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whisked herself down the hall toward Ralph’s
office before I could make up my mind.
    The elevator that brought her had left. Before another
arrived, Connie Ingram joined me, her paperwork apparently finished.
    “Mr. Rossy seems very protective of his documents,” I
commented.
    “We can’t afford to misplace any paper around here,”
she said primly. “People can sue us if we don’t have our records in tiptop
shape.”
    “Are you worried about a suit from the Sommers
family?”
    “Mr. Devereux said the agent was responsible for the
claim. So it’s not our problem here at the company, but of course he and Mr.
Rossy—”
    She stopped, red-faced, as if remembering Rossy’s
comment about my persuasive charms. The elevator arrived and she scurried into
it. It was twelve-forty, heart of the lunch hour. The elevator stopped every
two or three floors to take in people before making its express descent from
forty to the ground. I wondered what indiscretion she had bitten back, but
there wasn’t any way I could pump her.

VII
    Cold Call
    S omething
there is that doesn’t love a fence,” I muttered as I boarded the northbound L.
Lots of people on the train were muttering to themselves: I fit right in. “When
someone is guarding documents, is it because his corporate culture is
obsessive, as Rossy said? Or because there’s something in them he doesn’t want
me to see?”
    “Because he’s in the pay of the U-nited Nations,” the
man next to me said. “They’re bringing in tanks. Those U-nited Nations
helie-copters landing in Dee-troit, I seen them on TV.”
    “You’re right,” I said to his beery face. “It’s
definitely a UN plot. So you think I should go down to Midway Insurance, talk
to the agent, see if my charms are persuasive enough to wangle a look at the
sales file?”
    “Your charms plenty persuasive enough for me,” he
leered.
    That was esteem-enhancing. When I got off the train at
Western, I picked up my car and immediately headed south again. Down in Hyde
Park, I found a meter with forty minutes on it on one of the side streets near
the bank where Midway Insurance had their offices. The bank building itself was
the neighborhood’s venerable dowager, its ten stories towering over Hyde Park’s
main shopping street. The facade had recently been cleaned up, but once I got
off the elevator onto the sixth floor, the dim lights and dingy walls betrayed
a management indifference to tenant comfort.
    Midway Insurance was wedged between a dentist and a
gynecologist. The black letters on the door, telling me they insured life,
home, and auto, had been there a long time: part of the H in Home had peeled away, so that it looked as though Midway insured nome .
    The door was locked, but when I rang the bell someone
buzzed me in. The office beyond was even drearier than the hall. The flickering
fluorescent light was so dim that I didn’t notice a peeling corner of linoleum
until I’d tripped on it. I grabbed at a filing cabinet to keep from falling.
    “Sorry—I keep meaning to fix that.” I hadn’t noticed
the man until he spoke—he was sitting at a desk that took up most of the room,
but the light was bad enough I hadn’t seen him when I opened the door.
    “I hope you buy premises insurance, because you’re
inviting a nasty suit if you don’t glue that down,” I snapped, coming all the
way into the room.
    He turned on a desk lamp, revealing a face with
freckles so thick that they formed an orange carpet across his face. At my
words the carpet turned a deeper red.
    “I don’t get much walk-in business,” he explained.
“Most of the time we’re in the field.”
    I looked around, but there wasn’t a desk for a second
person. I moved a phone book from the only other chair and sat down. “You have
partners? Subordinates?”
    “I inherited the business from my dad. He died three
years ago, but I keep forgetting that. I think the business is going to die,
too. I never have been much good with cold