Delray stepped back out of the room. One by one, he moved on to the others, nudging their doors with his shoulder, then sweeping his light beam fast and low, searching for feet and legs, arms and guns. All were furnished with chairs, tables and ashtrays, except for the last one, which was a bathroom.
At the staircase to the third floor, he whispered, ‘Go back and pull the doors almost closed, the way they were.’ He watched from the stairs until I’d closed each door to its previous position, and then we continued up.
The street noise was barely audible at the third-floor landing. We stopped to listen anyway, this time just for a few seconds.
There were only three doors on the third floor. Two were ajar, like those below. The third door was closed tight.
I stood aside as he nudged the first of the slightly open doors. It revealed a small attic of exposed wall studs and roof rafters, empty except for an iron bedstead leaning against one wall and a dusty, galvanized bucket. The other partially open door led to a bedroom furnished with an iron bedstead like the one in the attic, a painted wood dresser, and a metal night table. There was no mattress. It must have been a servant’s room, unused for a hundred years.
Delray again raised his hand to the inside of his sport coat, stepped back, and motioned for me to open the closed door. He hadn’t yet drawn his gun and the thought that he was readying himself now made me nervous that he’d sensed something I had not. I twisted the knob.
The door was locked. I held out his picks. Handing me his pencil-beam, he worked the old lock open in an instant. We traded picks for flashlight and again his hand moved closer to his gun.
I turned the knob and pushed too hard. The door flew open, banging loudly into the side wall.
‘Shit,’ Delray muttered, stabbing his light into the room. He inhaled sharply, in surprise.
Only a table sat in the center of the small room. On it were four large, professional quality digital recorders. Thin wires ran from each of them to holes in the floor, likely down to microphones placed throughout the house.
Delray raised his forefinger to his lips, but I already knew. The recorders could have been sound activated.
He swept the flashlight beam swiftly across them, looking for any glow of LEDs or other signs that they’d been triggered by the sound of the door I’d just slammed into the wall. But the machines were still; they’d all been switched off.
The recorders had been labeled: BR1, BR2, BR3 and BR4. I had the inane thought, then, that even when bugging the former second-floor bedrooms, tradition required the eavesdropper to behave as a gentleman. The washroom had not been wired.
‘Let’s get out of here,’ Delray said, snapping off his flash-light.
We padded down the two flights of stairs and through the hall to the rear door. I opened the door and was about to step out when he whispered he should go first, in case anyone was waiting. He stepped outside and I pushed the button lock on the door and pulled it closed behind me.
We didn’t say anything as we walked down the alley and around the corner.
‘Coffee?’ I asked, after we’d crossed Delaware.
‘Booze,’ he said.
FORTY
There was a bar in a boutique hotel two blocks east of State Street. It was empty except for a bartender watching a television sitcom and two dozen chrome bowls of peanuts. Delray bought us squat tumblers of whiskey and ice, and though the place was deserted, carried them to the plush chairs in the back. I followed with two of the bowls of peanuts.
‘Paranoid about being seen committing a crime?’ I asked when we sat down, trying a joke.
He took a long sip of his whiskey. ‘I have to admit, it’s not my favorite thing to do.’
I took my own deep sip. Never before had the cold fire of whiskey tasted so good.
‘I’m getting used to it.’
‘What do you mean?’ he asked.
‘I got caught on a surveillance video last night; Lamm’s office. I had to tell some of what I knew.’
His face tensed as I told him about my morning at the movies with the IRS. ‘You’re sure you didn’t mention me?’
‘Positive.’
He relaxed back into his chair. ‘How close are they to finding Lamm?’
‘We weren’t sharing confidences. The conversation was mostly about me, looking stupid, though one of Krantz’s men stopped by later with Lamm’s appointments calendar. Lamm went to an address numbered sixty-six on those same Tuesday nights. That’s how I zeroed in on the clubhouse.’
‘The question is: who set up the recorders?’
‘Think about the purpose of those recorders,’ I said. ‘Likely someone was hoping to grab stock tips, or other insider information, by bugging the conversations going on in those private rooms.’
‘That doesn’t rule out any of them,’ Delray said. ‘They all would have had access to the clubhouse.’
‘Along the way, whoever bugged the rooms also learned who was vulnerable, health-wise, who had a condition or an illness.’
Delray leaned forward. ‘Benno Barberi’s heart condition,’ he said, seeing where I was headed.
‘And Jim Whitman’s cancer.’
‘Insurance,’ he said.
‘Barberi came home from the Confessors’ Club agitated that some anonymous someone had insured his life,’ I said. ‘Jim Whitman’s daughter had a different insurance concern: there was none that insured suicide.’
‘Unless?’ he asked, grinning, certain now.
‘Unless there was,’ I said. ‘Someone wrote a policy on Whitman’s life that Whitman knew nothing about.’
‘Like with Barberi?’
‘And like the policy taken out on Grant Carson that named some anonymous entity as beneficiary.’ I raised my glass in salute. ‘Insurance motives, three times over: Barberi, Whitman and Carson.’
‘Arthur Lamm.’
‘Arthur Lamm, the insurance man,’ I said. ‘He owned his own brokerage. He could fake his own medical exams, write his own policies, name his own beneficiaries. Smooth.’
‘Why risk murder? Lamm’s one of the wealthiest men in the city. Why dose Whitman with Gendarin at the December Confessors’ Club when all he had to do was wait to collect on the policy he wrote on the man’s life? And why risk pushing Carson out of a car?’ He swirled the ice cubes in his glass. His whiskey had gone.
I had no answer for that. I went to the bar and bought us another round. It was the first time I’d had a second drink since I’d been tossed out of Amanda’s gated community one sodden Halloween a few years earlier. That Halloween, though, I’d had a lot more than two whiskies.
‘How do we find Lamm?’ he asked when I came back.
‘Let Homicide find him. You’ve got enough to get them interested.’
‘Recording machines discovered during an illegal search? They’ll freak.’
‘Tell them to start by squeezing Canty. You do remember Canty, up in Wisconsin?’ Delray had to be the cop from Chicago the flannel shirts in the bar had told me about.
Delray grinned. ‘Yep,’ he mimicked.
‘Canty had to be the accomplice Lamm needed to kill Carson.’
He shook his head. ‘It isn’t enough to get Homicide involved.’
‘Then call Krantz, tell him you’ve got a hunch Lamm and the three dead men are linked to that graystone. They don’t need to know we went in. They’ll get search warrants; you’ll still be the hero.’
‘No,’ he said, staring into his drink. ‘I want to find Lamm myself.’
‘Career and ambition?’
‘Having a rabbi means I have to work doubly hard to prove myself.’ He looked up. ‘You’ve got to squeeze Wendell Phelps about Arthur Lamm. Phelps might know where Lamm is hiding.’
I had no illusions about keeping Wendell out of the investigation forever. Sooner or later, Delray or another cop would tumble on to the fact that Wendell had hired a private investigator to nose into the killings before he hired me to do the same thing. They’d pull out all the stops on Wendell, then, and squeeze out everything he knew.