Warshawski 01 - Indemnity Only (27 page)

Paul was waiting as promised. He had a good head—the car was out of sight in the alley. I slid into the front seat and drew the door closed. “Any trouble?” he said, starting the engine and pulling away from the curb.

“No, but I recognized a guy asleep in the alley. You’d better call Lotty from the clinic. Tell her not to leave Jill alone in the apartment. Maybe she can get a police escort to the clinic. Tell her to call a Lieutenant Mallory to request it.”

“Sure thing.” He was very likable. We drove the short way to the clinic in silence. I handed him my car keys, and reiterated where the car was. “It’s a dark blue Monza.”

“Good luck,” he said in his rich voice. “Don’t worry about Jill and Lotty—I’ll take care of them.”

“I never worry about Lotty,” I said, sliding into the driver’s seat. “She’s a force unto herself.” I adjusted the side mirror and the rearview mirror, and let in the
clutch: Lotty drove a small Datsun, as practical and unadorned as she was.

I kept checking the road behind me as I drove across Addison to the Kennedy, but it seemed to be clear. The air was clammy, the damp of a muggy night before the sun would rise and turn it into smog again. The eastern sky was light now, and I was moving quickly through the empty streets. Traffic was light on the expressway, and I cleared the suburbs to the northbound Milwaukee toll road in forty-five minutes.

Lotty’s Datsun handled well, although I was out of practice with a standard shift and ground the gears a bit changing down. She had an FM radio, and I listened to WFMT well past the Illinois border. After that the reception grew fuzzy so I switched it off.

It was six in clear daylight when I reached the Milwaukee bypass. I’d never been to Hartford, but I’d been to Port Washington, thirty miles to the east of it on Lake Michigan, many times. As far as I could tell, the route was the same, except for turning west onto route 60 instead of east when you get twenty miles north of Milwaukee.

At 6:50 I eased the Datsun to a halt on Hartford’s main street, across from Ronna’s Café—Homemade Food, and in front of the First National Bank of Hartford. My heart was beating fast. I unbuckled the seat belt and got out, stretching my legs. The trip had been just under 140 miles; I’d done it in two hours and ten minutes. Not bad.

Hartford is in the beautiful moraine country, the heart of Wisconsin dairy farming. There’s a small
Chrysler plant there that makes outboard motors, and up the hill I could see a Libby’s cannery. But most of the money in the town comes from farming, and people were up early. Ronna’s opened at 5:30, according to the legend on the door, and at seven most of the tables were full. I bought the
Milwaukee Sentinel
from a coin box by the door, and sat down at an empty table near the back.

One waitress was taking care of the crowd at the counter. Another covered all the tables. She was rushing through the swinging doors at the back, her arms loaded up with plates. Her short, curly hair had been dyed black. It was Anita McGraw.

She unloaded pancakes, fried eggs, toast, hash browns, at a table where three heavyset men in bib overalls were drinking coffee, and brought a fried egg to a good-looking young guy in a dark blue boiler suit at the table next to me. She looked at me with the harassment common to all overworked waitresses in coffee shops. “I’ll be right with you. Coffee?”

I nodded. “Take your time,” I said, opening the paper. The men in the bib overalls were kidding the good-looking guy—he was a veterinarian, apparently, and they were farmers who’d used his services. “You grow that beard to make everyone think you’re grown up. Doc?” one of them said.

“Naw, just to hide from the FBI,” the vet said. Anita was carrying a cup of coffee to me; her hand shook and she spilled it on the veterinarian. She flushed and started apologizing. I got up and took the cup from her before any more spilled, and the young
man said good-naturedly, “Oh, it just wakes you up faster if you pour it all over yourself—especially if it’s still hot. Believe me, Jody,” he added as she dabbed ineffectually at the wet spot on his arm with a napkin, “this is the nicest stuff that’s likely to spill on this outfit today.”

The farmers laughed at that, and Anita came over to take my order. I asked for a Denver omelette, no potatoes, whole-wheat toast, and juice. When in farm country, eat like a farmer. The vet finished his egg and coffee. “Well, I hear those cows calling me,” he said, put some money on the table, and left. Other people began drifting out, too: It was 7:15—time for the day to be under way. For the farmers this was a short break between morning milking and some business in town. They lingered over a second cup of coffee. By the time Anita brought back my omelette, though, only three tables had people still eating, and just a handful were left at the counter.

I ate half the omelette, slowly, and read every word in the paper. People kept drifting in and out; I had a fourth cup of coffee. When Anita brought my bill, I put a five on it and, on top of that, one of my cards. I’d written on it: Ruth sent me. I’m in the green Datsun across the street.”

I went out and put some money in the meter, then got back in the car. I sat for another half hour, working the crossword puzzle, before Anita appeared. She opened the passenger door and sat down without speaking. I folded up the paper and put it in the backseat and looked at her gravely. The picture I’d
found in her apartment had shown a laughing young woman, not precisely beautiful, but full of the vitality that is better than beauty in a young woman. Now her face was strained and gaunt. The police would never have found her from a photograph—she looked closer to thirty than twenty—lack of sleep, fear, and tension cutting unnatural lines in her young face. The black hair did not go with her skin, the delicate creamy skin of a true redhead.

“What made you choose Hartford?” I asked.

She looked surprised—possibly the last question she’d expected. “Peter and I came up here last summer to the Washington County Fair—just for fun. We had a sandwich in that cafe, and I remembered it.” Her voice was husky with fatigue. She turned to look at me and said rapidly, “I hope I can trust you—I’ve got to trust someone. Ruth doesn’t know—doesn’t know the kind of people who—who might shoot someone. I don’t either, really, but I think I have a better idea than she does.” She gave a bleak smile. “I’m going to lose my mind if I stay here alone any longer. But I can’t go back to Chicago. I need help. If you can’t do it, if you blow it and I get shot—or if you’re some clever female hit man who fooled Ruth into giving you my address—I don’t know. I have to take the chance.” She was holding her hands together so tightly that the knuckles were white.

“I’m a private investigator,” I said. “Your father hired me last week to find you, and I found Peter Thayer’s body instead. Over the weekend, he told me to stop looking. I have my own guesses as to what all
that was about. That’s how I got involved. I agree that you’re in a pretty tough spot. And if I blow it, neither of us will be in very good shape. You can’t hide here forever, though, and I think that I’m tough enough, quick enough, and smart enough to get things settled so that you can come out of hiding. I can’t cure the pain, and there’s more to come, but I can get you back to Chicago—or wherever else you want so that you can live openly and with dignity.”

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.