Deadlock (16 page)

She turned and left. My head was aching again.

Monday morning, Lotty removed the cast, pronounced the swelling down and healing well under way, and had me released from bondage. We went north to her tidy apartment.

Lotty drives her green Datsun recklessly, believing that all other cars will move out of the way. A dent in the right fender and a long scrape along the passenger door are testimony to the success of her approach. I opened my eyes on Addison—a mistake, since it was in time to see her swerve in front of a CTA bus and to turn right onto Sheffield.

“Lotty, if you’re going to drive like this, get a semi—the guy who’s responsible for putting my shoulder in this sling walked away from the accident unscratched.”

Lotty turned off the ignition and hopped out of the car. “Firmness is necessary, Vic. Firmness or the others will drive one from the streets.”

It was hopeless; I gave up an unequal struggle.

We had stopped by my apartment to pick up clothes and a bottle of Black Label—Lotty doesn’t keep whiskey in the house. I’d also taken my Smith & Wesson from a locked cupboard in the bedroom closet. Someone had
tried to smash me to bits on the Dan Ryan. I didn’t feel like roving the streets unprotected.

Lotty went to the clinic she operates nearby. I settled down in her living room with a telephone. I was going to talk to everyone who’d had a chance to take a crack at me. My rage had disappeared as my head wound healed, but my sense of purpose was strengthened.

I reached the helpful young office manager at the Pole Star Line on the third ring. The news she gave me was not encouraging. The
Lucella Wieser
had delivered her load in Buffalo and was steaming to Erie to pick up coal bound for Detroit. After that she was booked on the upper lakes for some time—they didn’t expert her in Chicago until the middle of June. They could help me set up a radio conversation if it was urgent. I couldn’t see going over the issues I needed to cover by radio—I’d have to speak to the Pole Star contingent face to face.

Baffled there, I called down to Eudora Grain’s office and asked for Janet. She came to the phone and told me she was sorry about my accident and glad I was feeling better. I asked her if she knew where Phillips lived—I might pay a surprise visit to his wife to find out what time her husband had come home the night of my accident.

Janet didn’t know. It was up north someplace. If it was important, she could ask around and find out. It was important, I said, and gave her Lotty’s number.

While I was waiting I got Howard Mattingly’s number from Myron Fackley. Boom Boom told Pierre he’d seen Mattingly in a strange place. I was betting Mattingly was hanging around Lake Bluff when Boom Boom went sailing there with Paige the Saturday before he died. I wanted to find out.

Mattingly wasn’t home, but his wife, Elsie the Breathless, was. I reminded her we’d met at a number of hockey functions. Oh yes, she gasped, she remembered me.

“Boom Boom told me he’d seen your husband sailing on the twenty-third. Did you go with him?”

She hadn’t gone out with Howard that day—she was pregnant and she got tired so easily. She didn’t know if he’d been sailing or not—he certainly hadn’t said anything about it. Yes, she’d tell Howard to call me. She hung up without asking why I wanted to know.

Lotty came home for lunch. I fixed sardines on toast with cucumber and tomato and Lotty made a pot of the thick Viennese coffee she survives on. If I drank as much of it as she does they’d have to pull me off the chandeliers. I had orange juice and half a sandwich. My head still bothered me and I didn’t have much appetite.

Janet called from Eudora Grain after lunch. She’d pilfered the personal files while everyone was eating and gotten Phillips’s address: on Harbor Road in Lake Bluff. I thanked her absently—a lot seemed to go on in Lake Bluff. Grafalk. Paige had grown up there. Phillips lived there. And Paige and Boom Boom had gone sailing there on the twenty-third of April. I realized Janet had hung up and that I was still holding the receiver.

I put it down and went into the guest room to dress for a trip to the northern suburbs. We were in the second week in May and the air was still cold. My dad used to say Chicago had two seasons: winter and August. It was still winter.

I put on the blue Chanel jacket with a white shirt and white wool slacks. The effect was elegant and professional. Lotty had given me a canvas sling to keep as much pressure off the shoulder as possible—I’d wear it up in the car and take it off when I got to Phillips’s house.

Lotty’s spare room doubles as her study and I rummaged in the desk for a pad of paper and some pens. I also found a small leather briefcase. I put the Smith & Wesson in there along with the writing equipment. Ready for any occurrence.

Until they processed my claim check, the Ajax Insurance Company provided me a Chevette with the stiffest steering I’ve ever encountered. I’d considered using Boom Boom’s Jaguar but didn’t think I could operate a stick shift one-handed. I was trying to get Ajax to exchange the Chevette for something easier to handle. In the meantime it was going to make getting around difficult.

Driving up the Edens to Lake Bluff was a major undertaking. Every turn of the wheel wrenched my healing shoulder and strained the muscles in my neck, also weak from the accident. By the time I pulled off the Tri-State Tollway onto Route 137, my entire upper back was aching and my professionally crisp white blouse was wet under the armpits.

At two-thirty on a weekday Lake Bluff was still. Just south of the Great Lakes Naval Training Station on Lake Michigan, the town is a tiny pocket of wealth. To be sure, there are small lots and eight-room ranch houses, but imposing mansions predominate. A weak spring sun shone on nascent lawns and the trees sporting their first pale green frills.

I turned south on Green Bay Road and meandered around until I found Harbor Road. As I suspected, it overlooked the lake. I passed an outsize red brick dwelling sprawled on a huge lot, perhaps ten acres, with tennis courts visible through the budding shrubs—they’d be hidden by midsummer when the plants were in full foliage. Three lots later I came to the Phillipses.

Theirs was not an imposing mansion, but the setting was beautiful. As I wrenched the Chevette up the drive I could see Lake Michigan unfold behind the house. It was a two-story frame structure, topped with those rough shingles people think imitate thatching. Painted white, with a silvery trim around the windows, it looked as if it might have ten rooms or so—a big place to keep up, but an energetic
person could do it without help if she (or he) didn’t work outside the home.

A dark blue Olds 88 sedan, new model, rested outside the attached three-car garage. It looked as if the lady of the house might be in.

I rang the front bell. After a wait the door opened. A woman in her early forties, dark hair cut expensively to fall around her ears, stood there in a simple shirtwaist—Massandrea, it looked like. A good two hundred fifty dollars at Charles A. Stevens. Even though it was Monday afternoon at home, her makeup was perfect, ready for any unexpected visitors. Diamond drops hung from gold filigree attached to her ears.

She looked at me coldly. “Yes?”

“Good afternoon, Mrs. Phillips. I’m Ellen Edwards with Tri-State Research. We’re doing a survey of the wives of important corporate executives and I wanted to talk to you. Do you have a few minutes this afternoon, or could we set a time when it would be convenient?”

She looked at me unblinkingly for a few minutes. “Who sent you?”

“Tri-State did. Oh, you mean how did we get your name? By surveying the biggest companies in the Chicago area—or divisions of big companies like Eudora Grain—and getting the names of their top men.”

“Is this going to be published someplace?”

“We won’t use your name, Mrs. Phillips. We’re talking to five hundred women and we’ll just do some composite profiles.”

She thought about it and finally decided, grudgingly, that she would talk to me. She took me into the house, into a back room that gave a good view of Lake Michigan. Through the window I watched a tanned, well-muscled young man struggling with an eighteen-foot sailboat tied to a mooring about twenty yards from the shore.

We sat in wing chairs covered with needlepointed scenes in orange, blue, and green. Mrs. Phillips lighted a Kent. She didn’t offer me one—not that I smoke, it just would have been good manners.

“Do you sail, Mrs. Phillips?”

“No. I never cared to learn. That’s my son Paul. He just got home from Claremont for the summer.”

“Do you have any other children?”

They had two daughters, both in high school. What were her own hobbies? Needlepointing, of course—the ugly chair covers were examples of her handiwork. And tennis, she adored tennis. Now that they belonged to the Maritime Country Club she could play year round with good professionals.

Had she lived in Lake Bluff long? The last five years. Before that they’d been in Park Forest South. Much closer to the Port, of course—but Lake Bluff was such a wonderful place to live. Such a good home for the girls, and, of course, for her.

I told her the main things we were interested in were the advantages and disadvantages of being a corporate spouse. So the advantages had to include lifestyle—right? Unless she or he had independent means to support it?

She gave a rather self-conscious laugh. “No, we’re not like the—like some of the families around here. Every penny we spend Clayton earns. Not that some of these people aren’t finding out what it’s like to have to struggle a bit.” She seemed about to expand on the statement but thought better of it.

“Most of the women we talk to find their husbands’ schedules one of the biggest disadvantages—raising families alone, spending too much time alone. I imagine an executive like your husband puts in pretty long hours—and of course it’s quite a drive from here down to the Port.” The Tri-State Tollway to I-94 would be a smooth run, but he’d be doing it with the traffic as far as the Loop going in
and starting at the Loop going home. Maybe ninety minutes if everything went well.

“What time does he usually get home?”

That varied, but generally by seven o’clock.

Paul had gotten the sails up and was untying the boat. It looked pretty big for one person to handle alone, but Mrs. Phillips didn’t seem worried. She didn’t even watch as the boat bobbed off into the lake. Maybe she had total confidence in her son’s ability to handle the boat. Maybe she didn’t care what he did.

I told her we’d just take a typical day in their lives together and go through it—say last Thursday. What time they had gotten up, what they had for breakfast, what she did with herself. What time her husband got home from work. I heard all the dreary details of a life without focus, the hours at the tennis club, at the beauty parlor, at the Edens Plaza Shopping Center, before I got the information I’d come for. Clayton hadn’t gotten home that night until nine. She remembered because she’d cooked a roast and finally she and the girls ate it without waiting for him. She couldn’t remember if he seemed upset or tired or if his clothes were covered with grease.

“Covered with grease?” she echoed, astonished. “Why would your research firm want to know a thing like that?”

I’d forgotten who I was supposed to be for a minute. “I wondered if you do your own laundry, or sent it out, or have a maid do it.”

“We send it out. We can’t afford a maid.” She gave a sour smile. “Not yet, anyway. Maybe next year.”

“Well, thank you for your time, Mrs. Phillips. We’ll mail you a copy of the report when we complete it. We’ll be bringing it out later this summer.”

She took me back through the house. The furniture was expensive but not very attractive. Someone with more money than taste had picked it out—she, or Phillips, or the two of them together. As I said good-bye I idly asked
who lived in the big brick place up the road, the one with the tennis courts.

An expression combining awe and envy crossed her well-made-up face. “That’s the Grafalks. You ought to talk to her. Her husband owns one of the biggest first in town, ships. They have maids and a chauffeur—the works.”

“Do you spend much time with them?”

“Oh well, they lead their lives, we lead ours. They sponsored us in the Maritime Club and Niels takes Paul and Clayton sailing with him sometimes. But
she
’s pretty standoffish. If you don’t belong to the Symphony Board you aren’t worth much to her.” She seemed to feel she might have said too much, for she hastily changed the subject and said good-bye.

I backed the Chevette onto Harbor Road and drove past the Grafalks’. So that was where the Viking lived. A pretty nice spread. I stopped the car and looked at it, half tempted to go in and try my pitch on Mrs. Grafalk. As I sat, a Bentley nosed its way through the gates and turned onto the road. A thin, middle-aged woman with graying black hair was at the wheel. She didn’t look at me as she came out—maybe they were used to gawkers. Or perhaps she wasn’t the owner but just a visitor—a sister member of the Symphony Board.