Warshawski 01 - Indemnity Only Read Online Free PDF

want to see me?” I asked.
    “Oh, I promised Jack Thayer I’d keep an eye on his boy, you know. And when a private detective comes around, it sounds kind of serious. Still, I wouldn’tworry about it too much, Miss—ah—although maybe we could hire you to find out where Peter’s gone.” He chuckled at his joke. “He hasn’t been in all week, you know, and we can’t reach him at home. I haven’t told Jack yet—he’s disappointed enough in the boy as it is.”
    He ushered me down the hall and back to the elevator. I rode down to the thirty-second floor, got off, and rode back up. I strolled back down the hall.
    “I’d like to see where young Thayer sits,” I told Ellen. She looked at Masters’s door for guidance, but it was shut.
    “I don’t think—”
    “Probably not,” I interrupted. “But I’m going to look around his desk anyway. I can always get someone else to tell me where it is.”
    She looked unhappy, but took me over to a partitioned cubicle. “You know, I’m going to be in trouble if Mr. Masters comes out and finds you here,” she said.
    “I don’t see why,” I told her. “It’s not your fault. I’ll tell him you did your best to force me off the floor.”
    Peter Thayer’s desk was unlocked. Ellen stood watching me for a few minutes as I pulled open the drawers and sorted through the papers. “You can search me on my way out to see if I’ve taken anything,” I told her without looking up. She sniffed, but walked back to her own desk.
    These papers were as innocuous as those in the boy’s apartment. Numerous ledger sheets with various aspects of the department’s budget added up, a sheaf of computer printouts that dealt with Workers Compensation case estimates, correspondence to Ajaxclaim handlers—“Dear Mr. So-and-So, please verify the case estimates for the following claimants.” Nothing you’d murder a boy for.
    I was scratching my head over these slim pickings, wondering what to do next, when I realized someone was watching me. I looked up. It wasn’t the secretary.
    “You’re certainly a lot more decorative than young Thayer,” my observer remarked. “You taking his place?”
    The speaker was in his shirt-sleeves, a man in his thirties who didn’t have to be told how good-looking he was. I appreciated his narrow waist and the way his Brooks Brothers trousers fit.
    “Does anyone around here know Peter Thayer at all well?” I asked.
    “Yardley’s secretary is making herself sick over him, but I don’t know whether she knows him. He moved closer. “Why the interest? Are you with the IRS? Has the kid omitted taxes on some of the vast family holdings deeded to him? Or absconded the Claim Department funds and made them over to the revolutionary committee?”
    “You’re in the right occupational ball park,” I conceded, “and he has, apparently, disappeared. I’ve never talked to him,” I added carefully. “Do you know him?”
    “Better than most people around here.” He grinned cheerfully and seemed likable despite his arrogance. “He supposedly did legwork for Yardley—Yardley Masters—you were just seen talking to him. I’m Yardley’s budget manager.”
    “How about a drink?” I suggested.
    He looked at his watch and grinned again.
    “You’ve got a date, little lady.”
    His name was Ralph Devereux. He was a suburbanite who had only recently moved to the city, following a divorce that left his wife in possession of their Downers Grove house, he informed me in the elevator. The only Loop bar he knew was Billy’s, where the Claim Department hung out. I suggested the Golden Glow a little farther west, to avoid the people he knew. As we walked down Adams Street, I bought a
Sun-Times.
    The Golden Glow is an oddity in the South Loop. A tiny saloon dating back to the last century, it still has a mahogany horseshoe-shaped bar where serious drinkers sit. Eight or nine little tables and booths are crammed in along the walls, and a couple of real Tiffany