Blood Shot (7 page)

“Joey Pankowski used to work at the Xerxes plant,” I continued, “but he died in 1985. Now there’s some question that Louisa Djiak, who also worked there, has a child whose father he may have been. That child is also entitled to a share of the settlement, but Ms. Djiak is very ill and her mind wanders—we can’t get a clear answer from her as to who the father is.”

“I can’t help you, young lady. I have no recollection of any of these names.”

“Well, I understand you took blood and medical histories from all the employees every spring for a number of years. If you would just go back and look at your records, you might find that—”

He cut me off with a violence that surprised me. “I don’t know who you’ve been talking to, but that’s an absolute lie. I won’t stand to be harassed and harangued in my own house. Now you get out right now, or I’ll call the police. And if you’re an officer of the court, you can explain that to them in jail.” He turned without waiting for a reply and marched from the room.

Clio Chigwell watched him leave, her scowl deeper than ever. “You’ll have to go.”

“He did the tests,” I said. “Why is he so upset?”

“I don’t know anything about it. But you can’t ask him to violate his patients’ confidentiality. Now you’d better leave, unless you do want to speak with the police.”

I got up as nonchalantly as I could under the circumstances. “You have my card,” I said to her at the door. “If something occurs to you, give me a call.”

9

Lifestyles of the Rich and Famous

A light drizzle had started to fall. I sat in the car staring at the windshield, watching the rain break up on the greasy glass. After a while I turned on the engine, hoping to coax a little heat from the noisy motor.

Was it the Pankowski name that had rattled Chigwell so? Or was it me? Had Joiner phoned him telling him to beware Polish detectives and the questions they bring? No, that couldn’t be right. If that was the case, Chigwell would never have agreed to see me at all. And anyway, Joiner wouldn’t know Chigwell. The doctor was almost eighty; he must have been long retired when Joiner started at the plant two years ago. So it had to have been the mention either of Pankowski or Louisa. But why?

I wondered with growing uneasiness what Caroline knew that she hadn’t bothered to tell me. I remembered in vivid detail the winter she had asked me to fight an eviction notice served on Louisa. After a week of running between courts and landlord, I saw an article in the Sun-Times on “Teens Who Make a Difference.” It featured a glowing sixteen-year-old Caroline and the soup kitchen she’d used the rent money to set up. That was the last cry for help I’d answered from her for ten years, and I was beginning to think I should have let it go for twenty.

I fished around on the backseat for a Kleenex and found a towel I’d used at the beach last summer. After wiping a peephole in the windshield I finally put the car into gear and headed for the expressway. I was torn between calling Caroline to tell her the deal was off and the elephant child’s ’satiable curiosity to find out what had rattled Chigwell so badly.

In the end I did nothing. When I had fought my way through the noontime Loop traffic to my office, messages from several clients awaited me—inquiries I’d let slide while I mucked around in Caroline’s problem. One was from an old customer who wanted help with computer security. I referred him to a friend of mine who’s a computer expert and tackled the other two. These were routine financial investigations, my bread and butter. It felt good to work on something where I could identify both problem and solution, and I spent the afternoon burrowing through files in the State of Illinois Building.

I returned to my office around seven to type the reports. They were worth five hundred dollars to me; since both clients paid promptly, I wanted to get the invoices into the mail.

I was rattling along on my old standard Olympia when the phone rang. I looked at my watch. Almost eight. Wrong number. Caroline. Maybe Lotty. I picked up the phone on the third ring, right before the answering service kicked in.

“Ms. Warshawski?” It was an old man’s voice, fragile and quavering.

“Yes,” I said.

“I want to speak to Ms. Warshawski, please.” For all its quavering, the voice was confident, used to managing people on the phone.

“Speaking,” I said as patiently as I could. I had missed lunch and was dreaming of a steak and whiskey.

“Mr. Gustav Humboldt would like to see you. When would it be convenient to schedule an appointment?”

“Can you tell me what he wants to see me about?” I backspaced and used white-out to cover a typo. It’s getting harder to find correction fluid and typewriter ribbons in these days of word processors, so I capped the bottle carefully to save it.

“I understand it’s a confidential matter, miss. If you’re free this evening, he could see you now. Or tomorrow afternoon at three.”

“Just a minute while I check my schedule.” I put the phone down and got Who’s Who in Chicago Commerce from the top of my filing cabinet. Gustav Humboldt’s listing covered a column and a half of six-point type. Born in Bremerhaven in 1904. Emigrated in 1930. Chairman and chief stockholder of Humboldt Chemical, founded in 1937, with plants in forty countries, 1986 sales of $8 billion, assets of $10 billion, director of this, member of that. Headquarters in Chicago. Of course. I’d passed the Humboldt Building a million times walking down Madison Street, an old no-nonsense structure without the attention-getting lobbies of the modem giants.

I picked up the phone. “I could make it around nine-thirty tonight,” I offered.

“That will be fine, Ms. Warshawski. The address is the Roanoke Building, twelfth floor. I’ll tell the doorman to look out for your car.”

The Roanoke was an old dowager on Oak Street, one of six or seven buildings bordering the strip between the lake and Michigan Avenue. All had gone up in the early decades of this century, providing housing for the McCormicks and Swifts and other riffraff. Nowadays if you had a million dollars to invest in housing and were related to the British royal family, they might let you in after a year or two of intensive checking.

I set a speed record for two-finger typing and got reports and invoices into their envelopes by eight-thirty. I’d have to forgo whiskey and steak—I didn’t want to be logy for an encounter with someone who could set me up for life—but there was time for soup and a salad at the little Italian restaurant up Wabash from my office. Especially if I didn’t have to worry about parking at the other end.

In the restaurant bathroom I saw that my hair was frizzing around my head from this morning’s drizzle, but at least the black dress still looked tidy and professional. I put on a little light makeup and retrieved my car from the underground garage.

It was just nine-thirty when I pulled into the semicircle under the Roanoke’s green awning. The doorman, resplendent in matching green livery, bent his head courteously while I gave him my name.

“Ah, yes, Ms. Warshawski.” His voice was fruity, his tone avuncular. “Mr. Humboldt is expecting you. If you’ll just give me your keys?”

He led me into the lobby. Most modem buildings going up for the rich these days feature glass and chrome lobbies with monstrous plants and hangings, but the Roanoke had been built when labor was cheaper and more skillful. The floor was an intricate mosaic of geometric shapes and the wood-paneled walls were festooned with Egyptian figurines.

An old man, also in green livery, was sitting on a chair next to some wooden double doors. He got up when the doorman and I came in.

“Young lady for Mr. Humboldt, Fred. I’ll let them know she’s here if you’ll take her on up.”

Fred unlocked the door—no remote-control clicks here—and took me to the elevator at a stately tread. I followed him into a roomy cage with a floral carpet on the floor and a plush-upholstered bench against the back wall. I sat casually on the bench, crossing my legs, as though personal elevator service were an everyday occurrence with me.

The elevator opened onto what might have been the foyer of a mansion. Gray-white marble tiles showing streaks of pink were covered here and there by throw rugs that had probably been made in Persia when the Ayatollah’s grandfather was a baby. The hall seemed to form an atrium, with the elevator at its center, but before I could tiptoe down to a marble statue in the left corner to explore, the carved wooden door in front of me opened.

An old man stood there in morning dress. His scalp showed pink through wisps of fine white hair. He inclined his head briefly, a token bow, but his blue eyes were frosty and remote. Rising to the solemnity of the occasion, I fished in my bag and handed him a card without speaking.

“Very good, miss. Mr. Humboldt will see you now. If you’ll follow me …”

He walked slowly, either from age or from some concept of a butler’s proper gait, giving me time to gawk in what I trusted was a discreet fashion. About halfway along the length of the building he opened a door on the left and held it for me to enter. Looking at the books lining three walls and the opulent red-leather furniture in front of a fireplace in the fourth, my keen intuition told me we were in the library. A florid man, heavy without being corpulent, sat in front of the fire with a newspaper. As the door opened he put the paper down and got to his feet.

“Ms. Warshawski. How good of you to come on such short notice.” He held out a firm hand.

“Not at all, Mr. Humboldt.”

He motioned me to a leather armchair on the other side of the fire from him. I knew from the Who’s Who entry that he was eighty-four, but he could have said sixty without anyone raising an eyebrow. His thick hair still showed a touch of pale yellow, and his blue eyes were sharp and clear in a face almost free of wrinkles.

“Anton, bring us some cognac—you drink cognac, Ms. Warshawski?—and then we’ll be fine on our own.”

The butler disappeared for perhaps two minutes, during which my host courteously made sure the fire wasn’t too hot for me. Anton returned with a decanter and snifters, poured, carefully placed the decanter in the center of a small table at Humboldt’s right hand, fiddled with the fire tongs. I realized he was as curious as I about what Humboldt wanted and was trying to think of ways to linger, but Humboldt dismissed him briskly.

“Ms. Warshawski, I have an awkward matter to discuss, and I beg your indulgence if I don’t do so with maximum grace. I’m an industrialist, after all, an engineer more at home with chemicals than beautiful young women.” He had come to America as a grown man; even after close to sixty years a mild accent remained.

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.”