Indemnity Only

2

Dropping Out of School

I woke up early to a day that promised to be as hot and steamy as the one before. Four days out of seven, I try to force myself to get some kind of exercise. I’d missed the previous two days, hoping that the heat would break, but I knew I’d better get out this morning. When thirty is a fond memory, the more days that pass without exercise, the worse you feel going back to it. Then, too, I’m undisciplined in a way that makes it easier to exercise than to diet, and the running helps keep my weight down. It doesn’t mean I love it, though, especially on mornings like this.

The five hundred dollars John Thayer had given me last night cheered me up considerably, and I felt good as I put on cutoffs and a T-shirt. The money helped take my mind off the thick air when I got outside. I did five easy miles-over to the lake and around Belmont Harbor and back to my large, cheap apartment on Halsted. It was only 8:30, but I was sweating freely from running in the heat. I drank a tall glass of orange juice and made coffee before taking a shower. I left my running clothes on a chair and didn’t bother with the bed. After all, I was on a job and didn’t have time-besides, who was going to see it?

Over coffee and some smoked herring I tried to decide how to approach Peter Thayer about his missing girl friend. If his family disapproved of her, he would probably resent his father hiring a private detective to look into her disappearance. I’d have to be someone connected with the university-maybe in one of her classes wanting to borrow some notes? I looked pretty old for an undergraduate-and what if she wasn’t registered for the summer quarter? Maybe I’d be from an underground journal, wanting her to do an article on something. Something on labor unions-Thayer had said she was trying to push Peter into being a union organizer.

I stacked my dishes by the sink and eyed them thoughtfully: one more day and I’d have to wash them. I took the garbage out, though-I’m messy but not a slob. Newspapers had been piling up for some time, so I took a few minutes to carry them out next to the garbage cans. The building super’s son made extra money recycling paper.

I put on jeans and a yellow cotton top and surveyed myself in the mirror with critical approval. I look my best in the summer. I inherited my Italian mother’s olive coloring, and tan beautifully. I grinned at myself. I could hear her saying, “Yes, Vic, you are pretty-but pretty is no good. Any girl can be pretty-but to take care of yourself you must have brains. And you must have a job, a profession. You must work.” She had hoped I would be a singer and had trained me patiently; she certainly wouldn’t have liked my being a detective. Nor would my father. He’d been a policeman himself, Polish in an Irish world. He’d never made it beyond sergeant, due partly to his lack of ambition, but also, I was sure, to his ancestry. But he’d expected great things of me… My grin went a little sour in the mirror and I turned away abruptly.

Before heading to the South Side, I walked over to my bank to deposit the five hundreds. First things first. The teller took them without a blink-I couldn’t expect everyone to be as impressed with them as I was.

It was 10:30 when I eased my Chevy Monza onto the Belmont entrance to Lake Shore Drive. The sky was already bleached out, and the waves reflected back a coppery sheen. Housewives, children, and detectives were the only people out this time of day; I coasted to Hyde Park in twenty-three minutes and parked on the Midway.

I hadn’t been on campus in ten years, but the place hadn’t changed much, not as much as I had. I’d read somewhere that the dirty, poverty-stricken collegiate appearance was giving way to the clean-cut look of the fifties. That movement had definitely passed Chicago by. Young people of indeterminate sex strolled by hand-in-hand or in groups, hair sticking out, sporting tattered cutoffs and torn work shirts-probably the closest contact any of them had with work. Supposedly a fifth of the student body came from homes with an annual income of fifty thousand dollars or more, but I’d hate to use looks to decide which fifth.

I walked out of the glare into cool stone halls and stopped at a campus phone to call the registrar. “ I’m trying to locate one of your students, a Miss Anita Hill.” The voice on the other end, old and creaky, told me to wait. Papers rustled in the background. “Could you spell that name?” I obliged. More rustling. The creaky voice told me they had no student by that name. Did that mean she wasn’t registered for the summer quarter? It meant they had no student by that name. I asked for Peter Thayer and was a little surprised when she gave me the Harper address-if Anita didn’t exist, why should the boy?

“I’m sorry to be so much trouble, but I’m his aunt. Can you tell me what classes he might be in today? He’s not home and I’m only in Hyde Park for the day.” I must have sounded benevolent, for Ms. Creaky condescended to tell me that Peter was not registered this summer, but that the Political Science Department in the college might be able to help me find him. I thanked her benevolently and signed off.

I frowned at the phone and contemplated my next move. If there was no Anita Hill, how could I find her? And if there was no Anita Hill, how come someone was asking me to find her? And why had he told me the two were students at the university, when the registrar showed no record of the girl? Although maybe he was mistaken about her being at the University of Chicago-she might go to Roosevelt and live in Hyde Park. I thought I should go to the apartment and see if anyone was home.

I went back to my car. It was stifling inside and the steering wheel burned my fingers. Among the papers on the backseat was a towel I’d taken to the beach a few weeks ago. I rummaged for it and covered the steering wheel with it. It had been so long since I’d been in the neighborhood that I got confused in the one-way streets, but I eventually made it to Harper. 5462 was a three-story building that had once been yellow brick. The entryway smelled like an el station-musty, with a trace of urine in the air. A bag labeled “Harold’s Chicken Shack” had been crumpled and thrown in a corner, and a few picked bones lay near it. The inner door hung loosely in its frame. It probably hadn’t had a lock for some time. Its paint, once brown, had chipped and peeled badly. I wrinkled my nose. I couldn’t blame the Thayers too much if they didn’t like the place their son lived in.

The names on the bell panel had been hand-printed on index cards and taped to the wall. Thayer, Berne, Steiner, McGraw, and Harata occupied a third-floor apartment. That must be the disgusting commune that had angered my client. No Hill. I wondered if he’d gotten Anita’s last name wrong, or if she was using an assumed name. I rang the bell and waited. No response. I rang again. Still no answer.

It was noon now and I decided to take a break. The Wimpy’s I remembered in the nearby shopping center had been replaced by a cool, attractive, quasi-Greek restaurant. I had an excellent crabmeat salad and a glass of Chablis and walked back to the apartment. The kids probably had summer jobs and wouldn’t be home until five, but I didn’t have anything else to do that afternoon besides trying to find my welching printer.

There was still no answer, but a scruffy-looking young man came out as I was ringing. “Do you know if anyone in the Thayer-Berne apartment is home?” I asked. He looked at me in a glazed way and mumbled that he hadn’t seen any of them for several days. I pulled Anita’s picture from my pocket and told him I was trying to track down my niece. “She should be home right now, but I’m wondering if I have the right address,” I added.

He gave me a bored look. “Yeah, I think she lives here. I don’t know her name.”

“Anita,” I said, but he’d already shuffled outside. I leaned against the wall and thought for a few minutes. I could wait until tonight to see who showed up. On the other hand, if I went in now, I might find out more on my own than I could by asking questions.

I opened the inside door, whose lock I’d noticed that morning was missing, and climbed quickly to the third floor. Hammered on the Thayer-Berne apartment door. No answer. Put my ear to it and heard the faint hum of a window air conditioner. Pulled a collection of keys from my pocket and after a few false starts found one that turned the lock back.

I stepped inside and quietly shut the door. A small hallway opened directly onto a living room. It was sparsely furnished with some large denim-covered pillows on the bare floor and a stereo system. I went over and looked at it-Kenwood turntable and JBL speakers. Someone here had money. My client’s son, no doubt.

The living room led to a hallway with rooms on either side of it, boxcar style. As I moved down it, I could smell something rank, like stale garbage or a dead mouse. I poked my head into each of the rooms but didn’t see anything. The hall ended in a kitchen. The smell was strongest there, but it took me a minute to see its source. A young man slumped over the kitchen table. I walked over to him. Despite the window air conditioner his body was in the early stages of decomposition.

The smell was strong, sweet, and sickening. The crabmeat and Chablis began a protest march in my stomach, but I fought back my nausea and carefully lifted the boy’s shoulders. A small hole had been put into his forehead. A trickle of blood had come out of it and dried across his face, but his face wasn’t damaged. The back of his head was a mess.

I lowered him carefully to the table. Something, call it my woman’s intuition, told me I was looking at the remains of Peter Thayer. I knew I ought to get out of the place and call the cops, but I might never have another chance to look over the apartment. The boy had clearly been dead for some time-the police could wait another few minutes for him.

I washed my hands at the sink and went back down the hall to explore the bedrooms. I wondered just how long the body had been there and why none of the inmates had called the police. The second question was partially answered by a list taped up next to the phone giving Berne’s, Steiner’s, and Harata’s summer addresses. Two of the bedrooms containing books and papers but no clothes must belong to some combination of those three.

The third room belonged to the dead boy and a girl named Anita McGraw. Her name was scrawled in a large, flowing hand across the flyleaves of numerous books. On the dilapidated wooden desk was an un-framed photo of the dead boy and a girl out by the lake. The girl had wavy auburn hair and a vitality and intenseness that made the photo seem almost alive. It was a much better picture than the yearbook snap my client had given me last night. A boy might give up far more than business school for a girl like that. I wanted to meet Anita McGraw.

I looked through the papers, but they were impersonal-flyers urging people to boycott nonunion-made sheets, some Marxist literature, and the massive number of notebooks and term papers to be expected in a student apartment. I found a couple of recent pay stubs made out to Peter Thayer from the Ajax Insurance Company stuffed in one drawer. Clearly the boy had had a summer job. I balanced them on my hand for a minute, then pushed them into my back jeans pocket. Wedged behind them were some other papers, including a voter registration card with a Winnetka address on it. I took that, too. You never know what may come in handy. I picked up the photograph and left the apartment.

Once outside I took some gulping breaths of the ozone-laden air. I never realized it could smell so good. I walked back to the shopping center and called the twenty-first police district. My dad had been dead for ten years, but I still knew the number by heart.

“Homicide, Drucker speaking,” growled a voice.

“There’s a dead body at Fifty-four sixty-two South Harper, apartment three,” I said.

“Who are you?” he snapped.

“Fifty-four sixty-two South Harper, apartment three,” I repeated. “Got that?” I hung up.

I went back to my car and left the scene. The cops might be all over me later for leaving, but right now I needed to sort some things out. I made it home in twenty-one minutes and took a long shower, trying to wash the sight of Peter Thayer’s head from my mind. I put on white linen slacks and a black silk shirt-clean, elegant clothes to center me squarely in the world of the living. I pulled the assortment of stolen papers from my back jeans pocket and put them and the photograph into a big shoulder bag. I headed back downtown to my office, ensconced my evidence in my wall safe, then checked in with my answering service. There were no messages, so I tried the number Thayer had given me. I rang three times and a woman’s voice answered: “The number you have dialed-674-9133-is not in service at this time. Please check your number and dial again.” That monotonous voice destroyed whatever faith I still had in the identity of my last night’s visitor. I was certain he was not John Thayer. Who was he, then, and why had he wanted me to find that body? And why had he brought the girl into it, then given her a phony name?

With an unidentified client and an identified corpse, I’d been wondering what my job was supposed to be-fall girl for finding the body, no doubt. Still… Ms. McGraw had not been seen for several days. My client might just have wanted me to find the body, but I had a strong curiosity about the girl.

My job did not seem to include breaking the news of Peter’s death to his father, if his father didn’t already know. But before I completely wrote off last night’s visitor as John Thayer, I should get his picture. “Clear as you go” has ever been my motto. I pulled on my lower lip for a while in an agony of thought and finally realized where I could get a picture of the man with a minimum of fuss and bother-and with no one knowing I was getting it.

I locked the office and walked across the Loop to Monroe and La Salle. The Fort Dearborn Trust occupied four massive buildings, one on each corner of the intersection. I picked the one with gold lettering over the door, and asked the guard for the PR department.

“Thirty-second floor,” he mumbled. “You got an appointment?” I smiled seraphically and said I did and sailed up thirty-two stories while he went back to chewing his cigar butt.

PR receptionists are always trim, well-lacquered, and dressed in the extreme of fashion. This one’s form-fitting lavender jumpsuit was probably the most outlandish costume in the bank. She gave me a plastic smile and graciously tendered a copy of the most recent annual report. I stuck on my own plastic smile and went back to the elevator, nodded beneficently to the guard, and sauntered out.

My stomach still felt a little jumpy, so I took the report over to Rosie’s Deli to read over ice cream and coffee. John L. Thayer, Executive Vice-President, Trust Division, was pictured prominently on the inside cover with some other big-wigs. He was Jean, tanned, and dressed in banker’s gray, and I did not have to see him under a neon light to know that he bore no resemblance to my last night’s visitor.

I pulled some more on my lip. The police would be interviewing all the neighbors. One clue I had that they didn’t because I had taken it with me, was the boy’s pay stubs. Ajax Insurance had its national headquarters in the Loop, not far from where I was now. It was three in the afternoon, not too late for business calls.

Ajax occupied all sixty floors of a modern glass-and-steel skyscraper. I’d always considered it one of the ugliest buldings downtown from the outside. The lower lobby was drab, and nothing about the interior made me want to reverse my first impression. The guard here was more aggressive than the one at the bank, and refused to let me in without a security pass. I told him I had an appointment with Peter Thayer and asked what floor he was on.

“Not so fast, lady,” he snarled. “We call up, and if the gentleman is here, he’ll authorize you.”

“Authorize me? You mean he’ll authorize my entry. He doesn’t have any authority over my existence.”

The guard stomped over to his booth and called up. The news that Mr. Thayer wasn’t in today didn’t surprise me. I demanded to talk to someone in his office. I was tired of being feminine and conciliatory, and made myself menacing enough that I was allowed to speak to a secretary.

“This is V. I. Warshawski,” I said crisply. “Mr. Thayer is expecting me.”

The soft female voice at the other end apologized, but “Mr. Thayer hasn’t been in all week. We’ve even tried calling him at home, but no one answers.”

“Then I think I’d better talk to someone else in your office.” I kept my voice hard. She wanted to know what my business was.

“I’m a detective,” I said. “Something rotten’s going on which young Thayer wanted to talk to me about. If he’s not in, I’ll talk to someone else who knows his job.” It sounded pretty thin to me, but she put me on hold and went off to consult someone. Five minutes later, the guard still glaring at me and fingering his gun, the soft-voiced female came back on the line, rather breathless. Mr. Masters, the Claim Department vice-president, would talk to me.

The guard hated letting me go up-he even called back up to Ms. Softy, in hopes I was lying. But I finally made it to the fortieth floor. Once off the elevator, my feet sank deep into green pile. I made my way through it to a reception area at the south end of the hall. A bored receptionist left her novel and shunted me to the soft-voiced young woman, seated at a teak desk with a typewriter to one side. She in turn ushered me in to see Masters.

Masters had an office big enough for the Bears to work out in, with a magnificent view of the lake. His face had the well-filled, faintly pink look a certain type of successful businessman takes on after forty-five, and he beamed at me above a well-cut gray summer suit. “Hold my calls, Ellen,” he said to the secretary as she walked out.

I gave him my card as we exchanged firm handshakes.

“Now what was it you wanted, Miss-ah-?” He smiled patronizingly.

“Warshawski. I want to see Peter Thayer, Mr. Masters. But as he’s apparently not in and you’ve agreed to see me, I’d like to know why the boy felt he needed a private detective.”

“I really couldn’t tell you that, Miss-ah-do you mind if I call you-” He looked at the card. “What does the V stand for?”

“My first name, Mr. Masters. Maybe you can tell me what Mr. Thayer does here.”

“He’s my assistant,” Masters obliged genially. “Jack Thayer is a good friend of mine, and when his boy-who’s a student at the University of Chicago-needed summer work, I was glad to help out.” He adjusted his features to look sorrowful. “Certainly if the boy is in the kind of trouble that it takes a detective to solve, I think I should know about it.”

“What kinds of things does Mr. Thayer do as your assistant? Settle claims?”

“Oh, no,” he beamed. “That’s all done at our field locations. No, we handle the business side of the business-budgets, that kind of thing. The boy adds up figures for me. And he does good staff work-reviews reports, et cetera. He’s a good boy-I hope he’s not in trouble with those hippies he runs around with down there.” He lowered his voice. “Between you and me. Jack says they’ve given him a bad idea of the business world. The big point about this summer job was to give him a better picture of the business world from the inside.”

“And has it?” I asked.

“I’m hopeful, Miss-ah-I’m hopeful.” He rubbed his hands together. “I certainly wish I could help you… If you could give me a clue about what was bothering the boy?”

I shook my head. “He didn’t say… Just called me and asked if I could stop by this afternoon. There wouldn’t be anything going on here that he’d feel would require a detective, would there?”

“Well, a department head often doesn’t know what’s going on in his own department.” Masters frowned importantly. “You’re too remote-people don’t confide in you.” He smiled again. “But I’d be very surprised.”

“Why did you want to see me?” I asked.

“Oh, I promised Jack Thayer I’d keep an eye on his boy, you know. And when a private detective comes around, it sounds kind of serious. Still, I wouldn’t worry about it too much, Miss-ah-although maybe we could hire you to find out where Peter’s gone.” He chuckled at his joke. “He hasn’t been in all week, you know, and we can’t reach him at home. I haven’t told Jack yet-he’s disappointed enough in the boy as it is.”

He ushered me down the hall and back to the elevator. I rode down to the thirty-second floor, got off, and rode back up. I strolled back down the hall.

“I’d like to see where young Thayer sits,” I told Ellen. She looked at Masters’s door for guidance, but it was shut.

“I don’t think-”

“Probably not,” I interrupted. “But I’m going to look around his desk anyway. I can always get someone else to tell me where it is.”

She looked unhappy, but took me over to a partitioned cubicle. “You know, I’m going to be in trouble if Mr. Masters comes out and finds you here,” she said.

“I don’t see why,” I told her. “It’s not your fault. I’ll tell him you did your best to force me off the floor.”

Peter Thayer’s desk was unlocked. Ellen stood watching me for a few minutes as I pulled open the drawers and sorted through the papers. “You can search me on my way out to see if I’ve taken anything,” I told her without looking up. She sniffed, but walked back to her own desk.

These papers were as innocuous as those in the boy’s apartment. Numerous ledger sheets with various aspects of the department’s budget added up, a sheaf of computer printouts that dealt with Workers Compensation case estimates, correspondence to Ajax claim handlers-“Dear Mr. So-and-So, please verify the case estimates for the following claimants.” Nothing you’d murder a boy for.

I was scratching my head over these slim pickings, wondering what to do next, when I realized someone was watching me. I looked up. It wasn’t the secretary.

“You’re certainly a lot more decorative than young Thayer,” my observer remarked. “You taking his place?”

The speaker was in his shirt-sleeves, a man in his thirties who didn’t have to be told how good-looking he was. I appreciated his narrow waist and the way his Brooks Brothers trousers fit.

“Does anyone around here know Peter Thayer at all well?” I asked.

“Yardley’s secretary is making herself sick over him, but I don’t know whether she knows him. He moved closer. “Why the interest? Are you with the IRS? Has the kid omitted taxes on some of the vast family holdings deeded to him? Or absconded the Claim Department funds and made them over to the revolutionary committee?”

“You’re in the right occupational ball park,” I conceded, “and he has, apparently, disappeared. I’ve never talked to him,” I added carefully. “Do you know him?”

“Better than most people around here.” He grinned cheerfully and seemed likable despite his arrogance. “He supposedly did legwork for Yardley-Yardley Masters-you were just seen talking to him. I’m Yardley’s budget manager.”

“How about a drink?” I suggested.

He looked at his watch and grinned again.

“You’ve got a date, little lady.”

His name was Ralph Devereux. He was a suburbanite who had only recently moved to the city, following a divorce that left his wife in possession of their Downers Grove house, he informed me in the elevator. The only Loop bar he knew was Billy’s, where the Claim Department hung out. I suggested the Golden Glow a little farther west, to avoid the people he knew. As we walked down Adams Street, I bought a Sun-Times.

The Golden Glow is an oddity in the South Loop. A tiny saloon dating back to the last century, it still has a mahogany horseshoe-shaped bar where serious drinkers sit. Eight or nine little tables and booths are crammed in along the walls, and a couple of real Tiffany lamps, installed when the place was built, provide a homey glow. Sal, the bartender, is a magnificent black woman, close to six feet tall. I’ve watched her break up a fight with just a word and a glance-no one messes with Sal. This afternoon she wore a silver pantsuit. Stunning.

She greeted me with a nod and brought a shot of Black Label to the booth. Ralph ordered a gin-and-tonic. Four o’clock is a little early, even for the Golden Glow’s serious-drinking clientele, and the place was mostly deserted.

Devereux placed a five-dollar bill on the table for Sal. “Now tell me why a gorgeous lady like yourself is interested in a young kid like Peter Thayer.”

I gave him back his money. “Sal runs a tab for me,” I explained. I thumbed through the paper. The story hadn’t come in soon enough for the front page, but they’d given it two quarter columns on page seven. RADICAL BANKING HEIR SHOT, the headline read. Thayer’s father was briefly mentioned in the last paragraph; his four roommates and their radical activities were given the most play. The Ajax Insurance Company was not mentioned at all.

I folded the paper back and showed the column to Devereux. He glanced at it briefly, then did a double take and snatched the paper from me. I watched him read the story. It was short and he must have gone through it several times. Then he looked up at me, bewildered.

“Peter Thayer? Dead? What is this?”

“I don’t know. I’d like to find out.”

“You knew when you bought the paper?”

I nodded. He glanced back down at the story, then at me. His mobile face looked angry.

“How did you know?”

“I found the body.”

“Why the hell didn’t you tell me over at Ajax instead of putting me through this charade?” he demanded.

“Well, anyone could have killed him. You, Yardley Masters, his girl friend… I wanted to get your reaction to the news.”

“Who the hell are you?”

“My name’s V. I. Warshawski. I’m a private detective and I’m looking into Peter Thayer’s death.” I handed him a business card.

“You? You’re no more a detective than I am a ballet dancer,” he exclaimed.

“I’d like to see you in tights and a tutu,” I commented, pulling out the plastic-encased photostat of my private investigator’s license. He studied it, then shrugged without speaking. I put it back in my wallet.

“Just to clear up the point, Mr. Devereux, did you kill Peter Thayer?”

“No, I goddamn did not kill him.” His jaw worked angrily. He kept starting to talk, then stopping, unable to put his feelings into words.

I nodded at Sal and she brought us a couple more drinks. The bar was beginning to fill up with precommute drinkers. Devereux drank his second gin and relaxed somewhat. “I’d like to have seen Yardley’s face when you asked him if he killed Peter,” he commented dryly.

“I didn’t ask him. I couldn’t figure out why he wanted to talk to me, though. Was he really very protective of Thayer? That’s what he intimated.”

“No.” He considered the question. “He didn’t pay much attention to him. But there was the family connection… If Peter was in trouble, Yardley’d feel he owed it to John Thayer to look after him… Dead… he was a hell of a nice boy, his radical ideas notwithstanding. Jesus, this is going to cut up Yardley. His old man, too. Thayer didn’t like the kid living where he did-and now, shot by some junkie…”

“How do you know his father didn’t like it?”

“Oh, it wasn’t any secret. Shortly after Pete started with us, Jack Thayer came storming in showing his muscle and bellowing around like a vice-president in heat-how the kid was betraying the family with his labor-union talk, and why couldn’t he live in a decent place-I guess they’d bought a condo for him down there, if you can believe that. I must say, the boy took it very well-didn’t blow up back or anything.”

“Did he work with any-well, highly confidential-papers at Ajax?”

Devereux was surprised. “You’re not trying to link his death with Ajax, are you? I thought it was pretty clear that he was shot by one of those drug addicts who are always killing people in Hyde Park.”

“You make Hyde Park sound like the site of the Tong Wars, Mr. Devereux. Of the thirty-two murders in the twenty-first police district last year, only six were in Hyde Park-one every two months. I don’t think Peter Thayer is just the neighborhood’s July-August statistic.”

“Well, what makes you think it’s connected with Ajax, then?”

“I don’t think so. I’m just trying to eliminate possibilities… Have you ever seen a dead body-or at least a body that got that way because of a bullet?” He shook his head and moved defensively in his chair. “Well, I have. And you can often tell from the way the body lies whether the victim was trying to fight off the attacker. Well, this boy was sitting at his kitchen table in a white shirt-probably ready to come down here Monday morning-and someone put a little hole smack in the middle of his head. Now a professional might have done that, but even so, he’d have to bring along someone whom the boy knew to get his confidence. It could’ve been you, or Masters, or his father, or his girl friend… I’m just trying to find out why it couldn’t be you.”

He shook his head. “I can’t do anything to prove it. Except that I don’t know how to handle a gun-but I’m not sure I could prove that to you.”

I laughed. “You probably could… What about Masters?”

“Yardley? Come on! The guy’s one of the most respected people you could hope to find at Ajax.”

“That doesn’t preclude his being a murderer. Why don’t you let me know more about what Peter did there.”

He protested some more, but he finally agreed to tell me about his work and what Peter Thayer had done for him. It just didn’t seem to add up to murder. Masters was responsible for the financial side of the claim operation, reserving and so on, and Peter had added up numbers for him, checking office copies of issued drafts against known reserves for various claims, adding up overhead items in the field offices to see where they were going over budget, and all the dull day-to-day activities that businesses need in order to keep on going. And yet… and yet… Masters had agreed to see me, an unknown person, and a detective besides, on the spur of the moment. If he hadn’t known Peter was in trouble-or even, maybe, known he was dead-I just couldn’t believe his obligation to John Thayer would make him do that.

I contemplated Devereux. Was he just another pretty face, or did he know anything? His anger had seemed to me the result of genuine shock and bewilderment at finding out the boy was dead. But anger was a good cover for other emotions, too… For the time being I decided to classify him as an innocent bystander.

Devereux’s native Irish cockiness was starting to return-he began teasing me about my job. I felt I’d gotten all I could from him until I knew enough to ask better questions, so I let the matter drop and moved on to lighter subjects.

I signed the bar tab for Sal-she sends me a bill once a month-and went on to the Officers’ Mess with Devereux for a protracted meal. It’s Indian, and to my mind one of the most romantic restaurants in Chicago. They make a very nice Pimm’s Cup, too. Coming on top of the Scotch, it left me with a muzzy impression of dancing at a succession of North Side discos. I might have had a few more drinks. It was after one when I returned, alone, to my apartment. I was glad just to fling my clothes onto a chair and fall into bed.