Mallory looked around in disgust. “You know, if Tony had turned you over his knee more often instead of spoiling you rotten, you’d be a happy housewife now, instead of playing at detective and making it harder for us to get our job done.”
“But I’m a happy detective, Bobby, and I made a lousy housewife.” That was true. My brief foray into marriage eight years ago had ended in an acrimonious divorce after fourteen months: some men can only admire independent women at a distance.
“Being a detective is not a job for a girl like you, Vicki-it’s not fun and games. I’ve told you this a million times. Now you’ve got yourself messed up in a murder. They were going to send Althans out to talk to you, but I pulled my rank to get the assignment. That still means you’ve got to talk. I want to know what you were doing messing around with the Thayer boy.”
“Thayer boy?” I echoed.
“Grow up, Vicki,” Mallory advised. “We got a pretty good description of you from that doped-out specimen on the second floor you talked to on your way into the building. Drucker, who took the squeal, thought it might be your voice when he heard the description… And you left your thumbprint on the kitchen table.”
“I always said crime didn’t pay, Bobby. You guys want some coffee or eggs or anything?”
“We already ate, clown. Working people can’t stay in bed like sleeping beauty.”
It was only 8:10, I noticed, looking at the wooden clock next to the back door. No wonder my head felt so woolly. I methodically sliced cheese, green peppers, and onions, put them on the pumpernickel, and put the open-faced sandwich under the broiler. I kept my back to Bobby and the sergeant while I waited for the cheese to melt, then transferred the whole thing to a plate and poured myself a cup of coffee. From his breathing I could tell Bobby’s temper was mounting. His face was red by the time I put my food on the table and straddled a chair opposite him.
“I know very little about the Thayer boy, Bobby,” I apologized. “I know he used to be a student at the University of Chicago, and that he’s dead now. And I knew he’s dead because I read it in the Sun-Times.”
“Don’t be cute with me, Vicki; you know he’s dead because you found the body.”
I swallowed a mouthful of toasted cheese and green pepper. “Well, I assumed after reading the Sun-Times story that the boy was Thayer, but I certainly didn’t know that when I saw the body. To me, he seemed to be just another corpse. Snuffed out in the springtime of life,” I added piously.
“Spare me his funeral oration and tell me what brought you down there,” Mallory demanded.
“You know me, Bobby-I have an instinct for crime. Where evil flourishes, there I will be, on my self-appointed mission to stamp it out.”
Mallory turned redder. McGonnigal coughed diffidently and changed the subject before his boss hemorrhaged. “Do you have a client of some kind, Miss Warshawski?” he asked.
Of course I’d seen this one coming, but I still wasn’t sure what I wanted to do. However, she who hesitates is lost in the detective biz, so I opted for partial disclosure.
“I was hired to get Peter Thayer to agree to go to business school.” Mallory choked. “I’m not lying, Bobby,” I said earnestly “I went down there to meet the kid. And the door to his apartment was open, so I-”
“When you got there or after you’d picked the lock?” Mallory interrupted.
“So I went in,” I continued. “Anyway, I guess I failed in my assignment, since I don’t think Peter Thayer will ever go to business school. I’m not sure I still have a client.”
“Who hired you, Vicki?” Mallory was talking more quietly now. “John Thayer?”
“Now why would John Thayer want to hire me, Bobby?”
“You tell me that, Vicki. Maybe he wanted some dirt to use as a lever to pry the kid off those potheads down there.”
I swallowed the rest of my coffee and looked at Mallory squarely. “A guy came to me night before last and told me he was John Thayer. He wanted me to find his son’s girl friend, Anita. Anita Hill.”
“There’s no Anita Hill in that setup,” McGonnigal volunteered. “There’s an Anita McGraw. It looks like he was sharing a room with a girl, but the whole setup is so unisex you can’t tell who was with who.”
“Whom,” I said absently. McGonnigal looked blank. “You can’t tell who was with whom, Sergeant,” I explained. Mallory made explosive noises. “Anyway,” I added hastily, “I was beginning to suspect that the guy had sent me on a wild-goose chase when I found there was no Anita Hill at the university. Later I was sure of it.”
“Why?” Mallory demanded.
“I got a copy of Thayer’s picture from the Fort Dearborn Bank and Trust. He wasn’t my client.”
“Vicki,” Mallory said, “I think you’re a pain in the butt. I think Tony would turn in his grave if he knew what you were doing. But you’re not a fool. Don’t tell me you didn’t ask for any identification.”
“He gave me his card and his home phone and a retainer. I figured I could get back to him.”
“Let me see the card,” Mallory demanded. Suspicious bastard.
“It’s his card,” I said.
“Could I please see it anyway.” Tone of father barely restraining himself with recalcitrant child.
“It won’t tell you anything it didn’t tell me, Bobby.”
“I don’t believe he gave you a card,” Mallory said. “You knew the guy and you’re covering for him.
I shrugged and went to the bedroom and got the card out of my top drawer. I wiped it clean of prints with a scarf and brought it back to Mallory. The Fort Dearborn logo was in the lower left-hand corner. “John L. Thayer, Executive Vice-President, Trust” was in the middle, with his phone number. On the bottom I had scribbled the alleged home number.
Mallory grunted with satisfaction and put it in a plastic bag. I didn’t tell him the only prints on it at this point were mine. Why spoil one of his few pleasures?
Mallory leaned forward. “What are you going to do next?”
“Well, I don’t know. I got paid some money to find a girl and I feel like I ought to find her.”
“You going to ask for a revelation, Vicki?” Mallory said with heavy humor. “Or do you have something to go on?”
“I might talk to some people.”
“Vicki, if you know anything that you’re not telling me in connection with this murder-”
“You’ll be the first to know, Bobby,” I promised. That wasn’t exactly a lie, because I didn’t know for sure that Ajax was involved in the murder-but we all have our own ideas on what’s connected to what.
“Vicki, we’re on the case. You don’t have to prove anything to me about how cute or clever you are. But do me a favor-do a favor for Tony-let Sergeant McGormigal and me find the murderer.”
I stared limpidly at Bobby. He leaned forward earnestly. “Vicki, what did you notice about the body?”
“He’d been shot, Bobby. I didn’t do a postmortem. ”
“Vicki, for two cents I’d kick you in your cute little behind. You’ve made a career out of something which no nice girl would touch, but you’re no dummy. I know when you-got yourself into that apartment-and we’ll overlook just how you got in there right now-you didn’t scream or throw up, the way any decent girl would. You looked the place over. And if something didn’t strike you straight off about that corpus, you deserve to go out and get your head blown off.”
I sighed and slouched back in the chair. “Okay, Bobby: the kid was set up. No dope-crazed radical fired that shot. Someone he knew, whom he would invite to sit down for a cup of coffee, had to be there. To my mind, a pro fired the shot, because it was perfectly done-just one bullet and right on the target-but someone he knew had to be along. Or it could have been an acquaintance who’s a heck of a marksman… You looking into his family?”
Mallory ignored my question. “I figured you’d work that out. It’s because you’re smart enough to see how dangerous this thing could be that I’m asking
you to leave it alone.” I yawned. Mallory was determined not to lose his temper. “Look, Vicki, stay out of that mess. I can smell organized crime, organized labor, a whole lot of organizations that you shouldn’t mess with.”
“You figure because the boy’s got radical friends and waves some posters he’s glued into organized labor? Come on, Bobby!”
Mallory’s struggle between the desire to get me out of the Thayer case and the need to keep police secrets to himself showed on his face. Finally he said, “We have evidence that the kids were getting some of their posters from a firm which does most of the printing for the Knifegrinders.”
I shook my head sorrowfully. “Terrible.” The International Brotherhood of Knifegrinders was notorious for their underworld connections. They’d hired muscle in the rough-and-tumble days of the thirties and had never been able to get rid of them since. As a result most of their elections and a lot of their finances were corrupt and-and suddenly it dawned on me who my elusive client was, why Anita McGraw’s name sounded familiar, and why the guy had picked me out of the Yellow Pages. I leaned farther back in my chair but said nothing.
Mallory’s face turned red. “Vicki, if I find you crossing my path on this case, I’m going to turn you in for your own good!” He stood so violently that his chair turned over. He motioned to Sergeant McGonnigal and the two slammed the door behind them.
I poured myself another cup of coffee and took it into the bathroom with me where I dumped a generous dollop of Azuree mineral salts into the tub and ran myself a hot bath. As I sank into it, the aftereffects of my late-night drinking seeping out of my bones, I recalled a night more than twenty years ago. My mother was putting me to bed when the doorbell rang and the man who lived in the apartment below us staggered in. A burly man my dad’s age, maybe younger-all big men seem old to little girls. I’d peeped around the door because everyone was making such a commotion and seen him covered with blood before my mother rounded on me and hustled me into the bedroom. She stayed there with me and together we heard snatches of conversation: The man had been shot, possibly by management-hired thugs, but he was afraid to go to the police officially because he’d hired thugs himself, and would my dad help him.
Tony did, fixing up the wound. But he ordered him-unusual in a man usually so gentle-to leave the neighborhood and never come around to us again. The man was Andrew McGraw.
I’d never seen him again, never even connected him with the McGraw who was now president of Local 108 and hence, in effect, of the whole union. But he’d obviously remembered my dad. I guessed he’d tried to reach Tony at the police and, when he’d learned my dad was dead, had pulled me out of the Yellow Pages, assuming I would be Tony’s son. Well, I wasn’t: I was his daughter, and not the easygoing type my dad had been. I had my Italian mother’s drive, and I try to emulate her insistence on fighting battles to the finish. But regardless of what kind of person I was, McGraw might be finding himself now in trouble of the kind that not even easygoing Tony would have helped him out of.
I drank some more coffee and flexed my toes in the water. The bath shimmered turquoise, but clear. I peered through it at my feet, trying to figure out what I knew. McGraw had a daughter. She probably loved him, since she seemed dedicated to the labor movement. Children usually do not espouse causes or careers of parents they hate. Had she disappeared, or was he hiding her? Did he know who had killed young Peter and had she run away because of this? Or did he think she’d killed the boy? Most murders, I reminded myself, were committed between loved ones, which made her statistically the odds-on favorite. What were McGraw’s connections with the hired muscle with whom the International Brotherhood lived so cozily? How easily could he have hired someone to fire that shot? He was someone the boy would let in and talk to, no matter what their feelings for each other were, because McGraw was his girl friend’s father.
The bathwater was warm, but I shivered as I finished my coffee.
4
You Can’t Scare Me
(I’m Sticking to the Union)
The headquarters of the International Brotherhood of Knifegrinders, Shear Edgers, and Blade Sharpeners is located on Sheridan Road just south of Evanston. The ten-story building was put up about five years ago, and is sided with white Italian marble. The only other building in Chicago built with such opulence is the headquarters for Standard of Indiana; I figured that put the brotherhood’s excess profits on a par with those of the oil industry.
Local 108 headquarters was on the ninth floor. I gave the floor receptionist my card. “Mr. McGraw is expecting me,” I told her. I was shunted down the north corridor. McGraw’s secretary was guarding the entrance to a lakeside office in an antechamber that would have done Louis XIV proud. I wondered how the International Brothers felt when they saw what their dues had built for them. Or maybe there were some beaten-up offices lower down for entertaining the rank-and-file.
I gave my card to the secretary, a middle-aged woman with gray sausage curls and a red-and-white dress that revealed an unlovely sag in her upper arms. I keep thinking I should lift five-pound weights to firm up my triceps. Looking at her, I wondered if I would have time to stop at Stan’s Sporting Goods on my way home to pick up some barbells.
“I have an appointment with Mr. McGraw.”
“You’re not in the book,” she said abruptly, not really looking at me. I had on my navy raw silk suit, with the blouson jacket. I looked stunning in this outfit and thought I deserved a little more attention. Must be those sagging triceps.
I smiled. “I’m sure you know as well as I do that Mr. McGraw conducts some of his business on his own. He arranged to see me privately.”
“Mr. McGraw may sometimes take up with whores,” she said, her face red, her eyes on her desktop, “but this is the first time he’s ever asked one up to his office.”
I restrained an impulse to brain her with her desk lamp. “Good-looking lady like you in his front office, he doesn’t need outside talent… Now will you please inform Mr. McGraw that I’m here?”
Her shapeless face shook under the thick pancake. “Mr. McGraw is in conference and can’t be disturbed.” Her voice trembled. I felt like a creep-I couldn’t find a girl or a murderer, but I sure knew how to rough up middle-aged secretaries.
McGraw’s office was soundproofed, but noise of the conference came into the antechamber. Quite a conference. I was about to announce my intention of sitting and waiting when one sentence rose above the din and penetrated the rosewood door.
“Goddamnit, you set my son up!”
How many people could possibly have sons who might have been set up in the last forty-eight hours and be connected with the Knifegrinders? Maybe more than one, but the odds were against it. With the sausage curls protesting loudly, I opened the door into the inner office.
Not as large as Masters’s, but by no means shabby, it overlooked Lake Michigan and a nice little private beach. At the moment it was none too peaceful. Two men had been sitting at a round table in the corner, but one was on his feet yelling to make his point. Even with his face distorted by anger I didn’t have any trouble recognizing the original of the picture in the Fort Dearborn Trust’s annual report. And rising to his feet and yelling back as I entered was surely my client. Short, squat without being fat, and wearing a shiny gray suit.
They both stopped cold as they saw me.
“What the hell are you doing in here!” my client roared. “Mildred?”
Sausage curls waddled in, her eyes gleaming. “I told her you wouldn’t want to see her, but no, she has to come barging in like she’s-”
“Mr. McGraw, I am V. I. Warshawski.” I pitched my voice to penetrate the din. “And you may not want to see me, but I look like an angel compared to a couple of homicide dicks who’re going to be after you pretty soon… Hi, Mr. Thayer,” I added, holding out a hand. “I’m sorry about your son-I’m the person who found the body.”
“It’s all right, Mildred,” McGraw said weakly. “I know this lady and I do
want to talk to her.” Mildred gave me a furious look, then turned and stalked out, shutting the door with what seemed unnecessary violence.
“Mr. Thayer, what makes you think Mr. McGraw set your son up?” I asked conversationally, seating myself in a leather armchair in a corner.
The banker had recovered himself. The anger had smoothed out of his face, leaving it dignified and blank. “McGraw’s daughter was going out with my son,” he said, smiling a little. “When I learned my boy was dead, had been shot, I just stepped in to see if McGraw knew anything about it. I don’t think he set Peter up.”
McGraw was too angry to play along with Thayer. “The hell you say,” he yelled, his husky voice rising. “Ever since Annie started hanging around with that whey-faced, North Shore pipsqueak, you’ve been coming around here, calling her names, calling me names. Now the kid is dead, you’re trying to smear her! Well, by God you won’t get away with it!”
“All right!” Thayer snapped. “If that’s the way you want to play ball, that’s how we’ll play it. Your daughter-I saw the kind of girl she was the first time I set eyes on her. Peter never had a chance-innocent young kid, high ideals, giving up everything his mother and I had planned for him for the sake of a girl who’d hop into bed with-”
“Watch what names you call my daughter,” McGraw growled.
“I practically begged McGraw here to leash his daughter,” Thayer continued. “I might as well have saved my pride. This type of person doesn’t respond to any human feeling. He and his daughter had earmarked Peter for some kind of setup because he came from a wealthy family. Then, when they couldn’t get any money out of him, they killed him.”
McGraw was turning purple. “Have you shared this theory with the police, Mr. Thayer?” I asked.
“If you have, Thayer, I’ll have your ass in court for slander,” McGraw put in.
“Don’t threaten me, McGraw,” Thayer growled. John Wayne impersonation.
“Have you shared this theory with the police, Mr. Thayer?” I repeated.
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