Sara Paretsky - Indemnity Only

“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.

Pub Crawl

The eager bureaucrats at City Hall took longer than I expected with forms, fees, incomprehensible directions, and anger at being asked to repeat them. I was already running late, but I decided to stop at my lawyer’s office to drop off a Xerox of the claim draft I’d found in Peter Thayer’s apartment. He was a dry, imperturbable man, and accepted without a blink my instructions to give the draft to Murray Ryerson should anything happen to me in the next few days.

By the time I got to Fiorella’s, a pleasant restaurant whose outdoor tables overlooked the Chicago River, Murray was already finishing his second beer. He was a big man who looked like a red-haired Elliott Gould, and he waved a hand at me lazily when he saw me coming.

A high-masted sailboat was floating past. “You know, they’re going to raise every drawbridge along here for that one boat. Hell of a system, isn’t it,” he said as I came up.

“Oh, there’s something appealing about a little boat being able to stop all the traffic on Michigan Avenue. Unless, of course, the bridge gets stuck up just when you need to cross the river.” This was an all-too-frequent happening: motorists had no choice but to sit and boil quietly while they waited. “Has there ever been a murder when one of these bridges is stuck-someone getting too angry and shooting the bridge tender or something?”