‘Meaning what?’
‘That Confessors’ Club on Delaware Street.’
‘How is it you knew its name before anyone else?’
‘We’ve been investigating Lamm’s activities for months,’ he said, lying, with an impressively straight face.
‘Maybe you should have tipped the cops about that club. Maybe you could have saved lives.’
‘Maybe you should explain what you were doing inside.’
‘I went in with a guy I thought was a cop.’
‘Where the hell is Phelps?’
‘I don’t know.’
‘Where’s the supposed cop?’
‘Supposed?’
‘Maybe he doesn’t exist,’ Krantz said.
‘Why don’t you get the cops to release the sketch I helped their artist develop?’
‘They’re touchy about someone passing as one of their own. They think people will end up not talking to any of them.’
Delray had gone to Wendell’s house, but I didn’t want to bring Wendell any closer into this conversation. ‘The kid posing as Delray Delmar is real. Whitman’s daughter spoke with him,’ I offered instead.
‘Your fingerprints were on pewter mugs left on the dining-room table in that graystone.’
‘Delmar had me take them off a wall rack. He left them out so they’d be printed.’
‘CPD also pulled your prints off a lot of doors.’
‘Delray was careful to leave no fingerprints of his own. He was setting me up to become a fall guy, someone to pin everything on.’
‘Why?’
‘Maybe to use as leverage, to get me to do something.’
‘What?’
‘I have no idea.’
Amanda came back into the kitchen, but stood facing the coffee maker, as though waiting for Krantz to leave before she poured herself a cup.
Krantz stood up. ‘Encouraging Wendell Phelps to come forward will deflect some of the glare off you, Elstrom, and help your father, Ms Phelps.’
I walked him out because the set of Amanda’s back showed she wouldn’t turn around to look at him.
At the door, Krantz looked at his watch. ‘I’m thinking twenty-four hours.’
‘Until?’
‘Until I ask the Chicago police to pick you up for questioning. They can lose records long enough to sweat you for forty-eight hours if I tell them you’re withholding information in their murder investigation.’
‘That’s crap.’
‘That’s notoriety for your ex-wife, and legal fees you can’t afford.’ He stepped out into the corridor. ‘Play tough with me, Elstrom, and there’ll be “details to follow,” to quote your favorite columnist.’
I slammed the door as he walked, whistling, to the elevator.
‘You left us to call Lake Forest?’ I asked, coming back to the kitchen.
‘My father raced out of there this morning with a suitcase, just as Krantz said. No one’s heard from him since. Delores is frantic.’
‘Did he leave by cab?’
‘No. He drove himself.’ She took coffee cups from a cabinet and was about to pour coffee when suddenly she shook her head. She set down the coffee pot and reached over to the counter for a corked bottle of Shiraz.
‘In that tan Buick?’
She spun around. ‘Why shouldn’t my father give Jim Whitman a ride home? They were friends. They served on boards together.’
‘As I said before, giving Whitman a ride home the night he died doesn’t mean your father killed him.’
‘My father was better friends with Arthur,’ she said, her voice quieting.
‘I don’t like your father buying into Lamm’s insurance brokerage.’
‘Arthur must have really needed money.’ She smacked the bottle hard as she started to fill one of the coffee cups. ‘Where’s my father?’
‘No wine for me,’ I said. ‘I’m driving.’
She looked up, startled. ‘Where?’
‘The only place I’m thinking your father would need to take a suitcase.’
‘Bent Lake,’ she said.
FIFTY-SEVEN
My first run north, by borrowed Porsche, had been a breathtaking mix of German engineering, fast speeds and precise, road-hugging turns. I’d had time, and something of a plan.
Now I was clattering to upper Wisconsin in an aged Jeep Wrangler that shook and trembled in perfect accompaniment to the fear and confusion playing tag in my gut.
I’d lied to Amanda. I had no belief that Wendell was innocent of anything. He and Lamm were friends, going way back. Some sense of loyalty, or just as possibly some sense of greed, might well have gotten Wendell to fold himself into whatever Lamm was up to, including buying into the scams Lamm was running from his insurance brokerage.
I could only blunder around blind. I’d ask around town to see if anyone had seen Wendell, or Lamm. I’d confront Wanda, the hostile girlfriend of the dead Canty, or at least see if the sheriff’s department had protected her from Lamm.
Only as a last resort would I come up on Lamm’s camp to see if he, or Wendell, was there.
Amanda demanded two things before I left her apartment. The first was that I take the two-million-dollar Carson payout along to Bent Lake, for no other reason than Arthur Lamm wanted it and it might be leverage, somehow, in keeping her father safe.
Her second stipulation was simpler: if any danger arose, I was to call Krantz.
I phoned when I got to within an hour of Bent Lake. She answered on the first ring.
‘No word from my father,’ she said.
I told her I might lose cell phone contact in a few miles, hung up, and went back to hoping Wendell wasn’t involved up to his neck in whatever Lamm was doing.
I got to Bent Lake later than the last time. It was now pitch black. The used-to-be service station was closed, its concrete island, shorn of pumps, looking like a casket vault left low and forgotten in the shadows. Of more interest was the phone booth next to the service bays. It had been awhile since I’d seen one, but then again, it had been awhile since I’d been any place where cell phone reception was considered so unpredictable.
Like last time, though, the Dairy Queen across the street was bright with lights and lust, and the same carb-swelled high school lovers were framed, embracing, in the order window beneath the yellow bug lights. Such was their intensity that neither looked up as I drove by.
I passed by the neon Budweiser sign beckoning in the middle of the block and pulled to a stop in the gravel lot of Loons’ Rest. As I’d feared, it was dark. But there was a note handwritten on lined tablet paper taped to the inside of the front window. ‘Closed for a while,’ it read. ‘Off for New Adventures.’
I drove back to the gas station, parked in the dark next to the pay phone, and took the aluminum case for a walk to the bar down the block. My footsteps echoed off the deserted store fronts, loud and alone, though I imagined the Bent Lake Children’s Club would soon come to fill the evening air with joyous sounds of beating brooms and stomping feet. It felt like a night for death all around.
The same three flannel shirts were perched at the bar, talking with the bartender. All four remembered me. In appreciation, I slapped a five-spot on the bar and bought short beers for the house.
‘Come back for more excitement?’ the beard behind the bar asked. I wondered whether he knew I’d been shot at during my last visit, or was just being witty. I played it like he was a comedian.
‘The excitement’s already started,’ I said. ‘There’s a note taped at Loons’ saying it’s closed.’
‘Wanda and Herman took off,’ the bartender said.
The faces above the flannel shirts nodded in agreement.
‘Who would know where they went?’
‘Who would want to?’ the bartender asked.
The flannel shirts laughed.
‘I don’t suppose Arthur Lamm’s been by?’