The rain had slowed to a drizzle by the time I got back to the turret. I walked down to the river, to have one last think at what seemed to be my only remaining option.
The Willahock agreed. It was angry, kicking up white spray over the banks and onto the crumbling riverwalk. Lightning lit the sky to the west, promising another storm, and the wind snapped hard at the two-armed ash. The ground around the tree was littered with young, green leaves, dead now forever. I didn’t need the leaves to tell me the world had turned into a dark tempest, and that the kid cop imposter, and Arthur Lamm and his caretaker, Canty – and R.B., whoever he was – were swirling right in the middle of its dark heart. It was four-thirty. Barely twenty-four hours remained before the Confessors were set to meet the next evening, when another of them might be killed. And Agent Krantz, the only person I could hope to trust, was too busy in meetings to call me.
I phoned the bastard who’d trashed my life.
‘John Keller,’ the voice said.
‘This is Dek Elstrom.’
He gave me a contemptuous sigh. ‘Listen, Elstrom, you gotta put this behind-’
I cut him off. ‘I’m not drunk this time, calling to rant about how you shafted me in your columns. I’ve got a story, maybe the biggest story you’ll ever get. It’s ideal for you, Keller, because I can’t prove any of it. You’re going to have to go with speculation. But you like that, Keller. All I ask is that you lead with it in tomorrow’s column – “details to follow,” your usual crap.’
‘I’ll listen,’ he said.
‘You better do more than that, or people are going to die.’
FORTY-SIX
Tuesday morning. Confessors’ Club day.
All night, one storm after another had thundered through Rivertown, pounding the ground, roiling the river. I wouldn’t have slept much anyway, not the night before the Confessors were to gather.
I got out of bed at six, finally, because there was no reason not to. I started coffee, slipped into my yellow rain poncho and stepped out into the downpour. In the faint light of the streetlamps, Rivertown looked like it had been shaken by a furious giant. The ground was littered everywhere with branches, and several trees were down in front of city hall. Rivertown, being Rivertown, would not field a city crew to clear the streets until well past noon. The lizard in charge of municipal services owned one of the tonks on Thompson Avenue, and spent most nights until dawn drinking deeply from his own inventory.
I pushed the end of a spindly limb off the Jeep’s hood, and then ran across the spit of land and Thompson Avenue to buy an Argus-Observer from the blue box in front of the Jiffy Lube. Ducking beneath the eave below the sign advertising full lubrications, it struck me, because my mind so often speeds in unnecessary directions, that full lubrications were the essence of Rivertown. During the day, cash greased the palms of the town’s fathers to ease sticky zoning violations or troublesome brushes with what passed for the law in Rivertown. At night, cash bought lubrication of an entirely different sort, from the sweet-smelling women who worked the darker patches along Thompson Avenue. I gave a mental nod to the red-and-white sign lit bright in the rain; it was a perfect beacon for the town.
I flipped the paper open to ‘Keller’s Korner’ only long enough to be sure he’d led with my words, then tucked it under my poncho and ran back to the turret. The coffee was ready. I caffeinated my travel mug and read what I had wrought.
Keller had headlined his column with his typical hysteria: ‘FEDS AND CHICAGO PD COVER UP SECRET BLACKMAIL MURDER CLUB.’ The smaller print below continued in his usual breathlessness: ‘According to the agent of a well-known local businessman, a secret blackmail and murder society has been operating in the city for over a century. In the past six months, several prominent Chicagoans have been snuffed out after attending meetings in the society’s secret headquarters in a graystone off the Mag Mile. And just one month ago, a private detective who discovered recording machines set up for high-stakes blackmail and worse in the ancient den was killed before he could spill what he knew. Still to be fathomed: another club member, a prominent insurance man with big-big connections to the very top-ola, has gone missing while CPD dithers and Federal boys bungle. Details to follow.’
‘Details to follow,’ was Keller’s signature tag line, and since there were rarely any details to begin with, almost none ever would follow. He was a master at frenzied innuendo, a jester at journalistic integrity. He’d distorted what little I’d given him, used only words that would sizzle in print. He’d not named the Confessors’ Club or its precise location, nor the Federal agency that was involved, the supposed murder victims, or Lamm. He’d written nothing of substance, and he’d done it as magnificently as I’d hoped. Now it was time for tens of thousands of Chicagoans to read ‘Keller’s Korner’ online or in print, and without realizing it, they’d begin to fill in the blanks themselves. Newsreaders abhor vacuums, and in talking the story up in office corridors, over store counters and on the phone from their homes or their cars, they’d add their own little suppositions that they were sure to be true. And by noon, a hundred versions of the story would have spread to half the people in town. It was Keller’s particular genius, setting roaring fires with so few tiny twigs.
I knew, because I’d been burned by those same flames. ‘POWER SON-IN-LAW DETECTIVE WHINES HE WAS DUPED TO CONSPIRE’ had been my bold print when Keller ridiculed me as a stupid schlep that conspired to falsify evidence. That I’d been stupid was true. That I’d conspired was false. But I was the son-in-law of Wendell Phelps, a major Chicagoan, and that got me the big ink. No matter that I’d never met Wendell, no matter that I’d been fooled by some very expert forging. No matter even that the charges against me were piled thick to obscure some very sloppy prosecution. None of that saw print in ‘Keller’s Korner.’ My details to follow, in the form of a full exoneration, never had followed in Keller’s column, and only in tiny print in the back pages of Chicago’s other newspapers.
I walked to the window. Lightning lit the Willahock, heaving and frothing in the storm. Amid a hundred lesser fallen branches, the butchered ash stood as though raging in the rain, angrily thrusting its two contorted, rain-slicked limbs at city hall. I had the hope that other, more human limbs were being contorted farther to the east, in the city. By now, someone at the IRS had read Keller, and had called Krantz in Washington, and I wondered if Krantz would order that I be run downtown for some extended, repetitive questioning, if only as retribution in advance for the ridicule his snail-paced investigation was soon to receive. The Chicago police would be slower. They’d have to play catch-up, frantically call the various Federal offices in Chicago to find the agency that knew who’d made them look stupid. I had no doubt that when they rang the IRS, Krantz’s crew would cough me up in a heartbeat, understanding that the Chicago cops needed their piece of me, too.
So be it. What mattered was that Keller’s words would render the Confessors’ Club toxic to its members. No one would dare go there that evening for fear of Feds, cops and killers. And in the coming days, other reporters, more conscientious than Keller, would dig. The names of the Confessors would be revealed, the house on Delaware would be pictured, and the graystone nest would be poisoned for all time. Nobody would ever return. Nobody would ever again be killed because of what had been recorded there.
Or so I thought, that morning.
FORTY-SEVEN
The first response I got wasn’t from Krantz’s men, pounding on my door. It was Wendell calling, and he was smoked.