‘What’s wrong with you?’ he asked.
‘My DNA.’
‘I’ve always worried about that, too,’ he said.
SIXTY-SEVEN
Amanda and I met for breakfast at ten the next morning. The dining room was empty except for us, a pitcher of milk, a Thermos of coffee, and several little boxes of barely sweetened, nutritious, thoroughly uninteresting cereal.
‘My room is charmingly ancient,’ I said, chattering light. ‘Real porcelain handles on the pedestal sink, cast-iron bed stand and a scratched maple dresser. Still, this place is quiet as a tomb, optimal for sleeping.’
She poured us coffee. ‘What time did you and Leo get in this morning?’
‘How did you know?’
She shrugged, trying to grin. ‘Your rusted muffler is quite distinctive. I heard it start up ten minutes after we checked in. At first I thought it might be Leo, moving it to park in back, but when I looked out, I couldn’t see it anywhere. It wasn’t hard to guess that he might have driven off, or who’d gone with him. The only question is why you didn’t take the Escalade.’
‘We were being clever, and worried you’d go out to the Cadillac for something. Seeing the Jeep gone, you’d simply assume Leo was off in search of doughnuts.’
‘Why did you go back if there was no chance for a peek in the trunk?’
‘Eliminate a link.’
She touched my wrist. She realized I’d gone to separate Wendell from Lamm, if only a little, if Wendell had even been there at all.
‘The other scenario is no better.’ I told her about the orange rowboat I’d seen, bailed out and bobbing high on the water at Lamm’s camp.
‘It’s why I’m waiting up here. I’m expecting he could be in a lake,’ she said, looking away.
Her eyes were clear; her chin was raised. In that instant, I could see the chief executive she was destined to be. ‘My father drove Jim Whitman home,’ she said.
‘I take that as proof of his innocence. Your father is not stupid. As I told you before, he wouldn’t have risked driving Whitman if he’d had any part in killing him.’
‘You’re sure?’
‘As much as I’m sure Whitman’s death shocked your father into hiring Eugene Small at the end of January.’
‘Two weeks later, Carson got killed.’
‘And Eugene Small was murdered two weeks after that. It made your father frantic.’
‘Richie Bales killed Small?’
‘I told Krantz it was either Bales, looking to get Small out of the way so he could extort money from Lamm; Lamm himself, because Small had learned too much; or Canty, on Lamm’s orders. Each had motive.’
‘Why did my father come up here?’
‘I told Krantz that either Krantz’s threat to prosecute him for Lamm’s crimes sent him into a rage, to come up and confront his false friend, or Richie Bales got to him, still posing as a cop, demanding your father come up on one pretext or another, perhaps to help Bales locate Lamm.
‘There’s no chance my father is still alive?’
The soft way she was asking sent my mind back to the small photos I’d seen in Wendell’s study, of the little girl she’d been, clutching a small cluster of blue balloons. The balloons would have soon gone away; there was never any helping that. Just like there was no way of helping her much now.
She said she was anxious to drive back to Bent Lake, to track down the sheriff. It was more likely she wanted to be alone, to prepare herself for a call from the sheriff. As I hobbled to walk her to the lobby door, we heard the resort manager yelling from a private office. ‘I don’t care where the hell he is. You tell him to get out here now with glass and new locks.’ A desk phone was then banged down in anger.
‘Tell the sheriff about that bailed-out rowboat,’ I said by the front door, ‘though he’s already searching the lakes for Canty.’
‘What’s worse, Dek? Finding my father in a car, or in a lake?’
I shook my head. There could never be an answer to that.
SIXTY-EIGHT
Leo found me at twelve-thirty in the lobby, eating unsweetened Cheerios, dry, and watching television. There had been no report of a corpse being discovered in a car in Chicago, nor on the websites I’d snagged on my cell phone. Then again, it had been that kind of neighborhood.
He curled a forefinger for me to stand up, and went to the front desk to check out. ‘Excellent beds you have here; I can’t remember the last time I slept a solid twelve hours,’ he said, as though he hadn’t just done a round trip to Chicago to partake in the felonious transport of a corpse.
‘You hear anything last night?’ the resort manager asked. It was the same question she’d asked me, after Amanda left.
‘I was out cold for twelve hours,’ he said again. ‘What happened?’
‘Damned kids, looking for booze. They broke in the kitchen door.’
‘Did they get away with much?’
She shook her head. ‘That’s just it: I can’t see where anything was taken, other than maybe a box of crackers and a jar of peanut butter. Damn, dumb bored kids, looking for a thrill.’
Outside, I said to Leo, ‘Clever, you saying that about being asleep for the whole night. Twice.’
‘Cleverness is one of my many middle names,’ he said.
‘Amanda heard us leave.’
‘Let’s hope the desk lady did not,’ he said, cleverness draining from his face. Then, ‘No news?’
‘Nothing on television or on the Internet.’
‘I checked the Internet, too, after I went out to the Escalade earlier. No word of a car being found, boosted and stripped, with a body in the trunk.’
We went outside. ‘Don’t blow a tire; you’re driving with no spare,’ I said, peering into the back as he climbed into the Jeep. He’d put the Jeep’s spare in the back, and covered it with my yellow rain poncho.
‘Caution is another of my middle names,’ he said, and took off for Chicago.
I called Jenny from the terrace.
‘Leo had implied your vocal chords were healthy enough to call before now,’ she said.
‘It’s been hectic.’
‘Yes, that story,’ she said. ‘Tell me.’
‘It’s unresolved, and potentially damaging.’
‘You’re worried about Amanda?’ she asked.
‘And her father.’
‘Where are you exactly?’
‘A ski resort in the piney woods of Wisconsin.’
‘Alone?’
‘Amanda’s here. Leo just left.’
‘I’m going to be so proud to not ask the next question.’
‘Separate rooms,’ I said.
‘This is so like high school.’
‘You rented rooms in high school?’
Jenny laughed before the newswoman, never far away, took over again. ‘Give me something for the future.’
I told her all of it.
‘The wires out of Chicago have barely scratched the surface of this,’ she said when I was done.
‘I need you to watch those wires.’
‘For a stolen car found stripped, with a body in the trunk.’
‘With luck, they’ll find it today, and then we’ll know.’
‘Are we still talking about you coming to San Francisco sometime?’
‘Seafood on the Wharf.’
‘There could be that,’ she said, hanging up and leaving me to wonder why I’d ever want to waste time going to the Wharf.
SIXTY-NINE
Amanda got back just before dark, red-eyed and hollow-cheeked. She’d been gone eight hours, but she said it seemed she’d been gone twenty. We sat at the bar in the deserted, dark lounge and had drinks – a whiskey and water for her, a med-friendly ginger ale for me – that the resort manager had come in to make for us.
Amanda had brought two bags. One was plastic, and contained a loaf of rye bread, a jar of Dijon mustard and an orange brick of Wisconsin’s official sustenance, cheddar cheese. The other bag was paper, and well worn. She’d ducked into an antique store that displayed used books in the window, and bought a collection of poems by somebody I’d never heard of, a guide to making soups, and a history of World Wars One and Two condensed into one hundred pages. She tried a big smile as she took out the last book, an old British mystery novel that she said was written when sexual activity was described with vague movements of eyebrows and fluttering hands, though she promised to take that one away if it set my own eyebrows and hands to twitching.