Indemnity Only

6

In the Cool of the Night

I’d dropped my purse by my door when Freddie and I were scuffling, and asked the cabdriver to come upstairs with me to get paid off. Living at the top of the building, I was pretty confident that my bag would still be there. It was, and my keys were still in the door.

The driver tried one last protest. “Thanks,” I said, “but I just need a hot bath and a drink and I’ll be all right.”

“Okay, lady.” He shrugged. “It’s your funeral.” He took his money, looked at me one last time, and went downstairs.

My apartment lacked the splendor of Earl’s. My little hallway had a small rug, not wall-to-wall carpeting, and an umbrella stand rather than a Louis Quinze table. But it also wasn’t filled with thugs.

I was surprised to find it was only seven. It had been only an hour and a half since I had come up the stairs the first time that evening. I felt as though I’d moved into a different time zone. I ran a bath for the second time that day and poured myself an inch of Scotch. I soaked in water as hot as I could bear it, lying in the dark with a wet towel wrapped around my head. Gradually my headache dissipated. I was very, very tired.

After thirty minutes of soaking and reheating the tub, I felt able to cope with some motion. Wrapping a large towel around me, I walked through the apartment, trying to keep my muscles from freezing on me. All I really wanted to do was sleep, but I knew if I did that now I wouldn’t be able to walk for a week. I did some exercises, gingerly, fortifying myself with Black Label. Suddenly I caught sight of a clock and remembered my date with Devereux. I was already late and wondered if he was still there.

With an effort I found the restaurant’s name in the phone book and dialed their number. The maître d’hotel was very cooperative and offered to look for Mr. Devereux in the bar. A few minutes passed, and I began to think he must have gone home when he came onto the line.

“Hello, Ralph.”

“This had better be good.”

“If I tried explaining it, it would take hours and you still wouldn’t believe me,” I answered. “Will you give me another half hour?”

He hesitated; I guessed he was looking for the pride to say no-good-looking guys aren’t used to being stood up. “Sure,” he said finally. “But if you’re not here by eight thirty, you can find your own way home.”

“Ralph,” I said, controlling my voice carefully, “this has been one absolute zero of a day. I’d like to have a pleasant evening, learn a little bit about insurance, and try to forget what’s gone before. Can we do that?”

He was embarrassed. “Sure, Vicki-I mean Vic. See you in the bar.”

We hung up and I looked through my wardrobe for something elegant enough for the Cartwheel, but loose and flowing, and found a string-colored Mexican dress that I’d forgotten about. It was two-piece, with a long full skirt and a woven, square-necked top that tied at the waist and bloused out below. The long sleeves covered my puffy arms and I didn’t have to wear pantyhose or a slip. Cork sandals completed the costume.

Surveying my face under the bathroom light made me want to reconsider going out in public, My lower lip was swollen where Earl’s pinky ring had sliced it, and a purple smudge was showing on my left jaw, extending veinous red lines like a cracked egg along my cheek to the eye.

I tried some makeup; my base wasn’t very heavy and didn’t conceal the worst of the purple but did cover the spidery red marks. Heavy shadow took the focus from an incipient black eye, and dark lipstick, applied more strongly than my usual style, made the swollen lip look pouty and sexy-or might if the lights were dim enough.

My legs were stiffening up, but my daily runs seemed to be paying off-I negotiated the stairs without more than minor tremors. A taxi was going by on Halsted; it dropped me in front of the Hanover House Hotel on Oak Street at 8:25.

This was my first visit to the Cartwheel. To me it typified the sterile place where bright, empty North Siders with more money than sense liked to eat. The bar, to the left of the entrance, was dark, with a piano amplified too loudly, playing songs that bring tears to the eyes of Yale graduates. The place was crowded, Friday night in Chicago. Ralph sat at the end of the bar with a drink. He looked up as I came in, smiled, sketched a wave, but didn’t get up. I concentrated on walking smoothly, and made it to where he sat. He looked at his watch. “You just made it.”

In more ways than one, I thought. “Oh, you’d never have left without finishing your drink.” There weren’t any empty stools. “How about proving you’re a more generous soul than I and letting me have that seat and a Scotch?”

He grinned and grabbed me, intending to pull me onto his lap. A spasm of pain shot through my ribs. “Oh, Jesus, Ralph! don’t!”

He let go of me at once, got up stiffly and quietly, and offered me the barstool. I stood, feeling awkward. I don’t like scenes, and I didn’t feel like using the energy to calm Ralph down. He’d seemed like a guy made for sunshine; maybe his divorce had made him insecure with women. I saw I’d have to tell him the truth and put up with his sympathy. And I didn’t want to reveal how badly Smeissen had shown me up that afternoon. It was no comfort that he would limp in pain for a day or two.

I dragged my attention back to Ralph. “Would you like me to take you home?” he was asking.

“Ralph, I’d like a chance to explain some things to you. I know it must look as though I don’t want to be here, showing up an hour late and all. Are you too upset for me to tell you about it?”

“Not at all,” he said politely.

“Well, could we go someplace and sit down? It’s a little confusing and hard to do standing up.”

“I’ll check on our table.” When he went off, I sank gratefully onto the barstool and ordered a Johnnie Walker Black. How many could I drink before they combined with my tired muscles and put me to sleep?

Ralph came back with the news that our table was a good ten-minute wait away. The ten stretched into twenty, while I sat with my uninjured cheek propped on my hand and he stood stiffly behind me. I sipped my Scotch. The bar was over-air-conditioned. Normally the heavy cotton of the dress would have kept me plenty warm, but now I started to shiver slightly.

“Cold?” Ralph asked.

“A little,” I admitted.

“I could put my arms around you,” he offered tentatively.

I looked up at him and smiled. “That would be very nice,” I said. “Just do it gently, please.”

He crossed his arms around my chest. I winced a little at first, but the warmth and the pressure felt good. I leaned back against him. He looked down at my face, and his eyes narrowed.

“Vic, what wrong with your face?”

I raised an eyebrow. “Nothing’s wrong.”

“No, really,” he said, bending closer, “you’ve gotten cut-and that looks like a bruise and swelling on your cheek.”

“Is it really bad?” I asked. “I thought the makeup covered it pretty well.”

“Well, they’re not going to put you on the cover of Vogue this week, but it’s not too awful. It’s just that as an old claims man I’ve seen lots of accident victims. And you look like one.”

“I feel like one too,” I agreed, “but really, this wasn’t-”

“Have you been to a doctor about this?” he interrupted.

“You sound just like the cabbie who took me home this afternoon. He wanted to rush me to Passavant-I practically expected him to come in with me and start making me chicken soup.”

“Was your car badly damaged?” he asked.

“My car is not damaged at all.” I was beginning to lose my temper-irrationally, I knew-but the probing made me feel defensive.

“Not damaged,” he echoed, “then how-”

At that moment our table was announced in the bar. I got up and went over to the headwaiter, leaving Ralph to pay for drinks. The headwaiter led me off without waiting for Ralph, who caught up with us just as I was being seated. My spurt of temper had infected him; he said, “I hate waiters who haul off ladies without waiting for their escorts.” He was just loud enough for the maitre d’ to hear. “ I’m sorry, sir-I didn’t realize you were with madame,” he said with great dignity before moving off.

“Hey, Ralph, take it easy,” I said gently. “A little too much ego-jockeying is going on-my fault as much as yours. Let’s stop and get some facts and start over again.”

A waiter materialized. “Would you care for a drink before dinner?”

Ralph looked up in irritation. “Do you know how many hours We’ve spent in the bar waiting for this table? No, we don’t want a drink-at least, I don’t.” He turned to me. “Do you?”

“No, thanks,” I agreed. “Any more and I’ll fall asleep-which will probably ruin forever any chance I have of making you believe that I’m not trying to get out of an evening with you.”

Were we ready to order? the waiter persisted. Ralph told him roundly to go away for five minutes. My last remark had started to restore his native good humor, however. “Okay, V. I. Warshawski-convince me that you really aren’t trying to make this evening so awful that I’ll never ask you out again.”

“Ralph,” I said, watching him carefully, “do you know Earl Smeissen?”

“Who?” he asked uncomprehendingly. “Is this some kind of detective guessing game?”

“Yeah, I guess so,” I answered. “Between yesterday afternoon and this afternoon I’ve talked to a whole lot of different people who either knew Peter Thayer or his girl friend-the gal who’s vanished. You and your boss, among others.

“Well, when I got home late this afternoon, two hired thugs were waiting for me. We fought. I was able to hold them off for a while, but one of them knocked me out. They took me to Earl Smeissen’s home. If you don’t know Earl, don’t try to meet him. He was just starting to muscle to the top of his racket-extortion, prostitution-when I was with the Public Defender ten years ago, and he seems to have kept right on trucking since then. He now has a stable of tough guys who all carry guns. He is not a nice person.”

I stopped to marshal my presentation. From the corner of my eye I saw the waiter shimmering up again, but Ralph waved him away. “Anyway, he ordered me off the Thayer case, and set one of his tame goons on me to back it up.” I stopped. What had happened next in Earl’s apartment was very raw in my mind. I had calculated it carefully at the time, decided that it was better to get everything over at once and convince Earl that I was scared than to sit there all evening while he took increasingly violent shots at me. Nonetheless, the thought of being so helpless, the memory of Tony beating me, like a disloyal whore or a welching loan customer-to be so vulnerable was close to unbearable. Unconsciously, my left hand had clenched, and I realized I was slicing it against the tabletop. Ralph was watching me, an uncertain look on his face. His business and suburban life hadn’t prepared him for this kind of emotion.

I shook my head and tried for a lighter touch. “Anyway, my rib cage is a little sore-which is why I winced and yelled when you grabbed hold of me in the bar. The question that’s exercising me, though, is who told Earl that I’d been around asking questions. Or more precisely, who cared so much that I’d been around that he asked-or paid-Earl to frighten me off.”

Ralph was still looking a little horrified. “Have you been to the police about this? ”

“No,” I said impatiently. “I can’t go to the police about this kind of thing. They know I’m interested in the case-they’ve asked me to get off, too, although more politely. If Bobby Mallory-the lieutenant in charge of the case-knew I’d been beaten up by Earl, Smeissen would deny the whole thing, and if I could prove it in court, he could say it was a million things other than this that made him do it. And Mallory wouldn’t give me an earful of sympathy-he wants me out of there anyway.”

“Well, don’t you think he’s right? Murder really is a police matter. And this group seems pretty wild for you to be mixed up with.”

I felt a quick surge of anger, the anger I get when I feel someone is pushing me. I smiled with an effort. “Ralph, I’m tired and I ache. I can’t try explaining to you tonight why this is my job-but please believe that it is my job and that I can’t give it to the police and run away. It’s true I don’t know specifically what’s going on here, but I do know the temperament and reactions of a guy like Smeissen. I usually only deal with white-collar criminals-but when they’re cornered, they’re not much different from an extortion artist like Smeissen.”

“I see.” Ralph paused, thinking, then his attractive grin came. “I have to admit that I don’t know much about crooks of any kind-except the occasional swindlers who try to rip off insurance companies. But we fight them in the courts, not with hand-to-hand combat. I’ll try to believe you know what you’re up to, though.”

I laughed a little embarrassedly. “Thanks. I’ll try not to act too much like Joan of Arc-getting on a horse and charging around in all directions.”

The waiter was back, looking a little intimidated. Ralph ordered baked oysters and quail, but I opted for Senegalese soup and spinach salad. I was too exhausted to want a lot of food.

We talked about indifferent things for a while. I asked Ralph if he followed the Cubs. “For my sins, I’m an ardent fan,” I explained. Ralph said he caught a game with his son every now and then. “But I don’t see how anyone can be an ardent Cub fan. They’re doing pretty well right now-cleaned out the Reds-but they’ll fade the way they always do. No, give me the Yankees.”

“Yankees!” I expostulated. “I don’t see how anyone can root for them-it’s like rooting for the Cosa Nostra. You know they’ve got the money to buy the muscle to win-but that doesn’t make you cheer them on.”

“I like to see sports played well,” Ralph insisted. “I can’t stand the clowning around that Chicago teams do. Look at the mess Veeck’s made of the White Sox this year.”

We were still arguing about it when the waiter brought the first course. The soup was excellent-light, creamy, with a hint of curry. I started feeling better and ate some bread and butter, too. When Ralph’s quail arrived, I ordered another bowl of soup and some coffee.

“Now explain to me why a union wouldn’t buy insurance from Ajax.”

“Oh, they could,” Ralph said, his mouth full. He chewed and swallowed. “But it would only be for their headquarters-maybe fire coverage on the building, Workers Compensation for the secretaries, things like that. There wouldn’t be a whole lot of people to cover. And a union like the Knifegrinders-see, they get their insurance where they work. The big thing is Workers Comp, and that’s paid for by the company, not the union.”

“That covers disability payments, doesn’t it?” I asked.

“Yes, or death if it’s job-related. Medical bills even if there isn’t lost time. I guess it’s a funny kind of setup. Your rates depend on the kind of business you conduct-a factory pays more than an office, for instance. But the insurance company can be stuck with weekly payments for years if a guy is disabled on the job. We have some cases-not many, fortunately-that go back to 1927. But see, the insured doesn’t pay more, or not that much more, if we get stuck with a whole lot of disability payments. Of course, we can cancel the insurance, but we’re still required to cover any disabled workers who are already collecting.

“Well, this is getting off the subject. The thing is, there are lots of people who go on disability who shouldn’t-it’s pretty cushy and there are plenty of corrupt doctors-but it’s hard to imagine a full-scale fraud connected with it that would do anyone else much good.” He ate some more quail. “No, your real money is in pensions, as you suggested, or maybe life insurance. But it’s easier for an insurance company to commit fraud with life insurance than for anyone else. Look at the Equity Funding case.”

“Well, could your boss be involved in something like that? Rigging phony policies with the Knifegrinders providing dummy policyholders?” I asked.

“Vic, why are you working so hard to prove that Yardley’s a crook? He’s really not a bad guy-I’ve worked for him for three years, and I’ve never had anything against him.”

I laughed at that. “It bugs me that he agreed to see me so easily. I don’t know a lot about insurance, but I’ve been around big corporations before. He’s a department head, and they’re like gynecologists-their schedules are always booked for about twice as many appointments as they can realistically handle.”

Ralph clutched his head. “You’re making me dizzy, Vic, and you’re doing it on purpose. How can a claim department head possibly be like a gynecologist!”

“Yeah, well, you get the idea. Why would he agree to see me? he’d never heard of me, he has wall-to-wall appointments-but he didn’t even take phone calls while we were talking.”

“Yes, but you knew Peter was dead, and he didn’t-so you were expecting him to behave in a certain guilty way and that’s what you saw,” Ralph objected. “He might have been worried about him, about Peter, because he’d promised Jack Thayer that he’d be responsible for the boy. I don’t really see anything so surprising in Yardley’s talking to you. If Peter had been just a stray kid, I might-but an old family friend’s son? The kid hadn’t been in for four days, he wasn’t answering the phone-Yardley felt responsible as much as annoyed.”

I stopped, considering. What Ralph said made sense. I wondered if I had gotten carried away, whether my instinctive dislike of over-hearty businessmen was making me see ghosts where there were none.

“Okay, you could be right. But why couldn’t Masters be involved in a life-insurance fiddle?”

Ralph was finishing off his quail and ordering coffee and dessert. I asked for a large dish of ice cream. “Oh, that’s the way insurance companies are set up,” he said when the waiter had disappeared again. “We’re big-third largest in total premiums written, which is about eight point four billion dollars a year. That includes all lines, and all of the thirteen companies that make up the Ajax group. For legal reasons, life insurance can’t be written by the same company that writes property and casualty. So the Ajax Assurance Company does all our life and pension products, while the Ajax Casualty and some of the smaller ones do property and casualty.”

The waiter returned with our desserts. Ralph was having some kind of gooey torte. I decided to get Kahlua for my ice cream.

“Well, with a company as big as ours,” Ralph continued, “the guys involved in casualty-that’s stuff like Workers Comp, general liability, some of the auto-anyway, guys like Yardley and me don’t know too much about the life side of the house. Sure, we know the people who run it, eat with them now and then, but they have a separate administrative structure, handle their own claims and so on. If we got close enough to the business to analyze it, let alone commit fraud with it, the political stink would be so high we’d be out on our butts within an hour. Guaranteed.”

I shook my head reluctantly and turned to my ice cream. Ajax did not sound promising, and I’d been pinning hopes to it. “By the way,” I said, “did you check on Ajax’s pension money?”

Ralph laughed. “You are persistent, Vic, I’ll grant you that. Yeah, I called a friend of mine over there. Sorry, Vic. Nothing doing. He says he’ll look into it, see whether we get any third-hand stuff laid off on us-” I looked a question. “Like the Loyal Alliance people give some money to Dreyfus to manage and Dreyfus lays some of it off on us. Basically though, this guy says Ajax won’t touch the Knifegrinders with a ten-foot pole. Which doesn’t surprise me too much.”

I sighed and finished my ice cream, feeling suddenly tired again. If things came easily in this life, we would never feel pride in our achievements. My mother used to tell me that, standing over me while I practiced the piano. She’d probably disapprove of my work, if she were alive, but she would never let me slouch at the dinner table grumbling because it wasn’t turning out right. Still, I was too tired tonight to try to grapple with the implications of everything I’d learned today.

“You look like your adventures are catching up with you,” Ralph said.

I felt a wave of fatigue sweep over me, almost carrying me off to sleep with it. “Yeah, I’m fading,” I admitted. “I think I’d better go to bed. Although in a way I hate to go to sleep, I’ll be so sore in the morning. Maybe I could wake up enough to dance. If you keep moving, it’s not so bad.”

“You look like you’d fall asleep on a disco floor right now, Vic, and I’d be arrested for beating you or something. Why does exercise help?”

“If you keep the blood circulating, it keeps the joints from stiffening so much.”

“Well, maybe we could do both-sleep and exercise, I mean.” The smile in his eyes was half embarrassed, half pleased.

I suddenly thought that after my evening with Earl and Tony, I’d like the comfort of someone in bed with me. “Sure,” I said, smiling back.

Ralph called to the waiter for the bill and paid it promptly, his hands shaking slightly. I considered fighting him for it, especially since I could claim it as a business expense, but decided I’d done enough fighting for one day.

We waited outside for the doorman to fetch the car. Ralph stood close to me, not touching me, but tense. I realized he had been planning this ending all along and hadn’t been sure he could carry it off, and I smiled a little to myself in the dark. When the car came, I sat close to him on the front seat. “I live on Halsted, just north of Belmont,” I said, and fell asleep on his shoulder.

He woke me up at the Belmont-Halsted intersection and asked for the address. My neighborhood is just north and west of a smarter part of town and there is usually good parking on the street; he found a place across from my front door.

It took a major effort to pull myself out of the car. The night air was warm and comforting and Ralph steadied me with shaking hands as we crossed the street and went into my front hallway. The three flights up looked very far away and I had a sudden mental flash of sitting on the front steps waiting for my dad to come home from work and carry me upstairs. If I asked Ralph to, he would carry me up. But it would alter the dependency balance in the relationship too much. I set my teeth and climbed the stairs. No one was lying in wait at the top.

I went into the kitchen and pulled a bottle of Martell from the liquor cupboard. I got two glasses down, two of my mother’s Venetian glasses, part of the small dowry she had brought to her marriage. They were a beautiful clear red with twisted stems. It had been a long time since I had had anyone up to my apartment, and I suddenly felt shy and vulnerable. I’d been overexposed to men today and wasn’t ready to do it again in bed.

When I brought the bottle and glasses back to the living room, Ralph was sitting on the couch, leafing through Fortune without reading it. He got up and took the glasses from me, admiring them. I explained that my mother had left Italy right before the war broke out on a large scale. Her own mother was Jewish and they wanted her out of harm’s way. The eight red glasses she wrapped carefully in her underwear to take in the one suitcase she had carried, and they had always held pride of place at any festive meal. I poured brandy.

Ralph told me that his family was Irish. “That’s why it’s ‘Devereux’ without an A-the As are French.” We sat for a while without talking, drinking our brandy. He was a bit nervous, too, and it helped me relax. Suddenly he grinned, his face lighting, and said, “When I got divorced I moved into the city because I had a theory that that’s where you meet the chicks-sorry, women. But to tell you the truth, you’re the first woman I’ve asked out in the six months I’ve been here-and you’re not like any woman I ever met before.” He flushed a little. “I just wanted you to know that I’m not hopping in and out of bed every night. But I would like to get into bed with you.”

I didn’t answer him, but stood up and took his hand. Hand-in-hand, like five-year-olds, we walked into the bedroom. Ralph carefully helped me out of my dress and gently stroked my puffy arms. I unbuttoned his shirt. He took off his clothes and we climbed into the bed. I’d been afraid that I might have to help him along; recently divorced men sometimes have problems because they feel very insecure. Fortunately he didn’t, because I was too tired to help anyone. My last memory was of his breath expelling loudly, and then I was asleep.