Canty screamed until the car crashed onto the rocks.
I lay on my back, frozen in the new, sudden stillness, afraid to move. The rain beat down on me as the river frothed high beneath the planks. At some point I reached to touch my left arm and found sticky wetness. I’d been shot. I’d not ducked down far enough. I laughed.
After a time I stood up and walked along the center of the bridge, careful to look only forward until I got safely to the solid ground on the other side. Even then, I walked another ten feet before I dared to turn around to look at the river below.
The Buick lay upside down, pinned between two boulders in the churning, swollen water. Its roof had been crushed by the fall.
I am told that I pulled off my belt and cinched it around my left arm above where the blood was the stickiest. I don’t remember. Nor do I remember the man in the flatbed truck who slowed behind me as I wobbled down the middle of County M, by then a mile from the bridge. He saw the blood on my shirt and the vacancy in my eyes, and raced me to an emergency medical clinic in a town I’d never heard of.
SIXTY-FOUR
While I was being stitched up, an enterprising nurse thought to try the last numbers in the call memory of my phone. She got both Leo and Amanda. They drove up together and arrived at the clinic about the time the sedatives began to lift.
Amanda sat beside my bed and took my good hand. Leo sat in the corner, a blur of tropical colors.
‘I don’t know about your father,’ I said to her – but I did, or at least I was afraid I did.
She didn’t ask whether I was talking about Wendell’s whereabouts or his complicity in Arthur Lamm’s crimes. She merely sat for a moment, silently squeezing my hand like she was afraid of letting go. I told her to go find a sheriff’s deputy, to see if they’d learned anything. I wanted to talk to Leo, because I was running out of time.
Agent Krantz materialized in the doorway before I could say a word. He must have been lurking in a side corridor, waiting for Amanda to step out.
‘You got here fast,’ I said.
‘It is standard procedure to notify the sheriff about a gunshot wound. This particular sheriff remembered you’d stopped by, asking about Lamm and, more interestingly, your father-in-law.’
‘Ex-father-in-law,’ I corrected.
‘The sheriff also remembered our own inquiry about Arthur Lamm’s whereabouts, so he called me. I’ve filled him in with some particulars, but I’ve left my concerns about you vague. For the time being, he’s agreed to let me be your only law enforcement contact.’
‘Feds trump locals,’ I offered.
‘Every time.’
Leo got up from his chair and came to stand by the bed.
Krantz made a show of looking closely at Leo’s clothes. Leo was wearing an outrageous medley, a shirt of pink parrots and lavender orchids on a yellow and black background, lime green trousers, and brown-and-white wingtip shoes with orange soles. ‘You are?’
‘Mr Elstrom’s advisor,’ Leo said.
‘Advisor for what?’
‘Haberdashery.’ He fingered the hem of his shirt, having noticed Krantz’s scrutiny of his duds, and then said, ‘Along with everything else.’
‘Does this seem eerily familiar?’ I asked Leo.
Leo smiled, whitening the entire room with teeth. He, too, was remembering Sweetie Rose. ‘Same state, different cop.’ He turned to Krantz. ‘We’ve done this before,’ he said, signaling we had previous practice and were real sharpies at admitting nothing to law enforcement officers.
Krantz frowned and turned to me. ‘He’s quite odd,’ he said as Leo went back to sit in the corner.
I shrugged as best I could using only my right arm, the left having been shot. ‘I need him to speak for me because I’ve been sedated and can’t be responsible for anything I say.’
‘You’re worried about vehicular manslaughter?’
‘Nah.’
Krantz sat down in the chair Amanda had vacated. ‘We have no body.’
I started to sit up, but the torn ligaments in my legs, and my shot left arm, tugged me back like I was on a leash. ‘What the hell, Krantz?’
‘We found a handgun and an aluminum case full of money, but no sign of Canty.’
‘He was stuck half out of the driver’s window when the car went over.’
‘We don’t yet know if it was Canty, Lamm or Phelps who was driving that Buick.’
‘Why would I lie?’
‘To protect Phelps.’
‘Let’s not talk until you find Canty’s body.’
‘Relax,’ he said. ‘I believe you. That river is running fast from the storm, and it might take a while to find him downriver, or in one of the lakes that feeds off it. But when they do, they’ll compare his fingerprints to those on the gun they recovered. The bullet they took out of your arm also looks to match one found in a dead young man in Arthur Lamm’s cabin, and together they will tie to the gun. You’re in the clear, Elstrom, so tell me everything.’
‘I went to Lamm’s camp, looking for Wendell, and got clubbed going in the door,’ I said. ‘I woke up to hear someone firing a shot, but I was trussed and covered by a blanket. I couldn’t see anything.’
‘Why were you left alive, Elstrom? Why didn’t Canty shoot you, too?’
I’d expected he’d ask that one. I couldn’t admit it was because Canty needed to be certain I’d brought up the Carson cash, so I said, ‘Charm,’ because it was all I could think to say.
Only Leo laughed, from the corner.
Krantz pulled out his smart phone, selected a picture. ‘This is the young man we found in Lamm’s cabin.’
It looked like an Illinois driver’s license photo. ‘Delray Delmar,’ I said.
‘Richie Bales,’ Krantz said. ‘A small-time repo man out of Chicago Heights. He did collections and auto repossessions. Ring any other bells?’
It rang a big bell. ‘He must have been the “R.B.” on the calendar I gave you.’
‘Phelps hired Small, and Small hired Bales,’ he said. ‘For what?’
‘As I’ve told you, Wendell never told me who he hired, but I do believe it was for surveillance. Wendell’s friends were dying. His goals were noble; he wanted to stop it.’
‘Wendell Phelps killed Small, for what he found out.’
‘There you go again, fencing with me about Wendell. Someone else killed Small, for what he found out.’
‘Who?’
‘Either Arthur Lamm, because Small discovered his scheme, or Canty, on Lamm’s orders, or Richie Bales, to get Small out of the way so he could extort big money out of Lamm.’
Krantz reached for the little bronze-colored Thermos on my bed tray and poured coffee into the matching bronze cup.
‘No coffee, thanks,’ I said.
Krantz smirked and took a sip. ‘Arthur Lamm’s brokerage wrote insurance policies on the lives of Benno Barberi, Jim Whitman and Grant Carson, each in the amount of two million dollars. Remember who owns half of Lamm Enterprises?’
‘You told me in Amanda Phelps’s kitchen.’
‘Your father-in-law, Wendell Phelps,’ he said anyway.
‘Ex-father-in-law,’ I corrected anyway, adding, ‘Wendell’s the good guy in this, Krantz. I think he bought half of Lamm’s brokerage to help out an old friend who had problems.’
‘Money problems?’
‘IRS problems.’
Undeterred, Krantz went on ‘Each of those life insurance policies was from a different company, but they all named something called Second Securities as beneficiary. It’s not listed as a business anywhere, but I’m thinking you’ve heard of it.’
Once Krantz got a whiff inside Second Securities, he’d open up the small Ford, see he had another murder on his hands, and come at me like a locomotive if he suspected I’d been there and hadn’t admitted it. And come at Wendell, because of his half-share in Lamm’s insurance agency, if Wendell was still alive. I needed to talk to Leo.