Sara Paretsky - Indemnity Only

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.”