Killing Orders Read Online Free PDF Page B

ashamed of me if I’d owned one of the Itsy-Bitsy Machine Company’s models.
    I quickly finished the bills, stuffed them in envelopes, turned out the lights, and locked up. Outside the street was jammed with rush-hour crowds. I jostled and darted my way through them with the ease of long experience and retrieved the Omega for another long slow drive through stop-and-go traffic.
    I bore the delays meekly, swooping off the Kennedy at Belmont and detouring around to my bank with the check before going home. In a sudden burst of energy I washed the dishes before changing clothes. I kept on the yellow silk top, found a pair of black velvet slacks in the closet, and put on a black-and-orange scarf. Eye-catching but not vulgar.
    Ferrant seemed to think so, too. He greeted me enthusiastically in the Scupperfield, Plouder apartment at the Hancock. “I remembered you were tough and funny, Vic, but I’d forgotten how attractive you are.”
    If you like thin men, which I do, Ferrant looked good himself. He had on well-tailored casual slacks with tiny pleats at the waist, and a dark green sweater over a pale yellow shirt. His dark hair, which had been carefully combed when he opened the door, fell into his eyes when I returned his hug. He pushed it back with a characteristic gesture.
    I asked what brought him to Chicago.
    “Business with Ajax, of course.” He led me into the living room, a modernistically furnished square overlooking the lake.
    A large orange couch with a glass-and-chrome coffee table in front of it was flanked by chrome chairs with black fabric seats.
    I winced slightly.
    “Hideous, isn’t it?” he said cheerfully. “If I have to stay in Chicago more than a month, I’m going to make them let me get my own apartment. Or at least my own furniture. . . . Do you drink anything besides Chateau St. Georges? We have a complete liquor cabinet.”
    He swept open a blond-and-glass cabinet in one corner to display an impressive array of bottles. I laughed: I’d drunk two bottles of Chateau St. Georges when we went to dinner together last May. “Johnny Walker Black if they have it.” He rummaged through the cupboard, found a half-used bottle, and poured each of us a modest drink.
    “They must hate you in London to send you to Chicago in January. And if you have to stay through February you’ll know you’re really on their hit list.”
    He grimaced. “I’ve been here before in winter. It must 4 explain why you American girls are so tough. Are they as hardboiled as you in South?”
    “Worse,” I assured him. “They’re tougher but they hide it under this veneer of soft manners, so you don’t know you’ve been hit until you start coming to.”
    I sat at one end of the orange couch; he pulled up one of the chrome chairs close to me and leaned storklike over his drink, his hair falling into his eyes again. He explained that Scupperfield, Plouder, his London firm, owned three percent of Ajax. “We’re not the largest stockholder, but we’re an important one. So we keep a finger in the Ajax pie. We send our young fellows here for training and take some Ajax people and teach them the London market. Believe it or not, I was a young fellow once myself.” Like many people in English insurance, Ferrant had started to work right after high school, or what we think of as high school. So at thirty-seven he had close to twenty years of experience in the topsy-turvy reinsurance business.
    “I’m telling you that so you won’t be so startled to hear I’m now a corporate officer pro tem.” He grinned. “A lot of people at Ajax feel their noses bent because I’m so young, but by the time they have my experience, they’ll be six or eight years older.”
    Aaron Carter, the head of Ajax’s reinsurance division, had died suddenly last month of a heart attack. His most likely successor had left in September to join a rival company. “I’m just filling in until they can find someone with the right qualifications. They