Sara Paretsky - Indemnity Only

“Not yet,” Murray said. “If it happens, I’ll be on the spot to interview you… What are you drinking?”

I don’t like beer that well; I ordered a white wine.

“Got your pix for you.” Murray tossed a folder over to me. “We had a lot of choice on McGraw, but only dug one up for Masters-he’s receiving some civic award out in Winnetka-they never ran the shot but it’s a pretty good three-quarter view. I got you a couple of copies.”

“Thanks,” I said, opening the folder. The one of Masters was good. He was shaking hands with the Illinois president of the Boy Scouts of America. At his right was a solemn-faced youth in uniform who apparently was his son. The picture was two years old.

Murray had brought me several of McGraw, one outside a federal courtroom where he was walking pugnaciously in front of a trio of Treasury men. Another, taken under happier circumstances, showed him at the gala celebration when he was first elected president of the Knifegrinders nine years ago. The best for my purposes, though, was a close-up, taken apparently without his knowledge. His face was relaxed, but concentrating.

I held it out toward Murray. “This is great. Where was it taken?”

Murray smiled. “Senate hearings on racketeering and the unions.”

No wonder he looked so thoughtful.

A waiter came by for our order. I asked for mostaccioli; Murray chose spaghetti with meatballs. I was going to have to start running again, sore muscles or not, with all the starch I was eating lately.

“Now, V. I. Warshawski, most beautiful detective in Chicago, what gives with these pictures,” Murray said, clasping his hands together on the table and leaning over them toward me. “I recall seeing that dead young Peter Thayer worked for Ajax, in fact for Mr. Masters, an old family friend. Also, somewhere in the thousands of lines that have been churned out since he died, I recall reading that his girl friend, the lovely and dedicated Anita McGraw, was the daughter of well-known union leader Andrew McGraw. Now you want pictures of both of them. Is it possible that you are suggesting they colluded in the death of young Thayer, and possibly his father as well?”

I looked at him seriously. “It was like this, Murray: McGraw has what amounts to a psychopathic hatred of capitalist bosses. When he realized that his pure young daughter, who had always been protected from any contact with management, was seriously considering marrying not just a boss, but the son of one of Chicago’s wealthiest businessmen, he decided the only thing to do was to have the young man put six feet underground., His psychosis is such that he decided to have John Thayer eliminated as well, just for-”

“Spare me the rest,” Murray said. “I can spell it out for myself. Is either McGraw or Masters your client?”

“You’d better be buying this lunch, Murray-it is definitely a business expense.”

The waiter brought our food, slapping it down in the hurried, careless way that is the hallmark of business restaurants at lunch. I snatched the pictures back just in time to save them from spaghetti sauce and started sprinkling cheese on my pasta: I love it really cheesy.

“Do you have a client?” he asked, spearing a meatball.

“Yes, I do.”

“But you won’t tell me who it is?” I smiled and nodded agreement.

“You buy Mackenzie as Thayer Junior’s murderer?” Murray asked.

“I haven’t talked to the man. But one does have to wonder who killed Thayer Senior if Mackenzie killed the son. I don’t like the thought of two people in the same family killed in the same week for totally unconnected reasons by unconnected people: laws of chance are against that,” I answered. “What about you?”

He gave a big Elliot Gould smile. “You know, I talked to Lieutenant Mallory after the case first broke, and he didn’t say anything about robbery, either of the boy or of the apartment. Now, you found the body, didn’t you? Well, did the apartment look ransacked?”

“I couldn’t really tell if anything had been taken-I didn’t know what was supposed to be there.”

“By the way, what took you down there in the first place?” he asked casually.

“Nostalgia, Murray-I used to go to school down there and I got an itch to see what the old place looked like.”

Murray laughed. “Okay, Vic, you win-can’t fault me for trying though, can you?”

I laughed too. I didn’t mind. I finished my pasta-no child had ever died in India because of my inhumane failure to clean my plate.

“ If I find out anything you might be interested in, I’ll let you know,” I said.

Murray asked me when I thought the Cubs would break this year. They were looking scrappy right now-two and a half games out.

“You know, Murray, I am a person with very few illusions about life. I like to have the Cubs as one of them.” I stirred my coffee. “But I’d guess the second week in August. What about you?”

“Well, this is the third week in July. I give them ten more games. Martin and Buckner can’t carry that team.”

I agreed sadly. We finished lunch on baseball and split the check when it came.

“There is one thing, Murray.”

He looked at me intently. I almost laughed, the change in his whole posture had been so complete-he really looked like a bloodhound on the trail, now.

“I have what I think is a clue. I don’t know what it means, or why it is a clue. But I’ve left a copy of it with my attorney. If I should be bumped off, or put out of action for any length of time, he has instructions to give it to you.”

“What is it?” Murray asked.

“You ought to be a detective, Murray-you ask as many questions and you’re just as hot when you’re on the trail. One thing I will say-Earl Smeissen’s hovering around this case. He gave me this beautiful black eye which you’ve been too gentlemanly to mention. It wouldn’t be totally out of the question for my body to come floating down the Chicago River-you might look out your office window every hour or so to see.”

Murray didn’t look surprised. “You already knew that?” I asked.

He grinned. “You know who arrested Donald Mackenzie?”

“Yes, Frank Carlson.”

“And whose boy is Carlson?” he asked.

“Henry Vespucci.”

“And do you know who’s been covering Vespucci’s back all these years?”

I thought about it. “Tim Sullivan?” I guessed.

“The lady wins a Kewpie doll,” Murray said. “Since you know that much, I’ll tell you who Sullivan spent Christmas in Florida with last year.

“Oh, Christ! Not Earl.”

Murray laughed. “Yes. Earl Smeissen himself. If you’re playing around with that crowd, you’d better be very, very careful.”

I got up and stuck the folder in my shoulder bag. “Thanks, Murray, you’re not the first one to tell me so. Thanks for the pictures. I’ll let you know if anything turns up.”

As I climbed over the barrier separating the restaurant from the sidewalk, I could hear Murray yelling a question behind me. He came pounding up to me just as I reached the top of the stairs leading from the river level to Michigan Avenue. “I want to know what it was you gave your lawyer,” he panted.

I grinned. “So long, Murray,” I said, and boarded a Michigan Avenue bus.

I had a plan that was really a stab in the dark more than anything else. I was assuming that McGraw and Masters worked together. And I was hoping they met at some point. They could handle everything over the phone or by mail. But McGraw might be wary of federal wiretaps and mail interception. He might prefer to do business in person. So say they met from time to time. Why not in a bar? And if in a bar, why not one near to one or the other of their offices? Of course, it was possible that they met as far from anyplace connected to either of them as they could. But my whole plan was based on a series of shots in the dark. I didn’t have the resources to comb the whole city, so I’d just have to add one more assumption to my agenda, and hope that if they met, and if they met in a bar, they did so near where they worked. My plan might not net me anything, but it was all I could think of. I was pinning more hope on what I might learn about Anita from the radical women’s group tomorrow night; in the meantime I needed to keep busy.