I smiled sardonically. When the owner of a ten-billion-dollar empire starts apologizing for his style, it’s time to hold tightly to your purse and count all your fingers.
“I’m sure you underestimate yourself, sir.”
He gave me a quick, sidelong glance and decided that warranted a barking laugh. “I see you are a careful woman, Ms. Warshawski.”
I sipped the cognac. It was staggeringly smooth. Please let him call me for frequent consultations, I begged the golden liquid. “I can be reckless when I have to, Mr. Humboldt.”
“Good. That’s very good. So you’re a private investigator. And do you find it a job that allows you to be both careful and reckless?”
“I like being my own boss. And I don’t have the desire to do it on the scale you’ve achieved.”
“Your clients speak very highly of you. I was talking to Gordon Firth just today and he mentioned how grateful the Ajax board was for your efforts there.”
“I’m delighted to hear it,” I said, sinking back in the chair and sipping some more.
“Gordon does a lot of my insurance, of course.”
Of course. Gustav calls Gordon and tells him he needs a thousand tons of insurance and Gordon says sure and thirty young men and women work eighty-hour weeks for a month putting it all together and then the two shake hands genially at the Standard Club and thank each other for their trouble.
“So I thought I might be able to help you out with one of your inquiries. After listening to Gordon’s glowing report I knew you were intelligent and discreet and not likely to abuse information given you in confidence.”
With enormous effort I kept myself from bolting up in the chair and spilling cognac all over my skirt. “It’s hard for me to imagine where our spheres of activity intersect, sir. By the way, this is most excellent cognac. It’s like drinking a fine single malt.”
At that Humboldt roared with genuine laughter. “Beautiful, my dear Ms. Warshawski. Beautiful. To take my news so calmly and then praise my liquor with the most subtle of insults! I wish I could persuade you to cease being your own boss.”
I smiled and put the snifter down. “I love compliments as much as the next person, and it’s been a tough day-I can use them. But I’m beginning to wonder who is meant to be helping whom. Not that it wouldn’t be a privilege to be of service to you.”
He nodded. “I think we can be of service to each other. You asked where our spheres of activity intersect-a fine expression. And the answer lies in South Chicago.”
I thought for a minute. Of course. I should have known. Xerxes had to be part of Humboldt Chemical. It was just being so used to thinking of it as part of my childhood’s landscape that I hadn’t made the connection when Anton phoned.
I casually mentioned it and Humboldt nodded again. “Very good, Ms. Warshawski. The chemical industry made a great contribution to the war effort. The Second World War I’m talking about, of course. And the war effort in turn prompted research and development on a grand scale. Many of the products that all of us-I mean Dow, Ciba, Imperial Chemical, all of us-make our bread and butter on today can be traced to research we did then. Xerxine was one of Humboldt’s great discoveries, one of the 1, 2 dichlorethanes. The last one I was able to devote time to myself.”
He stopped himself with a turned-up hand. “You’re not a chemist. That won’t be of interest to you. But we called the product Xerxes, because of the Xerxine, of course, and opened the South Chicago plant in 1949. My wife was an artist. She designed the logo, the crown on the purple background.”
He stopped to offer me the decanter. I didn’t want to appear greedy. On the other hand, to refuse might have seemed rude.
“Well, that South Chicago plant was the start of Humboldt’s international expansion, and it’s always meant a great deal to me. So even though I no longer concern myself with the day-to-day running of the company-I have grandchildren, Ms. Warshawski, and an old man fancies himself reliving his youth with young children. But my people know I care about that plant. So when a beautiful young detective begins poking around, asking questions, they naturally tell me.”
I shook my head. “I’m sorry if they needlessly alarmed you, sir. I’m not poking around in the plant. Merely trying to trace some men as part of a personal inquiry. For some reason your Mr. Joiner-the personnel manager-wanted me to believe they never worked for you.”
“So you found Dr. Chigwell.” His deep voice had sunk to a rumbling murmur, difficult to make out.
“Who was even more electrified by my questions than young Joiner. I couldn’t help wondering if he had a personal agenda of his own. Some transactions of his youth that weigh on his old-age conscience.”
Humboldt held his snifter so that he could look through it toward the fire. “How people rush to protect you when you are old and they want you to know they care about your interests.” He spoke to the glass. “And what problems they needlessly cause. It’s a constant issue with my daughter, one of nature’s worriers.”
He turned back to me. “We had a problem with these men, with Pankowski and Ferraro. Enough of a problem that I even know their names, you see, out of fifty-some thousand employees worldwide. They engaged in an attempted sabotage of the plant. Of the product, actually. Changing the balance in the mixture so that we had highly unstable vapor and a residue that stopped up the flow pipes. We had to shut the plant down three times in 1979 to clean everything. It took a year of investigation to find out who lay behind it. They and two other men were fired, and they then sued us for wrongful dismissal. The whole thing was a nightmare. A terrible nightmare.”
He grimaced and drained his glass. “So when you came around my people naturally assumed you were egged on by some unscrupulous lawyer trying to open these old wounds. But I knew from my friend Gordon Firth that that could not be so. So I have taken a risk. Invited you here. Explained the whole story to you. And I hope I am right, that you are not going to run back to some lawyer saying I tried to suborn you or whatever the expression is.”
“Suborn will do admirably,” I said, finishing my own glass and shaking my head at the proffered decanter. “And I can safely assure you that my inquiries have nothing to do with any suit these men might have been involved in. It is a purely personal matter.”
“Well, if it involves Xerxes employees, I can see that you get whatever assistance you need.”
I don’t like revealing my clients’ business. Especially not to strangers. But in the end I decided to tell him-it was the easiest way to get help. Not the whole story, of course. Not Gabriella and the baby-sitting and Caroline’s insistent manipulativeness and the angry Djiaks. But Louisa dying and Caroline wanting to find out who her father was and Louisa not wanting to tell.
“I’m European and old-fashioned,” he said when I finished. “I don’t like the girl not wanting to respect her mother’s wishes. But if you are committed, you are committed. And you think she might have said something to Chigwell because he was the plant doctor? I’ll call and ask him. He probably won’t want to talk to you himself But my secretary will phone you in a few days with the information.”
That was a dismissal. I slid forward to the edge of the chair so that I could stand without bracing my arms on the sides and was pleased to find that I moved smoothly, without the brandy affecting me. If I could make it out the front door without bumping into a priceless art object, I could easily handle the drive home.
I thanked Humboldt for the brandy and his help. He turned it aside with another chuckle.
“It’s a pleasure for me, Ms. Warshawski, to talk to an attractive young woman, and one who is brave enough to stand her ground with an old lion. You must come again when you are in the neighborhood.”
Anton was hovering outside the library to escort me to the door.
“I’m sorry,” I said when we reached the entryway. “I promised not to tell.”
He stiffly pretended not to hear me and summoned the elevator with frigid aloofness. I wasn’t sure what t
o do about the doorman and my car, but when I tentatively displayed a five-dollar bill he caused it to vanish while tenderly helping me into the Chevy.
I devoted the drive home to thinking of reasons why I was better off as a PI than a billionaire chemist. The list was much shorter than the drive.
10
Fire When Ready
I was drowning in a sea of thick gray Xerxine. I was choking while Gustav Humboldt and Caroline stood talking earnestly on the shore, ignoring my cries for help. I woke up at four-thirty, sweaty and panting, too roused by the dream to go back to sleep.
I finally got out of bed when it started to get light. It wasn’t cold in the bedroom, but I was shivering. I pulled a sweatshirt from the pile next to my bed and wandered around the apartment, trying to find something to turn my mind to. I picked out a scale on the piano, but stopped after one: it would be unfair to the neighbors to work on my rusty voice at this hour of the morning. I moved to the kitchen to make coffee, but lost interest after washing out the pot.
My four rooms normally seem open and spacious to me, but now they were making me feel cramped. The jumble of books, papers, and clothes, which usually looks homelike, began to appear shameful and squalid.
Don’t tell me you’ve been infected by Djiakism, I scolded myself crossly. Next thing you’ll be on your hands and knees in the lobby scrubbing the floor every morning.
Finally I pulled on jeans and my running shoes and went out. The dog recognized my step behind the locked first-floor door and let out a little yelping bark. I would have liked her company, but I didn’t have a key to Mr. Contreras’s place. I walked over to the lake alone, unable to work up energy for running.
It was another gray day. I could tell the sun was rising only by a change in the intensity behind the clouds on the eastern horizon. Under the sullen sky the lake resembled the thick gray liquid of my nightmare. I stared at it, trying to reason away my lingering unease, trying to lose myself in the changing patterns and colors of the water.
Early as it was, joggers were already on the lake path, getting in their miles before putting on pinstripe and panty hose for the day. They looked like the hollow men, each wrapped in a cocoon of sound from his private radio, their faces blank, their isolation chilling. I dug my hands deep into my pockets, shivering, and turned toward home.
I stopped on the way for breakfast at the Chesterton Hotel. It’s a residential hotel for well-heeled widows. The little Hungarian restaurant where you can get cappuccino and croissants caters to their slower pace and better manners.
As I stirred the foam in my second cappuccino I kept wondering why Gustav Humboldt had summoned me to his presence. Yes, he didn’t want me nosing around in his plant. No executive likes that. And yes, he had the inside dope on Pankowski and Ferraro. But the chairman of the board calling in the lowly detective to tell her in person? Despite all his talk of Gordon Firth, I’d never even seen the Ajax chairman in the course of three investigations involving the insurance company. Heads of multinational corporations, even if they’re eighty-four and dote on their grandchildren, have layers and layers of underlings to do that kind of job for them.
Last night my vanity had been tickled. The invitation alone was exciting, let alone the rarefied surroundings and incredible brandy. I hadn’t stopped to wonder about his comradely flow of information, but maybe I should.
And what of little Caroline? What did she know that she hadn’t been telling me? That Louisa’s two pals had been fired? Perhaps that Louisa herself had been involved in the efforts to sabotage the plant? Maybe Gustav Humboldt had been her lover long ago and had stepped in to protect her now. It would explain his personal involvement. Maybe he was Caroline’s father and she was due a gigantic inheritance, out of which a modest fee to me would be eminently feasible.
As my speculations grew more ludicrous, my mood lightened. I headed home much faster than I’d left, passing the second-floor tenants on their way to work with a “good morning” almost cheery enough for a flight attendant.
I was getting really sick of panty hose and pumps, but I put them on again so as to make a favorable impression at the Department of Labor. A friend of mine from law school worked for their Chicago office; he might be able to tell me about the sabotage and if the men really had been suing Humboldt for wrongful dismissal. My red shoes were still in the front hallway with my navy suit. If eventually, why not eventually? I scooped them up and took off.
By the time I found a place to park near the Federal Building it was after ten. The Loop has been attacked by a development fervor the last few years that has turned the business district into a jammed, honking copy of New York. Many of the public garages have been scrapped to make way for skyscrapers taller than city code permits, so we have four times the traffic we used to vying for half as much parking.
My temper wasn’t the best by the time I made it to the sixteenth floor of the Dirksen Building. It wasn’t helped by the attitude of the receptionist, who looked briefly my way before returning to her typing with the curt announcement that Jonathan Michaels wasn’t available.
“Is he dead?” I snapped. “Out of town? Under indictment?”
She looked at me coldly. “I said he’s not available and that’s all you need to know.”
The door leading to the offices was kept locked. The receptionist or someone on the other side could buzz you in, but this woman clearly wasn’t going to let me wander back among the cubicles to find Jonathan. I sat in one of the plastic straight-backed chairs and told her I’d wait.
“Suit yourself,” she snapped, typing furiously.
When a business-suited black man came in she made a big play of friendliness with him, cooing over him and flirting a little. She flashed him a sugary smile and a wish for a nice day while releasing the lock. When I went in behind him she was too taken aback even to squawk.
My escort raised his brows at me. “You belong in here?”
“Yeah,” I said. “I pay your salary. And I’m here to talk to Jonathan Michaels about it.”
He looked momentarily startled, trying to figure out which Washington bureaucrat I might be. Then my meaning dawned on him and he said, “Well, maybe you’d better wait outside until Gloria tells you to go in.”
“Since she never bothered to find out my name or my business, I can’t imagine her interest in serving the taxpaying public is enormous.”
I knew where Jonathan’s office was and quickened my pace to move ahead of my attendant. I could hear him speeding up on the carpet behind me calling, “Miss-uh, miss,” as I opened the comer door.
Jonathan was standing in the outer office next to his secretary’s desk. When he saw me his rosy face lightened into a smile. “Oh, it’s you, Vic.”
I grinned at him. “Gloria call to tell you the Weather Underground was heading in to smash up your office and tear your golden hair out by the roots?”
“What’s left of it,” he said plaintively. He had gone partly bald, which made him look like a youthful Father William.
Jonathan Michaels had been a quiet idealist in my law school class. While students like me-locked in our liberal straitjackets, as one conservative JD put it-rushed off to become public defenders, Jonathan had surveyed social issues quietly. He had clerked in a federal circuit court for two years and then moved to the Department of Labor. He was now senior counsel for the Chicago district.
He took me into his office and shut the door. “I’ve got a dozen attorneys from St. Louis in the conference room. Can you do your business in thirty seconds?”
I explained fast. “I want to know if there’s any trail-through OSHA, the NLRB, the Contract Compliance people, or maybe Justice-of Ferraro and Pankowski. The sabotage and the suit.”
I wrote their names on one of his yellow pads and added Louisa Djiak. “She might have been a party. I don’t want to tell you the whole story now-there isn’t time-but I had the news personally from Gustav Humboldt. He’s not anxious to have it made public.”
&nbs
p; Jonathan picked up his phone while I was still talking. “Myra, get Dutton over here, will you? I’ve got a research job.” He spelled it out in a few words and hung up. “Vic, next time, do me a big favor and do what the ad says-phone first.”
I kissed his cheek. “I will, Jonathan. But only if I can afford to spend two days playing phone tag before I talk to you. Ciao, ciao, bambino.”
He was back in the conference room before I had made it out the outer door. When Gloria saw me return to the reception area, she started typing furiously again. In a spirit of malice I waited outside for a minute, then peered around the door. She had picked up the Herald-Star.
“Get busy,” I said sternly. “The taxpayers expect value for their money.”
She gave me a glance of loathing. I went to the elevator laughing lightly to myself. I hope someday to outgrow such juvenile pleasures.
I walked the four blocks to my office. When I checked in with my answering service I learned that Nancy Cleghorn had been trying to reach me. Once early this morning, when I was out feeling sorry for myself along the lakefront, and again ten minutes ago. In the tiresome way that people have, she hadn’t bothered to leave a phone number.
I sighed aggrievedly and pulled my city directory from under a stack of papers on the windowsill. The Wabash el runs under my windows and the directory had a fine layer of soot on it, which I smeared on the front of my green wool dress.
Nancy was the environmental affairs director for Caroline’s community development group. I looked up SCRAP, which was a waste of time, since of course it was under South Chicago Reawakening Project. And that was a waste of time because Nancy wasn’t in, she hadn’t been in all day, and they didn’t know when to expect her. And no, they wouldn’t give me her home phone number, especially if I said I was her sister, because everyone knew she had four brothers, and if I didn’t stop harassing them, they’d get the police.
Blood Shot Page 8