Sara Paretsky - Indemnity Only

I was getting angry. “Are you trying to ask in a subtle way about whether I wish I had a husband and a family? I certainly do not miss Dick, nor am I sorry that I don’t have three kids getting under my feet.”

Ralph looked astonished. “Take it easy, Vic. Can’t you miss having a family without confusing that with Dick’s family? I don’t miss Dorothy-but that doesn’t mean I’m giving up on marriage. And I wouldn’t be much of a man if I didn’t miss my children.”

Tim brought our dinners. The salmon had a very good pimento sauce, but my emotions were still riding me and I couldn’t enjoy it properly. I forced a smile. “Sorry. Guess I’m overreacting to people who think a woman without a child is like Welch’s without grapes.”

“Well, please don’t take it out on me. Just because I’ve been acting like a protective man, trying to stop you from running after gangsters, doesn’t mean I think you ought to be sitting home watching soaps and doing laundry.”

I ate some salmon and thought about Dick and our short, unhappy marriage. Ralph was looking at me, and his mobile face showed concern and a little anxiety.

“The reason my first marriage fell apart was because I’m too independent. Also, I’m not into housekeeping, as you noticed the other night. But the real problem is my independence. I guess you could call it a strong sense of turf. It’s-it’s hard for me-” I smiled. “It’s hard for me to talk about it.” I swallowed and concentrated on my plate for a few minutes. I bit my lower lip and continued. “1 have some close women friends, because I don’t feel they’re trying to take over my turf. But with men, it always seems, or often seems, as though I’m having a fight to maintain who I am.”

Ralph nodded. I wasn’t sure he understood, but he seemed interested. I ate a little more fish and swallowed some wine.

“With Dick, it was worse. I’m not sure why I married him-sometimes I think it’s because he represented the white Anglo-Saxon establishment, and part of me wanted to belong to that. But Dick was a terrible husband for someone like me. He was an attorney with Crawford, Meade-they’re a very big, high-prestige corporate firm, if you don’t know them-and I was an eager young lawyer on the Public Defender’s roster. We met at a bar association meeting. Dick thought he’d fallen in love with me because I’m so independent; afterwards it seemed to me that it was because he saw my independence as a challenge, and when he couldn’t break it down, he got angry.

“Then I got disillusioned with working for the Public Defender. The setup is pretty corrupt-you’re never arguing for justice, always on points of law. I wanted to get out of it, but I still wanted to do something that would make me feel that I was working on my concept of justice, not legal point-scoring. I resigned from the Public Defender’s office, and was wondering what to do next, when a girl came to me and asked me to clear her brother of a robbery charge. He looked hopelessly guilty-it was a charge of stealing video equipment from a big corporate studio, and he had access, opportunity, and so on, but I took the case on and I discovered he was innocent by finding out who the guilty person really was.”

I drank some more wine and poked at my salmon. Ralph’s plate was clean, but he was waving off Tim-”Wait until the lady’s finished.”

“Well, all this time, Dick was waiting for me to settle down to being a housewife. He was very supportive when I was worrying through leaving the Public Defender, but it turned out that that was because he was hoping I’d quit to stay home on the sidelines applauding him while he clawed his way up the ladder in the legal world. When I took on that case-although it didn’t seem like a case at the time, just a favor to the woman who had sent the girl to me-” (That had been Lotty.) It had been awhile since I’d thought about all this and I started to laugh. Ralph looked a question. “Well, I take my obligations very seriously, and I ended up spending a night on a loading dock, which was really the turning point in the case. It was the same night that Crawford, Meade were having a big cocktail party, wives invited. I had on a cocktail dress, because I thought I’d just slip down to the dock and then go to the party, but the time slipped away, and Dick couldn’t forgive me for not showing up. So we split up. At the time it was horrible, but when I look back on it, the evening was so ludicrous it makes me laugh.”

I pushed my plate away. I’d only eaten half the fish, but I didn’t have much of an appetite. “The trouble is, I guess I’m a bit gun-shy now. There really are times when I wish I did have a couple of children and was doing the middle-class family thing. But that’s a myth, you know: very few people live like an advertisement, with golden harmony, and enough money, and so on. And I know I’m feeling a longing for a myth, not the reality. It’s just-I get scared that I’ve made the wrong choice, or-I don’t quite know how to say it. Maybe I should be home watching the soaps, maybe I’m not doing the best thing with my life. So if people try to suggest it, I bite their heads off.”

Ralph reached across the table and squeezed my hand. “I think you’re remarkable, Vic. I like your style. Dick sounds like an ass. Don’t give up on us men just because of him.”

I smiled and squeezed his hand in return. “I know. But-I’m a good detective, and I’ve got an established name now. And it’s not a job that’s easy to combine with marriage. It’s only intermittently demanding, but when I’m hot after something, I don’t want to be distracted by the thought of someone at home stewing because he doesn’t know what to do about dinner. Or fussing at me because Earl Smeissen beat me up.”

Ralph looked down at his empty plate, nodding thoughtfully. “I see.” He grinned. “Of course, you might find a guy who’d already done the children-and-suburbia number who would stand on the sidelines cheering your successes.”

Tim came back to take dessert orders. I chose Ahab’s spectacular ice-cream-and-cordial dessert. I hadn’t eaten all my fish, and I was sick of being virtuous anyway. Ralph decided to have some too.

“But I think this Earl Smeissen business would take a lot of getting used to,” he added after Tim had disappeared again.

“Aren’t there any dangers to claim handling?” I asked. “I would imagine you’d come across fraudulent claimants from time to time who aren’t too happy to have their frauds uncovered.”

“That’s true,” he agreed. “But it’s harder to prove a fraudulent claim than you might think. Especially if it’s an accident case. There are lots of corrupt doctors out there who will happily testify to nonprovable injuries-something like a strained back, which doesn’t show up on an X ray-for a cut of the award.

“I’ve never been in any danger. Usually what happens if you know it’s a blown-up claim, and they know you know, but no one can prove it either way, you give them a cash settlement considerably below what it would be if it came to court. That gets them off your back-litigation is very expensive for an insurance company, because juries almost always favor the claimant, so it’s really not as shocking as it sounds.”

“How much of there is that?” I asked.

“Well, everyone thinks the insurance company is there to give them a free ride-they don’t understand that it all comes out in higher rates in the end. But how often do we really get taken to the cleaners? I couldn’t say. When I was working in the field, my gut sense was that maybe one in every twenty or thirty cases was a phony. You handle so many, though, that it’s hard to evaluate each one of them properly-you just concentrate on the big ones.”