Total Recall

by Sara Paretsky

  Should I be embarrassed at how much I heard from the other side of the garden wall? I suppose, I suppose-it was only my childish infatuation with Claire that made me creep down there when I saw them all in the garden on Sunday afternoons.

  Now Claire flushed slightly. “War matured Ted. That, and losing Wallace. You haven’t seen him, have you, since he got back? I expect he’ll be quite a power in the city one of these days, but at home he’s much gentler than he used to be. Anyway, when he and Vanessa were over for dinner on Sunday and I explained how ill you were, how you needed rest and fresh air, they both immediately thought of Axmouth.

  “A local farmer named Jessup will probably sell you food cheaply; there’s a decent doctor in Axmouth, you should be able to manage on your own. I’ll come in December when my tour at St. Anne’s ends, but if you feel desperate before that you can send me a telegram; I could probably get away for a day in an emergency.”

  Just as she’d got me to school, to the scholarships I’d needed, she now organized all the details of my life. She even validated my request for medical leave due to tuberculosis. And persuaded the registrar that I would recover faster in the country, with fresh food, than at a sanitorium. I felt powerless to resist her, powerless to say I’d rather take my chances in London.

  When the time came to leave town, I didn’t know what to say to Carl. He’d returned to London from Brighton a week earlier, a succès fou, in a state of such forceful energy that I could hardly bear to be around him. In ten days he and the other Cellini players were leaving for the second Edinburgh arts festival. His successes, his plans, his vision of chamber music, these were so consuming that he didn’t even notice how ill I was. I finally wrote him a very awkward letter:

  Dear Carl, I am taking medical leave from the Royal Free. I wish you great success in Edinburgh.

  I tried to think of some sweet way to close, something that would evoke the evenings perched in the top balcony at the opera, our long walks along the Embankment, the pleasure we’d shared in his narrow bed at the hostel, before he started making enough money for a real flat. Those times all seemed dead to me now, as remote as my Oma and my Bobe. In the end I only added my name, putting the letter in the post outside Waterloo before boarding the train to Axmouth.

  XXV Paper Trail

  As soon as I got to Morrell’s I returned Nick Vishnikov’s call. He came on the line with his usual abrupt staccato.

  “Vic! Was that witchcraft? Or did you have some kind of evidence?”

  “So it wasn’t suicide.” I stood at the kitchen counter, letting out a long breath.

  “No gunpowder residue on the hand was the first pointer. And then a blow to the cranium, which must have stunned him long enough for the perp to shoot him-the junior who did the first autopsy didn’t bother to check for other injuries. What did you notice?”

  “Oh, the blow to the head,” I said airily. “No, actually, I saw the details of his life, not those of his death.”

  “Well, whatever, congratulations-although Commander Purling at the Twenty-first District isn’t happy. Since his team didn’t spot the problem on site, he doesn’t want it to be homicide. But as I told him, the SOC photos show the gun just below the vic’s hand. If he’d killed himself, he would have lost the gun up around his head and it would have fallen away from his arm, not right under his hand. So Purling’s assigned the case. Got to run.”

  Before he could hang up, I quickly asked if they were sure the SIG Trailside on the scene had killed Fepple.

  “More witchcraft, Warshawski? I’ll pass the question on to the lab. Later.”

  As I filled a bowl with water for the dogs, I wondered if I should call Commander Purling at the Twenty-first District to report what I knew. But it was so little-the mystery phone call on Friday night, the mystery visitor to Fepple’s office-the cops would get all that from the bank guard and Fepple’s phone logs. And anyway, if I called him, it would mean at best hours of explaining why I was involved. At worst-I could find myself in more trouble than I needed for having explored the scene of the crime on my own.

  Besides, this wasn’t my case, it wasn’t my problem. My only problem was to try to get Ajax to pay the Sommers family what they were owed on Aaron Sommers’s life insurance. Aaron Sommers, whose name appeared on an old ledger sheet in Howard Fepple’s briefcase with two crosses next to it.

  I called Cheviot Labs and asked for Kathryn Chang.

  “Oh, yes: Barry gave me your sheet of paper. I took a preliminary look at it. From the watermark I’m saying it’s of Swiss manufacture, the Baume Works outside Basel. It’s a kind of cotton weave that they didn’t make during the Second World War because of the shortage of raw material, so it dates from somewhere between 1925 and 1940. I can give you more precise dating than that when I’ve studied the ink-that will make it easier for me to date when the words were written. I can’t make that a priority, though: it will be at least a week because of other jobs I have ahead of you.”

  “That’s fine; this is enough for me for now,” I said slowly, trying to turn the information over in my mind. “Do you know-would this paper have been used primarily or exclusively in Switzerland?”

  “Oh, no, by no means. The Baume Works aren’t so important now, but well into the 1960’s they were one of the biggest makers of fine paper and business paper in the world. This particular stock was widely used for things like address books, personal journals, that kind of thing. It is very unusual to see it treated like this, as accounting paper. The person who used it must have been very-oh, let me say, fond of himself. It would be helpful, of course, if I could see the book this was torn from.”

  “That would help me, too. But one thing I’d like to know in particular: can you tell when the different entries were written? Not the exact year-but, well, if some are more recent than others I’d like to know that.”

  “Right. We’ll include that in your report, Ms. Warshawski.”

  It seemed to me it was time to visit Ralph again. His secretary remembered me from last week, but I couldn’t see Ralph: his schedule was packed until six-thirty tonight. However, when I said I might be able to defuse Alderman Durham’s protest, she put me on hold-as it turned out, long enough for me to read the entire sports section of the Herald-Star. When she came back, she said Ralph could squeeze me in for five minutes at noon if I got there on the dot.

  “On the dot it is.” I hung up and turned to the dogs. “That means we go back home, where you can lounge around the garden and I can put on panty hose. I know you will feel bereft, but ask yourselves-who really will be having more fun?”

  It was ten-thirty now. I’d had a wistful hope of climbing into Morrell’s bed for a nap, but I still had to drop photos of Radbuka off at Max’s for Tim Streeter. And I wanted to get back to my own place to change into something more appropriate than jeans for a Loop meeting. “Life’s just a wheel and I’m caught in the spokes,” I sang as I shepherded the dogs once more back to the car. All was still quiet at Max’s when I stopped to drop off Radbuka’s photographs. I zipped down the drive to Belmont, dumped the dogs with Mr. Contreras, and ran up the stairs to my own apartment.

  Tonight was my dinner with the Rossys, my chance to chatter Italian to cheer up Bertrand’s homesick wife. I put on a soft black trouser suit that could take me from meetings to dinner. A turtleneck that I could remove when I got to the Rossys’ so that the rose silk camisole underneath dressed up the outfit. My mother’s diamond-drop earrings I buttoned into a pocket. Pumps in my briefcase, the crepe-soled shoes I’d worn yesterday morning to step in Fepple’s-I broke off the thought without completing it and ran back down the stairs. The pinball back in action.

  I drove down to my office, then took the L into the Loop. At the Ajax building on Adams, a small band of protesters was still circling the sidewalk near the entrance. Without Alderman Durham there to lead the charge, the troops looked bedraggled. Every now and then they’d rouse themselves to chant something at the herd of people on their w
ay from office to lunch, but for the most part they merely talked among themselves, posters drooping against their shoulders. These seemed to be the same signs they had carried on Friday-no reparations for slaveowners, no high-rises on the bones of slaves, and so on, but the flyer a dogged young man handed me on my way in had cut out the attacks on me. Literally cut out-the middle header asking me if I had no shame was gone, leaving a gap between the merciless Ajax and the compassionless Birnbaums. The text looked strange:

  Ajax Insurance cashed her husband’s life-insurance policy ten years ago. When he died last week, they sent their tame detective to accuse Sister Sommers of stealing it.

  I guess this way they could just type my name back in if I reverted to chief villain. I tucked the flyer into my briefcase.

  At noon on the dot, the executive-floor attendant brought me to Ralph’s antechamber. Ralph himself was still in a meeting in his conference room, but his secretary buzzed him and after the briefest wait he emerged. This time I got a grim nod, not a grin and a hug.

  “Does trouble always follow you, Vic?” he said when we were in his office with the door shut. “Or does it just jump up to bite me anytime you’re in the vicinity?”

  “If you really only have five minutes, don’t spend it blaming me for Alderman Durham’s pickets.” I sat on one of the hard tubular chairs, while Ralph leaned against the edge of his desk. “I came to suggest that you make the Sommers family whole. Then you can issue a big PR statement about how your respect for the widow’s grief-”

  He cut me short. “We paid them ten thousand dollars in 1991. I won’t double-pay a life-insurance policy.”

  “The question is, who got that money back in 1991? Personally, I don’t think anyone in the Sommers family ever saw it. That check started and stopped at the agency door.”

  He folded his arms in an uncompromising line. “Do you have proof of this?”

  “You know, don’t you, that Howard Fepple is dead? There’s no one-”

  “He committed suicide because his agency was going down the toilet. It was in our executive briefing this morning.”

  I shook my head. “Old news. He was murdered. The Sommers family file has disappeared. There’s no one from the agency left to explain what really happened.”

  Ralph stared at me in angry disbelief. “What do you mean, he was murdered? The cops found his body, they found the suicide note. It was in the papers.”

  “Ralph, listen to me: barely an hour ago, the medical examiner called to tell me the autopsy proves murder. Don’t you think it was funny that the Sommers family file disappeared at the same time Fepple was killed?”

  “What are you trying to do to me? Am I supposed to believe this on your say-so?”

  I shrugged. “Call the medical examiner. Call the watch commander at the Twenty-first District. I’m not trying to do anything but help my client-and give you a way of defusing the protest down there on Adams.”

  “All right: let’s hear it.” The scowl emphasized his incipient jowls.

  “Make the Sommers family whole,” I repeated steadily, trying not to let my own temper get the better of me. “It’s only ten thousand dollars. That’s one round-trip ticket to Zurich for a member of your executive committee, but it’s the difference between penury and comfort for Gertrude Sommers and the nephew who fronted for the funeral. Make a big PR splash out of it. What can Durham do then? He may claim he forced you to take action, but he can’t go around saying you stole the widow’s mite.”

  “I’ll think about it. But it isn’t your best idea.”

  “Personally, I think it’s a beauty. It shows how utterly reliable the company is, even in the most unreliable of situations. I could probably write the ad copy for you.”

  “Because it isn’t your money.”

  I couldn’t help smiling. “What, will Rossy storm in, crying, ‘Young man, every penny of this is coming out of your stock options’?”

  “This isn’t a joke, Vic.”

  “I know. The unfunny part is the connections nasty-minded people will make about the Sommers file vanishing. Did the company do something a decade back that they were eager to keep hidden?”

  “We did not-categorically-” He cut off his own denial, remembering that we’d met over an Ajax claim fraud. “Is that what the cops think?”

  “I don’t know. I can put out some feelers, although if it’s any comfort to you, what I’m hearing about the guy heading the investigation is that he doesn’t want to break a sweat.” I stood up, pulling a copy of the old ledger sheet from my briefcase. “This was the one document relating to Sommers that was left in Fepple’s office. Does it mean anything to you?”

  Ralph looked at it briefly, shaking his head impatiently. “What is this? Who are these people?”

  “I was hoping you could tell me. When I was here last week, Connie Ingram, that young woman from your claims-records unit, left Sommers’s company file up here. If it has copies of all the agency documents in it, maybe it’s got a complete copy of this one. I don’t know who these other people are, but the two crosses suggest they’re dead. The original of this page is quite old. And here’s a funny thing about it, Ralph: a forensics lab tells me the paper was made in Switzerland before the war. Second World War, I mean, not the Persian Gulf.”

  His face tightened. “You’d better not be trying to suggest-”

  “Edelweiss? Good heavens, Ralph, the thought only drifted slightly through my mind. The lab says the paper was sold to narcissists all over the world-it was apparently quite expensive. But Swiss paper, a Swiss-made gun, both in an insurance agency that is attracting a lot of attention-the human mind isn’t rational, Ralph, it just puts contiguous events together. And that’s what mine is doing.”

  He looked at the paper now as if it were a cobra that had hypnotized him. The buzzer on his desk phone sounded, his secretary reminding him he was running late. He jerked his head away with a visible effort.

  “You can leave this here-I’ll have Denise check the file to see if there’s anything else in this handwriting in it. Right now I need to run to another meeting. On reserves, on our potential exposure from Holocaust survivors, and other matters worth a whole lot more than ten thousand dollars. And than baseless accusations against Edelweiss.”

  On my way down, I stopped on the thirty-ninth floor, where claims processing took place. Unlike the executive floor, with an attendant behind a mahogany console to monitor traffic, there was no obvious person to ask the way to Connie Ingram’s desk. There also weren’t rosy Chinese rugs floating on oceans of parquet. Hard mustard matting took me through a labyrinth of cubicles, mostly empty because of the lunch hour.

  Near the south end of the floor I found someone sitting at her desk, working the Tribune crossword while she ate bean sprouts out of a plastic container. She was a middle-aged woman with tight, dyed corkscrew curls, but when she looked up she gave me a warm smile and asked what I needed.

  “Connie Ingram? She’s on the other side. Come on, I’ll take you over, it’s too hard to figure out where anyone in the maze is if you’re not one of the rats yourself.”

  She slid her feet back into her pumps and took me across to the other side of the floor. Connie Ingram was just returning to her desk with a group of other women. They were giving the usual return-to-work moans, along with a few quick plans for the afternoon coffee break. They welcomed me and my guide with friendly interest: much better to have someone to talk to than stare at computer screens and files.

  “Ms. Ingram?” I gave my own forthright, girlfriends- together smile. “I’m V I Warshawski-we met last week in Ralph Devereux’s office, looking at the Aaron Sommers file.”

  Her round face turned wary. “Does Mr. Rossy know you’re here?”

  I held out my security pass, turning my smile up a few watts. “I’m here at Ralph Devereux’s invitation. Do you want to call up to his secretary to ask? Or do you want me to call Bertrand Rossy to tell him what I need?”

  Her coworkers ranged
themselves around her, protective, inquisitive. She muttered that she guessed that wasn’t necessary, but what did I want, anyway?

  “To look at the file. You know the agent who sold the policy is dead? His copy of the file is missing. I need to see the paperwork so I can try to figure out who filed the original death benefit claim. Mr. Devereux is considering the idea of paying the widow because of the confusion around the file, the agent’s death, and so on.”

  She flushed. “I’m sorry, but Mr. Rossy told me definitely not to show the file to anyone outside the company. And anyway, it’s still up on sixty-three.”

  “How about the microfiche? Didn’t you say you printed the documents from the fiche? This is about an elderly woman who spent her life changing bedpans while her husband worked two shifts to make his premium payments. If the policy was paid out because of a bookkeeping error or because the agent committed a swindle, should this old woman have to suffer indignity on top of her bereavement?” Instead of writing copy for Ajax, I could be putting out stuff for Bull Durham.

  “Honestly, it’s company policy not to show our files to outsiders: you can ask my supervisor when she gets back from lunch.”

  “I’m having dinner tonight with the Rossys. I’ll mention it to him then.”

  At that, her face became even more troubled. She liked to please people: what if I and the all-powerful foreign boss were both angry with her? But she was an honest young woman, as well, and in the end, she stuck by the company’s demands on her loyalty. I didn’t like it-but I certainly respected her for it. I smiled my thanks for her time and left her with one of my cards in case she changed her mind.