“So that what, Vic?” Lotty called impatiently behind me. “What are you doing?”

Turning off the chicken for starters: I’d forgotten the dinner I’d left simmering happily on the back of the stove. The olives were little charred lumps while the chicken seemed to have welded itself to the bottom of the pan. Definitely not the most successful recipe in my repertoire. I tried scraping the mess into the garbage can.

“Oh, never mind the dinner,” Lotty said irritably. “Just put it in the sink and tell me the rest of your thinking. The company argued that they couldn’t be responsible for the illness of anyone who worked for them if it took place before 1975 when Xerxine’s toxicity was established by Ciba-Geigy. Is that it?”

“Yeah, except I didn’t know about Ciba-Geigy or that 1975 was the critical year. And my bet is that they claimed to have lowered their ppm of Xerxine to whatever the decreed standard was, and that that’s what their reports to Washington show. The ones that Jurshak sent out for Humboldt. But that the analysis SCRAP did at the plant shows much higher levels. I need to call Caroline Djiak and find out.”

“But, Vic,” Lotty said, absently scraping charred chicken from the skillet, “you still don’t explain why they wouldn’t tell their workers their bodies were being damaged. If the standard wasn’t set until 1975, what difference did it make before then?”

“Insurance,” I said shortly, trying to find Louisa’s number in the directory. She wasn’t listed. Snarling, I went back to the spare room to dig my address book out of my suitcase.

I returned to the kitchen and started dialing. “The only person who might tell us definitely is Dr. Chigwell, and he’s missing right now. I’m not sure I could make him talk even if I could find him—Humboldt scares him much more than I do.”

Caroline answered the phone on the fifth ring. “Vic. Hi. I was just putting Ma to bed. Can you hold? Or should I call back?”

I told her I’d wait. “But you see,” I added to Lotty, “those notebooks mean bankruptcy now. Not for the whole company necessarily, but certainly for the Xerxes operation. A good lawyer gets hold of that stuff, contacts the employees or their families, and really goes to town. They’ve got all those Manville settlements to use by way of precedent.”

No wonder Humboldt had been desperate enough to seek me out personally. His little empire was being threatened by the Turks. Frederick Manheim had been right—it must have seemed incredible to all of them that a detective could start nosing around Pankowski and Ferraro and not be looking for evidence of the blood work.

Why had Chigwell tried to kill himself? Overcome by remorse? Or did someone threaten him with a fate worse than death if he told Murray or me anything? The people he’d pranced off to on Friday might well have killed him by now if they thought he was going to crack on them.