and stopped at the open glass door of the insurance agency. Taking a slow, guilty look around to be sure the camera recorded that he was up to no good, he stepped inside.
Another camera then recorded the man stopping to cock his head, listening, before turning to mouth silent words to someone out of the picture, undoubtedly a man wearing a white cleaning supervisor’s shirt with a name patch that read ‘Bill.’ After a minute, the cunning blue-shirted intruder smiled, obviously relieved. His shoulders relaxed, and he moved into the general office.
A third camera recorded the blue-shirted man approaching the private offices. He moved jerkily, like an overly medicated person trying not to collapse in a tea room. After pausing several times to take more furtive looks around, he finally bumped to a stop against a door. He pawed the doorknob. The knob didn’t turn; the door was locked.
The man walked to the nearest secretarial desk and sat down to write a note on a yellow Post-it. Shaking his own pen as though it had run dry, he picked through the items on the desk, pretending to be looking for another pen but clearly looking for something else. Finding nothing of interest, he opened the desk drawers and, after a prolonged search, came out with a blue ballpoint pen. He made writing motions on the Post-it and stuck the note to the FedEx envelope. The camera was high-resolution, and recorded that the Post-it was blank; the man had written nothing on it. The man turned the FedEx envelope upside down on the desk and sauntered away, a moronic smirk on his face. The screen went blank.
There had been no sound accompanying the video. Clown music, especially if accompanied by a chorus of honking squeeze horns and an uproarious laugh track, would surely have made the video a contender in any short comic film contest.
Krantz turned off the television, sat down and sighed. ‘Our man followed you down to the first floor and identified you from your license plates.’
‘Bill, the man operating the vacuum cleaner?’
‘Actually, his real name is Roger.’
I gestured at the now blank screen. ‘You don’t see that kind of cleverness very often, do you?’
‘Sadly, no,’ Krantz said, looking truly mournful. ‘If criminals were that inept, we’d have them all behind bars in a matter of weeks.’
He leaned back in his chair and made a come-to gesture with his hands. ‘Tell us.’
I had to offer something, having been caught by Feds. ‘I think Arthur Lamm is connected to three murders.’
I told him everything I knew, minus any mention of Delray and Wendell. By the time I finished, some of the lazy contempt in their eyes had gone.
‘You think Lamm’s a killer?’ Krantz asked.
‘I can’t see a motive for that, but I think he might know plenty.’
‘You’re working for Whitman’s daughter?’ Krantz asked.
Debbie Goring had become a superb justification for my snooping around, especially useful in keeping Wendell’s name out of the questioning. ‘She promised me five per cent of her father’s insurance proceeds if I can prove his death wasn’t a suicide.’
‘How will Lamm’s appointment book shed light on that?’
‘Each of the murdered men was secretive about where he went on the last night of his life. Lamm traveled in their same circles. His calendar might show exactly where they all went.’
Krantz looked at the younger agent, who then got up and left the room. Turning back to me, he said, ‘You really think Lamm killed those other three men?’
‘That, or he’s another victim. What can you tell me about your investigation?’
‘Not a damned thing,’ he said.
‘But you do have men looking for him?’ I asked.
‘We don’t have enough to arrest Lamm yet.’ Krantz stood up and opened the conference room door. ‘No more illegal entering, Mr Elstrom.’