10
Beautiful People
Lotty lifted her thick eyebrows as I came into the living room. “Ah,” she said, “success shows in your walk. The office was all right?”
“No, but I found what they were looking for.” I took out the draft and showed it to her. “Make anything of it?”
She put on a pair of glasses and looked at it intently, pursing her lips. “I see these from time to time, you understand, when I get paid for administering to industrial accident victims. It looks totally in order, as far as I can tell-of course, I don’t read them for their content, just glance at them and send them to the bank. And the name Gielczowski means nothing to me, except that it is Polish: should it?”
I shrugged. “I don’t know. Doesn’t mean anything to me either. I’d better make a copy of it and get it stowed away, though. Have you eaten?”
“I was waiting for you, my dear,” she answered.
“Then let me take you out to dinner. I need it-it took a lot of work finding this, physical I mean, although the mental process helped-nothing like a university education to teach you logic.”
Lotty agreed. I showered and changed into a respectable pair of slacks. A dressy shirt and a loose jacket completed the outfit, and the shoulder holster fitted neatly under my left arm. I put the claim draft in my jacket pocket.
Lotty scrutinized me when I came back into the living room. “You hide it well, Vic.” I looked puzzled and she laughed. “My dear, you left the empty box in the kitchen garbage, and I knew I had brought no Smith & Wesson into the house. Shall we go?”
I laughed but said nothing. Lotty drove us down to Belmont and Sheridan and we had a pleasant, simple dinner in the wine cellar at the Chesterton Hotel. An Austrian wine store, it had expanded to include a tiny restaurant. Lotty approved of their coffee and ate two of the rich Viennese pastries.
When we got home, I insisted on checking front and back entrances, but no one had been around. Inside, I called Larry Anderson, my cleaning friend, and arranged for him to right my apartment. Not tomorrow-he had a big job on, but he’d go over with his best crew personally on Tuesday. Not at all, he’d be delighted. I got hold of Ralph and agreed to meet him for dinner the next night at Ahab’s. “How’s your face?” he asked.
“Much better, thanks. I should look almost presentable for you tomorrow night.”
At eleven I bade Lotty a very sleepy good night and fell into bed. I was instantly asleep, falling down a black hole into total oblivion. Much later I began dreaming. The red Venetian glasses were lined up on my mother’s dining-room table. “Now you must hit high C, Vicki, and hold it,” my mother said. I made a tremendous effort and sustained the note. Under my horrified eyes, the row of glasses dissolved into a red pooh It way my mother’s blood. With a tremendous effort I pulled myself awake. The phone was ringing.
Lotty had answered it on her extension by the time I oriented myself in the strange bed. When I lifted the receiver, I could hear her crisp, soothing voice saying, “Yes, this is Dr. Herschel.” I hung up and squinted at the little illuminated face of the bedside clock: 5:13. Poor Lotty, I thought, what a life, and rolled back over to sleep.
The ringing phone dragged me back to life again several hours later. I dimly remembered the earlier call and, wondering if Lotty were back yet, reached for the phone. “Hello?” I said, and heard Lotty on the other extension. I was about to hang up again when a tremulous little voice said, “Is Miss Warshawski there?”
“Yes, speaking. What can I do for you?” I heard the click as Lotty hung up again.
“This is Jill Thayer,” the little voice quavered, trying to speak calmly. “Can you come out to my house, please?”
“You mean right now?” I asked.
“Yes,” she breathed.
“Sure thing, honey. Be right out. Can you tell me the trouble now?” I had shoved the receiver between my right shoulder and my ear and was pulling on some clothes. It was 7:30 and Lotty’s burlap curtains let in enough light to dress by without my having to fumble for the lamp switch.
“It’s-I can’t talk right now. My mother wants me. Just come, please.”
“Okay, Jill. Hold the fort. I’ll be there in forty minutes.” I hung up and hurriedly finished dressing in the clothes I’d worn last night, not omitting the gun under my left shoulder. I stopped in the kitchen where Lotty was eating toast and drinking the inevitable thick Viennese coffee.
“So,” she said, “the second emergency of the day? Mine was a silly hemorrhaging child who had a bad abortion because she was afraid to come to me in the first place.” She grimaced. “And the mother was not to know, of course. And you?”
“Off to Winnetka. Another child, but pleasant, not silly.” Lotty had the Sun-Times open in front of her. “Anything new about the Thayers? She sounded quite panicked.”
Lotty poured me a cup of coffee, which I swallowed in scalding gulps while scanning the paper, but I found nothing. I shrugged, took a piece of buttered toast from Lotty, kissed her cheek, and was gone.
Native caution made me check the stairwells and the front walk carefully before going to the street. I even examined the backseat and the engine for untoward activity before getting into the car. Smeissen really had me spooked.
Traffic on the Kennedy was heavy with the Monday morning rush hour and people staggering home at the last minute from weekends in the country. Once I hit the outbound Edens, however, I had the road chiefly to myself, I had given Jill Thayer my card more to let her feel someone cared than because I expected an SOS, and with the half of my mind that wasn’t looking for speed traps I wondered what had caused the cry for help. A suburban teen-ager who had never seen death might find anything connected with it upsetting, yet she had struck me as essentially levelheaded. I wondered if her father had gone off the deep end in a big way.
I had left Lotty’s at 7:42, and turned onto Willow Road at 8:03. Pretty good time for fifteen miles, considering that three had been in the heavy city traffic on Addison. At 8:09 I pulled up to the gates of the Thayer house. That was as far as I got. Whatever had happened, it was excitement in a big way. The entrance was blocked by a Winnetka police car, lights flashing, and as far as I could see into the yard, it was filled with more cars and many policemen. I backed the Chevy down the road a bit and parked it on the gravel verge. It wasn’t until I turned the motor off and got out that I noticed the sleek black Mercedes that had been in the yard on Saturday. Only it wasn’t in the yard, it was tilted at a strange angle off the road. And it was no longer sleek, The front tires were flat, and the front windshield was a series of glass shards, fragments left from radiating circles. My guess was that bullets, and many of them, had caused the damage.
In my neighborhood a noisy crowd would have gathered to gape over the sight. This being the North Shore, a crowd had gathered, but a smaller and quieter one than Halsted and Belmont would have attracted. They were being held at bay by a lean young policeman with a mustache.
“Gee, they really got Mr. Thayer’s car,” I said to the young man, strolling over.
When disaster strikes, the police like to keep all the news to themselves. They never tell you what happened, and they never answer leading questions. Winnetka’s finest were no exception. “What do you want?” the young man said suspiciously.
I was about to tell him the candid truth when it occurred to me that it would never get me past the herd in the driveway. “My name is V. I. Warshawski,” I said, smiling in what I hoped was a saintly way. “I used to be Miss Jill Thayer’s governess. When all the trouble started this morning, she called me and asked me to come out to be with her.”
The young cop frowned. “Do you have any identification?” he demanded.