“In a little bit. As soon as you answer some questions. I want to see the file on Aaron Sommers.”
His carpet of freckles turned a deeper orange. “You have a helluva nerve. Those are private papers, none of your damned business.”
“They are my client’s business. One way or another, either by you cooperating now or by my getting a court order, you’re going to show me the file. So let’s do it now.”
“Go get your court order if you can. My father trusted me with his business; I am not going to let him down.”
It was a strange and rather sad attempt at bravado. “Okay. I’ll get a court order. One other thing. Rick Hoffman’s notebook. That little black book he carried around with him, ticking off his clients’ payments. I want to see it.”
“Join the crowd,” he snapped. “Everyone in Chicago wants to see his notebook, but I don’t have it. He took it home with him every night like it was the secret of the atom bomb. And when he died it was at his home. If I knew where his son was, maybe I’d know where the damned notebook was. But that creep is probably in an insane asylum someplace. He’s not in Chicago, at any rate.”
His phone rang. He jumped on it so fast it might have been a hundred-dollar bill on the sidewalk.
“There’s someone with me right now,” he blurted into the mouthpiece. “Right, the woman detective.” He listened for a minute, said, “Okay, okay,” jotted what looked like numbers on a scrap of paper, and hung up.
He turned off his desk lamp and made a big show of locking his filing cabinets. When he came around to open the door, I had no choice but to get up, as well. We rode the elevator down to the lobby, where he surprised me by going up to the guard.
“See this lady, Collins? She’s been coming around my office, making threats. Can you make sure she doesn’t get into the building again tonight?”
The guard looked me up and down before saying, “Sure thing, Mr. Fepple,” without much enthusiasm. Fepple went outside with me. When I congratulated him on a successful tactic, he smirked before striding off down the street. I watched him go into the pizza restaurant on the corner. They had a phone in the entryway, which he stopped to use.
I joined a couple of drunks outside a convenience store across the street. They were arguing about a man named Clive and what Clive’s sister had said about one of them, but they broke off to try to cadge the price of a bottle from me. I moved away from them, still watching Fepple.
After about five minutes he came out, looked around cautiously, saw me, and darted toward a shopping center on the north side of the street. I started after him, but one of the drunks grabbed me, telling me not to be such a stuck-up bitch. I stuck a knee in his stomach and jerked my arm free. While he shouted obscenities I ran north, but I was still in my pumps. This time the left heel gave and I tumbled to the concrete. By the time I got myself collected, Fepple had disappeared.
I cursed myself, Fepple, and the drunks with equal ferocity. By a miracle, damage was limited to the shreds in my panty hose and a bloody scrape on my left leg and thigh. In the fading daylight I couldn’t tell if I’d ruined my skirt, a silky black number that I was rather fond of. I limped back to my car, where I used part of my bottle of water to clean the blood from my leg. The skirt had some dirt ground into it, fraying the fabric surface. I picked at the gravel bits disconsolately. Maybe when it was cleaned the torn threads wouldn’t show.
Leaning back in the front seat with my eyes shut, I wondered whether it was worthwhile trying to get back into the Hyde Park Bank building. Even if I could charm my way past the guard in my current disarray, if I took anything, Fepple would know it had been me. That project could wait until Monday.
I still had over an hour before I was due to meet Beth Blacksin-I should just go home and clean up properly for my interview. On the other hand, Amy Blount, Ph.D., the young woman who’d written Ajax ’s history, lived only three blocks from the bank. I called the number Mary Louise had dug up for me.
Ms. Blount was home. In her polite, aloof way she acknowledged that we’d met. When I explained that I wanted to ask some questions about Ajax, she turned from aloof to frosty.
“Mr. Rossy’s secretary has already asked me those questions. I find them offensive. I won’t answer them from you any more than from him.”
“Sorry, Ms. Blount, I wasn’t very clear. Ajax didn’t send me to you. I don’t know what questions Rossy wants to ask you, but they’re probably different from mine. Mine come from a client who’s trying to find out what happened to a life-insurance policy. I don’t think you know the answer, but I’d like to talk to you because-” Because of what? Because I was so frustrated at being stiffed by Fepple, defamed by Durham, that I was clutching at any straw? “Because I cannot figure out what’s going on and I’d like to talk to someone who understands Ajax. I’m in the neighborhood; I could stop by now for ten minutes if you can spare the time.”
After a pause, she said coldly she would hear what I had to say but couldn’t promise she’d answer any questions.
She lived in a shabby courtyard building on Cornell, the kind of haphazardly maintained property that students can afford. Even so, as I knew from the plaint of an old friend whose son was starting medical school down here, Blount probably paid six or seven hundred a month for the broken glass on the sidewalk, her badly hung lobby door, and the hole in the stairwell wall.
Blount stood in the open door to her studio apartment, watching while I climbed the third flight of stairs. Here at home, her dreadlocks hung loosely about her face. Instead of the prim tweed suit she’d worn to Ajax, she had on jeans and a big shirt. She ushered me in politely but without cordiality, waving a hand at a hardwood chair while seating herself in the swivel desk chair at her work station.
Except for a futon with a bright kente cover and a print of a woman squatting behind a basket, the room was furnished with monastic severity. It was lined on all sides by white pasteboard bookshelves. Even the tiny eating alcove had shelves fitted around a clock.
“Ralph Devereux told me you had a degree in economic history. Is that how you came to be involved with writing the Ajax history?”
She nodded without speaking.
“What did you do your dissertation on?”
“Is this relevant to your client’s story, Ms. Warshawski?”
I raised my brows. “Polite conversation, Ms. Blount. But that’s right, you said you wouldn’t answer any questions. You said you had already heard from Bertrand Rossy, so you know that Alderman Durham has had Ajax under-”
“His secretary,” she corrected me. “Mr. Rossy is too important to call me himself.”
Her voice was so toneless that I couldn’t be sure whether her intent was ironic. “Still, he made the questions take place. So you know Durham ’s picketing the Ajax building, claiming that Ajax and the Birnbaums owe restitution to the African-American community for the money they both made from slavery. I suppose Rossy accused you of supplying Durham the information out of the Ajax archives.”
She nodded fractionally, her eyes wary.
“The other piece of Durham ’s protest concerns me personally. Have you encountered the Midway Insurance Agency over in the bank building? Howard Fepple is the rather ineffectual present owner, but thirty years ago one of his father’s agents sold a policy to a man named Sommers.” I outlined the Sommers family problem. “Now Durham has hold of the story. Based on your work at Ajax, I’m wondering if you have any ideas on who might give the alderman such detailed inside information about both the company history and this current claim. Sommers complained to the alderman, but the Durham protest had one detail that I don’t think Sommers would have known: the fact that Ajax insured the Birnbaum Corporation in the years before the Civil War. I’m assuming that information is accurate, or Rossy wouldn’t have called you. Had his secretary call you.”
When I paused, Blount said, “It is, sort of. That is, the original Birnbaum, the one who started the family fortune, was insured by Ajax in the 18
50’s.”
“What do you mean, sort of?” I asked.
“In 1858, Mordecai Birnbaum lost a load of steel plows he was sending to Mississippi when the steamship blew up on the Illinois River. Ajax paid for it. I suppose that’s what Alderman Durham is referring to.” She spoke in a rapid monotone. I hoped when she lectured to students she had more animation, or they’d all be asleep.
“Steel plows?” I repeated, my attention diverted. “They existed before the Civil War?”
She smiled primly. “John Deere invented the steel plow in 1830. In 1847 he set up his first major plant and retail store here in Illinois.”
“So the Birnbaums were already an economic power in 1858.”
“I don’t think so. I think it was the Civil War that made the family fortune, but the Ajax archives didn’t include a lot of specifics-I was guessing from the list of assets being insured. The Birnbaum plows were only a small part of the ship’s cargo.”
“In your opinion, who could have told Durham about Birnbaum’s plow shipment?”
“Is this a subtle way to get me to confess?”
She could have asked the question in a humorous vein-but she didn’t. I made an effort not to lose my own temper in return. “I’m open to all possibilities, but I have to consider the available facts. You had access to the archives. Perhaps you shared the data with Durham. But if you didn’t, perhaps you have some ideas on who did.”
“So you did come here to accuse me.” She set her jaw in an uncompromising line.
I sank my face into my hands, suddenly tired of the matter. “I came here hoping to get better information than I have. But let it be. I have an interview with Channel Thirteen to discuss the whole sorry business; I need to go home to change.”
She tightened her lips. “Do you plan to accuse me on air?”
“I actually didn’t come here to accuse you of anything at all, but you’re so suspicious of me and my motives that I can’t imagine you’d believe any assurances I gave you. I came here hoping that a trained observer like you would have seen something that would give me a new way to think about what’s going on.”
She looked at me uncertainly. “If I told you I didn’t give Durham the files, would you believe me?”
I spread my hands. “Try me.”
She took a breath, then spoke rapidly, looking at the books over her computer. “I happen not to support Mr. Durham’s ideas. I am fully cognizant of the racial injustices that still exist in this country. I have researched and written about black economic and commercial history, so I am more familiar with the history of these injustices than most: they run deep, and they run wide. I took the job of writing that Ajax history, for instance, because I’m having a hard time getting academic history or economics programs to pay attention to me, outside of African-American studies, which are too often marginalized for me to find interesting. I need to earn something while I’m job-hunting. Also, the Ajax archives will make an interesting monograph. But I don’t believe in focusing on African-Americans as victims: it makes us seem pitiable to white America, and as long as we are pitiable we will not be respected.” She flushed, as if embarrassed to reveal her beliefs to a stranger.
I thought of Lotty’s angry vehemence with Max on the subject of Jews as victims. I nodded slowly and told Blount that I could believe her.
“Besides,” she added, her color still deepened, “it would seem immoral to me to make the Ajax files available to an outsider, when they had trusted me with their private documents.”
“Since you didn’t feed inside Ajax information to the alderman, can you think who might have?”
She shook her head. “It’s such a big company. And the files aren’t exactly secret, at least they weren’t when I was doing my research. They keep all of the old material in their company library, in boxes. Hundreds of boxes, as a matter of fact. Recent material they guarded carefully, but the first hundred years-it was more a question of having the patience to wade through it than any particular difficulty gaining access to it. Although you do have to ask the librarian to see it-still, anyone who wanted to study those papers could probably get around that difficulty.”
“So it might be an employee, someone with a grudge, or someone who could be bribed? Or perhaps a zealous member of Alderman Durham’s organization?”
“Any or all of those could be reasonable possibilities, but I have no names to put forward. Still, thirty-seven hundred people of color hold low-level clerical or manual-laboring positions in the company. They are underpaid, underrepresented in supervisory positions, and often are treated to overt racial slurs. Any of them could become angry enough to undertake an act of passive sabotage.”
I stood up, wondering if someone in the Sommers extended family was among the low-level clerks at Ajax. I thanked Amy Blount for being willing to talk to me and left her one of my cards, in case anything else occurred to her. As she walked me to the door I stopped to admire the picture of the squatting woman. Her head was bent over the basket in front of her; you didn’t see her face.
“It’s by Lois Mailou Jones,” Ms. Blount said. “She also refused to be a victim.”
XIV Running the Tape
Late that night, I lay in the dark next to Morrell, fretting uselessly, endlessly, about the day. My mind bounced-like a pinball-from Rhea Wiell to Alderman Durham, my fury with him rising each time I thought of that flyer he was handing out in the Ajax plaza. When I tried to put that to rest I’d go back to Amy Blount, to Howard Fepple, and finally to my gnawing worries about Lotty.
When I’d gone to my office from Amy Blount’s place, I’d found the copies of the Paul Radbuka video the Unblinking Eye had made for me, along with the stills of Radbuka.
My long afternoon dealing with Sommers and Fepple had pushed Radbuka out of my mind. At first I only stared at the packet, trying to remember what I’d wanted from the Eye. When I saw the stills of Radbuka’s face, I recalled my promise to Lotty to get her a copy of the video today. Numb with fatigue, I was thinking I might hang on to it until I saw her on Sunday at Max’s, when she phoned.
“ Victoria, I’m trying to be civilized, but have you not had my messages this afternoon?”
I explained that I hadn’t had a chance to check with my answering service. “In about fifteen minutes I’m talking to a reporter about the charges that Bull Durham’s been flinging at me, so I was trying to organize my response into sincere, succinct nuggets.”
“Bull Durham? The man who’s been protesting the Holocaust Asset Recovery Act? Don’t tell me he’s involved now with Paul Radbuka!”
I blinked. “No. He’s involved in a case I’ve been working on. Insurance fraud involving a South Side family.”
“And that takes precedence over responding to messages from me?”
“Lotty!” I was outraged. “Alderman Durham handed out flyers today defaming me. He marched around a public space bellowing insults about me through a bullhorn. It doesn’t seem extraordinary that I had to respond to that. I walked into my office five minutes ago. I haven’t even seen my messages.”
“Yes, I see,” she said. “I-but I need some support, too. I want to see this man’s video, Victoria. I want to know that you’re trying to help me. That you won’t aban-that you won’t forget our-”
Her voice was panicky; she was flailing about for words in a way that made my insides twist. “Lotty, please, how could I forget our friendship? Or ever abandon you? As soon as I finish with this interview, I’ll be right over. Say in an hour?”
When we hung up I checked my messages. She’d phoned three times. Beth Blacksin had phoned once, to say she’d love to talk to me but could I come to the Global building, since she was jammed up with editing all the interviews and demonstrations of the day. She’d seen Murray Ryerson-he’d join us at the studio. I thought wistfully of my cot in the back room but gathered up my things and drove back downtown.
Beth spent twenty minutes taping me while she and Murray peppered me with questions. I was bein
g careful not to implicate my client, but I freely tossed them Howard Fepple’s name-it was time someone besides me started pushing on him. Beth was gleeful enough to get this exclusive new source that she happily shared what she had with me, but neither she nor Murray had any idea who had given Durham the information on the Birnbaums.
“I got thirty seconds with the alderman, who says it’s common knowledge,” Murray said. “I talked to the Birnbaum legal counsel, who said it’s overblown ancient history. I couldn’t get to the woman who wrote their history, Amy Blount-someone at Ajax suggested it was her.”
“I talked to her,” I said smugly. “I’d bet hard against her. It has to be another Ajax insider. Or maybe someone in the Birnbaum company with a grudge. You talk to Bertrand Rossy? I gather he’s fulminating-the Swiss probably aren’t used to street demonstrations. If Durham hadn’t libeled me, I’d be chortling over it.”
“You know that piece we did on Wednesday on Paul Radbuka?” Beth said, changing the subject to something she cared about personally. “We’ve had about a hundred and thirty e-mails from people who say they know his little friend Miriam. My assistant’s tracking them down. Most of them are unstable glory-seekers, but it will be such a coup if one of them turns out to be the real deal. Just think if we reunite them on-air!”
“I hope you’re not building that up on-air,” I said sharply. “It may turn out to be just that: air.”
“What?” Beth stared at me. “You think he made up his friend? No, Vic, you’re wrong about that.”
Murray, whose six-eight frame had been curled against a filing cabinet, suddenly stood up straight and began pelting me with questions: what inside dope did I have on Paul Radbuka? What did I know about his playmate Miriam? What did I know about Rhea Wiell?
“Nothing on all of the above,” I said. “I haven’t talked to the guy. But I met Rhea Wiell this morning.”
“She’s not a fraud, Vic,” Beth said sharply.
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