“So who’s your client?” He turned to the refrigerator and laid out cream and a plate of muffins.
I absentmindedly watched the seat of his trousers tighten across his rear while he bent over. The seam was fraying; a few more deep bends could create an interesting situation. I nobly refrained from dropping a plate at his feet, but waited to answer until he was facing me again.
“Part of what my clients buy when they hire me is confidentiality. If I blabbed their secrets to you, I could hardly expect you to blab yours to me, could I?”
He shook his head. “I haven’t got any secrets. At least not relating to Nancy Cleghorn. I’m the counsel for SCRAP. I work for a number of community groups—public interest law’s my specialty. Nancy was great to work with. She was organized, clearheaded, knew when to fight and when to drop back. Unlike her boss.”
“Caroline?” It was hard to picture Caroline Djiak as any-one’s boss. “So all your dealings with Nancy were purely professional?”
He pointed a coffee spoon at me. “Don’t try to trip me up, Warshawski. I play ball with the big boys. Cream? You ought to, you know—binds with the caffeine and keeps you from getting stomach cancer.”
He set a heavy porcelain mug in front of me and stuck the plate of muffins into the microwave. “No. Nance and I had a brief fling a couple of years back. When I started at SCRAP. She was getting over a heavy thing and I’d been divorced about ten months. We cheered each other up, but we didn’t have anything special to offer each other. Besides friendship, which is special enough that you don’t screw it up. Certainly not by banging your friends on the head and dropping them in a swamp.”
He took the muffins out of the oven and climbed onto a stool at the end of the counter on my left. I drank some of the rich coffee and took a blueberry muffin.
“I’ll let the cops take you through your paces. Where were you Thursday afternoon at two P.M. and so on. What I really want to know, though, is who Nancy thought was following her. Did she think she’d got Dresberg’s back up? Or did it really have anything to do with the recycling plant?”
He grimaced. “Little Caroline’s theory—which makes me want to trash it. Not a good attitude for her outfit’s counsel to take. Truth is, I don’t know. We were both pissed as hell after the hearing two weeks ago. When we talked on Tuesday, Nance said she’d cover the political angle, see if she could find out if and why Jurshak was blocking it. I was working on the legal stuff, wondering if we could finesse the MSD—Metropolitan Sanitary District—to get the permit. Maybe get the state and U.S. EPA departments involved.”
He absentmindedly ate a second muffin and buttered a third. His bulging waistline made me shake my head when he offered me the plate.
“So you don’t know who she talked to in Jurshak’s office?”
He shook his head. “I had the impression, nothing concrete to go on, but I think she had a lover there. Someone she was a little ashamed of seeing and didn’t want her pals to know about, or someone she thought she had to protect.” He stared into the distance, trying to put his feelings into words. “Canceling dinner plans, not wanting to go to the Hawks games, which we shared season tickets to. Stuff like that. So she could’ve been getting information from him and not wanting me to know about it. The last time we spoke—a week ago today it must have been—she said she thought she was onto something but she needed more evidence. I never talked to her again.” He stopped abruptly and busied himself with his coffee.
“Well, what about Dresberg? Based on what you know of the situation down there, would you think he might’ve been against this recycling center?”
“God, I wouldn’t think so. Although with a guy like that you never know. Look.”
He set down his coffee cup and leaned intently across the counter, sketching Dresberg’s operations with sweeping gestures. The garbage empire included hauling, incinerating, storage-container and landfill operations. Within his domain Dresberg was protective of any perceived encroachments—even any questioning. Hence the threats a year before when Caroline and Nancy had tried to oppose a new PCB incinerator that didn’t meet code standards.
“But the recycling center didn’t have anything to do with any of his operations,” he finished. “Xerxes and Glow-Rite are just dumping into their own lagoons right now. All SCRAP would do is take the wastes and recycle them.”
I thought about it. “He could see expansion potential cutting into his business down the road. Or maybe he wants SCRAP to use his trucks to do the hauling.”