The Bohemian had put asterisks next to the names of Barberi, Carson and Whitman. In the middle of the page, next to the name of the missing Arthur Lamm, he’d first drawn a question mark, then added an asterisk.
Asterisk meant death. It was those four asterisks, those four names out of sixteen, which had kept the Bohemian up in the night.
It was the fifth person on the list, four lines below Arthur Lamm’s, who had put me in a trick bag: Wendell Phelps. For that, I now hated the son of a bitch even more than before.
My history with the man was limited. I’d called Wendell’s office right after Amanda and I married, thinking it reasonable to introduce myself as the man who’d wed the daughter he hadn’t seen in years – and maybe become a hero to my new wife, by effecting a reconciliation between the two.
I never got past the secretary to his secretary. No matter, I thought; there would be time to try again later.
There wasn’t. I was soon implicated in a fake evidence scheme, having erroneously authenticated cleverly doctored checks in a high-profile insurance fraud trial. My name flashed dark across the front pages of Chicago’s newspapers, there not for the notoriety of the trial, or my sloppiness, but because I was Wendell Phelps’s son-in-law. I was soon found to be innocent, but I was guilty of being stupid – and of being Wendell’s son-in-law. The publicity vaporized my credibility and killed my records research business. Unmoored, I poured alcohol on my self-pity. I blamed Wendell for my notoriety and found that so satisfying that, with the logic of someone totally lost to alcohol, I spread that blame to Amanda for being my link to him. No matter that she’d been estranged from her father for years. In my twisted, liquored logic, she was a most convenient target, and that was enough for me.
It was too much for Amanda. She filed for divorce and I got flushed out of her gated community – appropriately enough, on Halloween – unmasked as a fool.
I crawled back to Rivertown, the town I thought I’d escaped years before, and into the rat-infested turret I’d inherited from another failed man, my grandfather. Amanda fled to Europe, because she had no good place to go either. As I sobered up, I blamed Wendell Phelps for that, too. No matter that I’d trashed his daughter’s life; he could have descended from his executive suite to help undo the damage I’d done.
Amanda and Wendell later reconciled, so much so that he enticed Amanda to quit her jobs writing art books and teaching at the Art Institute to join his utilities conglomerate.
He and I had never had need for reconciling anything. We were done, and that was fine for us both.
Except now he was bringing new breath to old furies. If I misplayed his case, investigated what were delusions too seriously, the press might get wind of it and trigger his public humiliation. Worse, if the Bohemian’s fears of percentages were accurate and there really was a murderer out there, targeting Wendell and his ilk, my misplaying the case could get people killed.
Damn the man, Wendell Phelps.
By now, the glow of sunrise had risen above the massive dark shapes of Chicago to touch the top of the turret. Mine is the tallest building in Rivertown, a modest attainment in a town of abandoned factories, huddled bungalows and deserted storefronts. The only grand building in town, a city hall of long terraces, expansive private offices and tiny public rooms, was still in the darkness behind me. It, too, had been built of my grandfather’s limestone, but later, by corrupt city managers who saw no shame in seizing most of his widow’s land and all of its great pile of unused stone blocks. But those lizards couldn’t take the sun, nor change the fact that it always lit the turret first every day. I took satisfaction in that.
I crossed the roof to look down at the river. The sunrise would soon light the butchered, two-limbed ash, causing it to cast a dark, jagged ‘V’ west along the river path. The shadow would look like a giant, crooked-fingered hex, a Greek moutza of contempt, thrust directly at Rivertown’s corrupt city hall. I took satisfaction in that, too.
Likely enough, there would be no satisfaction in the direction I was now heading.
Damn the man, Wendell Phelps.
SEVEN
News of Arthur Lamm’s disappearance had not yet hit the Internet, so I searched for more information on Grant Carson’s hit-and-run, the most recent of the deaths in the heavy cream. There was plenty of speculation over the impact his passing would have on his international conglomerate, but there were very few facts surrounding the hit-and-run, and no suspicion that his death had been premeditated murder.
On a day in early February, just after midnight, Grant Carson had pulled his Lincoln Town Car sharply to a curb, got out and was struck by a passing car. He was thrown twenty feet and died instantly. The police noted that by all appearances it had been an accident: Carson had stepped out of his car without checking for oncoming traffic; a car had struck him. Panicked, the driver sped away. The police were seeking anyone who might have witnessed the accident.
I phoned a dozen of my insurance company contacts to learn who’d carried policies on Carson’s life. I wasn’t interested in beneficiary information; I was hoping an insurance company’s private investigation had yielded more than the few facts the cops had released. It was the kind of work I used to do often, before I got tangled up in scandal. I struck gold nowhere, but got promises that others would ask around.
By now it was eight o’clock in the morning in California. I called Jenny. ‘I’ve got a job,’ I said.
‘A trip-canceling job?’
‘More like a trip-rescheduling job.’
‘It’s life or death, this case?’
‘I’m fearing that.’
‘What aren’t you telling me?’ Her newswoman’s antennae had picked up words I’d not used.
‘Amanda’s father is the client.’
‘And Amanda – she’s involved, too?’
‘Only to have steered me to her father. I’m working for him.’
‘We were going to have such an amazing four days,’ she said, dropping her voice.
‘I know.’
‘An amazingly lustful four days,’ she said, whispering now.
‘Oh, how I’d hoped…’ I said.
‘Oh, how I hope you’d hoped,’ she whispered one last time, and hung up.
Mercifully, in the next instant I got a call to change the direction of my thwarted naughty thoughts. It was from Gaylord Rikk. He worked for one of Carson’s insurers.
‘What’s your interest?’ he asked.
‘One of Carson’s rich friends asked me to follow up to see if anything new has been uncovered,’ I said, trying for casual.
‘Ask the cops.’
‘I will. What’s the status of your investigation?’
‘There is none. We’ve closed our file.’
‘So soon?’
‘It’s been over a month. The police have no leads.’
‘The area where Carson got hit is upscale, full of nightlife. It was only midnight. Surely someone saw something.’
‘Only midnight,’ Rikk agreed, ‘in a late-night district that’s full of Starbucks, young bucks and sweet girls.’
‘Nobody was headed home after a late last purple cocktail or out walking a designer dog?’
He gave me the sort of long sigh one gives an idiot. ‘Remember a few years ago, some young woman hit a homeless guy with her car, knocked him up over her hood and half through the windshield?’
‘Everyone remembers that.’
‘She drove all the way home with the guy stuck, head first, through her windshield. That was at midnight, too, when there were other cars on the road and people out walking. She pulled into her garage with the poor bastard still alive, his head and upper body leaking fluids into her car. He pleaded with her to get him help. Nope. She left him as he was and went into the house – though at the trial she assured the judge she did come out several times to apologize profusely to the guy for ruining his day, or whatever.’