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.”