The Union Maid
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.
“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 caught 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.
“Murray, I’ve got the story of a lifetime for you if you can keep a key witness on ice for a few days.”
“Where are you?” he asked. “You sound like you’re calling from the North Pole. Who’s the witness? The McGraw girl?”
“Murray, your mind works like a steel trap. I want a promise and I need some help.”
“I’ve already helped you,” he protested. “Lots. First by giving you those photos, and then by not running a story that you were dead so I could collect your document from your lawyer.”
“Murray, if there was another soul on earth I could turn to right now, I would. But you are absolutely in if faced with the promise of a good story.”
“All right,” he agreed. “I’ll do what I can for you.”
“Good. I’m in Hartford, Wisconsin, with Anita McGraw. I want to get her back to Chicago and keep her under close wraps until this case blows over. That means no one must have a whiff of where she is, because if they do, you’ll be covering her obituary. I can’t bring her down myself because I’m a hot property now. What I want to do is take her to Milwaukee and put her on a train and have you meet her at Union Station. When you do, get her into a hotel. Some place far enough from the Loop that some smart bellhop on Smeissen’s payroll won’t put two and two together when she comes in. Can do?”
“Jesus, Vic, you don’t do anything in a small way, do you? Sure. What’s the story? Why is she in danger? Smeissen knock off her boyfriend?”
“Murray, I’m telling you, you put any of this in print before the whole story is finished, and they’re going to be fishing your body out of the Chicago River: I guarantee I’ll put it there.”
“You have my word of honor as a gent who is waiting to scoop the City of Chicago. What time is the train coming in?”
“I don’t know. I’ll call you again from Milwaukee.”
When I hung up, Anita had come back out and was waiting by the car. “They weren’t real happy about me quitting,” she said.
I laughed. “Well, worry about that on the way down. It’ll keep your mind off your troubles.”