Indemnity Only

  Indemnity Only

  Sara Paretsky

  The vice-president of a Chicago bank hires V.I. Warshawski to find his son. She's pleased. The head of the International Brotherhood of Knifegrinders hires her to find his daughter. She's not so pleased. Who's the boss in this dangerous game of insurance fraud, murder contracts and gunmen?

  Sara Paretsky

  Indemnity Only

  The first book in the V.I. Warshawski series, 1982

  For Stuart Kaminsky. Thanks.

  A NOTE FROM THE AUTHOR

  On New Year’s Eve, flushed with champagne, I made a secret resolution to write a novel in 1979 or send that fantasy packing along with my daydreams of singing at La Scala or dancing with Nureyev. The next day I began:

  I looked hopefully in my wallet, but found only the two greasy singles which had been there in the morning. I could get a sandwich, or a pack of cigarettes and a cheap shot of scotch. I sighed and looked down at the Wabash Avenue el tracks.

  Nine months later, I’d added about fifty pages to this unpromising opening and thought I should resign myself to a life of selling computers to insurance agents. At that point a co-worker named Mary Hogan, who knew about my efforts, showed me the Northwestern University fall extension catalog. Stuart Kaminsky was teaching an evening course called “Writing Detective Fiction for Publication.” I felt like Alice finding the mushroom-just what I needed to get to be the right size.

  Stuart read my puny story with great care. He gave me essential advice for thinking about my character and my story. In the process, V. I. stopped smoking and took up my whiskey, Black Label. Most important, Stuart became the voice I needed to hear, the voice that said, “You can write. You can do this thing.” Without Stuart I would not have had the confidence to push the story through to the end. That is why Indemnity Only is dedicated to him.

  Whenever I read the memoirs of a writer like Sartre, who says he knew from childhood he was “destined for words,” or Bellow, who knew he “was born to be a performing or interpretive creature,” I wonder what unacknowledged voice spoke to them as children. Sartre actually tells us it was his mother and his grandfather who bound his childish effusions as novels and passed them with much outspoken pride around the neighborhood. Without his family creating in him that vision of himself, young Jean-Paul could not have grown up with such a sense of destiny. His cousins, told at the same age they were fated to be engineers, became engineers.

  I wrote from my earliest childhood, but for myself only. Like the heroine of Dream Girl, I spent vast amounts of my waking hours imagining myself inside different stories; when they acquired some kind of shape, I wrote them down. But I thought my stories were a sign of the sickness afflicting the woman in the play, and that true love would cure me as it did her, for I grew up in a time and place where little girls were destined to be wives and mothers.

  I did find true love, but my husband, Courtenay Wright, convinced me that my stories were worth telling, that my dreams signaled not sickness but a lively mind. His support has not wavered from that cold New Year’s Day to the present hot June in which I struggle with my seventh V. I. novel. I have had some years of terrible pain and disability in between; Courtenay has held on to me and kept me from losing that essential core from which my stories come. In a way, every word I write is dedicated to Courtenay.

  When I finished the manuscript in May 1980, with the first weak paragraph and limp chapter exchanged for the current one, Stuart Kaminsky sent it to his agent, Dominick Abel, in New York. Dominick took on V. I. and me and has stuck with us ever since. I don’t want to turn this introduction into a volume of the Talmud, so I’ll only say of Dominick, in the old Chinese words, that I would send him for horses.

  It took him a year to find a publisher for Indemnity Only. Indeed, when I’m getting too conceited with myself, I pull out the file of rejection letters from that year and read that I’m “too talky”; have “wooden characters”; wrote a “derivative story”; and that Indemnity Only was a “marginal book which we can’t afford to take on.” The file is a nice fat one and a good antidote for vanity. In the face of so much negativism, I’m especially grateful to Nancy van Itallie and the Dial Press for taking the gamble on publishing me.

  The Dial Press is no more, and that is sad. [1] But after almost a decade of wandering I’ve found my proper home at Delacorte. Jackie Farber and Carole Baron provide the kind of editorial and publishing support most writers only dream about.

  Indemnity Only came to life so precariously that it remains very precious to me. Sometimes I look at it with amazement-amazed that I did find the strength to write a book, amazed that someone actually published it. And now that Delacorte is bringing out a new edition I look at it with a lot of pride. I was tempted to go through and polish up the writing, change those flaws I wasn’t alert enough to see in 1979. But I decided it would be unethical to tamper with the text. With the exception of two very small corrections this is the same book I sent Dominick Abel ten years ago.

  Sara Paretsky

  Chicago

  June 1990

  1

  Summertime

  The night air was thick and damp. As I drove south along Lake Michigan, I could smell rotting alewives like a faint perfume on the heavy air. Little fires shone here and there from late-night barbecues in the park. On the water a host of green and red running lights showed people seeking relief from the sultry air. On shore traffic was heavy, the city moving restlessly, trying to breathe. It was July in Chicago.

  I got off Lake Shore Drive at Randolph Street and swung down Wabash under the iron arches of the elevated tracks, At Monroe I stopped the car and got out.

  Away from the lake the city was quieter. The South Loop, with no entertainment beyond a few peep-shows and the city lockup, was deserted-a drunk weaving uncertainly down the street was my only companion. I crossed Wabash and went into the Pulteney Building next to the Monroe Street Tobacco Store. At night it looked like a terrible place to have an office. The hall’s mosaic-tiled walls were chipped and dirty. I wondered if anyone ever washed the scuffed linoleum floor. The lobby must create a reassuring impression on potential clients.

  I pushed the elevator button. No response. I tried again. Again no response. I shoved open the heavy stairwell door, climbing slowly to the fourth floor. It was cool in the stairwell and I lingered there a few minutes before moving on down the badly lit hallway to the east end, the end where rents are cheaper because all the offices look out on the Wabash el. In the dim light I could read the inscription on the door: “V. I. Warshawski. Private Investigator.”

  I had called my answering service from a filling station on the North Side, just a routine check on my way home to a shower, air conditioning, and a late supper. I was surprised when they told me I had a caller, and unhappy when they said he’d refused to give a name. Anonymous callers are a pain. They usually have something to hide, often something criminal, and they don’t leave their names just so you can’t find out what they’re hiding ahead of time.

  This guy was coming at 9:15, which didn’t even give me time to eat. I’d spent a frustrating afternoon in the ozone-laden heat trying to track down a printer who owed me fifteen hundred dollars. I’d saved his firm from being muscled out by a national chain last spring and now I was sorry I’d done it. If my checking account hadn’t been so damned anemic, I’d have ignored this phone call. As it was, I squared my shoulders and unlocked the door.

  With the lights on my office looked Spartan but not unpleasant and I cheered up slightly. Unlike my apartment, which is always in mild disarray, my office is usually tidy. I’d bought the big wooden desk at a police auction. The little Olivetti portable had been my mother’s, as well as a reproduction of the Ufizzi hanging over
my green filing cabinet. That was supposed to make visitors realize that mine was a high-class operation. Two straight-backed chairs for clients completed the furniture. I didn’t spend much time here and didn’t need any other amenities.

  I hadn’t been in for several days and had a stack of bills and circulars to sort through. A computer firm wanted to arrange a demonstration of what computers could do to help my business. I wondered if a nice little desktop IBM could find me paying customers.

  The room was stuffy. I looked through the bills to see which ones were urgent. Car insurance-I’d better pay that. The others I threw out-most were first-time bills, a few second-time. I usually only pay bills the third time they come around. If they want the money badly, they won’t forget you. I stuffed the insurance into my shoulder bag, then turned to the window and switched the air conditioner onto “high.” The room went dark. I’d blown a fuse in the Pulteney’s uncertain electrical system. Stupid. You can’t turn an air conditioner right onto “high” in a building like this. I cursed myself and the building management equally and wondered whether the storeroom with the fuse boxes was open at night. During the years I’d spent in the building, I’d learned how to repair most of what could go wrong with it, including the bathroom on the seventh floor, whose toilet backed up about once a month.

  I made my way back down the hall and down the stairs to the basement. A single naked bulb lit the bottom of the stairs. It showed a padlock on the supply-room door. Tom Czarnik, the building’s crusty superintendent, didn’t trust anyone. I can open some locks, but I didn’t have time now for an American padlock. One of those days. I counted to ten in Italian, and started back upstairs with even less enthusiasm than before.

  I could hear a heavy tread ahead of me and guessed it was my anonymous visitor. When I got to the top, I quietly opened the stairwell door and watched him in the dim light. He was knocking at my office door. I couldn’t see him very well, but got the impression of a short stocky man. He held himself aggressively, and when he got no answer to his knocking, he opened the door without hesitation and went inside. I walked down the hallway and went in after him.

  A five-foot-high sign from Arnie’s Steak Joynt flashed red and yellow across the street, providing spasms of light to my office. I saw my visitor whirl as I opened the door. “I’m looking for V. I. Warshawski,” he said, his voice husky but confident-the voice of a man used to having his own way.

  “Yes,” I said, going past him to sit behind my desk.

  “Yes, what?” he demanded.

  “Yes, I’m V.I. Warshawski. You call my answering service for an appointment?”

  “Yeah, but I didn’t know it would mean walking up four flights of stairs to a dark office. Why the hell doesn’t the elevator work?”

  “The tenants in this building are physical fitness nuts. We agreed to get rid of the elevator-climbing stairs is well known as a precaution against heart attacks.”

  In one of the flashes from Arnie’s I saw him make an angry gesture. “I didn’t come here to listen to a comedienne,” he said, his husky voice straining. “When I ask questions I expect to hear them answered.”

  “In that case, ask reasonable questions. Now, do you want to tell me why you need a private investigator?”

  “I don’t know. I need help all right, but this place-Jesus-and why is it so dark in here?”

  “The lights are out,” I said, my temper riding me. “You don’t like my looks, leave. I don’t like anonymous callers, either.”

  “All right, all right,” he said placatingly. “Simmer down. But do we have to sit in the dark?”

  I laughed. “A fuse blew a few minutes before you showed up. We can go over to Arnie’s Steak Joynt if you want some light.” I wouldn’t have minded getting a good look at him myself.

  He shook his head. “No, we can stay here.” He fidgeted around some, then sat in one of the visitors’ chairs.

  “You got a name?” I asked, to fill in the pause while he collected his thoughts.

  “Oh, yeah, sorry,” he said, fumbling in his wallet. He pulled out a card and passed it across the desk. I held it up to read in a flash from Arnie’s. “John L. Thayer, Executive Vice-President, Trust, Ft. Dearborn Bank and Trust.” I pursed my lips. I didn’t make it over to La Salle Street very often, but John Thayer was a very big name indeed at Chicago’s biggest bank. Hot diggity, I thought. Play this fish right, Vic, I urged myself. Here come de rent!

  I put the card in my jeans pocket. “Yes, Mr. Thayer. Now what seems to be the problem?”

  “Well, it’s about my son. That is, it’s about his girl friend. At least she’s the one who-” He stopped. A lot of people, especially men, aren’t used to sharing their problems, and it takes them a while to get going. “You know, I don’t mean any offense, but I’m not sure I should talk to you after all. Not unless you’ve got a partner or something.”

  I didn’t say anything.

  “You got a partner?” he persisted.

  “No, Mr. Thayer,” I said evenly. “I don’t have a partner.”

  “Well, this really isn’t a job for a girl to take on alone.”

  A pulse started throbbing in my right temple. “I skipped dinner after a long day in the heat to meet you down here.” My voice was husky with anger. I cleared my throat and tried to steady myself. “You wouldn’t even identify yourself until I pushed you to it. You pick at my office, at me, but you can’t come out and ask anything directly. Are you trying to find out whether I’m honest, rich, tough, or what? You want some references, ask for them. But don’t waste my time like this. I don’t need to argue you into hiring my services-it was you who insisted on making an appointment for the middle of the night.”

  “I’m not questioning your honesty,” he said quickly. “Look, I’m not trying to get your goat. But you are a girl, and things may get heavy.”

  “I’m a woman, Mr. Thayer, and I can look out for myself. If I couldn’t, I wouldn’t be in this kind of business. If things get heavy, I’ll figure out a way to handle them-or go down trying. That’s my problem, not yours. Now, you want to tell me about your son, or can I go home where I can turn on an air conditioner?”

  He thought some more, and I took some deep breaths to calm myself, ease the tension in my throat.

  “I don’t know,” he finally said. “I hate to, but I’m running out of options.” He looked up, but I couldn’t see his face. “Anything I tell you has to be strictly in confidence.”

  “Righto, Mr. Thayer,” I said wearily. “Just you, me, and Arnie’s Steak Joynt.”

  He caught his breath but remembered he was trying to be conciliatory. “It’s really Anita, my son’s girl friend. Not that Pete-my son, that is-hasn’t been a bit of a problem, too.”

  Dope, I thought morosely. All these North Shore types think about is dope. If it was a pregnancy, they’d just pay for an abortion and be done with it. However, mine was not to pick and choose, so I grunted encouragingly.

  “Well, this Anita is not really a very desirable type, and ever since Pete got mixed up with her he’s been having some peculiar ideas.” The language sounded strangely formal in his husky voice.

  “I’m afraid I only detect things, Mr. Thayer. I can’t do too much about what the boy thinks.”

  “No, no, I know that. It’s just that-they’ve been living together in some disgusting commune or other-did I tell you they’re students at the University of Chicago? Anyway, he, Pete, he’s taken to talking about becoming a union organizer and not going to business school, so I went down to talk to the girl. Make her see reason, kind of.”

  “What’s her last name, Mr. Thayer?”

  “Hill. Anita Hill. Well, as I said, I went down to try to make her see reason. And-right after that she disappeared.”

  “It sounds to me like your problem’s solved.”

  “I wish it was. The thing is, now Pete’s saying I bought her off, paid her to disappear. And he’s threatening to change his name and drop out of sight unless she
turns up again.”

  Now I’ve heard everything, I thought. Hired to find a person so her boyfriend would go to business school.

  “And were you responsible for her disappearance, Mr. Thayer?”

  “Me? If I was, I’d be able to get her back.”

  “Not necessarily. She could have squeezed fifty grand out of you and gone off on her own so you couldn’t get it back. Or you could have paid her to disappear completely. Or you may have killed her or caused her to he killed and want someone else to take the rap for you. A guy like you has a lot of resources.”

  He seemed to laugh a little at that. “Yeah, I suppose all that could be true. Anyway, I want you to find her-to find Anita.”

  “Mr. Thayer, I don’t like to turn down work, but why not get the police-they’re much better equipped than I for this sort of thing.”

  “The police and I-” he started, then broke off. “I don’t feel like advertising my family problems to the police,” he said heavily.

  That had the ring of truth-but what had he started to say? “And why were you so worried about things getting heavy?” I wondered aloud.

  He shifted in his chair a bit. “Some of those students can get pretty wild,” he muttered. I raised my eyebrows skeptically, but he couldn’t see that in the dark.

  “How did you get my name?” I asked. Like an advertising survey-did you hear about us in Rolling Stone or through a friend?

  “I found your name in the Yellow Pages. And I wanted someone in the Loop and someone who didn’t know-my business associates.”

  “Mr. Thayer, I charge a hundred and a quarter a day, plus expenses. And I need a five-hundred-dollar deposit. I make progress reports, but clients don’t tell me how to do the job-any more than your widows and orphans tell you how to run the Fort Dearborn’s Trust Department.”