With an unidentified client and an identified corpse, I’d been wondering what my job was supposed to be-fall girl for finding the body, no doubt. Still… Ms. McGraw had not been seen for several days. My client might just have wanted me to find the body, but I had a strong curiosity about the girl.
My job did not seem to include breaking the news of Peter’s death to his father, if his father didn’t already know. But before I completely wrote off last night’s visitor as John Thayer, I should get his picture. “Clear as you go” has ever been my motto. I pulled on my lower lip for a while in an agony of thought and finally realized where I could get a picture of the man with a minimum of fuss and bother-and with no one knowing I was getting it.
I locked the office and walked across the Loop to Monroe and La Salle. The Fort Dearborn Trust occupied four massive buildings, one on each corner of the intersection. I picked the one with gold lettering over the door, and asked the guard for the PR department.
“Thirty-second floor,” he mumbled. “You got an appointment?” I smiled seraphically and said I did and sailed up thirty-two stories while he went back to chewing his cigar butt.
PR receptionists are always trim, well-lacquered, and dressed in the extreme of fashion. This one’s form-fitting lavender jumpsuit was probably the most outlandish costume in the bank. She gave me a plastic smile and graciously tendered a copy of the most recent annual report. I stuck on my own plastic smile and went back to the elevator, nodded beneficently to the guard, and sauntered out.