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.