Sara Paretsky - Indemnity Only

“Miss Warshawski was just leaving, Jill. In fact, why don’t you show her out and I’ll go see what your mother wants.”

He got up and walked to the door, waiting until I followed him to say good-bye. I didn’t offer to shake hands. Jill led me back the way I’d come earlier; her father walked briskly in the opposite direction.

“I’m very sorry about your brother,” I said as we got to the greenish statue.

“So am I,” she said, pulling her lips together. When we got to the front of the house, she followed me outside and stood staring up in my face, frowning a little. “Did you know Peter?” she finally asked.

“No, I never met him,” I answered. “I’m a private investigator, and I’m afraid I’m the person who found him the other morning.”

“They wouldn’t let me look at him,” she said.

“His face was fine. Don’t have nightmares about him-his face wasn’t damaged.” She wanted more information. If he’d been shot in the head, how could his face look all right? I explained it to her in a toned-down, clinical way.

“Peter told me you could decide whether to trust people by their faces,” she said after a minute. “But yours is pretty banged up so I can’t tell. But you told me the truth about Peter and you’re not talking to me as if I was a baby or something.” She paused. I waited. Finally she asked, “Did Dad ask you to come out here?” When I replied, she asked, “Why was he angry?”

“Well, he thinks the police have arrested your brother’s murderer, but I think they’ve got the wrong person. And that made him angry.”

“Why?” she asked. “I mean, not why is he mad, but why do you think they got the wrong person?”

“The reasons are pretty complicated. It’s not because I know who did it, but because I saw your brother, and the apartment, and some other people who’ve been involved, and they’ve reacted to my seeing them. I’ve been in this business for a while, and I have a feel for when I’m hearing the truth. A drug addict wandering in off the streets just doesn’t fit with what I’ve seen and heard.”

She stood on one foot, and her face was screwed up as if she were afraid she might start crying. I put an arm around her and pulled her to a sitting position on the shallow porch step.

“I’m okay,” she muttered. “It’s just-everything is so weird around here. You know, it’s so terrible, Pete dying and everything. He-he-well-” She hiccuped back a sob. “Never mind. It’s Dad who’s crazy. Probably he always was but I never noticed it before. He’s been raving on and on about how Anita and her father shot Pete for his money and dumb stuff like that, and then he’ll start saying how it served Pete right, like he’s glad he’s dead or something.” She gulped and ran her hand across her nose. “Dad was always in such a stew about Peter disgracing the family name, you know, but he wouldn’t have-even if he’d become a union organizer he would have been a successful one. He liked figuring things out, he was that kind of person, figuring things out and trying to do them the best way.” She hiccuped again. “And I like Anita. Now I suppose I’ll never see her again. I wasn’t supposed to meet her, but she and Pete took me out to dinner sometimes, when Mom and Dad were out of town.”

“She’s disappeared, you know,” I told her. “You wouldn’t know where she’s gone, would you?”

She looked up at me with troubled eyes. “Do you think something’s happened to her?”

“No,” I said with a reassurance I didn’t feel. “I think she got scared and ran away.”

“Anita’s really wonderful,” she said earnestly. “But Dad and Mother just refused even to meet her. That was when Dad first started acting weird, when Pete and Anita began going together. Even today, when the police came, he wouldn’t believe they’d arrested this man. He kept saying it was Mr. McGraw. It was really awful.” She grimaced unconsciously. “Oh, it’s been just horrible here. Nobody cares about Pete. Mother just cares about the neighbors. Dad is freaked out. I’m the only one who cares he’s dead.” Tears were steaming down her face now and she stopped trying to fight them. “Sometimes I even get the crazy idea that Dad just freaked out totally, like he does, and killed Peter.”

This was the big fear. Once she’d said it, she started sobbing convulsively and shivering. I took off my jacket and wrapped it around her shoulders. I held her close for a few minutes and let her sob.

The door opened behind us. Lucy stood there, scowling. “Your father wants to know where you’ve gone to-and he doesn’t want you standing around gossiping with the detective.”

I stood up. “Why don’t you take her inside and wrap her up in a blanket and get her something hot to drink: she’s pretty upset with everything that’s going on, and she needs some attention.”

Jill was still shivering, but she’d stopped sobbing. She gave me a watery little smile and handed me my jacket. “I’m okay,” she whispered.

I dug a card out of my purse and handed it to her. “Call me if you need me, Jill,” I said. “Day or night.” Lucy hustled her inside at top speed and shut the door. I was really toning down the neighborhood-good thing they couldn’t see me through the trees.

My shoulders and legs were beginning to hurt again and I walked slowly back to my car. The Chevy had a crease in the front right fender where someone had sideswiped it in last winter’s heavy snow. The Alfa, the Fox, and the Mercedes were all in mint condition. My car and I looked alike, whereas the Thayers seemed more like the sleek, scratchless Mercedes. There was a lesson in there someplace. Maybe too much urban living was bad for cars and people. Real profound, Vic.

I wanted to get back to Chicago and call Bobby and get the lowdown on this drug addict they’d arrested, but I needed to do something else while Lotty’s painkiller was still holding me up. I drove back over to the Edens and went south to the Dempster exit. This road led through the predominantly Jewish suburb of Skokie, and I stopped at the Bagel Works delicatessen and bagel bakery there. I ordered a jumbo corned beef on rye and a Fresca, and sat in the car, eating while I tried to decide where to get a gun. I knew how to use them-my dad had seen too many shooting accidents in homes with guns. He’s decided the way to avoid one in our house was for my mother and me to learn how to use them. My mother had always refused: they gave her unhappy memories of the war and she would always say she’d use the time to pray for a world without weapons. But I used to go down to the police range with my dad on Saturday afternoons and practice target shooting. At one time I could clean and load and fire a.45 police revolver in two minutes, but since my father had died ten years ago, I hadn’t been out shooting. I’d given his gun to Bobby as a memento when he’d died, and I’d never needed one since then. I had killed a man once, but that had been an accident. Joe Correl had jumped me outside a warehouse when I was looking into some inventory losses for a company. I had broken his hold and smashed his jaw in, and when he fell, he’d hit his head on the edge of a forklift. I’d broken his jaw, but it was his skull against the forklift that killed him.

But Smeissen had a lot of hired muscle, and if he was really pissed off, he could hire some more. A gun wouldn’t completely protect me, but I thought it might narrow the odds.

The corned beef sandwich was delicious. I hadn’t had one for a long time, and decide to forget my weight-maintenance program for one afternoon and have another. There was a phone booth in the deli, and I let my fingers do the walking through the Yellow Pages. The phone book showed four columns of gun dealers. There was one not too far from where I was in the suburb of Lincolnwood. When I called and described what I wanted, they didn’t have it. After $1.20 worth of calls, I finally located a repeating, mediumweight Smith & Wesson on the far South Side of the city. My injuries were really throbbing by this time and I didn’t feel like a forty-mile drive to the other end of the city. On the other hand, those injuries were why I needed the gun. I paid for the corned beef sandwich and with my second Fresca swallowed four of the tablets Lotty had given me.