Should I talk to Vince or to Ed Murray? Vince knew his way around the law profession as well as anyone. He didn’t have the political contacts that Ed had. This wasn’t, however, a political game. And Vince was family. I might need a man with family loyalties before this was over. Especially a man with Southern Italian family loyalties.
For that matter Ed Murray was almost family. Cordelia had become the foster sister’s foster sister, as thick as the proverbial thieves with Peg and Rosemarie. They lived two blocks away from us and three blocks from Vince and Peg—in a home that, according to Rosemarie, had been a “nice compromise between Lake Forest and Beverly.”
Rosemarie had surely found them the house.
“Love is. expansive, it seeks to embrace the whole world,” she had told me piously when I wondered if there was room in her friendship with Peg for a third person.
It turned out she was right. The “monstrous regiment” grew by one.
Still, near-family was not quite the same as family. I would consult with Vince.
I rode downtown on the Lake Street L and found Vince working on a brief in his office in what was then called the Field Building (now the LaSalle National Bank Building) on LaSalle Street.
It was a prestigious office, in an important law firm, for a very successful young lawyer.
“Not bad for an Italian kid from Division Street.”
“Cut it out.” He grinned as he shook hands. “The guy married. well, that’s all.”
“That he did, that he did.”
“Assistant concert master for her symphony.” He beamed proudly. “In musical circles I’m becoming famous because I’m her husband.”
We talked about our wives and kids for a few moments. Then I told him what I wanted.
“I suspect that Jim Clancy has left some dirt with his papers, nothing criminal, but something that would hurt Rosemarie terribly. The only reason it hasn’t come out is that old Joe O’Laughlin, who was Jim’s lawyer, died a few months after Jim. It’s probably sitting somewhere in the office of whoever took over O’Laughlin’s practice.”
“He was one of the great, all-time scumbags of the Chicago Bar. Crooked, corrupt, incompetent. No one ever did figure out where he put all his money. He was apparently not planning on dying, ever.”
“I figure that the only reason this dirt hasn’t surfaced is that whoever has it probably doesn’t know he has it.”
Vince drummed his fingers on his big mahogany desk. “Jim Clancy leaves the papers—or whatever—with Joe O’Laughlin. Gives him instructions to go public with them after a few months maybe. Joe dies and leaves no instructions with whoever took over that part of the Clancy files. So the stuff sits there for all these years, like a ticking bomb.”
“Precisely. We have a lot of Jim’s papers in our own files. No income tax returns from the forties and fifties, however. So someone else has them.”
“The sleaze vultures picked his corpse pretty clean. I’d say that if you haven’t heard from anyone, the guy that has them is as inefficient as O’Laughlin. The stuff is gathering dust in some scumbag’s office.”
“That’s the way I figure it too.”
Vince nodded. Not once had he asked or even hinted at asking what the dirt was.
“You want me to poke around very gently and find out who might have those tax returns?”
“Very gently. And not a word to anyone. Not even to Peg.”
He rolled his soulful brown eyes. “Especially not to Peg.”
That afternoon, the smell of the hunt in my nostrils, I turned to the new question.
“Do you mind,” I asked Rosemarie, who I found in the darkroom working on the “Parochial School” pictures, “if I have a visit with Dr. Stone?”
She hesitated. “Is something wrong?”
“Not with you. I want to make sure that I’m responding properly.”
Not the whole truth, but only a little lie.
“You are … still, I don’t mind if you talk to her. Maybe it would be a good idea. Don’t expect any answers.”
I did indeed expect an answer, but that was not the point.
“Good, I’ll call her later on this afternoon. Now let’s see about these playground pictures.”
Moira, blissfully sleeping, let us work for a whole hour before she woke up and demanded (if Rosemarie was to be believed) that her Daddy hold her and sing to her.
Irish songs at that.
Afterwards I phoned Dr. Stone.