“Well, when I got home late this afternoon, two hired thugs were waiting for me. We fought. I was able to hold them off for a while, but one of them knocked me out. They took me to Earl Smeissen’s home. If you don’t know Earl, don’t try to meet him. He was just starting to muscle to the top of his racket-extortion, prostitution-when I was with the Public Defender ten years ago, and he seems to have kept right on trucking since then. He now has a stable of tough guys who all carry guns. He is not a nice person.”
I stopped to marshal my presentation. From the corner of my eye I saw the waiter shimmering up again, but Ralph waved him away. “Anyway, he ordered me off the Thayer case, and set one of his tame goons on me to back it up.” I stopped. What had happened next in Earl’s apartment was very raw in my mind. I had calculated it carefully at the time, decided that it was better to get everything over at once and convince Earl that I was scared than to sit there all evening while he took increasingly violent shots at me. Nonetheless, the thought of being so helpless, the memory of Tony beating me, like a disloyal whore or a welching loan customer-to be so vulnerable was close to unbearable. Unconsciously, my left hand had clenched, and I realized I was slicing it against the tabletop. Ralph was watching me, an uncertain look on his face. His business and suburban life hadn’t prepared him for this kind of emotion.
I shook my head and tried for a lighter touch. “Anyway, my rib cage is a little sore-which is why I winced and yelled when you grabbed hold of me in the bar. The question that’s exercising me, though, is who told Earl that I’d been around asking questions. Or more precisely, who cared so much that I’d been around that he asked-or paid-Earl to frighten me off.”
Ralph was still looking a little horrified. “Have you been to the police about this? ”
“No,” I said impatiently. “I can’t go to the police about this kind of thing. They know I’m interested in the case-they’ve asked me to get off, too, although more politely. If Bobby Mallory-the lieutenant in charge of the case-knew I’d been beaten up by Earl, Smeissen would deny the whole thing, and if I could prove it in court, he could say it was a million things other than this that made him do it. And Mallory wouldn’t give me an earful of sympathy-he wants me out of there anyway.”
“Well, don’t you think he’s right? Murder really is a police matter. And this group seems pretty wild for you to be mixed up with.”
I felt a quick surge of anger, the anger I get when I feel someone is pushing me. I smiled with an effort. “Ralph, I’m tired and I ache. I can’t try explaining to you tonight why this is my job-but please believe that it is my job and that I can’t give it to the police and run away. It’s true I don’t know specifically what’s going on here, but I do know the temperament and reactions of a guy like Smeissen. I usually only deal with white-collar criminals-but when they’re cornered, they’re not much different from an extortion artist like Smeissen.”
“I see.” Ralph paused, thinking, then his attractive grin came. “I have to admit that I don’t know much about crooks of any kind-except the occasional swindlers who try to rip off insurance companies. But we fight them in the courts, not with hand-to-hand combat. I’ll try to believe you know what you’re up to, though.”
I laughed a little embarrassedly. “Thanks. I’ll try not to act too much like Joan of Arc-getting on a horse and charging around in all directions.”
The waiter was back, looking a little intimidated. Ralph ordered baked oysters and quail, but I opted for Senegalese soup and spinach salad. I was too exhausted to want a lot of food.
We talked about indifferent things for a while. I asked Ralph if he followed the Cubs. “For my sins, I’m an ardent fan,” I explained. Ralph said he caught a game with his son every now and then. “But I don’t see how anyone can be an ardent Cub fan. They’re doing pretty well right now-cleaned out the Reds-but they’ll fade the way they always do. No, give me the Yankees.”
“Yankees!” I expostulated. “I don’t see how anyone can root for them-it’s like rooting for the Cosa Nostra. You know they’ve got the money to buy the muscle to win-but that doesn’t make you cheer them on.”
“I like to see sports played well,” Ralph insisted. “I can’t stand the clowning around that Chicago teams do. Look at the mess Veeck’s made of the White Sox this year.”
We were still arguing about it when the waiter brought the first course. The soup was excellent-light, creamy, with a hint of curry. I started feeling better and ate some bread and butter, too. When Ralph’s quail arrived, I ordered another bowl of soup and some coffee.
“Now explain to me why a union wouldn’t buy insurance from Ajax.”
“Oh, they could,” Ralph said, his mouth full. He chewed and swallowed. “But it would only be for their headquarters-maybe fire coverage on the building, Workers Compensation for the secretaries, things like that. There wouldn’t be a whole lot of people to cover. And a union like the Knifegrinders-see, they get their insurance where they work. The big thing is Workers Comp, and that’s paid for by the company, not the union.”
“That covers disability payments, doesn’t it?” I asked.
“Yes, or death if it’s job-related. Medical bills even if there isn’t lost time. I guess it’s a funny kind of setup. Your rates depend on the kind of business you conduct-a factory pays more than an office, for instance. But the insurance company can be stuck with weekly payments for years if a guy is disabled on the job. We have some cases-not many, fortunately-that go back to 1927. But see, the insured doesn’t pay more, or not that much more, if we get stuck with a whole lot of disability payments. Of course, we can cancel the insurance, but we’re still required to cover any disabled workers who are already collecting.
“Well, this is getting off the subject. The thing is, there are lots of people who go on disability who shouldn’t-it’s pretty cushy and there are plenty of corrupt doctors-but it’s hard to imagine a full-scale fraud connected with it that would do anyone else much good.” He ate some more quail. “No, your real money is in pensions, as you suggested, or maybe life insurance. But it’s easier for an insurance company to commit fraud with life insurance than for anyone else. Look at the Equity Funding case.”
“Well, could your boss be involved in something like that? Rigging phony policies with the Knifegrinders providing dummy policyholders?” I asked.
“Vic, why are you working so hard to prove that Yardley’s a crook? He’s really not a bad guy-I’ve worked for him for three years, and I’ve never had anything against him.”
I laughed at that. “It bugs me that he agreed to see me so easily. I don’t know a lot about insurance, but I’ve been around big corporations before. He’s a department head, and they’re like gynecologists-their schedules are always booked for about twice as many appointments as they can realistically handle.”
Ralph clutched his head. “You’re making me dizzy, Vic, and you’re doing it on purpose. How can a claim department head possibly be like a gynecologist!”
“Yeah, well, you get the idea. Why would he agree to see me? he’d never heard of me, he has wall-to-wall appointments-but he didn’t even take phone calls while we were talking.”
“Yes, but you knew Peter was dead, and he didn’t-so you were expecting him to behave in a certain guilty way and that’s what you saw,” Ralph objected. “He might have been worried about him, about Peter, because he’d promised Jack Thayer that he’d be responsible for the boy. I don’t really see anything so surprising in Yardley’s talking to you. If Peter had been just a stray kid, I might-but an old family friend’s son? The kid hadn’t been in for four days, he wasn’t answering the phone-Yardley felt responsible as much as annoyed.”
I stopped, considering. What Ralph said made sense. I wondered if I had gotten carried away, whether my instinctive dislike of over-hearty businessmen was making me see ghosts where there were none.
“Okay, you could be right. But why couldn’t Masters be involved in a life-insurance fiddle?”
The waiter returned with our desserts. Ralph was having some kind of gooey torte. I decided to get Kahlua for my ice cream.
“Well, with a company as big as ours,” Ralph continued, “the guys involved in casualty-that’s stuff like Workers Comp, general liability, some of the auto-anyway, guys like Yardley and me don’t know too much about the life side of the house. Sure, we know the people who run it, eat with them now and then, but they have a separate administrative structure, handle their own claims and so on. If we got close enough to the business to analyze it, let alone commit fraud with it, the political stink would be so high we’d be out on our butts within an hour. Guaranteed.”
I shook my head reluctantly and turned to my ice cream. Ajax did not sound promising, and I’d been pinning hopes to it. “By the way,” I said, “did you check on Ajax’s pension money?”
Ralph laughed. “You are persistent, Vic, I’ll grant you that. Yeah, I called a friend of mine over there. Sorry, Vic. Nothing doing. He says he’ll look into it, see whether we get any third-hand stuff laid off on us-” I looked a question. “Like the Loyal Alliance people give some money to Dreyfus to manage and Dreyfus lays some of it off on us. Basically though, this guy says Ajax won’t touch the Knifegrinders with a ten-foot pole. Which doesn’t surprise me too much.”
I sighed and finished my ice cream, feeling suddenly tired again. If things came easily in this life, we would never feel pride in our achievements. My mother used to tell me that, standing over me while I practiced the piano. She’d probably disapprove of my work, if she were alive, but she would never let me slouch at the dinner table grumbling because it wasn’t turning out right. Still, I was too tired tonight to try to grapple with the implications of everything I’d learned today.
“You look like your adventures are catching up with you,” Ralph said.
I felt a wave of fatigue sweep over me, almost carrying me off to sleep with it. “Yeah, I’m fading,” I admitted. “I think I’d better go to bed. Although in a way I hate to go to sleep, I’ll be so sore in the morning. Maybe I could wake up enough to dance. If you keep moving, it’s not so bad.”
“You look like you’d fall asleep on a disco floor right now, Vic, and I’d be arrested for beating you or something. Why does exercise help?”
“If you keep the blood circulating, it keeps the joints from stiffening so much.”
“Well, maybe we could do both-sleep and exercise, I mean.” The smile in his eyes was half embarrassed, half pleased.
I suddenly thought that after my evening with Earl and Tony, I’d like the comfort of someone in bed with me. “Sure,” I said, smiling back.
Ralph called to the waiter for the bill and paid it promptly, his hands shaking slightly. I considered fighting him for it, especially since I could claim it as a business expense, but decided I’d done enough fighting for one day.
We waited outside for the doorman to fetch the car. Ralph stood close to me, not touching me, but tense. I realized he had been planning this ending all along and hadn’t been sure he could carry it off, and I smiled a little to myself in the dark. When the car came, I sat close to him on the front seat. “I live on Halsted, just north of Belmont,” I said, and fell asleep on his shoulder.
He woke me up at the Belmont-Halsted intersection and asked for the address. My neighborhood is just north and west of a smarter part of town and there is usually good parking on the street; he found a place across from my front door.
It took a major effort to pull myself out of the car. The night air was warm and comforting and Ralph steadied me with shaking hands as we crossed the street and went into my front hallway. The three flights up looked very far away and I had a sudden mental flash of sitting on the front steps waiting for my dad to come home from work and carry me upstairs. If I asked Ralph to, he would carry me up. But it would alter the dependency balance in the relationship too much. I set my teeth and climbed the stairs. No one was lying in wait at the top.
I went into the kitchen and pulled a bottle of Martell from the liquor cupboard. I got two glasses down, two of my mother’s Venetian glasses, part of the small dowry she had brought to her marriage. They were a beautiful clear red with twisted stems. It had been a long time since I had had anyone up to my apartment, and I suddenly felt shy and vulnerable. I’d been overexposed to men today and wasn’t ready to do it again in bed.
When I brought the bottle and glasses back to the living room, Ralph was sitting on the couch, leafing through Fortune without reading it. He got up and took the glasses from me, admiring them. I explained that my mother had left Italy right before the war broke out on a large scale. Her own mother was Jewish and they wanted her out of harm’s way. The eight red glasses she wrapped carefully in her underwear to take in the one suitcase she had carried, and they had always held pride of place at any festive meal. I poured brandy.
Ralph told me that his family was Irish. “That’s why it’s ‘Devereux’ without an A-the As are French.” We sat for a while without talking, drinking our brandy. He was a bit nervous, too, and it helped me relax. Suddenly he grinned, his face lighting, and said, “When I got divorced I moved into the city because I had a theory that that’s where you meet the chicks-sorry, women. But to tell you the truth, you’re the first woman I’ve asked out in the six months I’ve been here-and you’re not like any woman I ever met before.” He flushed a little. “I just wanted you to know that I’m not hopping in and out of bed every night. But I would like to get into bed with you.”
I didn’t answer him, but stood up and took his hand. Hand-in-hand, like five-year-olds, we walked into the bedroom. Ralph carefully helped me out of my dress and gently stroked my puffy arms. I unbuttoned his shirt. He took off his clothes and we climbed into the bed. I’d been afraid that I might have to help him along; recently divorced men sometimes have problems because they feel very insecure. Fortunately he didn’t, because I was too tired to help anyone. My last memory was of his breath expelling loudly, and then I was asleep.
7
A Little Help from a Friend
When I woke up, the room was full of the soft light of late morning, diffused through my heavy bedroom curtains. I was alone in the bed and lay still to collect my thoughts. Gradually the memory of yesterday’s events returned, and I moved my head cautiously to look at the bedside clock. My neck was very stiff, and I had to turn my whole body to see the time-11:30. I sat up. My stomach muscles were all right, but my thighs and calves were sore, and it was painful to stand upright. I did a slow shuffle to the bathroom, the kind you do the day after you run five miles when you haven’t been out for a couple of months, and turned the hot water in the tub on full blast.
Ralph called to me from the living room. “Good morning,” I called back. “If you want to talk to me, you’ll have to come here-I’m not walking any farther.” Ralph came into the bathroom, fully dressed, and joined me while I gloomily studied my face in the mirror over the sink. My incipient black eye had turned a deep blackish-purple, streaked with yellow and green. My uninjured left eye was bloodshot. My jaw had turned gray. The whole effect was unappealing.
Ralph seemed to share my feeling. I was watching his face in the mirror; he seemed a little disgusted. My bet was that Dorothy had never come home with a black eye-suburban life is so dull.
“Do you do this kind of thing often?” Ralph asked.
“You mean scrutinize my body, or what?” I asked.
He moved his hands vaguely. “The fighting,” he said.
“Not as much as I did as a child. I grew up on the South Side. Ninetieth and Commercial, if you know the area-lots of Polish steelworkers who didn’t welcome racial and ethnic newcomers-and the feeling was mutual. The law of the jungle ruled in my high school-if you couldn’t swing a mean toe or fist, you might as well forget it.”
I turned from the mirror. Ralph was shaking his head, but he was trying to understand, trying not to back away. “It’s a different world,” he said slowly. “I grew up in Libertyville, and I don’t think I was ever in a real fight. And if my sister had come home with a black eye, my mother would have been hysterical for a month. Didn’t your folks mind?”
“Oh, my mother hated it, but she died when I was fifteen, and my dad was thankful that I could take care of myself.” That was true-Gabriella had hated violence. But she was a fighter, and I got my scrappiness from her, not from my big, even-tempered father.
“Did all the girls in your school fight?” Ralph wanted to know.
I climbed into the hot water while I considered this. “No, some of them just got scared off. And some got themselves boyfriends to protect them. The rest of us learned to protect ourselves. One girl I went to school with still loves to fight-she’s a gorgeous redhead, and she loves going to bars and punching out guys who try to pick her up. Truly amazing.”
I sank back in the water and covered my face and neck with hot wet cloths. Ralph was quiet for a minute, then said, “I’ll make some coffee if you’ll tell me the secret-I couldn’t find any. And I didn’t know whether you were saving those dishes for Christmas, so I washed them.”
I uncovered my mouth but kept the cloth over my eyes. I’d forgotten the goddamn dishes yesterday when I left the house. “Thanks.” What else could I say? “Coffee’s in the freezer-whole beans. Use a tablespoon per cup. The grinder’s by the stove-electric gadget. Filters are in the cupboard right over it, and the pot is still in the sink-unless you washed it.”
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