She looked at me again. “I hear you,” she said in that same weary voice. “I hear you, but it doesn’t make it any better. My father is the kind of man who gets people killed, and he got Peter killed.”
We sat looking at the stream for a few minutes without talking. Then she said, “I grew up on the union. My mother died when I was three. I didn’t have any brothers or sisters, and my dad and I-we were very close. He was a hero, I knew he was in a lot of fights, but he was a hero. I grew up knowing he had to fight because of the bosses, and that if he could lick them, America would be a better place for working men and women everywhere.” She smiled mirthlessly again. “It sounds like a child’s history book, doesn’t it? It was child’s history. As my dad moved up in the union, we had more money. The University of Chicago-that was something I’d always wanted. Seven thousand dollars a year? No problem. He bought it for me. My own car, you name it. Part of me knew that a working-class hero didn’t have that kind of money, but I pushed it aside. ‘He’s entitled,’ I’d say. And when I met Peter, I thought, why not? The Thayers have more money than my father ever dreamed of, and they never worked for it.” She paused again. “That was my rationalization, you see. And guys like Smeissen. They’re around the house-not much, but some. I just wouldn’t believe any of it. You read about some mobster in the paper, and he’s been over drinking with your father? No way.” She shook her head.
“Peter came home from the office, you see. He’d been working for Masters as a favor to his dad. He was sick of the whole money thing-that was before we fell in love, even, although I know his father blamed me for it. He wanted to do something really fine with his life-he didn’t know what. But just to be nice, he agreed to work at Ajax. I don’t think my father knew. I didn’t tell him. I didn’t talk to him about Peter much-he didn’t like me going around with the son of such an important banker. And he is kind of a Puritan-he hated my living with Peter like that. So like I said, I didn’t talk to him about Peter.
“Anyway, Peter knew who some of the big shots in the union are. You know, when you’re in love, you learn that kind of thing about each other. I knew who the chairman of the Fort Dearborn Trust is, and that’s not the kind of thing I know as a rule.”
The story was starting to come easily now. I didn’t say anything, just made myself part of the landscape that Anita was talking to.
“Well, Peter did rather boring things for Masters. It was a kind of make-work job in the budget department. He worked for the budget director, a guy he liked, and one of the things they asked him to do was check records of claim drafts against claim files-see if they matched, you know. Did Joe Blow get fifteen thousand dollars when his file shows he should only have gotten twelve thousand dollars? That kind of thing. They had a computer program that did it, but they thought there was something wrong with the program, so they wanted Peter to do a manual check.” She laughed, a laugh that was really a sob. “You know, if Ajax had a good computer system, Peter would still be alive. I think of that sometimes, too, and it make me want to shoot all their programmers. Oh, well. He started with the biggest ones-there were thousands and thousands-they have three hundred thousand Workers Compensation claims every year, but he was only going to do a spot check. So he started with some of the really big ones-total disability claims that had been going on for a while. At first it was fun, you know, to see what kinds of things had happened to people. Then one day he found a claim set up for Carl O’Malley. Total disability, lost his right arm and been crippled by freak accident with a conveyor belt. That happens, you know-someone gets caught on a belt and pulled into a machine. It’s really terrible.”
I nodded agreement.
She looked at me and started talking to me, rather than just in front of me. “Only it hadn’t happened, you see. Carl is one of the senior vice-presidents, my dad’s right-hand man-he’s been part of my life since before I can remember. I call him Uncle Carl. Peter knew that, so he brought home the address, and it was Carl’s address. Carl is as well as you or me-he’s never been in an accident, and he’s been away from the assembly line for twenty-three years.”
“I see. You didn’t know what to think, but you didn’t ask your father about it?”
“No, I didn’t know what to ask. I couldn’t figure it out. I guess I thought Uncle Carl had put in for a fake accident, and we kind of treated it like a joke, Peter and I did. But he got to thinking about it; he was like that, you know, he really thought things through. And he looked up the other guys on the executive board. And they all had indemnity claims. Not all of them for total disability, and not all of them permanent, but all of them good-sized sums. And that was the terrible thing. You see, my dad had one, too. Then I got scared, and I didn’t want to say anything to him.”
“Is Joseph Gielczowski on the executive board?” I asked.
“Yes, he’s one of the vice-presidents, and president of Local 3051, a very powerful local in Calumet City. Do you know him?”
“That was the name of the claim draft I found.” I could see why they didn’t want that innocent little stick of dynamite in my hands. No wonder they’d torn my place apart looking for it. “So Peter decided to talk to Masters? You didn’t know Masters was involved, did you?”
“No, and Peter thought he owed it to him, to talk to him first, you know. We weren’t sure what we would do next-talk to my dad, we had to. But we thought Masters should know.” Her blue eyes were dark pools of fear in her face. “What happened was, he told Masters, and Masters told him it sounded really serious, and that he’d like to talk it over with Peter in private, because it might have to go to the State Insurance Commission. So Peter said sure, and Masters said he would come down Monday morning before work.” She looked at me. “That was strange, wasn’t it? We should have known it was strange, we should have known a vice-president doesn’t do that, he talks to you in his office. I guess we just assumed it was Peter being a friend of the family.” She looked back at the stream. “I wanted to be there, but I had a job, you see, I was doing some research for one of the guys in the Political Science Department.”
“Harold Weinstein?” I guessed.
“Yeah. You really have been detecting me, haven’t you? Well, I had to be there at eight thirty, and Masters was coming by around nine, so I left Peter to it. I really left him to it, didn’t I? Oh, God, why did I think that job was so goddamn important? Why didn’t I stay there with him?” Now she was crying, real tears, not the dry heaves. She hid her face in her hands and sobbed. She kept repeating that she’d left Peter alone to be killed, and she should have been the one that died; her father was the one with all the criminal friends, not his. I let her go on for several minutes.
“Listen, Anita,” I said in a clear sharp voice, “you can blame yourself for this for the rest of your life. But you didn’t kill Peter. You didn’t abandon him. You didn’t set him up. If you had been there, you’d be dead, too, and the truth of what happened might never come out.”
“I don’t care about the truth,” she sobbed. “I know it. It doesn’t matter whether the rest of the world knows it or not.”
“If the rest of the world doesn’t know it, then you’re as good as dead,” I said brutally. “And the next nice young boy or girl who goes through those files and learns what you and Peter learned is dead, too. I know this is rotten. I know you’ve been through hell and more besides, and you’ve got worse ahead. But the quicker we get going and finish off this business, the quicker you can get that part over with. It will only get more unbearable, the longer you have to anticipate it.”