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The last of the upholstered seatback tore away, but the metal springs behind it wouldn’t budge. They’d been fastened tight with a pneumatic wrench on an assembly line.

I swung blindly at the rear shelf now, crazed by the ever stronger foulness rising from the trunk. The fiberboard dented and at last split apart. I ripped at the pieces, threw them out of the car, and reached down into the trunk.

I touched cold metal, ribbed and hard. Reaching past it, I found something just as cold, but not quite as hard, wrapped in thick plastic. My gut twisted. It was what I knew I’d find. Rigor.

I pulled my hand back, felt again the cold metal. It was a case of some sort, wedged between the seat back and the corpse. I found the handle and tugged it through the hole where the rear shelf had been. It was an aluminum metal briefcase. I dropped it on the front passenger seat and stuck my hand back into the hole.

I was sure I was touching death, perhaps days old. I felt along its shape, found a shoulder, and then the curve of an arm locked in place, unyielding. And a knee, tucked up under the chest.

I wanted to run, get free from the stench, the death. But I had to know. For myself. For Amanda, more.

I sunk the teeth of the hammer’s claw into the plastic shrouding the death, ripping it. The purest fumes of hell came at me, searing my nose, constricting my throat, pulling up bile. I held my breath, afraid I’d vomit. I found a belt and followed fabric – denim, wool or cotton; I couldn’t tell through the yellow gloves – past a dead hip to the small raised square that I was hoping to find. A wallet in a back pocket. An answer.

I eased it out with my fingers, backed out of the car, and dropped it on the hood. I poked it open with my index finger. The driver’s license was in a plastic window.

Herman Canty, PO Box 12, Bent Lake, Wisconsin.

The body exhaled behind me, a soft sound of gas escaping through the rips I’d made in the plastic. I grabbed the metal case from the front passenger seat, left the wallet behind, and ran to the ruined door that led to the office.

FIFTY-FIVE

‘Oh, hell,’ Amanda said after we’d sped down the first mile of Milwaukee Avenue. ‘I forgot to leave the key.’ She looked stricken at the thought we’d have to drive back and slip the key through the slot in the door.

After the briefest glance at the cash inside the metal case, we’d fled Second Securities unnerved, sick from the smell of death, barely able to remember to lock the door behind us.

‘Put it in the ashtray,’ I said. ‘I’ll get rid of it later.’

‘Why did we take all that money?’ she asked, gesturing at the metal case I’d tossed in back. Her hands shook as she dropped the key in the ashtray.

‘To see who comes after it.’ It was all I could think to say. I had no plan that involved grabbing cash. I hadn’t expected it would be there. ‘Canty must have been Lamm’s partner in running down Grant Carson. Lamm must have killed him to silence him for all time, then left the money with the corpse, thinking it would be safest there, while he went north to tidy up a last detail.’

‘What last detail?’

‘Canty’s girlfriend, Wanda. Lamm must be thinking Canty told her some things. Do you know how to block your number when you make a call?’

‘Sure,’ she said.

‘Get the number of the sheriff’s department near Bent Lake. Leave an anonymous tip that Wanda over at Loons’ Rest might be in trouble.’

It only took her a couple of minutes. Then she asked, ‘I still don’t understand: if Arthur needs money badly enough to kill for it, why risk leaving it in that garage?’

‘Guys like Lamm and your father, they don’t fly commercial, right?’

‘Lear jets, chartered out of Midway Airport,’ she said.

‘Then Second Securities is the safest short-term place he knows. Nobody knows about it except Rikk at the insurance company…’ I let the thought trail away.

‘Dek?’

‘And anybody else he might have told. He swore he didn’t tell Delray when he called, posing as a cop. But you never know.’

‘Does that matter?’

I thought for a moment, and said, ‘I don’t think so. Delray’s got to be thinking the check was picked up and cashed somewhere. I’m pretty sure the only person who’s going to be shocked at Second Securities is Arthur Lamm, when he comes back. He’ll be light the two million dollars he needs for fleeing in a corporate jet.’

‘Are you going to tell Krantz to keep watch for Arthur to show up at Second Securities?’

‘I owe your father more than that. We’re going to tell him about the money we just found. That ought to make him talk about his friend Arthur.’

‘And then?’

‘We find a way to give it to the cops without implicating your father.’

‘Damn it,’ she said. ‘I wish my father didn’t get rid of his security detail. Too much cash is being tossed around.’

‘He believes he has nothing to fear from his old friend Arthur.’

‘I’m going to call my father when we get back to my apartment.’

We drove in silence for another five minutes, until she told me to pull over in front of a discount men’s clothing store.

‘My treat,’ she said. I stunk of the death I’d found in the small battered Ford, and I’d torn one knee of my khakis, ripping my way into the car trunk. She was out with a bag in five minutes, and we were back on our way.

Upstairs in her condo, she handed me the bag.

‘Ah, new duds,’ I said.

‘But the same you,’ she said. ‘Cheap khakis, de rigueur blue button-down shirt in cotton polyester, socks and underwear. Thirty-six fifty for the whole outfit. Once you’ve showered, you’ll smell and look like new.’ She forced a nervous laugh, but she was firing on all pistons, in control. ‘Guest bath is waiting. While you’re showering, I’ll call my father, see if we can meet him in an hour or so.’ She handed me a paper bag for the clothes I was wearing. ‘Incinerator chute is outside, in the hall.’

Shampoo and soap were in the shower; I needed nothing. Yet previous lives occasionally demand a fast indulgence. Inside the medicine cabinet were wrapped bars of soap, two fresh tubes of toothpaste, a sealed toothbrush, and nothing else. Most especially, there was no man’s razor, shaving cream, or deodorant.

She’d mentioned Richard Rudolph, socially impeccable silver-haired hedge fund manager and investor, only in passing, saying he was in Russia, doing a deal. I’d mentioned Jenny the same way, just as reluctantly and also only in passing. I’d supposed our vagueness was normal, an offering of respect for the past and probably nothing more.

Now, in her guest bathroom, surrounded by her soaps, her linens, things didn’t feel so firmly rooted in the past.

I opened the linen closet, looking for a towel, and got a soft jolt. An inch of familiar red and blue striped terry showed bright behind the stack of white towels. I pushed the towels to one side and was sure. It was the robe she’d bought me right after we married. That she’d kept it wanted to set off too many conflicting thoughts, and I showered trying not to think about any of them.

I emerged twenty minutes later, studiously scrubbed, garbed in fresh polyester and smelling swell. I dropped my paper bag of clothes into the incinerator chute down the hall, came back, and went into the kitchen. She’d made us coffee, and set cups on the kitchen table.

‘My father is in meetings,’ she said.

‘I’ll leave the two million here,’ I said. ‘You’ve got all the building security it needs.’

We drank the coffee, then she walked me to the door and told me she’d call as soon as she heard from her father.

FIFTY-SIX

Amanda didn’t call, and I fiddled away all of the next morning and the earliest part of the afternoon on the Internet. News sites everywhere had seized upon the graystone they were all now calling the Confessors’ Club, used only six times a year for the secret meetings of wealthy men. Facts were in short supply, so many of the reports offered Keller-like speculations of wild drunkenness, sexual debauchery, political manipulations and, of course, murderous plotting. It seemed that the farther the news organization was from Chicago, the wilder was the prose it used on its website.