“A lesson I’m sure Gertrude Sommers and her nephew learned at Aaron Sommers’s funeral,” I said, getting up to leave.
He bowed his head mournfully, as if unaware of the bite behind my words. He hadn’t gotten to be one of the richest men in South Shore by apologizing for his rigorous business methods.
VIII Tales of Hoffman
The score so far today seemed to be Warshawski zero, visitors three. I hadn’t gotten any satisfaction from Ajax, or the Midway Agency, or the funeral director. While I was south, I might as well complete my sweep of frustrating meetings by visiting the widow.
She lived a few blocks from the Dan Ryan Expressway, in a rickety twelve-flat with a burnt-out building on one side and a lot with bits of masonry and rusted-out cars on the other. A couple of guys were leaning over the engine of an elderly Chevy when I pulled up. The only other person on the street was a fierce-looking woman muttering as she sucked from a brown paper bag.
The Sommerses’ doorbell didn’t seem to work, but the street door hung loosely on its hinges, so I went on into the building. The stairwell smelled of urine and stale grease. Dogs barked from behind several doors as I passed, briefly overwhelming the thin hopeless wail of a baby. I was so depressed by the time I reached Gertrude Sommers’s door that I was hard put to knock instead of beating a craven retreat.
A few minutes passed. Finally I heard a slow step and a deep voice calling to know who it was. I told her my name, that I was the detective her nephew had hired. She scraped back the three dead bolts holding the door and stood in the entrance for a moment, looking me over somberly before letting me in.
Gertrude Sommers was a tall woman. Even in old age she was a good two inches taller than my five-eight, and even in grief she held herself erect. She was wearing a dark dress that rustled when she walked. A black lace handkerchief, tucked in the cuff of her left sleeve, underscored her mourning. Looking at her made me feel grubby in my work-worn skirt and sweater.
I followed her into the apartment’s main room, standing until she pointed regally at the sofa. The bright floral upholstery was shielded in heavy plastic, which crackled loudly when I sat down.
The building’s squalor ended on her doorstep. Every surface that wasn’t encased in plastic shone with polish, from the dining table against the far wall to the clock with its fake chimes over the television. The walls were hung with pictures, many of the same smiling child, and a formal shot of my client and his wife on their wedding day. To my surprise, Alderman Durham was on the wall-once in a solo shot, and again with his arms around two young teens in his blue Empower Youth Energy sweatshirts. One of the boys was leaning on metal crutches, but both were beaming proudly.
“I’m sorry for your loss, Ms. Sommers. And sorry for the terrible mix-up over your husband’s life insurance.”
She folded her lips tightly. She wasn’t going to help.
I plowed ahead as best I could, laying the photocopies of the fraudulent death certificate and canceled insurance check in front of her. “I’m bewildered by this situation. I’m wondering if you have any suggestions about how it could have occurred.”
She refused to look at the documents. “How much did they pay you to come here and accuse me?”
“No one paid me to do that, and no one could pay me to do that, Ms. Sommers.”
“Easy words, easy words for you to say, young woman.”
“True enough.” I paused, trying to feel my way into her point of view. “My mother died when I was fifteen. If some stranger had cashed in her burial policy and then accused my dad of doing it, well, I can imagine what he would have done, and he was an easygoing guy. But if I can’t ask you any questions about this, how am I ever going to find out who cashed this policy all those years ago?”
She clamped her lips together, thinking it over, then said, “Have you talked to the insurance man, that Mr. Hoffman who came around every Friday afternoon before Mr. Sommers could spend his pay on drink, or whatever he imagined a poor black man would do instead of putting food on his family’s table?”
“Mr. Hoffman is dead. The agency is in the hands of the previous owner’s son, who doesn’t seem to know too much about the business. Did Mr. Hoffman treat your husband with disrespect?”
She sniffed. “We weren’t people to him. We were ticks in that book he carried around with him. Driving up in that big Mercedes like he did, we knew just where our hard-saved nickels went. And no way to question whether he was honest or not.”
“You think now he cheated you?”
“How else do you explain this?” She slapped the papers on the table, still without looking at them. “You think I am deaf, dumb, and blind? I know what goes on in this country with black folk and insurance. I read how that company in the south got caught charging black folk more than their policies were worth.”
“Did that happen to you?”
“No. But we paid. We paid and we paid and we paid. All to have it go up in smoke.”
“If you didn’t file the claim in 1991, and you don’t think your husband did, who would have?” I asked.
She shook her head, but her gaze inadvertently went to the wall of photographs.
I drew a breath. “This isn’t easy to ask, but your son was listed on the policy.”
Her look scorched me. “My son, my son died. It was because of him we went after a bigger policy, thinking to leave him a little something besides our funerals, Mr. Sommers’s and mine. Muscular dystrophy, our boy had. And in case you’re thinking, Oh, well, they cashed the policy to pay his medical bills, let me tell you, miss, Mr. Sommers worked two shifts for four years, paying those bills. I had to quit my job to take care of my son when he got too sick to move anymore. After he passed, I worked two shifts, too, to get rid of the bills. At the nursing home where I was an aide. If you’re going to pry into all my private details you can have that one without charging my nephew a nickel for it: the Grand Crossing Elder Care Home. But you can go snooping through my life. Maybe I have a secret drinking vice-you’ll go ask them at the church where I became a Christian and where my husband was a deacon for forty-five years. Maybe Mr. Sommers gambled and used all my housekeeping money. That’s the way you plan on ruining my reputation, isn’t it.”
I looked at her steadily. “So you won’t let me ask you any questions about the policy. And you can’t think of anyone who might have cashed it in. You don’t have other nephews or nieces besides Mr. Isaiah Sommers who might have?”
Again her gaze turned to the wall. On an impulse, I asked her who the other boy was in the picture of Alderman Durham with her son.
“That’s my nephew Colby. And no, you’re not getting a shot along with the cops to pin something on him, nor yet on the alderman’s Empower Youth Energy organization. Alderman Durham has been a good friend, to my family and to this neighborhood. And his group gives boys something to do with their time and energy.”
It didn’t seem like the right time or place to ask about the rumors that EYE members hustled campaign contributions with a judicious use of muscle. I turned back to the papers in front of us and asked about Rick Hoffman.
“What was he like? Can you imagine him stealing the policy from you?”
“Oh, what do I know about him? Except, like I said, his leather book that he ticked off our names in. He could have been Adolf Hitler for all I know.”
“Did he sell insurance to a lot of people in this building?” I persisted.
“And why do you want to know that?”
“I’d like to find out if other people who bought from him had the same experience you did.”
At that she finally looked at me, instead of through me. “In this building, no. At where Aaron-Mr. Sommers-worked, yes. My husband was at South Branch Scrap Metal. Mr. Hoffman knew people want to be buried decent, so he came around to places like that on the South Side, must have had ten or twenty businesses he’d hit on Friday afternoon. Sometimes he’d collect at the shop yard, sometimes he’d come here, it all depended
on his schedule. And Aaron, Mr. Sommers, he paid his five dollars a week for fifteen years, until he was paid up.”
“Would you have any way of knowing the names of some of the other people who bought from Hoffman?”
She studied me again, trying to assess whether this was a soft sell, and deciding finally to take a chance that I was being genuine. “I could give you four names, the men my husband worked with. They all bought from Hoffman because he made it easy, coming around like he did. Does this mean you understand I’m telling the truth about this?” She swept a hand toward my documents, still without looking at them.
I grimaced. “I have to consider all the possibilities, Ms. Sommers.”
She eyed me bitterly. “I know my nephew meant it for the best, hiring you, but if he’d known how little respect you’d have-”
“I’m not disrespecting you, Ms. Sommers. You told your nephew you’d talk to me. You know the kinds of questions this must raise: there’s a death certificate with your husband’s name on it, with your name on it as the presenter, dated almost ten years ago, with a check made out to you through the Midway Insurance Agency. Someone cashed it. If I’m going to find out who, I have to start somewhere. It would help me believe you if I could find other people this same thing happened to.”
Her face pinched up with anger, but after sitting in silence while the clock ticked off thirty seconds, she pulled a lined notepad from under the telephone. Wetting her index finger, she turned the pages of a weather-beaten address book and finally wrote down a series of names. Still without speaking, she handed the list to me.
The interview was over. I picked my way back along the unlit hall and down the stairs. The baby was still wailing. Outside, the men were still huddled over the Chevy.
When I unlocked the Mustang the men shouted over a jovial offer to trade. I grinned and waved. Oh, the kindness of strangers. It was only when people talked to me they got so hostile. There was a lesson in there for me, but not one I particularly wished to pursue.
It was almost three: I hadn’t eaten since my yogurt at eight this morning. Maybe the situation would seem less depressing if I had some food. I passed a strip mall on my way to the expressway and bought a slice of cheese pizza. The crust was gooey, the surface glistened with oil, but I ate every bite with gusto. When I got out of my car at the office I realized I’d dripped oil down the front of my rose silk sweater. Warshawski zero, visitors five, at this point. At least I didn’t have any business meetings this afternoon.
My part-time assistant, Mary Louise Neely, was at her desk. She handed me a packet with the video of the Radbuka interviews, which Beth Blacksin had messengered over. I stuffed it in my briefcase and brought Mary Louise up to date with the Sommers case, so she could check on the other men who had bought insurance from Rick Hoffman, then told her about Don’s interest in Paul Radbuka.
“I couldn’t find anyone named Radbuka in the system,” I finished, “so either-”
“Vic-if he changed his name, he had to do so in front of a judge. There will be a court order.” Mary Louise looked at me as though I were the village idiot.
I gaped at her like a dying pike and meekly went to turn on my computer. It was small comfort that if Radbuka or Ulrich or whatever his name was had taken any legal action, it wasn’t in the system yet: I should have thought of that myself.
Mary Louise, not wanting to go stomping far and wide through the city, didn’t believe Radbuka wasn’t somewhere in the system. She did her own search and then said she would stop at the courts in the morning to double-check the paper record.
“Although maybe the therapist will tell you where to find him. What’s her name?”
When I told her, her eyes opened wide. “Rhea Wiell? The Rhea Wiell?”
“You know her?” I spun around in my chair to face her.
“Not personally.” Mary Louise’s skin turned the same orangy pink as her hair. “But because, you know, because of my own story, I followed her career. I sat in on some of the trials where she testified.”
Mary Louise had run away from an abusive home when she was a teenager. After a tumultuous ride through sex and drugs, she’d pulled herself together and become a police officer. In fact, the three children she was fostering had been rescued from an abusive home. So it wasn’t surprising she paid special attention to a therapist who worked with molested children.
“Wiell used to be with the State Department of Children and Family Services. She was one of the staff therapists, she worked with kids, but she also was an expert witness in court cases that hinged on abuse. Remember the MacLean trial?”
As Mary Louise described it, the details began coming back to me. The guy was a law professor who’d started life as a Du Page County criminal prosecutor. When his name was put forward for a federal judgeship, his daughter, by then a grown woman, came forward to denounce him as having raped her when she was a child. She was insistent enough that she forced the state to bring charges.
Various right-wing family foundations had ridden to MacLean’s rescue, claiming the daughter was the mouthpiece of a liberal smear campaign, since the father was a conservative Republican. In the end, the jury in the criminal sexual-assault trial found for the father, but his name was dropped from consideration for the judgeship.
“And Wiell testified?” I asked Mary Louise.
“More than that. She was the daughter’s therapist. It was working with Rhea Wiell that made the woman recover the memories of abuse, when she’d blocked them for twenty years. The defense brought in Arnold Praeger from the Planted Memory Foundation. He tried all kinds of cheap shots to make her look bad, but he couldn’t shake her.” Mary Louise glowed with admiration.
“So Praeger and Wiell go back a ways together.”
“I don’t know about that, but they definitely have been adversaries in court for quite a few years.”
“I put in a search to ProQuest before I left this morning. If their fights have been in the news, I should have the stories.” I brought up my ProQuest search. Mary Louise came to read over my shoulder. The case she had mentioned had generated a lot of ink at the time. I skimmed a couple of pieces in the Herald-Star, which praised Wiell’s unflappable testimony.
Mary Louise bristled with anger over an op-ed piece Arnold Praeger had run in The Wall Street Journal, criticizing both Wiell and the law, which would allow the testimony of young children who had clearly been coached in what they remembered. Wiell wasn’t even a reputable therapist, Praeger concluded. If she was, why had the State of Illinois dropped her from its payroll?
“Dropped her?” I said to Mary Louise, sending the piece to the printer with several of the others. “Do you know about that?”
“No. I assumed she decided private practice was a better place to be. Sooner or later, just about everyone gets burned out working for DCFS.” Mary Louise’s pale eyes were troubled. “I thought she was a really good, really genuine therapist. I can’t believe the state would fire her, or at least not for any good reason. Maybe out of spite. She was the best they had, but there’s always a lot of jealousy in offices like that. When I saw her in court, I used to imagine she was my mother. In fact, I was incredibly jealous of a woman I met who saw her professionally.”
She laughed in embarrassment. “I’ve got to go, time for me to pick up the kids before class. I’ll do those Sommers queries first thing tomorrow. You filling in your time sheets?”
“Yes, ma’am,” I saluted her smartly.
“It’s not a joke, Vic,” she said sternly. “It’s the only way-”
“I know, I know.” Mary Louise doesn’t like to be teased, which can be boring-but probably also is why she’s such a good office manager.
When Mary Louise had left, promising to stop by the courts to check for Radbuka’s change-of-name filing, I called a lawyer I knew in the State Department of Children and Family Services. We’d met at a seminar on women and law in the public sector and kept in touch in a desultory way.
She re
ferred me to a supervisor in the DCFS office who would speak if it was far off the record. The supervisor wanted to call me back from a pay phone, in case her desk line was being monitored. I had to wait until five, when the woman stopped at a public phone in the basement of the Illinois Center on her way home. Before she’d tell me anything, my informant made me swear I wasn’t calling on behalf of the Planted Memory Foundation.
“Not everyone at DCFS believes in hypnotherapy, but nobody here wants to see our clients hurt by one of those Planted Memory lawsuits.”
When I assured her, by running through a list of possible references until I hit on a name she knew and trusted, she was amazingly frank. “Rhea was the most empathic therapist we ever used. She got incredible results from kids who would hardly even give their names to other therapists. I still miss her when we have certain kinds of trauma cases. The trouble was, she began to see herself as the priestess of DCFS. You couldn’t question her results or her judgment.
“I don’t remember exactly when she started her private practice, maybe six years ago, doing it part-time. But it was three years ago when we decided to sever her contract with the state. The press release said it was her decision, that she wanted to concentrate on her practice, but the feeling here was that she wouldn’t take direction. She was always right; we-or the state attorney general, or anyone who disagreed with her-were wrong. And you can’t have a staff person, someone you rely on with kids and in court, who always wants to be Joan of Arc.”
“Did you think she might misrepresent a situation for her own glory?” I asked.
“Oh, no. Nothing like that. She wasn’t out for glory-she was on a mission. I’m telling you, some of the younger women started calling her Mother Teresa, and not always out of admiration. Actually, that was part of the problem; she split the office straight in half between Rhea worshipers and Rhea doubters. And then she wouldn’t let you question how she came to a conclusion. Like in that one case where the guy she was accusing of molestation was a former prosecutor who’d been nominated for a federal judgeship. Rhea wouldn’t let us see her case notes before she testified. If the case had backfired, we could have been facing a ton of damages.”
Total Recall Page 7