Indemnity Only

9

Filing a Claim

When I got to Lotty’s it was afternoon. I had stopped on the way to call my answering service-a Mr. McGraw and a Mr. Devereux had both phoned, and left numbers. I copied them into my pocket phone book but decided not to call until I got to Lotty’s. She greeted me with a worried head shake. “Not content with beating you, they beat your apartment. You run with a wild crowd, Vic.” But no censure, no horror-one of the things I liked in Lotty.

She examined my face and my eye with her ophthalmoscope. “Coming along nicely. Much less swelling already. Headache? A bit? To be expected. Have you eaten? An empty stomach makes it worse. Come, a little boiled chicken-nice Eastern European Sunday dinner.” She had eaten, but drank coffee while I finished the chicken. I was surprised at how hungry I was.

“How long can I stay?” I asked. “I’m expecting no one this month. As long as you like until August tenth.”

“I shouldn’t be more than a week-probably less. But I’d like to ask the answering service to switch my home calls here.”

Lotty shrugged. “In that case, I won’t switch off the phone by the guest bed-mine rings at all hours-women having babies, boys being shot-they don’t keep nine-to-five schedules. So you run the risk of answering my calls and if any come for you, I’ll let you know.” She got up. “Now I must leave you. My medical advice is for you to stay in, have a drink, relax-you’re not in good shape and you’ve had a bad shock. But if you choose to disregard my professional advice, well, I’m not liable in a malpractice suit”-she chuckled slightly-”and keys are in the basket by the sink. I have an answering machine by my bedroom phone-turn it on if you decide to go out.” She kissed the air near my face and left.

I wandered restlessly around the apartment for a few minutes. I knew I should go down to my office and assess the damage. I should call a guy I knew who ran a cleaning service to come and restore my apartment. I should call my answering service and get my calls transferred to Lotty’s. And I needed to get back to Peter Thayer’s apartment to see if there was something there that my apartment smashers believed I had.

Lotty was right: I was not in prime condition. The destruction of my apartment had been shocking. I was consumed with anger, the anger one has when victimized and unable to fight back. I opened my suitcase and got out the box with the gun in it. I unwrapped it and pulled out the Smith & Wesson. While I loaded it, I had a fantasy of planting some kind of hint that would draw Smeissen-or whomever-back to my apartment while I stood in the hallway and pumped them full of bullets. The fantasy was very vivid and I played it through several times. The effect was cathartic-a lot of my anger drained away and I felt able to call my answering service. They took Lotty’s number and agreed to transfer my calls.

Finally I sat down and called McGraw. “Good afternoon, Mr. McGraw,” I said when he answered. “I hear you’ve been trying to get in touch with me.”

“Yes, about my daughter.” He sounded a little ill-at-ease.

“I haven’t forgotten her, Mr. McGraw. In fact, I have a lead-not on her directly, but on some people who may know where she’s gone.”

“How far have you gone with them-these people?” he demanded sharply.

“As far as I could in the time I had. I don’t drag cases on just to keep my expense bill mounting.”

“Yeah, no one’s accusing you of that. I just don’t want you to go any further.”

“What?” I said incredulously. “You started this whole chain of events and now you don’t want me to find Anita? Or did she turn up?”

“No, she hasn’t turned up. But I think I flew off the handle a bit when she left her apartment. I thought she might be wrapped up in young Thayer’s murder somehow. Now the police have arrested this drug addict, I see the two weren’t connected.”

Some of my anger returned. “You do? By divine inspiration, maybe? There were no signs of robbery in that apartment, and no sign that Mackenzie had been there. I don’t believe he did it.”

“Look here, Warshawski, who are you to go around questioning the police? The goddamn punk has been held for two days now. If he hadn’t done it, he’d have been let go by now. Now where the hell do you get off saying ‘I don’t believe it’?” he mimicked me savagely.

“Since you and I last talked, McGraw, I have been beaten and my apartment and office decimated by Earl Smeissen in an effort to get me off the case. If Mackenzie is the murderer, why does Smeissen care so much?”

“What Earl does has no bearing on anything I do,” McGraw answered. “I’m telling you to stop looking for my daughter. I hired you and I can fire you. Send me a bill for your expenses-throw in your apartment if you want to. But quit.”

“This is quite a change. You were worried sick about your daughter on Friday. What’s happened since then?”

“Just get off the case, Warshawski,” McGraw bellowed. “I’ve said I’ll pay you-now stop fighting over it.”

“Very well,” I said in cold anger. “I’m off the payroll. I’ll send you a bill. But you’re wrong about one thing, McGraw-and you can tell Earl from me-you can fire me, but you can’t get rid of me.”

I hung up. Beautiful, Vic: beautiful rhetoric. It had just been possible that Smeissen believed he’d cowed me into quitting. So why be so full of femalechismo and yell challenges into the phone? I ought to write, “Think before acting” a hundred times on the blackboard.

At least McGraw had agreed to knowing Earl, or at least to knowing who he was. That had been a shot-not totally in the dark, however, since the Knifegrinders knew most of the hoods in Chicago. The fact that he knew Earl didn’t mean he’d sikked him onto my apartment-or onto killing Peter Thayer-but it was sure a better connection than anything else I had.

I dialed Ralph’s number. He wasn’t home. I paced some more, but decided the time for action had arrived. I wasn’t going to get any further thinking about the case, or worrying about intercepting a bullet from Tony’s gun. I changed out of the green slacks into jeans and running shoes. I got out my collection of skeleton keys and put them in one pocket, car keys, driver’s license, private investigator license, and fifty dollars in the other. I fastened the shoulder holster over a loose, man-tailored shirt and practiced drawing the gun until it came out quickly and naturally.

Before leaving Lotty’s, I examined my face in the bathroom mirror. She was right-I did look better. The left side was still discolored-in fact it was showing some more yellow and green-but the swelling had gone down considerably. My left eye was completely open and not inflamed, even though the purple had spread farther. It cheered me up a bit; I switched on Lotty’s telephone answering machine, slipped on a jean jacket and left, carefully locking the doors behind me.

The Cubs were playing a doubleheader with St. Louis, and Addison was filled with people leaving the first game and those arriving for the second. I turned on WGN radio just in time to hear Dejesus lead off the bottom of the first inning with a hard drive to the shortstop. He was cut down easily at first, but at least he hadn’t hit into a double play.

Once clear of Wrigley Field traffic, it was a quick twenty-minute drive downtown. It being Sunday, I was able to park on the street outside my office. The police had left the area, but a patrolman came over as I entered the building.

“What’s your business here, miss?” he asked sharply but not unpleasantly.

“I’m V. I. Warshawski,” I told him. “I have an office here which was broken into earlier today and I’ve come to inspect the damage.”

“I’d like to see some identification, please.”

I pulled out my driver’s license and my private investigator photo-ID. He examined them, nodded, and gave them back to me. “Okay, you can go on up. Lieutenant Mallory told me to keep an eye out and not let anyone but tenants into the building. He told me you’d probably stop by.”

I thanked him and went inside. For once the elevator was working and I took it rather than the stairs-I could keep fit someday when I wasn’t feeling quite so terrible. The office door was closed, but its upper glass half had been shattered. When I went inside, though, the damage wasn’t as severe as to my apartment. True, all my files had been dumped onto the floor, but the furniture had been left intact. No safe is totally entry-proof: someone had been into the little one in back of the big one. But it must have taken five hours at least. No wonder they’d been so angry by the time they got to my apartment-all that effort for nothing. Fortunately I hadn’t had any money or sensitive papers in the place at the time.

I decided to leave the papers where they were: Tomorrow I’d get a Kelly Girl to come in and file them all for me again. But I’d better call a boarding service for the door, or the place would be ransacked by thieves. I’d lost one of Gabriella’s glasses; I didn’t want the Olivetti to go as well. I got a twenty-four-hour place to agree to send someone over, and went downstairs. The patrolman wasn’t too happy when I explained what I’d done, but he finally agreed to check it with the lieutenant. I left him at the phone and continued on my way to the South Side.

The bright, cool weather was continuing, and I had a pleasant drive south. The lake was dotted with sailboats along the horizon. Nearer the shore were a few swimmers. The game was in the bottom of the third, and Kingman struck out. 2-0, St. Louis. The Cubs had bad days, too-in fact, more than I did, probably.

I parked in the shopping center lot behind the Thayer apartment and reentered the building. The chicken bones had disappeared, but the smell of urine remained. No one came out to question my right to be in the building, and I had no trouble finding a key to open the third-floor apartment.

I should have been prepared for the shambles, but it took me by surprise. When I’d been here before, there had just been the typical disorder of a student apartment. Now, the same hand or hands that had been to my place had done a similar job here. I shook my head to clear it. Of course. They were missing something, and they had been here first. It was only after they hadn’t found it that they had come to me. I whistled a bit between my teeth-the opening bars to the third act of Simon Boccanegra-and tried to decide what to do. I wondered what was missing and thought it most likely to be a piece of paper of some kind. It might be evidence of fraud or a picture, but I didn’t think it would be an actual object.

It didn’t seem too likely that it was still in the apartment. Young Thayer might have given it to Anita. If she had it, she was in worse danger than she seemed to be already. I scratched my head. It looked as though Smeissen’s boys had covered all the possibilities-sofa cushions ripped, papers and books dumped on the floor. I decided to believe that they had gone through everything page by page-only if my search didn’t turn up anything would I take that job on. In a student apartment with several hundred books it would take a sizable chunk of time to examine each one in detail. The only things that were still intact were appliances and floors. I made a methodical search of all the rooms for loose boards or tiles. I found a few and pried them up, using a hammer I found under the kitchen sink, but didn’t turn up anything more interesting than some old termite damage. Then I went through the bathroom fixture by fixture, taking down the shower rod and looking into it, and the toilet and sink pipes. That was quite a job; I had to go to my car for tools and break into the basement to turn off the water. It took me more than an hour to get the rusted fittings loose enough to open them. I wasn’t surprised to find nothing but water in them-if anyone had been into them, they would have opened more easily.

It was 6:30 and the sun was going down when I returned to the kitchen. The chair where Peter Thayer had been sitting had had its back to the stove. It was possible, of course, that the missing thing had not been hidden deliberately, but had dropped. A piece of paper might float unnoticed under the stove. I lay on my stomach and shone a flashlight under it. I couldn’t see anything, and the opening was pretty small. How thorough did I want to be? My muscles were aching and I had left my phenylbutazone at Lotty’s. But I went to the living room and got some bricks from a brick-and-board bookcase. Using the jack from my trunk as a lever and the bricks as a wedge, I slowly pried the stove off the floor. It was an impossible task; the jack would catch and raise the thing, and just as I was kicking a brick under the side, down it would slip again. Finally, by dint of pulling the table over and wedging the jack underneath it, I was able to get one brick under the right side. After that the left came up more easily. I checked the gas line to make sure it wasn’t straining, and carefully raised the stove by another brick. I then got down on my stomach again and looked underneath. There it was, a piece of paper stuck by grease to the bottom of the stove. I peeled it slowly off in order not to tear it, and took it over to the window to examine.

It was a carbon copy about eight inches square. The top left corner had the Ajax logo on it. In the center it read, “Draft only: not negotiable,” and it was made out to Joseph Gielczowski, of 13227 South Ingleside in Matteson, Illinois. He could take this to a bank and have it certified, at which point Ajax would pay the sum of $250 to the bank as a Workers Compensation indemnity payment. The name meant nothing to me and the transaction sounded perfectly straightforward. What was so important about it? Ralph would know, but I didn’t want to call him from here-better get the stove down and leave while the leaving was good.

I levered up the stove, using the table again as a wedge, and pulled the bricks out. The stove made a dull thud as it dropped-I hoped the downstairs neighbors weren’t home or were too self-engrossed to call the police. I gathered up my tools, folded the claim draft and put it in my shirt pocket, and left. A second-floor apartment door opened a crack as I went by. “Plumber,” I called. “There won’t be any water on the third floor tonight.” The door closed again and I left the building quickly.

When I got back to my car, the game was long over and I had to wait for the eight o’clock news to come on to get the score. The Cubs had pulled it out in the eighth inning. Good old Jerry Martin had hit a double; Ontiveros had singled, and wonderful Dave Kingman had gotten all three of them home with his thirty-second homer of the season. And all this with two out. I knew how the Cubs were feeling tonight, and sang a little Figaro on the way home to show it.