Warshawski 01 - Indemnity Only (20 page)

Carol arrived as I was looking a number up in the directory. “Jill’s asleep,” I told her. “I hope she’ll sleep through the afternoon.”

“Good,” she answered. “I’ve brought all the old medical records over: we’re always too busy at
the clinic to get them updated, but this is a good opportunity.”

We chatted for a few minutes about her mother, who had emphysema, and the prospects for finding the arsonists who were plaguing the neighborhood, before I went back to the phone.

Murray Ryerson was the crime reporter for the
Herald-Star
who interviewed me after the Transicon case broke. He’d had a by-line, and a lot of his stuff was good. It was getting close to lunch, and I wasn’t sure he’d be in when I called the city desk, but my luck seemed to be turning.

“Ryerson,” he rumbled into the phone.

“This is V.I. Warshawski.”

“Oh, hi,” he said, mind turning over competently and remembering me without trouble. “Got any good stories for me today?”

“Not today. But I might have later in the week. I need some help, though. A couple of pictures.”

“Whose?”

“Look, if I tell you, will you promise not to put two and two together in the paper until I have some evidence?”

“Maybe. Depends on how close you’re coming to a story that we know is happening anyway.”

“Andrew McGraw on any of your hot lists?”

“Oh, he’s a perennial favorite but we don’t have anything breaking on him right now. Who’s the other?”

“Guy named Yardley Masters. He’s a vice-president over at Ajax, and you probably have something
in your file from Crusade of Mercy publicity or something like that.”

“You tying McGraw to Ajax?”

“Stop slobbering in the phone, Murray; Ajax doesn’t do any business with the Knifegrinders.”

“Well, are you tying McGraw to Masters?” he persisted.

“What is this, twenty questions?” I said irritably. “I need two pictures. If a story breaks, you can have it—you did all right from me on Transicon, didn’t you?”

“Tell you what—you eaten yet? Good, I’ll meet you at Fiorella’s in an hour with the pictures, if any, and try to pick your brains over a beer.”

“Great, Murray, thanks.” I hung up and looked at my watch. An hour would give me time to stop and register the Smith & Wesson. I started humming
“Ch’io mi scordi di te”
again. “Tell Lotty I’ll be back around six but I’ll be eating dinner out,” I called to Carol on my way out.

The eager bureaucrats at City Hall took longer than I expected with forms, fees, incomprehensible directions, and anger at being asked to repeat them. I was already running late, but I decided to stop at my lawyer’s office to drop off a Xerox of the claim draft I’d found in Peter Thayer’s apartment. He was a dry, imperturbable man, and accepted without a blink my instructions to give the draft to Murray Ryerson should anything happen to me in the next few days.

By the time I got to Fiorella’s, a pleasant restaurant whose outdoor tables overlooked the Chicago River, Murray was already finishing his second beer. He was a big man who looked like a red-haired Elliott Gould, and he waved a hand at me lazily when he saw me coming.

A high-masted sailboat was floating past. “You know, they’re going to raise every drawbridge along here for that one boat. Hell of a system, isn’t it,” he said as I came up.

“Oh, there’s something appealing about a little
boat being able to stop all the traffic on Michigan Avenue. Unless, of course, the bridge gets stuck up just when you need to cross the river.” This was an all-too-frequent happening: motorists had no choice but to sit and boil quietly while they waited. “Has there ever been a murder when one of these bridges is stuck—someone getting too angry and shooting the bridge tender or something?”

“Not yet,” Murray said. “If it happens, I’ll be on the spot to interview you…. What are you drinking?”

I don’t like beer that well; I ordered a white wine.

“Got your pix for you.” Murray tossed a folder over to me. “We had a lot of choice on McGraw, but only dug one up for Masters—he’s receiving some civic award out in Winnetka—they never ran the shot but it’s a pretty good three-quarter view. I got you a couple of copies.”

“Thanks,” I said, opening the folder. The one of Masters was good. He was shaking hands with the Illinois president of the Boy Scouts of America. At his right was a solemn-faced youth in uniform who apparently was his son. The picture was two years old.

Murray had brought me several of McGraw, one outside a federal courtroom where he was walking pugnaciously in front of a trio of Treasury men. Another, taken under happier circumstances, showed him at the gala celebration when he was first elected president of the Knifegrinders nine years ago. The best for my purposes, though, was a close-up, taken
apparently without his knowledge. His face was relaxed, but concentrating.

I held it out toward Murray. “This is great. Where was it taken?”

Murray smiled. “Senate hearings on racketeering and the unions.”

No wonder he looked so thoughtful.

A waiter came by for our order. I asked for mostaccioli; Murray chose spaghetti with meatballs. I was going to have to start running again, sore muscles or not, with all the starch I was eating lately.

“Now, V. I. Warshawski, most beautiful detective in Chicago, what gives with these pictures,” Murray said, clasping his hands together on the table and leaning over them toward me. “I recall seeing that dead young Peter Thayer worked for Ajax, in fact for Mr. Masters, an old family friend. Also, somewhere in the thousands of lines that have been churned out since he died, I recall reading that his girl friend, the lovely and dedicated Anita McGraw, was the daughter of well-known union leader Andrew McGraw. Now you want pictures of both of them. Is it possible that you are suggesting they colluded in the death of young Thayer, and possibly his father as well?”

I looked at him seriously. “It was like this, Murray: McGraw has what amounts to a psychopathic hatred of capitalist bosses. When he realized that his pure young daughter, who had always been protected from any contact with management, was seriously
considering marrying not just a boss, but the son of one of Chicago’s wealthiest businessmen, he decided the only thing to do was to have the young man put six feet underground., His psychosis is such that he decided to have John Thayer eliminated as well, just for—”

“Spare me the rest,” Murray said. “I can spell it out for myself. Is either McGraw or Masters your client?”

“You’d better be buying this lunch, Murray—it is definitely a business expense.”

The waiter brought our food, slapping it down in the hurried, careless way that is the hallmark of business restaurants at lunch. I snatched the pictures back just in time to save them from spaghetti sauce and started sprinkling cheese on my pasta: I love it really cheesy.

“Do you have a client?” he asked, spearing a meatball.

“Yes, I do.”

“But you won’t tell me who it is?” I smiled and nodded agreement.

“You buy Mackenzie as Thayer Junior’s murderer?” Murray asked.

“I haven’t talked to the man. But one does have to wonder who killed Thayer Senior if Mackenzie killed the son. I don’t like the thought of two people in the same family killed in the same week for totally unconnected reasons by unconnected people: laws of chance are against that,” I answered. “What about you?”

He gave a big Elliot Gould smile. “You know, I
talked to Lieutenant Mallory after the case first broke, and he didn’t say anything about robbery, either of the boy or of the apartment. Now, you found the body, didn’t you? Well, did the apartment look ransacked?”

“I couldn’t really tell if anything had been taken—I didn’t know what was supposed to be there.”

“By the way, what took you down there in the first place?” he asked casually.

“Nostalgia, Murray—I used to go to school down there and I got an itch to see what the old place looked like.”

Murray laughed. “Okay, Vic, you win—can’t fault me for trying though, can you?”

I laughed too. I didn’t mind. I finished my pasta—no child had ever died in India because of my inhumane failure to clean my plate.

“ If I find out anything you might be interested in, I’ll let you know,” I said.

Murray asked me when I thought the Cubs would break this year. They were looking scrappy right now—two and a half games out.

“You know, Murray, I am a person with very few illusions about life. I like to have the Cubs as one of them.” I stirred my coffee. “But I’d guess the second week in August. What about you?”

“Well, this is the third week in July. I give them ten more games. Martin and Buckner can’t carry that team.”

I agreed sadly. We finished lunch on baseball and split the check when it came.

“There is one thing, Murray.”

He looked at me intently. I almost laughed, the change in his whole posture had been so complete—he really looked like a bloodhound on the trail, now.

“I have what I think is a clue. I don’t know what it means, or why it is a clue. But I’ve left a copy of it with my attorney. If I should be bumped off, or put out of action for any length of time, he has instructions to give it to you.”

“What is it?” Murray asked.

“You ought to be a detective, Murray—you ask as many questions and you’re just as hot when you’re on the trail. One thing I will say—Earl Smeissen’s hovering around this case. He gave me this beautiful black eye which you’ve been too gentlemanly to mention. It wouldn’t be totally out of the question for my body to come floating down the Chicago River—you might look out your office window every hour or so to see.”

Murray didn’t look surprised. “You already knew that?” I asked.

He grinned. “You know who arrested Donald Mackenzie?”

“Yes, Frank Carlson.”

“And whose boy is Carlson?” he asked.

“Henry Vespucci.”

“And do you know who’s been covering Vespucci’s back all these years?”

I thought about it. “Tim Sullivan?” I guessed.

“The lady wins a Kewpie doll,” Murray said. “Since you know that much, I’ll tell you who Sullivan spent Christmas in Florida with last year.

“Oh, Christ! Not Earl.”

Murray laughed. “Yes. Earl Smeissen himself. If you’re playing around with that crowd, you’d better be very, very careful.”

I got up and stuck the folder in my shoulder bag. “Thanks, Murray, you’re not the first one to tell me so. Thanks for the pictures. I’ll let you know if anything turns up.”

As I climbed over the barrier separating the restaurant from the sidewalk, I could hear Murray yelling a question behind me. He came pounding up to me just as I reached the top of the stairs leading from the river level to Michigan Avenue. “I want to know what it was you gave your lawyer,” he panted.

I grinned. “So long, Murray,” I said, and boarded a Michigan Avenue bus.

I had a plan that was really a stab in the dark more than anything else. I was assuming that McGraw and Masters worked together. And I was hoping they met at some point. They could handle everything over the phone or by mail. But McGraw might be wary of federal wiretaps and mail interception. He might prefer to do business in person. So say they met from time to time. Why not in a bar? And if in a bar, why not one near to one or the other of their offices? Of course, it was possible that they met as far from anyplace connected to either of them as they could. But my whole plan was based on a series of shots in the dark. I didn’t have the resources to comb the whole city, so I’d just have to add one more assumption to my agenda, and hope that if they met, and if they met in a bar, they did
so near where they worked. My plan might not net me anything, but it was all I could think of. I was pinning more hope on what I might learn about Anita from the radical women’s group tomorrow night; in the meantime I needed to keep busy.

Ajax’s glass-and-steel high-rise was on Michigan Avenue at Adams. In the Loop, Michigan is the easternmost street. The Art Institute is across the street, and then Grant Park goes down to the lake in a series of pleasant fountains and gardens. I decided to take the Fort Dearborn Trust on La Salle Street as my western border, and to work from Van Buren, two blocks south of Ajax, up to Washington, three blocks north. A purely arbitrary decision, but the bars in that area would keep me busy for some time; I could expand it in desperation if that was necessary.

I rode my bus south past the Art Institute to Van Buren and got off. I felt very small walking between the high-rises when I thought of the vast terrritory I had to cover. I wondered how much I might have to drink to get responses from the myriad bartenders. There probably is a better way to do this, I thought, but this was the only way that occurred to me. I had to work with what I could come up with—no Peter Wimsey at home thinking of the perfect logical answer for me.

I squared my shoulders and walked half a block along Van Buren and went into the Spot, the first bar I came to. I’d debated about an elaborate cover story, and finally decided that something approximating the truth was best.

The Spot was a dark, narrow bar built like a railway caboose. Booths lined the west wall and a long bar ran the length of the east, leaving just enough room for the stout, bleached waitress who had to tend to orders in the booths.