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?”