“Why don’t you just take them, dear?” Mrs. Cleghorn smiled tremulously. “If you can look after them, get her work papers back to SCRAP, it would be a big help to me.”

I hoisted the heap under my left arm and put my right arm around her shoulders. “Yeah, sure. Call me if anything else happens, or if you need help with the cops.” It was more work than I wanted, but it seemed the least I could do under the circumstances.

21

Mama’s Boy

I sat in my car with the heater on, flipping through Nancy’s files. Anything that had to do with routine SCRAP business I put to one side. I wanted to drop the lot at the office on Commercial before leaving South Chicago.

I was looking for something that would tell me why Alderman Jurshak was opposing the SCRAP recycling plant. That was what Nancy had been trying to find the last time I talked to her. If she’d been killed because of something hot she knew on the South Side, I assumed it was in connection with the plant.

In the end I did find a document with the Jurshak name on it, but it had nothing to do with the recycling proposal—or any other environmental issue. It was a photocopy of a letter, dated back in 1963, to the Mariners Rest Life Assurance Company, explaining that Jurshak & Parma were now fiduciaries for Humboldt Chemical’s Xerxes plant. Attached to it was an actuarial study showing that Xerxes losses were in line with those of other comparable companies in the area and asking for the same rate consideration.

I read the report through three times. It made no sense to me. That is, it made no sense as being the document that could have gotten Nancy killed. Life and health insurance are not my specialty, but this looked like perfectly ordinary, straightforward insurance stuff. It wouldn’t even have seemed out of place to me except that it was so old and so unconnected to anything Nancy worked on.

There was one person who could explain the significance to me. Well, more than one, but I didn’t feel like going to Big Art with it. Where did you find this, young lady? Oh, blowing around the street, you know how these things happen.

But young Art might tell me. Even though he was clearly on the periphery of his father’s life, he might know enough about the insurance side to explain the document. Or, if Nancy had found it and it had meant something to her, she might have told him. In fact, she must have: that was why he was so nervous. He knew why she’d been killed and he didn’t want to let on.

That seemed like a good theory. How to get Art to reveal what he knew was another question altogether. I contorted my face in an effort to concentrate. When that didn’t produce results I tried relaxing all my muscles and hoped that an idea would float to the top of my mind. Instead I found myself thinking about Nancy and our childhood together. The first time I’d gone to her house for dinner, in fourth grade, when her mother had served canned spaghetti. I’d been afraid to tell Gabriella what we’d eaten—I thought she wouldn’t let me go back to a house where they didn’t make their own pasta.