She nodded again. “It was too stupid for words. I was off my head, with anger, and fear, and—and grief. Not just for Peter, you know, but for my father, and the union, and everything I’d grown up thinking was fine and—and worth fighting for.”
“Yes, that was tough.” She didn’t say anything else, so I went on. “Your father didn’t know at first what had happened. It was only a few days later that he connected Peter with Masters. Then he knew that Masters had had Peter killed. Then he knew that you were in trouble, too. And that’s when he fired me. He didn’t want me to find you because he didn’t want anyone else to find you, either.”
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.”