Total Recall

by Sara Paretsky

  “This here is all the documents on L-146938-72. I’m sorry about being in my jeans and all, but my supervisor is away, so they told me to bring the file up myself. I printed the financials from off the microfiche, so they aren’t as clear as they could be, but I did the best I could.”

  Bertrand Rossy joined me when I got up to look over her shoulder at the papers. Connie Ingram flipped through the pages until she came to the payment documents.

  Ralph pulled them out of the file and studied them. He looked at them for a long moment, then turned to me sternly. “It seems that your client’s family was trying to collect twice on the same policy, Vic. We frown on that here.”

  I took the pages from him. The policy had been paid up in 1986. In 1991, someone had submitted a death certificate. A photocopy of the canceled check was attached. It had been paid to Gertrude Sommers, care of the Midway Insurance Agency, and duly endorsed by them.

  For a moment, I was too dumbfounded to speak. The grieving widow must be quite a con artist to convince the nephew into shelling out for his uncle’s funeral when she’d collected on the policy a decade ago. But how on earth had she gotten a death certificate back then? My first coherent thought was mean-spirited: I was glad I’d insisted on earnest money up front. I doubted Isaiah Sommers would have paid to learn this bit of news.

  “This isn’t your idea of a joke, is it, Vic?” Ralph demanded.

  He was angry because he thought he looked foolishly incompetent in front of his new master: I wasn’t going to ride him. “Scout’s honor, Ralph. The story I told you is the identical one I got from my client. Have you ever seen something like this before? A fraudulent death certificate?”

  “It happens.” He flicked a glance at Rossy. “Usually it’s someone faking his own death to get away from creditors. And then the circumstances of the policy-the size-the timing between when it was sold and when it was cashed-make us investigate before we pay. For something like this”-he snapped the canceled check with his middle finger-“we wouldn’t investigate such a small face value-and one where we’d collected all the premium years before.”

  “So the possibility exists? The possibility that people are submitting claims that aren’t rightfully theirs?” Rossy took the whole file from Ralph and started going through it one page at a time.

  “But the company would only pay once,” Ralph said. “As you can see, we had all the information available when the funeral home submitted the policy, so we didn’t pay the claim twice. I don’t suppose anyone from the agency would have bothered to check whether the purchaser”-he looked at the tab on the file-“whether Sommers was really dead when his wife filed the claim.”

  Connie Ingram asked doubtfully if she should talk to her supervisor about calling the agency or the funeral home. Ralph turned to me. “Are you going to talk to them anyway, Vic? Will you let Connie know what you find out? The truth, I mean, not some version that you want Ajax to learn?”

  “If Miss Warshawski is in the habit of hiding her findings from the company, Ralph, perhaps we shouldn’t trust her with these delicate questions.” Rossy gave me a little bow. “I’m sure you would ask your questions so skillfully that our agent might be startled into telling you-what he ought to keep between himself and the company.”

  Ralph started to say that he was only trying to bait me, then sighed and told Connie by all means to ask any questions she needed to reclose the file.

  “Ralph, what if someone else filed the claim, someone pretending to be Gertrude Sommers,” I said. “Would the company make her whole?”

  Ralph rubbed the deepening crease between his eyes. “Don’t ask me to make moral decisions without the facts. What if it was her husband-or her kid? He’s listed as a secondary beneficiary after her. Or her minister? I’m not going to commit the company to anything until I know the truth.”

  He was talking to me but looking at Rossy, who was looking at his watch, not at all discreetly. Ralph muttered something about their next appointment. This made me more uneasy even than the fraud over the claim: I don’t like my lovers, even long-former lovers, to feel the need to be obsequious.

  As I left the office, I asked Ralph for a photocopy of the canceled check and the death certificate. Rossy answered for him. “These are company documents, Devereux.”

  “But if you don’t let me show them to my client, then he has no way of knowing whether I’m lying to him,” I said. “You remember the case this last spring, where various life-insurance companies admitted to charging black customers as much as four times the amount they did whites? I assure you, that will leap into my client’s mind. And then, instead of me coming around asking for documents in a nice way, you might have a federal lawsuit with a subpoena attached.”

  Rossy stared at me, suddenly frosty. “If the threat of a lawsuit seems to your mind to be ‘asking in a nice way,’ then I have to ask myself questions about your business practices.”

  With the dimples in abeyance, he showed he could be a formidable corporate presence. I smiled and took his hand, turning it to look at the palm. He was startled into standing motionless.

  “Signor Rossy, I wasn’t threatening you with a lawsuit: I was an indovina, reading your fortune, foreseeing an inevitable future.”

  The frost melted abruptly. “What other things do you divine?”

  I put his hand down. “My powers are limited. But you seem to have a long lifeline. Now, with your permission may I copy the canceled check and the death certificate?”

  “Forgive my Swiss habits of being unwilling to part with official documents. By all means, make copies of these two papers. But the file as a whole I think I’ll keep with me. Just in case your charm makes you more persuasive with this young lady than her normal loyalties would allow you to be.”

  He gestured at Connie Ingram, who blushed. “Sir, I’m really sorry, sir, but can you fill out a slip for me? I can’t let a claim file stay out of our area without a notice of the number and of who has it.”

  “Ah, so you have respect for documents as well. Excellent. You write down what you need, and I will sign it. Will that fulfill the requirements?”

  Her color spreading to her collarbone, Connie Ingram went out to Ralph’s secretary to type up what she needed. I followed with the documents I was allowed to have; Ralph’s secretary copied them for me.

  Ralph walked partway down the hall with me. “Stay in touch, Vic, okay? I would be grateful to hear from you if you learn anything about this business.”

  “You’ll be the second to know,” I promised. “You going to be equally forthcoming?”

  “Naturally.” He grinned, briefly showing a trace of the old Ralph. “And if I remember right, I’m likely to be much more forthcoming than you.”

  I laughed, but I still felt sad as I waited for the elevator. When the doors finally opened with a subdued ding, a young woman in a prim tweed suit stepped off, clutching a tan briefcase to her side. The dreadlocks tidily pulled away from her face made me blink in recognition.

  “Ms. Blount-I’m V I Warshawski-we met at the Ajax gala a month ago.”

  She nodded and briefly touched my fingertips. “I need to be in a meeting.”

  “Ah, yes: with Bertrand Rossy.” I thought of putting her on her guard against Rossy’s accusation that she was siphoning off company documents for Bull Durham, but she whisked herself down the hall toward Ralph’s office before I could make up my mind.

  The elevator that brought her had left. Before another arrived, Connie Ingram joined me, her paperwork apparently finished.

  “Mr. Rossy seems very protective of his documents,” I commented.

  “We can’t afford to misplace any paper around here,” she said primly. “People can sue us if we don’t have our records in tiptop shape.”

  “Are you worried about a suit from the Sommers family?”

  “Mr. Devereux said the agent was responsible for the claim. So it’s not our problem here at the company, but of course he and Mr. Rossy-”

>   She stopped, red-faced, as if remembering Rossy’s comment about my persuasive charms. The elevator arrived and she scurried into it. It was twelve-forty, heart of the lunch hour. The elevator stopped every two or three floors to take in people before making its express descent from forty to the ground. I wondered what indiscretion she had bitten back, but there wasn’t any way I could pump her.

  VII Cold Call

  Something there is that doesn’t love a fence,” I muttered as I boarded the northbound L. Lots of people on the train were muttering to themselves: I fit right in. “When someone is guarding documents, is it because his corporate culture is obsessive, as Rossy said? Or because there’s something in them he doesn’t want me to see?”

  “Because he’s in the pay of the U-nited Nations,” the man next to me said. “They’re bringing in tanks. Those U-nited Nations helie-copters landing in Dee-troit, I seen them on TV.”

  “You’re right,” I said to his beery face. “It’s definitely a UN plot. So you think I should go down to Midway Insurance, talk to the agent, see if my charms are persuasive enough to wangle a look at the sales file?”

  “Your charms plenty persuasive enough for me,” he leered.

  That was esteem-enhancing. When I got off the train at Western, I picked up my car and immediately headed south again. Down in Hyde Park, I found a meter with forty minutes on it on one of the side streets near the bank where Midway Insurance had their offices. The bank building itself was the neighborhood’s venerable dowager, its ten stories towering over Hyde Park ’s main shopping street. The facade had recently been cleaned up, but once I got off the elevator onto the sixth floor, the dim lights and dingy walls betrayed a management indifference to tenant comfort.

  Midway Insurance was wedged between a dentist and a gynecologist. The black letters on the door, telling me they insured life, home, and auto, had been there a long time: part of the H in Home had peeled away, so that it looked as though Midway insured nome.

  The door was locked, but when I rang the bell someone buzzed me in. The office beyond was even drearier than the hall. The flickering fluorescent light was so dim that I didn’t notice a peeling corner of linoleum until I’d tripped on it. I grabbed at a filing cabinet to keep from falling.

  “Sorry-I keep meaning to fix that.” I hadn’t noticed the man until he spoke-he was sitting at a desk that took up most of the room, but the light was bad enough I hadn’t seen him when I opened the door.

  “I hope you buy premises insurance, because you’re inviting a nasty suit if you don’t glue that down,” I snapped, coming all the way into the room.

  He turned on a desk lamp, revealing a face with freckles so thick that they formed an orange carpet across his face. At my words the carpet turned a deeper red.

  “I don’t get much walk-in business,” he explained. “Most of the time we’re in the field.”

  I looked around, but there wasn’t a desk for a second person. I moved a phone book from the only other chair and sat down. “You have partners? Subordinates?”

  “I inherited the business from my dad. He died three years ago, but I keep forgetting that. I think the business is going to die, too. I never have been much good with cold calls, and now the Internet is killing independent agents.”

  Mentioning the Internet reminded him that his computer was on. He flicked a key to start the screensaver, but before the fish began cascading I saw he’d been playing some kind of solitaire.

  The computer was the only newish item in the room. His desk was a heavy yellow wooden one, the kind popular fifty years ago, with two rows of drawers framing a kneehole for the user’s legs. Black stains from decades of grime, coffee, ink, and who knows what scarred the yellow in the places I could see it-most of the surface was covered in a depressing mass of paper. My own office looked monastic by comparison.

  Four large filing cabinets took up most of the remaining space. A curling poster of the Chinese national table-tennis team provided the only decoration. A large pot hung from a chain above the window, but the plant within had withered down to a few drying leaves.

  He sat up and tried to put a semblance of energy into his tone. “What can I do for you?”

  “I’m V I Warshawski.” I handed him one of my cards. “And you are?”

  “Fepple. Howard Fepple.” He looked at my card. “Oh. The detective. They told me you’d be calling.”

  I looked at my watch. It had been just over an hour since I left Ajax. Someone in the company had moved fast.

  “Who told you that? Bertrand Rossy?”

  “I don’t know the name. It was one of the girls in claims.”

  “Women,” I corrected irritably.

  “Whatever. Anyway, she told me you’d be asking about one of our old policies. Which I can’t tell you anything about, because I was in high school when it was sold.”

  “So you looked it up? What did it tell you about who cashed it in?”

  He leaned back in his chair, the man at ease. “I can’t see why that’s any of your business.”

  I grinned evilly, all ideas about charm and persuasion totally forgotten. “The Sommers family, whom I represent, have an interest in this matter that could be satisfied by a federal lawsuit. Involving subpoenas for the files and suing the agency for fraud. Maybe your father sold the policy to Aaron Sommers back in 1971, but you own the agency now. It wouldn’t be the Internet that would finish you off.”

  His fleshy lips pursed together in a pout. “For your information it wasn’t my father who sold the policy but Rick Hoffman, who worked for him here.”

  “So where can I find Mr. Hoffman?”

  He smirked. “Wherever you look for the dead. But I don’t imagine old Rick ended up in heaven. He was a mean SOB. How he did as well as he did…” He shrugged eloquently.

  “You mean unlike you he wasn’t afraid of the cold call?”

  “He was a Friday man. You know, going into the poor neighborhoods on Friday afternoons collecting after people got paid. A lot of our business is life insurance like that, small face value, enough to get someone buried right and leave a little for the family. It’s all someone like this Sommers could probably afford, ten thousand, although that was big by our standards, usually they’re only three or four thousand.”

  “So Hoffman collected from Aaron Sommers. Had he paid up the policy?”

  Fepple tapped a file on top of the mess of papers. “Oh, yes. Yes, it took him fifteen years, but it was paid in full. The beneficiaries were his wife, Gertrude, and his son, Marcus.”

  “So who cashed it in? And if they did, how come the family still had the policy?”

  Looking at me resentfully, Fepple started through the file, page by page. He stopped at one point, staring at a document, his lips moving soundlessly. A little smile flickered at the corners of his mouth, an unpleasant, secretive smile, but after a moment he continued the search. Finally he pulled out the same documents I’d already seen at the company: a copy of the death certificate and a copy of the countersigned check.

  “What else was in the file?” I asked.

  “Nothing,” he said quickly. “There was nothing unusual about it at all. Rick did a zillion of these little weekend sales. There’s no surprise to them.”

  I didn’t believe him, but I didn’t have a way to call his bluff. “Not much of a way to make a living, three- and four-thousand-dollar sales.”

  “Rick did real well for himself. He knew how to work the angles, I’ll tell you that much.”

  “And what you’re not telling me?”

  “I’m not telling you my private business. You’ve barged in here without an appointment, fishing around for dirt, but you don’t have any grounds to ask questions. And don’t go waving federal lawsuits at me. If there was any funny business about this, it was the company’s responsibility, not mine.”

  “Did Hoffman have any family?”

  “A son. I don’t know what happened to him-he was a whole lot older than me, and he and old Rick
didn’t hit it off too great. I had to go to the funeral, with my old man, and we were the only damned people in the church. The son was long gone by then.”

  “So who inherited Hoffman’s share of the business?”

  Fepple shook his head. “He wasn’t a partner. He worked for my old man. Strictly commission, but-he did well.”

  “So why don’t you pick up his client list and carry on for him?”

  The nasty little smile reappeared. “I might just do that very thing. I didn’t realize until the company called me what a little gold mine Rick’s way of doing business represented.”

  I wanted to see that file badly, but short of grabbing it from the desk and running off down the stairs into the arms of the guard in the lobby, I couldn’t think of any way to look at it. At least, not at the moment. As I left, I tripped again on the corner of the linoleum. If Fepple didn’t fix it soon I’d be suing him myself.

  Since I was already south, I went on another two miles to Sixty-seventh Street, where the Delaney Funeral Parlor stood. It was in an imposing white building, easily the grandest on the block, with four hearses parked in the lot behind it. I left my Mustang next to them and went in to see what I could learn.

  Old Mr. Delaney talked to me himself, about how sorry they were to have had to inflict such grief on a sweet decent woman like Sister Sommers but that he couldn’t afford to bury people for charity: if you did it once, every freeloader on the South Side would be coming around with some story or other about their insurance falling through. As to how he’d learned that Sommers’s policy had already been cashed in, they had a simple procedure with the life-insurance companies. They had called, given the policy number, and been told that the policy had already been paid. I asked who he’d spoken to.

  “I don’t give anything away free, young lady,” Mr. Delaney said austerely. “If you want to pursue your own inquiries at the company, I urge you to do so, but don’t expect me to give you for nothing information I spent my hard-earned money finding out. All I will tell you is that it isn’t the first time this has happened, that a bereaved family has discovered that their loved one had disposed of his resources without privileging them with the information. It isn’t a regular occurrence, but families are often sadly surprised at the behavior of their loved ones. Human nature can be all too human.”