His car chirped and flashed its headlights.
I knew Wendell drove a vintage Mercedes. Not today. The car he got into wasn’t expensive. It was a medium-priced sedan, the kind of car that retirees, merchants and countless thousands of other ordinary people drive.
It was older and tan, the one I’d seen in Wendell’s garage the day I’d first gone up to speak with him. The kind of car that had swerved in front of me on South Michigan Avenue, wanting to trigger that memory.
The kind with holes on the side, the kind Mrs Johnson had seen Jim Whitman coming home in the night he’d been murdered. A Buick.
Wendell Phelps had driven Jim Whitman home the night Whitman was murdered.
FORTY-FIVE
Monday: the day before the Confessors’ Club was to reconvene.
I woke at six, light on sleep but heavy with what I knew should be done.
I should pull photos of Buicks with portholes from the Internet and forward them to Mrs Johnson to identify – for me to then forward to the police – the precise model and year of car that had driven Whitman home. The cops would then run a list of all such Buicks, in tan, registered in the Chicagoland area. Even if the car was titled to some corporate entity, some enterprising young cop – perhaps Delray, perhaps not – would probe deeper, and link Wendell to the Buick, and from there to Jim Whitman.
This I did not do.
I should call Delray again, in hope of getting him and not his voice mail, to tell him of a mysterious associate of Small’s whose initials were R.B., someone who might know important things about the secret meetings of the men in the heavy cream. It was a useful lead, one that should be tracked down before the cops converged to watch the Confessors meet the following night.
This, at least, I tried to do, several times, but each time I got Delray’s voice mail. Finally, I called the main number of the Chicago Police Department. ‘Delray Delmar, please.’
‘Which department?’ a woman said.
‘Special Projects.’
She hesitated, then said, ‘Hold please.’
She came back on a moment later. ‘We have no department named Special Projects.’
‘He reports to the deputy chief.’
‘You mean deputy superintendent?’
‘Sure.’
‘Which one?’
‘There’s more than one?’
‘Of course.’
‘I don’t know.’
‘Hold please.’ This time she didn’t come back for three minutes. ‘Officer Delmar is in Traffic, but he’s on leave.’
She transferred me to Traffic, and I asked the crusty voice that answered how I could contact Delray.
‘You a friend?’
‘Yes.’
‘You’re a friend, and you don’t know he’s on leave?’
A thousand charged needles began prickling the top of my head, thinking he’d been hurt. ‘What’s he on leave for?’
‘Look, pal, if you’re a friend, ask the family.’ There was a question now in his cop voice. He hung up.
I called the main police number again, asked to be transferred to Traffic. Luckily a different voice, young and female, answered. ‘I’m from Haggarty and Dunn, jams and jellies out of Napa, California?’ I said. ‘Someone, a Mr Delray Delmar, gave this phone number when he placed an order. I can’t read the delivery instructions. What time will he be in?’
‘This has to do with police work?’
‘No, ma’am. This has to do with a gift he wants to send.’
‘We don’t give out home phone numbers.’
‘I should leave a message with you?’
‘What the hell, call St Agnes in Chicago.’
None of it made sense. Delray had said nothing about working in Traffic; he’d just been reassigned to Narcotics on the north side. More troubling, he was now in the hospital. And that might have meant he hadn’t tipped Homicide about the upcoming meeting at the Confessors’ Club.
A new spring storm had raged up suddenly outside. I ran out to the Jeep through rain drops hurling down as big as nickels. The Eisenhower was the most direct route to St Agnes, but the sewers built to drain the expressway were collapsing, like so many in Chicago, and had begun clogging up, stopping traffic in monstrous puddles whenever it rained. I sped as best as I could through the side streets, blowing through stop signs, running the red lights. It took an hour to make what should have been a thirty-minute trip.
The kindly lady at the hospital’s front desk said it was too soon for visiting hours. I asked for Delray’s room number, said I wanted to send him flowers. She smiled and said he was in 518, and that he was fortunate to have such a considerate friend.
I went out the main door, came back in through the hall from Emergency, and took the elevator up.
A pushcart holding breakfast plates under stainless steel covers was outside 518. Above it, the slip-in name holder by the door read ‘Delmar, D.’ I peeked in. The bed closest to the door was empty. A woman in a yellow uniform was by the window bed, taking a plate from a rolling table. The occupant of the bed was concealed behind the curtain. I smiled at her when she came out. She didn’t smile back. I went in.
‘Delray-’ I began, but stopped when I got past the curtain. The man in the hospital bed eating scrambled eggs was at least fifty years old, and had gray hair.
‘Sorry; wrong room,’ I said, and started to back out.
‘I’m Delray,’ he said in a surprisingly robust voice.
I moved forward to the edge of the curtain. ‘Delray Delmar?’
He nodded.
‘Chicago police?’
‘Twenty-eight years,’ he said.
‘I’m looking for your son.’ There was nothing else to think.
The man set down his fork. ‘No son; just two daughters. What’s this about?’
I turned and walked out of the room. At the nurses’ station, I said I was the old man’s nephew in as steady a voice as I could manage. ‘I just learned about my uncle’s condition. How long has he been here?’
The nurse checked a chart. ‘His bypass surgery was last week, but there were complications. His lungs started-’
‘He’s lucid?’
‘Of course. No problems with that…’
I walked away before she could finish, on legs that felt like they weren’t mine.
Outside St Agnes, the rain had stopped, but the sky had gotten even darker, as if it too knew that hell was coming to Delaware Street tomorrow and that all the notecards I’d made in my head had been reshuffled and thrown into the wind. The air felt too heavy to breathe. I walked across the street to the garage and leaned against a cold concrete column. Delray Delmar, the boy cop, was no cop. The kid was a fraud and maybe a killer.
I called the IRS. A sweet voice said Krantz wasn’t in. I asked if I could speak with anybody who was working on the Arthur Lamm case. Sweet Voice said she couldn’t confirm which cases the IRS was working on. I said bullshit. She asked if I would leave a number and I said I damned well would, that the matter was extremely urgent.
I hurried to the Jeep, but made it only a block before the sky opened up again. The earlier rain had filled the sewers. The new downpour was now turning the streets to rivers, the intersections to lakes. Worse, every form of road cholesterol had come out to clog my way, from distracted, pokey drivers too intent on cell phones to the truly timid, frozen by the deluge and waiting, I supposed, for a white-bearded man in robes to part the waters and show them the way to the ark. I swore at every damned one of them, cut up an alley, across another, and finally got free several blocks later.
I pulled into a gas station and called the IRS again. This time I insisted on speaking with someone who worked directly with Krantz. A man took the call, said Krantz was in Washington. Hell was coming down, I told him; Krantz had to call me. The man said Krantz was in meetings.
‘There’s a murderer out there, maybe two!’ I yelled. I hung up, realizing I’d sounded too deranged to warrant pulling Krantz out of any meeting.