Indemnity Only

by Sara Paretsky

  She thought about that, nodding her head. People were walking up and down the sidewalk; I felt as if we were in a fishbowl. “Is there somewhere we can go to talk-somewhere with a little more room? ”

  “There’s a park.”

  “That’d be fine.” It was back along route 60 toward Milwaukee. I parked the Datsun out of sight of the road and we walked down to sit on the bank of a little stream that ran through the park, dividing it from the back wall of the Chrysler plant on the other side. The day was hot, but here in the country the air was clear and sweet.

  “You said something about living with dignity,” she said, looking at the water, her mouth twisted in a harsh smile. “I don’t think I’ll ever do that again. I know what happened to Peter, you see. In a way, I guess you could say I killed him.”

  “Why do you say that?” I asked gently.

  “You say you found his body. Well, so did I. I came home at four and found him. I knew then what had happened. I lost my head and ran. I didn’t know where to go-I didn’t come here until the next day. I spent the night at Mary’s house, and then I came up here. I couldn’t figure out why they weren’t waiting for me, but I knew if I went back they’d get me.” She was starting to sob, great dry sobs that heaved her shoulders and chest. “Dignity!” she said in a hoarse voice. “Oh, Chirst! I’d settle for a night’s sleep.” I didn’t say anything, but sat watching her. After a few minutes she calmed down a bit. “How much do you know?” she asked.

  “I don’t know much for certain-that I can prove, I mean. But I’ve got some guesses. What I know for certain is that your father and Yardley Masters have a deal going. I don’t know what it is, but I found a claim draft from Ajax in your apartment. I presume that Peter brought it home, so one of my guesses is that the deal has to do with claim drafts. I know that your father knows Earl Smeissen, and I know that someone wanted something very badly that they thought was in your apartment and then thought that I had taken it and put in mine. They wanted it badly enough to ransack both places. My guess is that they were looking for the claim draft, and that it was Smeissen, or one of his people, who did the ransacking.”

  “Is Smeissen a killer?” she asked in her harsh, strained voice.

  “Well, he’s doing pretty well these days: he doesn’t kill, himself, but he’s got muscle to do it for him.”

  “So my father had him kill Peter, didn’t he?” She stared at me challengingly, her eyes hard and dry, her mouth twisted. This was the nightmare she’d been lying down with every night. No wonder she wasn’t sleeping.

  “I don’t know. This is one of my guesses. Your father loves you, you know, and he’s going nuts right now. He would never knowingly have put your life in danger. And he would never knowingly have let Peter be shot. I think what happened was that Peter confronted Masters, and Masters panicked and called your dad.” I stopped. “This isn’t pretty and it’s hard to say to you. But your dad knows the kind of people who will put someone away for a price. He’s made it to the top of a rough union in a rough industry, and he’s had to know those kinds of people.”

  She nodded wearily, not looking at me. “I know. I never wanted to know it in the past, but I know it now. So my-my father, gave him this Smeissen’s name. Is that what you’re getting at?”

  “Yes, I’m sure Masters didn’t tell him who it was who’d crossed his path-just that someone had tumbled to the secret, and had to be eliminated. It’s the only thing that explains your father’s behavior.”

  “What do you mean?” she asked, not very interested.

  “ Your father came to me last Wednesday, gave me a fake name and a phony story, but he wanted me to find you. He knew about Peter’s death at that point, and he was upset because you’d run away. You called and accused him of killing Peter, didn’t you?”

  She nodded again. “It was too stupid for words. I was off my head, with anger, and fear, and-and grief. Not just for Peter, you know, but for my father, and the union, and everything I’d grown up thinking was fine and-and worth fighting for.”

  “Yes, that was tough.” She didn’t say anything else, so I went on. “Your father didn’t know at first what had happened. It was only a few days later that he connected Peter with Masters. Then he knew that Masters had had Peter killed. Then he knew that you were in trouble, too. And that’s when he fired me. He didn’t want me to find you because he didn’t want anyone else to find you, either.”

  She looked at me again. “I hear you,” she said in that same weary voice. “I hear you, but it doesn’t make it any better. My father is the kind of man who gets people killed, and he got Peter killed.”

  We sat looking at the stream for a few minutes without talking. Then she said, “I grew up on the union. My mother died when I was three. I didn’t have any brothers or sisters, and my dad and I-we were very close. He was a hero, I knew he was in a lot of fights, but he was a hero. I grew up knowing he had to fight because of the bosses, and that if he could lick them, America would be a better place for working men and women everywhere.” She smiled mirthlessly again. “It sounds like a child’s history book, doesn’t it? It was child’s history. As my dad moved up in the union, we had more money. The University of Chicago-that was something I’d always wanted. Seven thousand dollars a year? No problem. He bought it for me. My own car, you name it. Part of me knew that a working-class hero didn’t have that kind of money, but I pushed it aside. ‘He’s entitled,’ I’d say. And when I met Peter, I thought, why not? The Thayers have more money than my father ever dreamed of, and they never worked for it.” She paused again. “That was my rationalization, you see. And guys like Smeissen. They’re around the house-not much, but some. I just wouldn’t believe any of it. You read about some mobster in the paper, and he’s been over drinking with your father? No way.” She shook her head.

  “Peter came home from the office, you see. He’d been working for Masters as a favor to his dad. He was sick of the whole money thing-that was before we fell in love, even, although I know his father blamed me for it. He wanted to do something really fine with his life-he didn’t know what. But just to be nice, he agreed to work at Ajax. I don’t think my father knew. I didn’t tell him. I didn’t talk to him about Peter much-he didn’t like me going around with the son of such an important banker. And he is kind of a Puritan-he hated my living with Peter like that. So like I said, I didn’t talk to him about Peter.

  “Anyway, Peter knew who some of the big shots in the union are. You know, when you’re in love, you learn that kind of thing about each other. I knew who the chairman of the Fort Dearborn Trust is, and that’s not the kind of thing I know as a rule.”

  The story was starting to come easily now. I didn’t say anything, just made myself part of the landscape that Anita was talking to.

  “Well, Peter did rather boring things for Masters. It was a kind of make-work job in the budget department. He worked for the budget director, a guy he liked, and one of the things they asked him to do was check records of claim drafts against claim files-see if they matched, you know. Did Joe Blow get fifteen thousand dollars when his file shows he should only have gotten twelve thousand dollars? That kind of thing. They had a computer program that did it, but they thought there was something wrong with the program, so they wanted Peter to do a manual check.” She laughed, a laugh that was really a sob. “You know, if Ajax had a good computer system, Peter would still be alive. I think of that sometimes, too, and it make me want to shoot all their programmers. Oh, well. He started with the biggest ones-there were thousands and thousands-they have three hundred thousand Workers Compensation claims every year, but he was only going to do a spot check. So he started with some of the really big ones-total disability claims that had been going on for a while. At first it was fun, you know, to see what kinds of things had happened to people. Then one day he found a claim set up for Carl O’Malley. Total disability, lost his right arm and been crippled by freak accident with a conveyor belt. That happens, you know-someone gets cau
ght on a belt and pulled into a machine. It’s really terrible.”

  I nodded agreement.

  She looked at me and started talking to me, rather than just in front of me. “Only it hadn’t happened, you see. Carl is one of the senior vice-presidents, my dad’s right-hand man-he’s been part of my life since before I can remember. I call him Uncle Carl. Peter knew that, so he brought home the address, and it was Carl’s address. Carl is as well as you or me-he’s never been in an accident, and he’s been away from the assembly line for twenty-three years.”

  “I see. You didn’t know what to think, but you didn’t ask your father about it?”

  “No, I didn’t know what to ask. I couldn’t figure it out. I guess I thought Uncle Carl had put in for a fake accident, and we kind of treated it like a joke, Peter and I did. But he got to thinking about it; he was like that, you know, he really thought things through. And he looked up the other guys on the executive board. And they all had indemnity claims. Not all of them for total disability, and not all of them permanent, but all of them good-sized sums. And that was the terrible thing. You see, my dad had one, too. Then I got scared, and I didn’t want to say anything to him.”

  “Is Joseph Gielczowski on the executive board?” I asked.

  “Yes, he’s one of the vice-presidents, and president of Local 3051, a very powerful local in Calumet City. Do you know him?”

  “That was the name of the claim draft I found.” I could see why they didn’t want that innocent little stick of dynamite in my hands. No wonder they’d torn my place apart looking for it. “So Peter decided to talk to Masters? You didn’t know Masters was involved, did you?”

  “No, and Peter thought he owed it to him, to talk to him first, you know. We weren’t sure what we would do next-talk to my dad, we had to. But we thought Masters should know.” Her blue eyes were dark pools of fear in her face. “What happened was, he told Masters, and Masters told him it sounded really serious, and that he’d like to talk it over with Peter in private, because it might have to go to the State Insurance Commission. So Peter said sure, and Masters said he would come down Monday morning before work.” She looked at me. “That was strange, wasn’t it? We should have known it was strange, we should have known a vice-president doesn’t do that, he talks to you in his office. I guess we just assumed it was Peter being a friend of the family.” She looked back at the stream. “I wanted to be there, but I had a job, you see, I was doing some research for one of the guys in the Political Science Department.”

  “Harold Weinstein?” I guessed.

  “Yeah. You really have been detecting me, haven’t you? Well, I had to be there at eight thirty, and Masters was coming by around nine, so I left Peter to it. I really left him to it, didn’t I? Oh, God, why did I think that job was so goddamn important? Why didn’t I stay there with him?” Now she was crying, real tears, not the dry heaves. She hid her face in her hands and sobbed. She kept repeating that she’d left Peter alone to be killed, and she should have been the one that died; her father was the one with all the criminal friends, not his. I let her go on for several minutes.

  “Listen, Anita,” I said in a clear sharp voice, “you can blame yourself for this for the rest of your life. But you didn’t kill Peter. You didn’t abandon him. You didn’t set him up. If you had been there, you’d be dead, too, and the truth of what happened might never come out.”

  “I don’t care about the truth,” she sobbed. “I know it. It doesn’t matter whether the rest of the world knows it or not.”

  “If the rest of the world doesn’t know it, then you’re as good as dead,” I said brutally. “And the next nice young boy or girl who goes through those files and learns what you and Peter learned is dead, too. I know this is rotten. I know you’ve been through hell and more besides, and you’ve got worse ahead. But the quicker we get going and finish off this business, the quicker you can get that part over with. It will only get more unbearable, the longer you have to anticipate it.”

  She sat with her head in her hands, but her sobs died down. After a while she sat up and looked at me again. Her face was tear-streaked and her eyes red, but some of the strain had gone out of it, and she looked younger, less like a death mask of herself. “You’re right. I was brought up not to be afraid of dealing with people. But I don’t want to go through this with my dad.”

  “I know,” I said gently. “My father died ten years ago. I was his only child and we were very close. I know what you must be feeling.”

  She was wearing a ridiculous waitress costume, black rayon with a white apron. She blew her nose into the apron.

  “Who cashed the drafts?” I asked. “The people they were made out to?”

  She shook her head. “There’s no way of telling. You don’t cash drafts, you see: you present them to the bank and the bank verifies you have an account there and tells the insurance company to send a check to that account. You’d have to know what bank the drafts were presented to, and that information wasn’t in the files-only carbons of the drafts were there. I don’t know if they kept the originals or if they went to the controller’s department, or what. And Peter-Peter didn’t like to probe too far without Masters knowing.”

  “How was Peter’s father involved?” I asked. Her eyes opened at that. “Peter’s father? He wasn’t.”

  “He had to be: he was killed the other day-Monday.”

  Her head started moving back and forth and she looked ill. “I’m sorry,” I said. “That was thoughtless, to spring it on you like that.” I put an arm around her shoulders. I didn’t say anything more. But I bet Thayer had helped Masters and McGraw cash in on the drafts. Maybe some of the other Knifegrinders were involved, but they wouldn’t share a kitty like that with the whole executive board. Besides, that was the kind of secret that everyone would know if that many people knew. Masters and McGraw, maybe a doctor, to put a bona fide report in the files. Thayer sets up an account for them. Doesn’t know what it is, doesn’t ask any questions. But they give him a present every year, maybe, and when he threatens to push the investigation into his son’s death, they stick in the knife: he’s been involved, and he can be prosecuted. It looked good to me. I wondered if Paul and Jill would find anything in Thayer’s study. Or if Lucy would let either of them into the house. Meanwhile there was Anita to think of.

  We sat quietly for a while. Anita was off in her own thoughts, sorting out our conversation. Presently she said, “It makes it better, telling someone else about it. Not quite so horrible.”

  I grunted agreement. She looked down at her absurd outfit. “Me, dressed up like this! If Peter could see me, he’d-” The sentence trailed off into a sniff. “I’d like to leave here, stop doing the Jody Hill thing. Do you think I can go back to Chicago?”

  I considered this. “Where were you planning to go?”

  She thought for a few minutes. “That’s a problem, I guess. I can’t involve Ruth and Mary any more.”

  “You’re right. Not just because of Ruth and Mary, but also because I was followed to the UWU meeting last night, so chances are Earl will keep an eye on some of the members for a while. And you know you can’t go home until this whole business is cleared up.”

  “Okay,” she agreed. “It’s just-it’s so hard-it was smart in a way, coming up here, but I’m always looking over my shoulder, you know, and I can’t talk to anyone about what’s really going on in my mind. They’re always teasing me about boyfriends, like that nice Dr. Dan, the one I spilled coffee on this morning, and I can’t tell them about Peter, so they think I’m unfriendly.”

  “I could probably get you back to Chicago,” I said slowly. “But you’d have to hole up for a few days-until I get matters straightened out… We could publish an account of the insurance scheme, but that would get your dad in trouble without necessarily getting Masters. And I want him implicated in a way he can’t slide out of before I let everything else out. Do you understand?” She nodded. “Okay, in that case, I can see that you get put up in a
Chicago hotel. I think I can fix it so that no one will know you are there. You wouldn’t be able to go out. But someone trustworthy would stop by every now and then to talk to you so you won’t go completely stir crazy. That sound all right?”

  She made a face. “I guess I don’t have any choice, do I? At least I’d be back in Chicago, closer to the things I know… Thanks,” she added belatedly. “I didn’t mean to sound so grudging-I really appreciate everything you’re doing for me.”

  “Don’t worry about your party manners right now; I’m not doing it for the thanks, anyway.”

  We walked slowly back to the Datsun together. Little insects hummed and jumped in the grass and birds kept up an unending medley. A woman with two young children had come into the park. The children were rooting industriously in the dirt. The woman was reading a book, looking up at them every five minutes. They had a picnic basket propped under a tree. As we walked by, the woman called, “Matt! Eve! How about a snack?” The children came running up. I felt a small stirring of envy. On a beautiful summer day it might be nice to be having a picnic with my children instead of hiding a fugitive from the police and the mob.

  “Is there anything you want to collect in Hartford?” I asked.

  She shook her head. “I should stop at Ronna’s and tell them I’m leaving.”

  I parked in front of the restaurant and she went in while I used the phone on the corner to call the Herald-Star. It was almost ten and Ryerson was at his desk.