Warshawski 01 - Indemnity Only Read Free Page B

cutoffs and a T-shirt. The money helped take my mind off the thick air when I got outside. I did five easy miles—over to the lake and around Belmont Harbor and back to my large, cheap apartment on Halsted. It was only 8:30, but I was sweating freely from running in the heat. I drank a tall glass of orange juice and made coffee before taking a shower. I left myrunning clothes on a chair and didn’t bother with the bed. After all, I was on a job and didn’t have time—besides, who was going to see it?
    Over coffee and some smoked herring I tried to decide how to approach Peter Thayer about his missing girl friend. If his family disapproved of her, he would probably resent his father hiring a private detective to look into her disappearance. I’d have to be someone connected with the university—maybe in one of her classes wanting to borrow some notes? I looked pretty old for an undergraduate—and what if she wasn’t registered for the summer quarter? Maybe I’d be from an underground journal, wanting her to do an article on something. Something on labor unions—Thayer had said she was trying to push Peter into being a union organizer.
    I stacked my dishes by the sink and eyed them thoughtfully: one more day and I’d have to wash them. I took the garbage out, though—I’m messy but not a slob. Newspapers had been piling up for some time, so I took a few minutes to carry them out next to the garbage cans. The building super’s son made extra money recycling paper.
    I put on jeans and a yellow cotton top and surveyed myself in the mirror with critical approval. I look my best in the summer. I inherited my Italian mother’s olive coloring, and tan beautifully. I grinned at myself. I could hear her saying, “Yes, Vic, you are pretty-but pretty is no good. Any girl can be pretty—but to take care of yourself you must have brains. And you must have a job, a profession. You must work.” Shehad hoped I would be a singer and had trained me patiently; she certainly wouldn’t have liked my being a detective. Nor would my father. He’d been a policeman himself, Polish in an Irish world. He’d never made it beyond sergeant, due partly to his lack of ambition, but also, I was sure, to his ancestry. But he’d expected great things of me … My grin went a little sour in the mirror and I turned away abruptly.
    Before heading to the South Side, I walked over to my bank to deposit the five hundreds. First things first. The teller took them without a blink—I couldn’t expect everyone to be as impressed with them as I was.
    It was 10:30 when I eased my Chevy Monza onto the Belmont entrance to Lake Shore Drive. The sky was already bleached out, and the waves reflected back a coppery sheen. Housewives, children, and detectives were the only people out this time of day; I coasted to Hyde Park in twenty-three minutes and parked on the Midway.
    I hadn’t been on campus in ten years, but the place hadn’t changed much, not as much as I had. I’d read somewhere that the dirty, poverty-stricken collegiate appearance was giving way to the clean-cut look of the fifties. That movement had definitely passed Chicago by. Young people of indeterminate sex strolled by hand-in-hand or in groups, hair sticking out, sporting tattered cutoffs and torn work shirts—probably the closest contact any of them had with work. Supposedly a fifth of the student body came from homes with an annual income of fifty thousanddollars or more, but I’d hate to use looks to decide which fifth.
    I walked out of the glare into cool stone halls and stopped at a campus phone to call the registrar. “ I’m trying to locate one of your students, a Miss Anita Hill.” The voice on the other end, old and creaky, told me to wait. Papers rustled in the background. “Could you spell that name?” I obliged. More rustling. The creaky voice told me they had no student by that name. Did that mean she wasn’t registered for the summer quarter? It meant they had no