Indemnity Only

11

Friendly Persuasion

I stopped at the clinic before going to the apartment to let Lotty know I’d made free with her hospitality and to see if she thought Jill needed anything for shock. A small group of women, most of them with younger children, were waiting in the little anteroom. Jill looked around her curiously. I poked my head into the inner door, where Lotty’s nurse, a young Puerto Rican woman, saw me. “Hello, Vic,” she said. “Lotty’s with a patient. Do you need something?”

“Hi, Carol. Tell her that I’d like to bring my young friend back to her apartment-the one I went out this morning to see. She’ll know whom you mean. And ask her if she can take a quick look at her-healthy kid, but she’s had a lot of stress lately.”

Carol went into the tiny examining room where she spoke for a few minutes. “Bring her into the office. Lotty will take a quick look at her after Mrs. Segi has left. And of course, take her to the apartment.”

I took Jill into Lotty’s office, among disapproving frowns from those who had been waiting longer. While we waited, I told her a little bit about Lotty, Austrian war refugee, brilliant London University medical student, maverick doctor, warm friend. Lotty herself came bustling in.

“So, this is Miss Thayer,” she said briskly. “Vic has brought you down for a little rest? That’s good.” She lifted Jill’s chin with her hand, looked at her pupils, made her do some simple tests, talking all the while.

“What was the trouble?” she asked.

“Her father was shot,” I explained.

Lotty clicked her tongue and shook her head, then turned to Jill. “Now, open your mouth. No, I know you haven’t got a sore throat, but it’s free, I’m a doctor, and I have to look. Good. Nothing wrong with you, but you need some rest and something to eat. Vic, when you get her home, a little brandy. Don’t talk too much, let her get some rest. Are you going out? ”

“Yes, I’ve got a lot to do.”

She pursed her lips and thought a minute. “I’ll send Carol over in about an hour. She can stay with Jill until one of us gets home.”

At that moment I realized how much I liked Lotty. I’d been a little uneasy about leaving Jill alone, in case Earl was close on my trail. Whether Lotty knew that, or simply felt a scared young girl should not be left alone, it was a worry I now did not have to speak aloud.

“Great. I’ll wait until she gets there.”

We left the clinic among more baleful stares while Carol summoned the next patient. “She’s nice, isn’t she? ” Jill said as we got into the car. “Lotty or Carol?”

“Both, but Lotty, I meant. She really doesn’t mind me showing up like this, does she?”

“No,” I agreed. “All of Lotty’s instincts are directed at helping people. She’s just not sentimental about it.”

When we got back to the apartment, I made Jill stay in the car while I checked the street and the entranceway. I didn’t want to add to her fears, but I didn’t want anyone getting a shot at her, either. The coast was still clear. Maybe Earl really did believe he’d scared me off. Or maybe with the police arresting poor Donald Mackenzie, he was resting easy.

When we got inside, I told Jill to take a hot bath. I was going to prepare some breakfast, and I would have to ask her a few questions, but then she was to sleep. “I can tell by your eyes that you haven’t been doing that for a while,” I said.

Jill agreed shyly. I helped her unpack her small suitcase in the room I’d been sleeping in; I could sleep on the daybed in the living room. I got out one of Lotty’s enormous white bath sheets and showed her the bathroom.

I realized that I was quite hungry; it was ten and I hadn’t eaten the toast Lotty had thrust at me. I foraged in the refrigerator: no juice-Lotty never drank anything out of cans. I found a drawer full of oranges and squeezed a small pitcher of juice, and then took some of Lotty’s thick light Viennese bread and turned it into French toast, whistling under my breath. I realized I felt good, despite Thayer’s death and all the unexplained dangling pieces to the case. Some instinct told me that things were finally starting to happen.

When Jill emerged pink and sleepy from the bath, I set her to eating, holding my questions and telling her a little bit about myself in answer to her inquiries. She wanted to know if I always caught the killer.

“This is the first time I’ve ever really dealt directly with a killer,” I answered. “But generally, yes, I do get to the root of the problems I’m asked to look into.”

“Are you scared?” Jill asked. “I mean, you’ve been beaten up and your apartment got torn up, and they-they shot Daddy and Pete.”

“Yes, of course I’m scared,” I said calmly. “Only a fool would look at a mess like this and not be. It’s just that it doesn’t panic me-it makes me careful, being scared does, but it doesn’t override my judgment.

“Now, I want you to tell me everything you can remember about whom your father talked to in the last few days, and what they said. We’ll go sit on the bed, and you’ll drink some hot milk with brandy as Lotty ordered, so that when I’m done you’ll go to sleep.”

She followed me into the bedroom and got into bed, obediently sipping at the milk. I had put in brown sugar and nutmeg and laced it heavily. She made a face but continued sipping it while we talked.

“When I came out on Saturday, you said your father at first didn’t believe this Mackenzie they’ve arrested killed your brother, but the neighbors talked him out of it. What neighbors?”

“Well, a lot of people came by, and they all more or less said the same thing. Do you want all their names?”

“If you can remember them and remember what they said.”

We went through a list of about a dozen people, which included Yardley Masters and his wife, the only name I recognized. I got some long histories of relations among the families, and Jill contorted her face in the effort of trying to remember exactly what they’d all said.

“You said they ‘all more or less said the same thing,’ “ I repeated after a while. “Was anyone more emphatic about it than the others?”

She nodded at that. “Mr. Masters. Daddy kept raving that he was sure that Anita’s father had done it, and Mr. Masters said something like, ‘Look, John, you don’t want to keep going around saying things like that. A lot of things could come out that you don’t want to hear.’ Then Daddy got mad and started yelling, ‘What do you mean? Are you threatening me?’ And Mr. Masters said, ‘No, of course not, John. We’re friends. Just giving you some advise,’ or something like that.”

“I see,” I said. Very illuminating. “Was that all?”

“Yes, but it was after Mr. and Mrs. Masters left that Daddy said he guessed he was wrong, which made me glad at the time, because of course Anita wouldn’t try to kill Peter. But then he started saying terrible things about Peter.”

“Yeah, let’s not talk about that now. I want you to calm down so you can sleep. Did anything happen yesterday?”

“Well, he got into a fight with someone on the phone, but I don’t know who, or what it was about. I think it was some deal going on at the bank, because he said, ‘I won’t be a party to it’-that’s all I heard. He’d been so-strange.” She gulped and swallowed some more milk. “At the funeral, you know, I sort of was staying out of his way. And when I heard him start yelling on the phone, I just went outside. Susan was after me anyway to put on a dress and sit in the living room entertaining all these gruesome people who came over after the funeral, so I just sort of left and went down to the beach.”

I laughed a little. “Good for you. This fight on the telephone-did your father get a call or make a call?”

“I’m pretty sure he made it. At least, I don’t remember hearing the phone ring.”

“Okay, all that’s a help. Now try to put it out of your mind. You finish your milk while I brush your hair, and then you sleep.”

She was really very tired; between the hairbrushing and the brandy she relaxed and lay down. “Stay with me,” she asked drowsily. I pulled the shades behind the burlap curtains and sat down beside Jill, holding her hand. Something about her pierced my heart, made me long for the child I’d never had, and I watched her carefully until she was in a deep sleep.

While I waited for Carol, I made some phone calls, first to Ralph. I had to wait a few minutes while a secretary hunted him down on the floor, but he was as cheerful as ever when he came on the line. “How’s it going, Sherlock?” he asked breezily.

“Pretty well,” I answered.

“You’re not calling me to cancel dinner tonight, are you?”

“No, no,” I assured him. “I’d just like you to do something that you can find out more easily than I can.”

“What’s that?”

“Just find out if your boss has had any calls from a guy named Andrew McGraw. And do it without letting him know you’re asking.”

“Are you still flogging that dead horse?” he asked, a little exasperated.

“I haven’t written anyone off, Ralph, not even you.”

“But the police made an arrest.”

“Well, in that case, your boss is innocent. Just look on it as a favor to a lady who’s had a rough week.”

“All right,” he agreed, not too happily. “But I wish you could believe the police know as much about catching murderers as you do.”

I laughed. “You’re not the only one By the way, did you know young Peter’s father was killed this morning?”

“What!” he exclaimed. “How did that happen?”

“Well, he was shot. Too bad Donald Mackenzie is already in jail, but there must be some dope dealers on the North Shore to take the blame for this one.”

“You think Peter’s death is connected to this?”

“Well, it staggers the imagination if two members of the same family are killed within a week of each other and those events are only randomly associated.”

“All right, all right,” Ralph said. “you’ve made your point-no need to be sarcastic… I’ll ask Yardley’s secretary.”

“Thanks, Ralph, see you tonight.”

The claim draft, Masters’s remarks to Thayer, which might or might not have been vague threats. It didn’t add up to much, but it was worth pursuing. The other piece to the puzzle was McGraw and the fact that McGraw knew Smeissen. Now, if I could connect McGraw and Masters, or Masters and Smeissen… I should have asked Ralph to check on Earl, too. Well, I could do that tonight. Say McGraw and Masters were doing an unspecified something together. If they were smart, they wouldn’t leave names when they called each other. Even McGraw’s enchanting secretary might give him away to the police if the evidence was hot enough. But they might get together, meet for a drink. I might make a trip to bars in the Loop and near Knifegrinder headquarters to see if the two had ever been seen together. Or Thayer with McGraw, for that matter. I needed some photographs, and I had an idea where to find them.

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.