“Apparently Ajax insured the Birnbaums back in the 1850’s. Part of the vast Birnbaum holdings came from something in the South. Ajax execs are steaming over how Durham got that information.”
As I oozed onto the expressway I was glad I’d bought the water: traffic seems to run freely these days only between ten at night and six the next morning. At two-thirty, the trucks heading south on the Ryan formed a solid wall. I put Mary Louise on hold while I slid my Mustang in between an eighteen-wheel UPS truck and a long flatbed with what looked like a reactor coil strapped to it.
Before hanging up, I asked her to dig up Amy Blount’s home phone number and address. “Phone them to me here in my car, but don’t call her yourself. I don’t know yet if I want to talk to her.”
The flatbed behind me gave a loud hoot that made me jump: I had let three car lengths open up in front of me. I scooted forward.
Mary Louise said, “Before you go, I tracked down those men Aaron Sommers worked with at South Branch Scrap Metal. The ones who bought life insurance from Rick Hoffman along with Mr. Sommers.”
The Durham attack on me personally had driven the earlier business from my mind. I’d forgotten to tell Mary Louise the client had fired me, so she’d gone ahead with the investigation and had found three of the four men still alive. Claiming to be doing an independent quality check for the company, she’d persuaded the policyholders to call the Midway Agency. The men said their policies were still intact; she’d double-checked with the carrier. The third man had died eight years ago. His funeral had been duly paid for by Ajax. So whatever fraud had been committed, it wasn’t some wholesale looting by Midway or Hoffman of those particular burial policies. Not that it really mattered at this point, but I thanked her for the extra effort—she’d done a lot in a short morning—and turned my attention to the traffic.
When I reached the Stevenson cutoff, my motion slowed to something more like a turtle on Valium than a pinball—construction, now in its third year, cut off half the lanes. The Stevenson Expressway is the key to the industrial zone along the city’s southwest corridor. Truck traffic along it is always heavy; with the construction and the afternoon rush building, we all bumped along at about ten miles an hour.
At Kedzie I was glad to leave the expressway for the maze of plants and scrap yards alongside it. Even though the day was clear, down here among the factories the air turned blue-grey from smoke. I passed yards full of rusting cars, yards making outboard motors, a rebar mill, and a mountain of yellowish salt, ominous portent of the winter ahead. The roads were deeply rutted. I drove cautiously, my car slung too low to the ground for the axle to survive a major hole. Trucks jumped past me with a happy disregard of any traffic signs.
Even with a good detail map I blundered a few times. It was a quarter past three, fifteen minutes after Isaiah Sommers’s shift ended, before I jolted into the yard of the Docherty Engineering Works. A roughly graveled area, it was as scarred by heavy trucks as the surrounding streets. A fourteen-wheeler was snorting at a loading dock when I got out of the Mustang.
It was my lucky afternoon—it looked as though the seven-to-three shift was just leaving the shop. I leaned against my car, watching men straggle through a side door. Isaiah Sommers appeared about halfway through the exodus. He was talking to a couple of other men, laughing in an easy way that took me by surprise: when I’d met him he’d been hunched and surly. I waited until he’d clapped his coworkers on the shoulder and gone on to his own truck before straightening up to follow him.
“Mr. Sommers?”
The smile vanished, leaving his face in the guarded lines I’d seen the other night. “Oh. It’s you. What do you want?”
I pulled the broadsheet from my purse and handed it to him. “I see the steps you took on your own led you straight to Alderman Durham. There are a few factual errors, but it’s having quite a galvanizing effect on the city: you should be pleased.”
He read the sheet with the same slow concentration he’d given my contract. “Well?”
“You know as well as I that I wasn’t present at your uncle’s funeral. Did you tell Mr. Durham that I was?”
“Maybe he put the two pieces of the story together wrong, but, yes, I did talk to him. Told him about you accusing my aunt.” He stuck his jaw out pugnaciously.
“I’m not here to play he-said, she-said with you but to find out why you went out of your way to pillory me in this public way, instead of trying to work things out in private.”
“My aunt—she doesn’t have money or connections or a way to get even when someone like you comes along to accuse her unjustly.”