“If you come across anything else you think I could help you with, let me know,” he said, shaking my hand. “Especially if it might give me some grounds for a writ of certiorari.”
I assured him I would and left. I was wiser than I’d been when I came in, but no less confused.
16
House Call
It was well past noon by the time Manheim and I finished talking. I headed for the Loop and picked up a Diet Coke and a sandwich-corned beef, which I reserve for occasions when I need special nourishment-and took them to my office.
I could see Manheim’s point. Sort of If Humboldt lost a suit like that, it could spell disaster, the kind of problem that drove Johns-Manville to seek bankruptcy protection. But Manville’s situation had been different: they had known asbestos was toxic and covered up their knowledge. So when the ugly truth came out workers sued for punitive damages.
All Humboldt would have faced was a series of comp claims. Even so, that might be sticky. Say they’d had a thousand workers at the plant over a ten-year period and they all died: at a quarter of a million a pop, even if Ajax was paying for it, that was a lot of balloons.
I licked mustard from my fingers. Maybe I was looking at it wrong-maybe it was Ajax not wanting to make the payout-Gordon Firth telling his good buddy Gustav Humboldt to cool out any attempts to reopen the case. But Firth couldn’t have known I was involved-the word wouldn’t have run around Chicago that fast. Or maybe it would. You’ve never seen gossip and rumor mills until you’ve spent a week in a large corporation.
And then, why had someone threatened Manheim about the appeal? If Humboldt was dead to rights on the legal issues, there wasn’t any percentage in going after Manheim -it would just cause a judge to vacate the decree. So it couldn’t have been the company trying to brush him back.
Or maybe it was some very junior person. Someone who thought he could make a name for himself in the company by putting a little muscle on the plaintiffs. That wasn’t a totally improbable scenario. You get a corporate atmosphere where ethics are a little loose and subordinates think that the way to management’s heart is across their opponents’ bodies.
But that still didn’t explain why Humboldt had lied about the suit. Why dump a charge of sabotage on the poor bastards when all they wanted was some workers’ comp money? I wondered if it would be worthwhile to try to speak to Humboldt again. I visualized his full, jovial face with the cold blue eyes. You have to swim carefully when your waters are shared by a great shark. I wasn’t sure I wanted to go to the big man just yet.
I groaned to myself The problem was spreading out in front of me like ripples in a pond. I was the stone dropped in the middle and the lines were moving farther and farther away from me. I just couldn’t handle so many intangible waves on my own.
I tried to turn my attention to some problems that had come in the mail, including a notice of insufficient funds to cover the check of a small hardware store whose pilfering problems I’d solved a few weeks ago. I made a call that brought me no satisfaction and decided to pack it in for the day. I’d just slung my mail into the wastebasket when the phone rang.
An efficient alto told me she was Clarissa Hollingsworth, Mr. Humboldt’s personal secretary.
I sat up in my chair. Time to be alert. I wasn’t ready to go to him, but the shark wanted to swim to me. “Yes, Ms. Hollingsworth. What can I do for Mr. Humboldt?”
“I don’t believe he wants you to do anything,” she said coolly. “He just asked me to pass on some information to you. About someone named-uh-Louisa Djiak.”
She stumbled over the name-she should have practiced pronouncing it before phoning.
I repeated Louisa’s name correctly. “Yes?”
“Mr. Humboldt says he talked to Dr. Chigwell about her and that it is probable that Joey Pankowski was the child’s father.” She had trouble with Pankowski too. I expected better from Humboldt’s private secretary.
I took the receiver away from my ear and looked at it, as though I could see Ms. Hollingsworth’s face in it. Or Humboldt’s. At last I held it back to my mouth and asked, “Do you know who did the investigation for Mr. Humboldt?”
“I believe he interested himself directly in the matter,” she said primly.
I said slowly, “I think Dr. Chigwell may have misled Mr. Humboldt. It’s important that I see him to discuss the matter with him.”
“I doubt that very much, Ms. Warshawski. Mr. Humboldt and the doctor have worked together a long time. If he gave Mr. Humboldt the information, you may certainly depend on it.”
“Perhaps so.” I tried to make my tone conciliatory. “But Mr. Humboldt told me himself that his staff sometimes try to protect him from unfortunate events. I suspect something like that may have been going on in this case.”
“Really,” she said huffily. “You may work in an environment where people can’t trust each other. But Dr. Chigwell has been a most reliable associate of Mr. Humboldt’s for fifty years. Maybe someone like you can’t appreciate it, but the idea of Dr. Chigwell lying to Mr. Humboldt is totally ludicrous.”
“Just one thing before you hang up in righteous indignation. Someone misled Mr. Humboldt terribly about the true nature of the suit Pankowski and Ferraro brought against Xerxes. That’s why I’m not too confident about this last bit of news.”
There was a pause, then she said grudgingly, “I’ll mention the matter to Mr. Humboldt. But I doubt very much that he’ll want to talk to you.”
That was the best I could get from her. I frowned at the phone some more, wondering what I would say to Humboldt if I saw him. Fruitless. I locked up the office and drove up to the little hardware store on Diversey. They hadn’t wanted to talk to me on the phone, but when they saw I was prepared to be vocal in front of their customers they took me into the back and reluctantly wrote out another check. Plus the ten dollars handling for the bad one. I paid it directly into my bank and went home.
Slipping in through the back entrance, I managed to sidestep Mr. Contreras and the dog. I stopped in the kitchen to inspect the food supply. Still grim. I fixed a bowl of popcorn and took it into the living room with me. Popcorn and corned beef-um-um good.
Four-thirty is a terrible time to find anything on TV-I flipped through game shows, Sesame Street, and the beaming face of The Frugal Gourmet I finally turned off the set in disgust and reached for the phone.
The Chigwells were listed under Clio’s name. She answered on the third ring, her voice distant, unyielding. Yes, she remembered who I was. She didn’t think her brother would want to speak to me, but she went to see, anyway. He didn’t.
“Look, Ms. Chigwell. I hate having to be such a pest, but there’s something I want to know. Has Gustav Humboldt called him in the last few days?”
She was surprised. “How did you know?”
“I didn’t. His secretary passed on some information that Humboldt supposedly got from your brother. I wondered if Humboldt made it up.”
“What did he say Curtis told him?”
“That Joey Pankowski was Caroline Djiak’s father.”
She asked me to explain who they were, then went off to confront her brother. She was gone for a quarter of an hour. I finished the popcorn and did some leg raises, lying with the phone near my ear so I could hear her return.
She came back on the line abruptly. “He says he knew about the man, that the girl’s mother had told him all about it back when they hired her.”
“I see,” I said weakly.
“The trouble is, you can’t spend your whole life with someone without knowing when they’re lying. I don’t know what part of it Curtis is making up, but one thing I can tell you-he’d say anything Gustav Humboldt told him to.”
While I struggled to add this news to my pickled brain, something else struck me. “Why are you telling me this, Ms. Chigwell?”
“I don’t know,” she said, surprised. “Maybe after seventy-nine years, I’m tired of having Curtis hide behind me. Good-bye.” She hung
up with an abrupt click.
I spent Saturday stewing about Humboldt and Chigwell, unable to think of any reason why they would concoct a story about Louisa and Joey, unable to think of a way to get a handle on them. When Murray Ryerson, head of the Herald-Star’ s crime bureau, called me on Sunday because one of his gofers had dug up the news that Nancy Cleghorn and I went to high school together, I even agreed to talk to him.
Murray follows De Paul basketball. Or slobbers over it. Although I live-and die-with the Cubs every year, and maintain a wistful love for the Bears’ Otis Wilson, I don’t really care whether the Blue Demons ever score another basket. In Chicago that’s extreme heresy-equivalent to saying you hate St. Patrick’s Day parades. So I agreed to truck out to the Horizon and watch them scrap around with Indiana or Loyola or whoever.
“Anyway,” Murray said, “you can sit there remembering how you and Nancy handled the same shots, only better. It will give a more intense flavor to your memories.”
De Paul lost a squeaker, with Murray commenting libelously on young Joey Meyer and the entire offense during the hour wait to move from the parking lot back to the tollway. It was only when we were in Ethel’s, a Lithuanian restaurant on the northwest side, filling Murray’s six-four frame with a few dozen sweet-and-sour cabbage rolls, that he got down to the real business of the afternoon.
“So what’s your interest in Cleghorn’s death?” he asked casually. “Family call you in to investigate?”
“The cops got a tip that I sent her to her death.” I calmly ate another fluffy dumpling. I’d have to run ten miles in the morning to work off all this.
“Come on. I must’ve heard a dozen people say you’ve been nosing around down there. What’s going on?”
I shook my head. “I told you. I’m clearing my name.”
“Yeah, and I’m the Ayatollah of Detroit.”
I love it when I’m telling Murray the truth and he’s convinced it’s a big cover-up-it gives me terrific leverage. Unfortunately, there wasn’t much to pry out of him. The police had called on Steve Dresberg, on Dresberg’s mouthpiece, Leon Haas, on a few dozen other upstanding South Chicagoans-including some old lovers of Nancy’s-and didn’t have anything they considered a real lead.
Murray finally got tired of the game. “I guess there’s enough that we could do a little human-interest story of Nancy and you in college, living on table scraps and studying the classics in between creaming the best women’s teams in the region. I hate giving you print space when you’re not earning it, but it’ll help keep her name in front of the state’s attorney.”
“Thanks a whole bunch, Murray.”
When he dropped me at my place on Racine, I got in my car and headed for Hinsdale. Seeing him had given me a nasty little idea on a way to pressure Chigwell.
It was close to seven when I rang the bell at the side door, not the ideal time for paying house calls. When Ms. Chigwell answered my ring I tried to make myself look earnest and trustworthy. Her stern features didn’t give me any clue as to whether I was succeeding.
“Curtis won’t talk to you,” she said in her abrupt way, showing no surprise at my appearance.
“Try this on him,” I suggested in an earnest, trustworthy manner. “His picture on the front page of the Herald-Star and some heartwarming stories on his medical career.”
She looked at me grimly. Why she didn’t just shut the door in my face I didn’t understand. And why she went off to deliver the message puzzled me still further. It reminded me of some elderly cousins of my beloved ex-husband Dick, two brothers and a sister who lived together. The brothers had quarreled some thirteen years previously and refused to speak, so they would ask the sister to pass them salt, marmalade, and tea, and she obligingly did so.
However, Dr. Chigwell came to the door in person this time, not trusting his sister with the marmalade. With his thin neck bobbing forward, he looked like a harassed turkey.
“Listen here, young lady. I don’t have to take these threats. If you’re not away from this door in thirty seconds, I’m calling the police and you can explain to them why you’ve started a persecution campaign.”
He had me. I could just imagine trying to tell a suburban cop-or even Bobby Mallory-that one of Chicago’s ten wealthiest men was lying to me and getting his old plant doctor to collude. I bowed my head in resignation.
“Consider me gone. The reporter who’ll be calling you in the morning is named Murray Ryerson. I’ll explain to him about your old medical cases and so on.”
“Get out of here!” His voice had turned to a hiss that chilled my blood. I left.
17
Tombstone Blues
Nancy’s funeral was scheduled for eleven Monday morning in the Methodist church she had attended as a child. I seem to spend too much time at the funerals of friends-I have a navy suit associated so strongly with them that I can’t bring myself to wear it anywhere else. I dawdled around in panty hose and a blouse, unable to shake a superstitious dread that putting on the suit would make Nancy’s death final.
I couldn’t set my mind to anything, to Chigwell or Humboldt, to organizing a plan to beat the police to Nancy’s killer, or even to organizing the spreading papers in my living room. That was where I had started the morning, thinking with a few hours on my hands I could get things put away. I was too fragmented to create order.
Suddenly at ten of ten, still in my underwear, I looked up the number for Humboldt’s corporate offices and phoned. An indifferent operator switched me through to his office, where I reached not Clarissa Hollingsworth but her assistant. When I asked for Mr. Humboldt, after a certain amount of dickering I got Ms. Hollingsworth.
The cool alto greeted me patronizingly. “I haven’t had a chance to speak to Mr. Humboldt about seeing you, Ms. Warshawski. I’ll make sure that he gets the message, but he doesn’t come in every day anymore.”
“Yeah, I don’t suppose you call him at home for consultations, either. In case you do, you might add to my other message that I saw Dr. Chigwell last night.”
She finished the conversation with a condescending speed that left me shouting into a dead phone. I finished dressing as easily as I could with my hands shaking and headed south once more.
Mount of Olives Methodist dated to the turn of the century, its high-backed dark pews and giant rose window evoking a time when it was filled with women in long dresses and children in high-buttoned shoes. Today’s congregation couldn’t afford to keep up the stained-glass windows showing Jesus in Calvary. Places where Jesus’s brooding ascetic face had been broken were filled in with wired burglar glass, making him look like a sufferer from an acute skin disease.
While Nancy’s four brothers served as ushers their children sat in the front pews, shoving and poking at each other despite the near presence of their aunt’s draped casket. Their harshly whispered insults could be heard throughout the nave until drowned by some melancholy bars from the organ.
I went up to the front to let Mrs. Cleghorn know I was there. She smiled at me with tremulous warmth.
“Come over to the house after the service,” she whispered. “We’ll have coffee and a chance to talk.”
She invited me to sit with her, glancing distastefully at her grandchildren. I disengaged myself gently-I didn’t want to be a buffer between her and the wrestling monsters. Besides, I wanted to go to the back so I could see who showed up-it’s a cliché, but murderers often can’t resist going to their victims’ funerals. Maybe part of a primitive superstition, trying to make sure the person is really dead, that she gets truly buried so her ghost doesn’t walk.
After I’d settled myself near the entrance Diane Logan swept in, resplendent in her silver fox. She brushed my cheek and squeezed my hand before moving up the aisle.
“Who was that?” a voice muttered in my ear.
I gave a start and turned around. It was Sergeant McGonnigal, trying to look mournful in a dark suit. So the police were also hopeful.
“She used to play bask
etball with Nancy and me; she owns a Gold Coast PR firm nowadays,” I muttered back. “I don’t think she slugged Nancy-she could outplay her twenty years ago. Today, too, come to think of it. I don’t know everyone’s name-tell me which one the killer is.”
He smiled a little. “When I saw you sitting here I thought my worries were over-little Polish detective is going to nab the murderer in front of the altar.”
“Methodist church,” I muttered. “I don’t think they call it an altar.”
Caroline clattered in with the group of people I’d seen in the SCRAP office with her. They had the preternatural earnestness of those who don’t often find themselves at solemn functions. Caroline’s copper curls were brushed into a semblance of tidiness. She wore a black suit designed for a much taller woman-the bunched clumps of material at the bottom showed where she’d hemmed it with her usual impatient inefficiency. If she saw me, she gave no sign, moving with the SCRAP contingent to a pew about halfway up the aisle.
Behind them came a handful of older women, perhaps Mrs. Cleghorn’s pals at the local branch of the library. When they’d passed I saw a thin young man standing in their wake. The dim light picked out his angular silhouette. He looked around uncertainly, saw me staring at him, and looked away.
The self-deprecating embarrassment with which he turned his head brought back to me who he was: young Art Jurshak. He’d made just such an effacing move in talking to the old ward heelers at his father’s office.
In the half-light from the windows I couldn’t make out his beautifully chiseled features. He sidled into a seat toward the back.
McGonnigal tapped me on the shoulder. “Who’s that alfalfa sprout?” he growled.
I smiled seraphically and put a finger to my lips-the organ had begun to play loudly, signaling the arrival of the minister. We went through “Abide with Me” at such a slow pace that I kept bracing myself for each succeeding chord.
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