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.
Harbor Road turned west toward Sheridan a hundred yards beyond the Grafalk estate. The Bentley disappeared around the corner at a good clip. I put the Chevette into gear and was getting ready to follow when a dark blue sports car came around the bend. Going fifty or so, the driver turned left across my path. I braked hard and avoided a collision by inches. The car, a Ferrari, went on through the brick pillars lining the drive, stopping with a great squeal just clear of the road.
Niels Grafalk came up to the Chevette before I had time to disappear. I couldn’t fool him with some tale about opinion polls. He was wearing a brown tweed jacket and an open-necked white shirt and his face was alive with anger.
“What the hell did you think you were doing?” he exploded at the Chevette.
“I’d like to ask you the same question. Do you ever signal before you turn?”
“What were you doing in front of my house anyway?” Anger had obscured his attention and he hadn’t noticed who I was at first; now recognition mixed with anger. “Oh, it’s you-the lady detective. What were you doing-trying to catch my wife or me in an indiscreet position?”
“Just admiring the view. I didn’t realize I needed life insurance to travel to the northern suburbs.” I started once more to move the car up Harbor Road, but he stuck a hand through the open window and seized my left arm. It was attached at the top to my dislocated shoulder and his grasp sent a shudder of pain through both arm and shoulder. I stopped the car once more.
“That’s right, you don’t do divorces, do you?” His dark blue eyes were flooded with emotion-anger, excitement, it was hard to tell. He released my arm and I turned off the ignition. My fingers strayed to my left shoulder to rub it. I let them fall-I wasn’t going to let him see he’d hurt me. I got out of the car, almost against my will, pulled by the force of his energy. That’s what it means to have a magnetic personality.
“You missed your wife.”
“I know-I passed her on the road. Now I want to know why you were spying on my property.”
“Honest Injun, Mr. Grafalk-I wasn’t spying. If I were, I wouldn’t do it right outside your front door like that. I’d conceal myself and you’d never know I was here.”
The blaze died down a bit in the blue eyes and he laughed. “What were you doing here, then?”
“Just passing through. Someone told me you lived here and I was gawking at it-it’s quite a nice place.”
“You didn’t find Clayton at home, did you?”
“Clayton? Oh, Clayton Phillips. No, I expect he’d be at work on a Monday afternoon, wouldn’t he?” It wouldn’t do to deny I’d been at the Phillipses-even though I’d used a fake name, Grafalk could check that pretty easily.
“You talked to Jeannine, then. What did you think of her?”
“Are you interviewing her for a job?”
“What?” He looked puzzled, then secretly amused. “How about a drink? Or don’t private eyes drink on duty?”
I looked at my watch-it was almost four-thirty. “Let me just move the Chevette out of the way of any further Lake Bluff menaces. It isn’t mine and I’d hate for something to happen to it.”
Grafalk was through being angry, or at least he had buried his anger below the civilized urbanity I’d seen down at the Port last week. He leaned against one of the brick pillars while I hauled at the stiff steering and maneuvered the car onto the grass verge. Inside the gates he put an arm around me to guide me up the drive. I gently disengaged it.
The house, made from the same brick as the pillars, lay about two hundred yards back from the road. Trees lined the front on both sides, so that you had no clue to how big the place really was as you approached it.
The lawn was almost completely green-another week and they’d have to give it the season’s first mowing. The trees were coming into leaf. Tulips and jonquils provided bursts of color at the corners of the house. Birds twittered with the business of springtime. They were nesting on some of the most expensive real estate in Chicago but they probably didn’t feel snobbish toward the sparrows in my neighborhood. I complimented Grafalk on the grounds.
“My father built the place back in the twenties. It’s a little more ornate than we care for today-but my wife likes it, so I’ve never done anything to change it.”
We went in through a side door and back to a glassed-in porch overlooking Lake Michigan. The lawn sloped down steeply to a sandy beach with a little cabana and a couple of beach umbrellas. A raft was anchored about thirty yards off-shore but I didn’t see a boat.
“Don’t you keep your boat out back here?”
Grafalk gave his rich man’s chuckle. He didn’t share his birds’ social indifference. “The beaches here have a very gradual slope-you can’t keep anything with more than a four-foot draw close to the shore.”
“Is there a harbor in Lake Bluff, then?”
“The closest public harbor’s in Waukegan. It’s extremely polluted, however. No, the commandant at Great Lakes Naval Training Station, Rear Admiral Jergensen, is a personal friend. I tie my sailboat up there.”