“Yeah, I guess so,” I answered. “Between yesterday afternoon and this afternoon I’ve talked to a whole lot of different people who either knew Peter Thayer or his girl friend-the gal who’s vanished. You and your boss, among others.
“Well, when I got home late this afternoon, two hired thugs were waiting for me. We fought. I was able to hold them off for a while, but one of them knocked me out. They took me to Earl Smeissen’s home. If you don’t know Earl, don’t try to meet him. He was just starting to muscle to the top of his racket-extortion, prostitution-when I was with the Public Defender ten years ago, and he seems to have kept right on trucking since then. He now has a stable of tough guys who all carry guns. He is not a nice person.”
I stopped to marshal my presentation. From the corner of my eye I saw the waiter shimmering up again, but Ralph waved him away. “Anyway, he ordered me off the Thayer case, and set one of his tame goons on me to back it up.” I stopped. What had happened next in Earl’s apartment was very raw in my mind. I had calculated it carefully at the time, decided that it was better to get everything over at once and convince Earl that I was scared than to sit there all evening while he took increasingly violent shots at me. Nonetheless, the thought of being so helpless, the memory of Tony beating me, like a disloyal whore or a welching loan customer-to be so vulnerable was close to unbearable. Unconsciously, my left hand had clenched, and I realized I was slicing it against the tabletop. Ralph was watching me, an uncertain look on his face. His business and suburban life hadn’t prepared him for this kind of emotion.
I shook my head and tried for a lighter touch. “Anyway, my rib cage is a little sore-which is why I winced and yelled when you grabbed hold of me in the bar. The question that’s exercising me, though, is who told Earl that I’d been around asking questions. Or more precisely, who cared so much that I’d been around that he asked-or paid- Earl to frighten me off.”
Ralph was still looking a little horrified. “Have you been to the police about this? ”
“No,” I said impatiently. “I can’t go to the police about this kind of thing. They know I’m interested in the case- they’ve asked me to get off, too, although more politely. If Bobby Mallory-the lieutenant in charge of the case-knew I’d been beaten up by Earl, Smeissen would deny the whole thing, and if I could prove it in court, he could say it was a million things other than this that made him do it. And Mallory wouldn’t give me an earful of sympathy-he wants me out of there anyway.”
“Well, don’t you think he’s right? Murder really is a police matter. And this group seems pretty wild for you to be mixed up with.”
I felt a quick surge of anger, the anger I get when I feel someone is pushing me. I smiled with an effort. “Ralph, I’m tired and I ache. I can’t try explaining to you tonight why this is my job-but please believe that it is my job and that I can’t give it to the police and run away. It’s true I don’t know specifically what’s going on here, but I do know the temperament and reactions of a guy like Smeissen. I usually only deal with white-collar criminals-but when they’re cornered, they’re not much different from an extortion artist like Smeissen.”
“I see.” Ralph paused, thinking, then his attractive grin came. “I have to admit that I don’t know much about crooks of any kind-except the occasional swindlers who try to rip off insurance companies. But we fight them in the courts, not with hand-to-hand combat. I’ll try to believe you know what you’re up to, though.”
I laughed a little embarrassedly. “Thanks. I’ll try not to act too much like Joan of Arc-getting on a horse and charging around in all directions.”
The waiter was back, looking a little intimidated. Ralph ordered baked oysters and quail, but I opted for Senegalese soup and spinach salad. I was too exhausted to want a lot of food.
We talked about indifferent things for a while. I asked Ralph if he followed the Cubs. “For my sins, I’m an ardent fan,” I explained. Ralph said he caught a game with his son every now and then. “But I don’t see how anyone can be an ardent Cub fan. They’re doing pretty well right now-cleaned out the Reds-but they’ll fade the way they always do. No, give me the Yankees.”
“Yankees!” I expostulated. “I don’t see how anyone can root for them-it’s like rooting for the Cosa Nostra. You know they’ve got the money to buy the muscle to win-but that
“I like to see sports played well,” Ralph insisted. “I can’t stand the clowning around that Chicago teams do. Look at the mess Veeck’s made of the White Sox this year.”
We were still arguing about it when the waiter brought the first course. The soup was excellent-light, creamy, with a hint of curry. I started feeling better and ate some bread and butter, too. When Ralph’s quail arrived, I ordered another bowl of soup and some coffee.
“Now explain to me why a union wouldn’t buy insurance from Ajax.”
“Oh, they could,” Ralph said, his mouth full. He chewed and swallowed. “But it would only be for their headquarters-maybe fire coverage on the building, Workers Compensation for the secretaries, things like that. There wouldn’t be a whole lot of people to cover. And a union like the Knifegrinders-see, they get their insurance where they work. The big thing is Workers Comp, and that’s paid for by the company, not the union.”
“That covers disability payments, doesn’t it?” I asked.
“Yes, or death if it’s job-related. Medical bills even if there isn’t lost time. I guess it’s a funny kind of setup. Your rates depend on the kind of business you conduct-a factory pays more than an office, for instance. But the insurance company can be stuck with weekly payments for years if a guy is disabled on the job. We have some cases-not many, fortunately-that go back to 1927. But see, the insured doesn’t pay more, or not that much more, if we get stuck with a whole lot of disability payments. Of course, we can cancel the insurance, but we’re still required to cover any disabled workers who are already collecting.
“Well, this is getting off the subject. The thing is, there are lots of people who go on disability who shouldn’t- it’s pretty cushy and there are plenty of corrupt doctors-but it’s hard to imagine a full-scale fraud connected with it that would do anyone else much good.” He ate some more quail. “No, your real money is in pensions, as you suggested, or maybe life insurance. But it’s easier for an insurance company to commit fraud with life insurance than for anyone else. Look at the Equity Funding case.”
“Well, could your boss be involved in something like that? Rigging phony policies with the Knifegrinders providing dummy policyholders?” I asked.
“Vic, why are you working so hard to prove that Yardley’s a crook? He’s really not a bad guy-I’ve worked for him for three years, and I’ve never had anything against him.”
I laughed at that. “It bugs me that he agreed to see me so easily. I don’t know a lot about insurance, but I’ve been around big corporations before. He’s a department head, and they’re like gynecologists-their schedules are always booked for about twice as many appointments as they can realistically handle.”
Ralph clutched his head. “You’re making me dizzy, Vic, and you’re doing it on purpose. How can a claim department head possibly be like a gynecologist!”
“Yeah, well, you get the idea. Why would he agree to see me? he’d never heard of me, he has wall-to-wall appointments-but he didn’t even take phone calls while we were talking.”
“Yes, but you knew Peter was dead, and he didn’t-so you were expecting him to behave in a certain guilty way and that’s what you saw,” Ralph objected. “He might have been worried about him, about Peter, because he’d promised Jack Thayer that he’d be responsible for the boy. I don’t really see anything so surprising in Yardley’s talking to you. If Peter had been just a stray kid, I might-but an old family friend’s son? The kid hadn’t been in for four days, he wasn’t answering the phone-Yardley felt responsible as much as annoyed.”
I stopped, considering. What Ralph said made sense. I wondered if I had gotten carried away, whether my instinctive dislike of over-hearty businessmen was making me see ghosts where there were none.
“Okay, you could be right. But why couldn’t Masters be involved in a life-insurance fiddle?”
Ralph was finishing off his quail and ordering coffee and dessert. I asked for a large dish of ice cream. “Oh, that’s the way insurance companies are set up,” he said when the waiter had disappeared again. “We’re big-third largest in total premiums written, which is about eight point four billion dollars a year. That includes all lines, and all of the thirteen companies that make up the Ajax group. For legal reasons, life insurance can’t be written by the same company that writes property and casualty. So the Ajax Assurance Company does all our life and pension products, while the Ajax Casualty and some of the smaller ones do property and casualty.”
The waiter returned with our desserts. Ralph was having some kind of gooey torte. I decided to get Kahlua for my ice cream.
“Well, with a company as big as ours,” Ralph continued, “the guys involved in casualty-that’s stuff like Workers Comp, general liability, some of the auto-anyway, guys like Yardley and me don’t know too much about the life side
