Indemnity Only by Sara Paretsky Page B

expecting him to behave in a certain guilty way and that’s what you saw,” Ralph objected. “He might have been worried about him, about Peter, because he’d promised Jack Thayer that he’d be responsible for the boy. I don’t really see anything so surprising in Yardley’s talking to you. If Peter had been just a stray kid, I might—but an old family friend’s son? The kid hadn’t been in for four days, he wasn’t answering the phone—Yardley felt responsible as much as annoyed.”
    I stopped, considering. What Ralph said made sense. I wondered if I had gotten carried away, whether my instinctive dislike of over-hearty businessmen was making me see ghosts where there were none.
    “Okay, you could be right. But why couldn’t Masters be involved in a life-insurance fiddle?”
    Ralph was finishing off his quail and ordering coffee and dessert. I asked for a large dish of ice cream. “Oh, that’s the way insurance companies are set up,” he said when the waiter had disappeared again. “We’re big—third largest in total premiums written, which is about eight point four billion dollars a year. That includes all lines, and all of the thirteencompanies that make up the Ajax group. For legal reasons, life insurance can’t be written by the same company that writes property and casualty. So the Ajax Assurance Company does all our life and pension products, while the Ajax Casualty and some of the smaller ones do property and casualty.”
    The waiter returned with our desserts. Ralph was having some kind of gooey torte. I decided to get Kahlua for my ice cream.
    “Well, with a company as big as ours,” Ralph continued, “the guys involved in casualty—that’s stuff like Workers Comp, general liability, some of the auto—anyway, guys like Yardley and me don’t know too much about the life side of the house. Sure, we know the people who run it, eat with them now and then, but they have a separate administrative structure, handle their own claims and so on. If we got close enough to the business to analyze it, let alone commit fraud with it, the political stink would be so high we’d be out on our butts within an hour. Guaranteed.”
    I shook my head reluctantly and turned to my ice cream. Ajax did not sound promising, and I’d been pinning hopes to it. “By the way,” I said, “did you check on Ajax’s pension money?”
    Ralph laughed. “You are persistent, Vic, I’ll grant you that. Yeah, I called a friend of mine over there. Sorry, Vic. Nothing doing. He says he’ll look into it, see whether we get any third-hand stuff laid off on us—” I looked a question. “Like the Loyal Alliance people give some money to Dreyfus to manage andDreyfus lays some of it off on us. Basically though, this guy says Ajax won’t touch the Knifegrinders with a ten-foot pole. Which doesn’t surprise me too much.”
    I sighed and finished my ice cream, feeling suddenly tired again. If things came easily in this life, we would never feel pride in our achievements. My mother used to tell me that, standing over me while I practiced the piano. She’d probably disapprove of my work, if she were alive, but she would never let me slouch at the dinner table grumbling because it wasn’t turning out right. Still, I was too tired tonight to try to grapple with the implications of everything I’d learned today.
    “You look like your adventures are catching up with you,” Ralph said.
    I felt a wave of fatigue sweep over me, almost carrying me off to sleep with it. “Yeah, I’m fading,” I admitted. “I think I’d better go to bed. Although in a way I hate to go to sleep, I’ll be so sore in the morning. Maybe I could wake up enough to dance. If you keep moving, it’s not so bad.”
    “You look like you’d fall asleep on a disco floor right now, Vic, and I’d be arrested for beating you or something. Why does exercise help?”
    “If you keep the blood circulating, it keeps the joints from stiffening so