Indemnity Only by Sara Paretsky Read Free Book Online Page B

gentle—to leave the neighborhood and never come around to us again. The man was Andrew McGraw.
    I’d never seen him again, never even connected him with the McGraw who was now president of Local 108 and hence, in effect, of the whole union. But he’d obviously remembered my dad. I guessed he’d tried to reach Tony at the police and, when he’d learned my dad was dead, had pulled me out of the Yellow Pages, assuming I would be Tony’s son. Well, I wasn’t: I was his daughter, and not the easygoing type my dad had been. I had my Italian mother’s drive, and I try to emulate her insistence on fighting battles to the finish. But regardless of what kind of person I was, McGraw might be finding himself now in trouble of the kind that not even easygoing Tony would have helped him out of.
    I drank some more coffee and flexed my toes in thewater. The bath shimmered turquoise, but clear. I peered through it at my feet, trying to figure out what I knew. McGraw had a daughter. She probably loved him, since she seemed dedicated to the labor movement. Children usually do not espouse causes or careers of parents they hate. Had she disappeared, or was he hiding her? Did he know who had killed young Peter and had she run away because of this? Or did he think she’d killed the boy? Most murders, I reminded myself, were committed between loved ones, which made her statistically the odds-on favorite. What were McGraw’s connections with the hired muscle with whom the International Brotherhood lived so cozily? How easily could he have hired someone to fire that shot? He was someone the boy would let in and talk to, no matter what their feelings for each other were, because McGraw was his girl friend’s father.
    The bathwater was warm, but I shivered as I finished my coffee.

4

You Can’t Scare Me
(I’m Sticking to the Union)       
    The headquarters of the International Brotherhood of Knifegrinders, Shear Edgers, and Blade Sharpeners is located on Sheridan Road just south of Evanston. The ten-story building was put up about five years ago, and is sided with white Italian marble. The only other building in Chicago built with such opulence is the headquarters for Standard of Indiana; I figured that put the brotherhood’s excess profits on a par with those of the oil industry.
    Local 108 headquarters was on the ninth floor. I gave the floor receptionist my card. “Mr. McGraw is expecting me,” I told her. I was shunted down the north corridor. McGraw’s secretary was guarding the entrance to a lakeside office in an antechamber that would have done Louis XIV proud. I wondered how the International Brothers felt when they saw what their dues had built for them. Or maybe there were some beaten-up offices lower down for entertaining the rank-and-file.
    I gave my card to the secretary, a middle-agedwoman with gray sausage curls and a red-and-white dress that revealed an unlovely sag in her upper arms. I keep thinking I should lift five-pound weights to firm up my triceps. Looking at her, I wondered if I would have time to stop at Stan’s Sporting Goods on my way home to pick up some barbells.
    “I have an appointment with Mr. McGraw.”
    “You’re not in the book,” she said abruptly, not really looking at me. I had on my navy raw silk suit, with the blouson jacket. I looked stunning in this outfit and thought I deserved a little more attention. Must be those sagging triceps.
    I smiled. “I’m sure you know as well as I do that Mr. McGraw conducts some of his business on his own. He arranged to see me privately.”
    “Mr. McGraw may sometimes take up with whores,” she said, her face red, her eyes on her desktop, “but this is the first time he’s ever asked one up to his office.”
    I restrained an impulse to brain her with her desk lamp. “Good-looking lady like you in his front office, he doesn’t need outside talent…. Now will you please inform Mr. McGraw that I’m here?”
    Her shapeless face shook under the