The clothes and shoes, of course, had not fared as well as the wristwatch. The press had gone from the trousers, and here and there tiny bits of milky flesh protruded where the wool had been abraded by the barky texture of the water reeds. The shirt was now a putrid green, mossed and dirtied by the muck at the shore. And the leather of his shoes had puckered and blistered, for even the finest of leathers, no matter how well oiled, are not meant to withstand submersion.
They turned him over. That part of his face closest to the bullet hole was gone, nibbled away in tiny bites by the sunny fish and microscopic urchins that worked the shore of the small lake.
I nodded and the paramedic covered him again.
‘They were both shot somewhere else, then dumped in this lake by someone in a boat.’ Krantz had come up to join us.
‘An orange rowboat, recently bailed out,’ I said.
The sheriff looked at me and nodded. ‘Canty, in Lamm’s boat,’ he said.
The medical examiner held out two spent bullets for the sheriff to see. ‘We’ll have them tested,’ he said, ‘but they’re the same caliber as those we found in Bales, and in…’ He gestured toward me, the meat that had also caught a bullet from Canty’s gun.
‘Canty, for sure,’ the sheriff said.
‘Can you identify time of death?’ I asked the medical examiner, to be certain.
Krantz looked sharply at me.
‘Actually, yes, for both,’ the medical examiner said.
And then I turned on my crutches, and started the slow walk back down the pressed tracks we’d just made, alone. No one had thought to offer to help me back. And that was good. I needed to understand all I’d just heard. And all I now believed.
At the car, I slid my crutches in back, and got in behind the wheel.
Amanda said nothing, the gold flecks in her eyes impossible to see behind the tears.
‘Time to go back to Chicago,’ I said.
‘Do not start the car,’ she said.
SEVENTY-THREE
‘Tell me what happened up here, all of it, right now,’ Amanda said in a surprisingly strong voice. ‘In this, his last place.’
I let my hand fall away from the ignition switch. ‘He’s dead. One bullet.’
‘Who shot him?’
‘Canty. Delray was never a killer,’ I said, sure of that and most everything else, now.
‘From the beginning at Second Securities then, as best you see it.’
‘Canty must have driven Lamm down to Chicago to convert the Carson check to cash, and probably to help Lamm leave the country from there. Except Canty saw an opportunity to change his own life instead. He killed Lamm, stuffed him in the trunk of the Carson kill car along with the cash, and came back up here to erase the only other person who knew what he’d been up to.’
‘Wanda.’
‘Unfortunately for Canty, Richie Bales was up here by then, looking for Lamm. He surprised Canty, maybe as Canty was bailing the boat to take Wanda on her last ride, or maybe when Canty got back to the dock after disposing of her. Canty must have breathed a huge sigh of relief when Richie told him he wanted half the payout. Don’t forget, Canty still thought Richie was a cop, and saw him as one who could be bought off.’
‘So they drove down to Second Securities to split the money?’
‘Where, surprise, surprise, Canty saw the splintered door and the trashed car and thought the money had gone forever, and with it his hopes for getting out of the country a rich man. Richie, though, took a broader view.’
‘Meaning he saw how you could have learned through your insurance contracts that Second Securities was the Carson beneficiary, and gotten to the money ahead of them.’
‘And he saw how he could use your father to get that money back.’
‘All he had to do was lure my father up here to hold as hostage,’ she said.
‘I’ll bet checking your father’s phone records will show your father received a call from a burner phone just a few minutes before he left Lake Forest for work that Thursday morning. That would have been Richie, who your father still believed was a cop named Delray Delmar, telling him some of his and Arthur’s legal problems might go away if he’d come up to Bent Lake to talk to him and Arthur.’
‘Krantz had already frightened my father when he’d called for an appointment, threatening to prosecute him for Arthur’s crimes because my father owned half of Lamm’s agency.’
‘Between Krantz and Richie, it was enough to induce sudden panic in your father. He shot up to Bent Lake with no hesitation.’
‘When was my father killed?’
‘As soon as he arrived up here, according to the medical examiner’s timeline. They didn’t need to keep your father alive to lure me up here with the money.’
She looked out the window. ‘What could anyone have done?’ she asked.
It was the question I knew she would ask, and the one I most feared. I took a breath. ‘I wish I’d moved slower.’
She turned to look at me. ‘That Tuesday, Confessors’ Club day?’
‘No. The day before, Monday, when I’d been in such a rush to call Keller.’
‘You were in a panic; worried that Lamm would kill again the next night.’
‘I didn’t know Lamm was already dead, so I called Keller on Monday. On Tuesday morning, early, your father called me, furious. I got furious right back at him, saying he’d kept what he knew to himself for too long. He hung up on me before I could tell him that Delray Delmar was a fraud.’
‘Because if he’d known Richie was no cop, he never would have come up here?’
‘Yes.’
I waited for a moment and then for another, but there was nothing more to say. And so I started the engine and swung around to head back to Chicago.
Neither of us spoke the whole way down.
SEVENTY-FOUR
Debbie Goring came by a week after I’d gotten back from Wisconsin. It was eleven in the morning and I was on the bench by the river, watching Leo up in the purple ash. He was sawing off one of its main limbs. I’d come back from up north to find seven more leaves curled on the ground, but I fought the idea of cutting down the tree. There’d been too much death that spring.
She tossed a thick, letter-sized white envelope on the bench next to me and sat down. ‘I was expecting to hear from you,’ she rasped.
‘I was vacationing, up in Wisconsin.’
‘So I read in the newspapers. You got shot, pushed a killer off a bridge with your car and then snapped his neck and broke his back a few days later.’
‘The vacation brochures are right: there’s always plenty to do in Wisconsin.’
Debbie looked up at the ash. Leo, wearing an orange Sesame Street T-shirt, had begun hamming it up like a monkey, waving his bow saw at the front of the turret. Someone else had arrived.
‘What’s wrong with him?’ she asked.
‘His clothes, mostly.’
She turned back to me. ‘Even though I received that anonymous cashier’s check for a hundred grand-’
‘Wendell Phelps sent you that check, though it need never be proved,’ I interrupted.
‘Then it’s a shame, his death,’ she said. ‘Anyway, that check was a damned fine thing to receive, don’t get me wrong, but I was still bummed thinking no one would ever be prosecuted for killing my father,’ she said. ‘Then I heard about your little foray into the woods. Now, at least, it might become obvious that my father was murdered.’
‘It will never go to trial without Lamm. And Small and Richie Bales are dead.’
‘Arthur Lamm has escaped, scot-free?’
‘That’s what everyone is saying.’ Only Leo, Amanda and I knew that Arthur Lamm had escaped nothing. The Carson kill car had never been recovered, and by now I was daring to believe that it had been compressed to a small steel cube in a scrap yard friendly to car thieves, and that Lamm was on his way to becoming a doorknob spindle or perhaps part of a toaster.