Leaning back in the front seat with my eyes shut, I wondered whether it was worthwhile trying to get back into the Hyde Park Bank building. Even if I could charm my way past the guard in my current disarray, if I took anything, Fepple would know it had been me. That project could wait until Monday.
I still had over an hour before I was due to meet Beth Blacksin—I should just go home and clean up properly for my interview. On the other hand, Amy Blount, Ph.D., the young woman who’d written Ajax’s history, lived only three blocks from the bank. I called the number Mary Louise had dug up for me.
Ms. Blount was home. In her polite, aloof way she acknowledged that we’d met. When I explained that I wanted to ask some questions about Ajax, she turned from aloof to frosty.
“Mr. Rossy’s secretary has already asked me those questions. I find them offensive. I won’t answer them from you any more than from him.”
“Sorry, Ms. Blount, I wasn’t very clear. Ajax didn’t send me to you. I don’t know what questions Rossy wants to ask you, but they’re probably different from mine. Mine come from a client who’s trying to find out what happened to a life-insurance policy. I don’t think you know the answer, but I’d like to talk to you because—” Because of what? Because I was so frustrated at being stiffed by Fepple, defamed by Durham, that I was clutching at any straw? “Because I cannot figure out what’s going on and I’d like to talk to someone who understands Ajax. I’m in the neighborhood; I could stop by now for ten minutes if you can spare the time.”
After a pause, she said coldly she would hear what I had to say but couldn’t promise she’d answer any questions.
She lived in a shabby courtyard building on Cornell, the kind of haphazardly maintained property that students can afford. Even so, as I knew from the plaint of an old friend whose son was starting medical school down here, Blount probably paid six or seven hundred a month for the broken glass on the sidewalk, her badly hung lobby door, and the hole in the stairwell wall.
Blount stood in the open door to her studio apartment, watching while I climbed the third flight of stairs. Here at home, her dreadlocks hung loosely about her face. Instead of the prim tweed suit she’d worn to Ajax, she had on jeans and a big shirt. She ushered me in politely but without cordiality, waving a hand at a hardwood chair while seating herself in the swivel desk chair at her work station.
Except for a futon with a bright kente cover and a print of a woman squatting behind a basket, the room was furnished with monastic severity. It was lined on all sides by white pasteboard bookshelves. Even the tiny eating alcove had shelves fitted around a clock.
“Ralph Devereux told me you had a degree in economic history. Is that how you came to be involved with writing the Ajax history?”
She nodded without speaking.
“What did you do your dissertation on?”
“Is this relevant to your client’s story, Ms. Warshawski?”
I raised my brows. “Polite conversation, Ms. Blount. But that’s right, you said you wouldn’t answer any questions. You said you had already heard from Bertrand Rossy, so you know that Alderman Durham has had Ajax under—”
“His secretary,” she corrected me. “Mr. Rossy is too important to call me himself.”
Her voice was so toneless that I couldn’t be sure whether her intent was ironic. “Still, he made the questions take place. So you know Durham’s picketing the Ajax building, claiming that Ajax and the Birnbaums owe restitution to the African-American community for the money they both made from slavery. I suppose Rossy accused you of supplying Durham the information out of the Ajax archives.”
She nodded fractionally, her eyes wary.
“The other piece of Durham’s protest concerns me personally. Have you encountered the Midway Insurance Agency over in the bank building? Howard Fepple is the rather ineffectual present owner, but thirty years ago one of his father’s agents sold a policy to a man named Sommers.” I outlined the Sommers family problem. “Now Durham has hold of the story. Based on your work at Ajax, I’m wondering if you have any ideas on who might give the alderman such detailed inside information about both the company history and this current claim. Sommers complained to the alderman, but the Durham protest had one detail that I don’t think Sommers would have known: the fact that Ajax insured the Birnbaum Corporation in the years before the Civil War. I’m assuming that information is accurate, or Rossy wouldn’t have called you. Had his secretary call you.”
When I paused, Blount said, “It is, sort of. That is, the original Birnbaum, the one who started the family fortune, was insured by Ajax in the 1850’s.”
“What do you mean, sort of?” I asked.
“In 1858, Mordecai Birnbaum lost a load of steel plows he was sending to Mississippi when the steamship blew up on the Illinois River. Ajax paid for it. I suppose that’s what Alderman Durham is referring to.” She spoke in a rapid monotone. I hoped when she lectured to students she had more animation, or they’d all be asleep.