Total Recall

by Sara Paretsky

  “Another thing for technicians to look at,” I snapped. “You can back-enter dates, but you can’t fool the machine: it will tell you what day those keystrokes were typed. It seems to me we’ve just about covered anything useful here: I need to get these technical problems to the cops before little Miss Innocence here goes down and wipes out the hard drive.”

  Tears were streaming down Connie’s face. “Karen, Mr. Devereux, honest, I was never down in that agent’s office. I never said I’d go out with him, even though he asked me to, why would I? He didn’t sound like a nice person on the phone.”

  “He asked you out on a date?” I interrupted her wailing. “When was that?”

  “When I called down there. After you were here last week I called him, like I said, like Mr. Rossy and Mr. Devereux asked me to. To find out what he had in his files, and he said, he talked in this kind of nasty way, he said, ‘Lots of juicy stuff. Wouldn’t you like to see it? We could share a bottle of wine and go over the file together.’ And I said, ‘No, sir, I just want you to send me copies of all your relevant documents so I can find out how this policy got a check issued on it when the policyholder was still alive.’ And then he said more stuff, really, I can’t repeat it, and he seemed to think it would be fun to have a date, but honestly, I know I still live with my mother and I’m thirty-three, but I’m not a desperate virgin like-anyway, I never said I would see him. If he put it in his calendar, he was a liar and I’m not sorry he’s dead, so there!” She ran sobbing from the room.

  “Does that satisfy you, Miss Detective?” Karen Bigelow said coldly. “Seems to me you could find something better to do than bully an honest, hardworking girl like Connie Ingram. Excuse me, Mr. Devereux, I’d better make sure she’s all right.”

  She started to sail majestically from the room, but I moved to block her path. “Ms. Claims Supervisor, it’s great that you support your staff, but you came up here to accuse me of theft. Before you go off to mop up Connie Ingram’s tears, I want that accusation cleared up.”

  She breathed heavily at me. “I heard from the girl who took you over to Connie’s workstation that you were wandering around the floor. You could have been in those files.”

  “Then we’ll call the cops. I won’t have this kind of accusation made lightly about me. Besides which, someone is trying to make sure no copies of that file remain. I may be advising my client to sue Ajax. In which case, if you can’t find the documents you’re going to look mighty stupid in court.”

  “If that’s your goal, you’d have all the more motive for stealing the fiche,” Ralph said.

  Red lights of anger were starting to dance in front of me. “And I’ll bring an action for slander.”

  I moved to his desk and started pressing keys on the phone. It had been a long time since I’d dialed the work number for my dad’s oldest friend on the force, but I still knew it by heart. Bobby Mallory has made a reluctant adjustment to my career as a detective, but he still prefers that when we meet it be for family events.

  “What do you think you’re doing?” Ralph demanded, as an officer answered the phone.

  “I’m doing what you should have done, calling the cops.” I turned to the phone. “Officer Bostwick, it’s V I Warshawski: is Captain Mallory in?”

  Ralph’s eyes glittered. “You have no authority to bring the cops into this building. I will speak to this officer and tell him so.”

  It was a sign of the change in Bobby’s attitude toward me that although I’d never met Officer Bostwick he recognized my name. He told me that Bobby was unavailable; was there a message?

  “A murder in the Twenty-first District, officer-there’s evidence in the computer, which was left running and left in the vic’s office.” I gave him Fepple’s address and date of death. “Commander Purling may not have realized the importance of the computer. But I’m at the Ajax Insurance company, where the vic did a lot of business, and there may be a question of checking the time when data was entered.”

  “ Ajax?” Bostwick said. “They’re having a lot of trouble these days- Durham and Posner are out front right now, aren’t they?”

  “Yes, indeed, the building is surrounded by demonstrators, but the claims vice president thinks this agent’s death merits more of his attention than a few protesters.”

  “Doesn’t sound like a few to me, miss, the way they were asking for backup out there on Adams. But give me the details about this computer-I’ll make sure a forensics unit gets down to it. Commander Purling, well, with the Robert Taylor Homes in his district, he doesn’t have time to do a lot of finesse work.”

  A discreet way of saying the guy was a lazy jerk. I gave Bostwick the details about Fepple and the importance of the date, adding that I had seen the victim shortly before he left for an appointment on Friday evening. Bostwick repeated back what I said, double-checked the spelling of my name, and asked where Captain Mallory could reach me if he wanted to discuss the situation.

  I hung up and glared at Ralph. “I’m respecting the privacy of your company and your authority over it, but you had damned well better make a call like that yourself if you want to find out who really was in your microfiche cabinet. Especially if you’re going to keep accusing me of theft. We should know by the end of the day tomorrow, or Thursday at the latest, when that date with Connie Ingram was entered in Fepple’s computer. If it was before I last saw him on Friday, then Ms. Ingram’s going to be crying for a bigger audience than us. By the way, what happened to your paper file? The one Rossy hung on to last week?”

  Ralph and Karen Bigelow exchanged startled glances. “I guess he still has it,” the supervisor said. “It hasn’t been checked back into our unit.”

  “Is his office up here? Let’s go ask him about it-unless you think I wandered in and stole it after we spoke at noon, Ralph.”

  He flushed. “No, I don’t imagine you did. But why did you go down to the thirty-ninth floor at noon without telling me? You’d been with me seconds earlier.”

  “It was an impulse; it only occurred to me when I got to the elevators. You had pretty much stiffed me on the file, and I was hoping Ms. Ingram would let me see it. Can we at least go see Rossy, get the paper file back from him?”

  “The chairman went down to Springfield today. The Holocaust Recovery Act is coming up in front of the banking and insurance committee-he wanted to testify against it. Rossy went with him.”

  “Really.” My brows went up. “He’d invited me to dinner tonight.”

  “What’d he do that for?” Ralph’s flush deepened into resentment.

  “When he called yesterday to invite me, he said it was because his wife was homesick and wanted someone she could speak Italian with.”

  “Are you making that up?”

  “No, Ralph. I’m not making up anything I said this afternoon. But maybe he forgot about the invitation. When did he decide to go to Springfield?”

  Resentment was still uppermost in Ralph’s mind. “Hey, I just run the claims department. Apparently not too well if people make off with our files. No one talks to me about deep subjects like legislative hearings. Rossy’s got an office on the other side of the floor. His secretary’s probably here: you can ask her if he’s coming back tonight. I’ll walk you over to see if he’s still got the file.”

  “I should find Connie, Mr. Devereux,” Karen Bigelow said. “But what should I do about the microfiche? Should I report the theft to security?”

  Ralph hesitated, then told her she should lock the cabinet and declare it off-limits. “Conduct a desk-by-desk search of your unit tomorrow. Someone may have inadvertently kept the fiche after looking up some other file. If you don’t find it by the end of the day, let me know: I’ll call security.”

  “Look, you two,” I said, impatient with this futile proposal, “Connie’s name in Fepple’s calendar is serious. If she didn’t set up the date, someone did it using her name. Which means it was someone who knows her as a claims handler. And that means a very limited universe, especi
ally since it wasn’t me.”

  Ralph knotted his tie and unrolled his cuffs. “According to you, anyway.”

  XXIX Strange Bedfellows

  We found Rossy’s secretary in the chairman’s conference room, watching the early-evening news with the chairman’s secretary, the head of the marketing department-whom I’d met at Ajax’s hundred-fiftieth-birthday celebration-and five other people who were never introduced.

  “We are demanding a boycott of all Ajax insurance by America ’s Jewish community,” Posner was proclaiming to the camera. “Preston Janoff insulted the whole Jewish community, he insulted the sacred memories of the dead, by his remarks in Springfield today.”

  Beth Blacksin’s face replaced Posner’s on the screen. “Preston Janoff is the chairman of the Ajax Insurance group. He testified today against adoption of a bill that would require life-insurance companies to scan their books to see if they have any outstanding obligations to families of Holocaust victims.”

  The camera switched to Janoff, standing in front of the legislative chamber in Springfield. He was tall, silver-haired, somber in a charcoal suit that suggested, but didn’t emphasize, mourning.

  “We understand the pain of those who lost loved ones in the Holocaust, but we believe it would be an insult to the African-American, to the Native American, and to other communities who have suffered greatly in this country, to single out for special treatment people whose families were killed in Europe. And Ajax did not sell life insurance in Europe in the decades before the Second World War. For us to turn our files inside out on the off chance that one or two policies might come to light would place an extraordinary burden on our shareholders.”

  One of the legislators rose to ask if it wasn’t true that Edelweiss Re of Switzerland was now the owner of Ajax. “Our committee wants to know about Edelweiss’s life-insurance policies.”

  Janoff held up a copy of Amy Blount’s history, “One Hundred Fifty Years of Life and Still Going Strong.” “I believe this booklet will show the committee that Edelweiss was a small regional player in the life-insurance business in Switzerland during the war. The company has made copies available to all members of the legislature. Again, any involvement with consumers in Germany or eastern Europe would have been very small.”

  A babble erupted as various members sprang to their microphones, but the program returned us to the Global studio, where Murray Ryerson, who occasionally did political commentary for Global, was speaking. “Later this afternoon, the House Insurance Committee voted eleven-to-two to table the proposed bill, which effectively kills it. Joseph Posner has been leafletting, telephoning, and picketing in an effort to start a nationwide boycott of all Ajax Insurance products in retaliation. It’s too early to tell if he’s succeeding, but we have heard that the Birnbaum family will continue to use Ajax for their workers’ compensation coverage, business reputedly worth sixty-three million dollars in premiums to Ajax this year. Alderman Louis Durham hailed Janoff’s speech and the vote with mixed reactions.”

  We were treated to a close-up of Durham outside the Ajax building in his beautifully cut jacket. “Ideally, we want to see compensation for victims of African slavery in this country. Or at the very least in this state. But we appreciate Chairman Janoff’s sensitivity to the issue, to not letting Jews dominate a discussion of reparations in Illinois. We will take our fight for reparations for the victims of slavery directly to the legislature now, and we will fight until we win.”

  When the evening news anchor, sitting next to Murray in the studio, came on the screen saying, “In other news, the Cubs lost their thirteenth straight today at Wrigley,” Janoff’s secretary switched off the set.

  “This is wonderful news-Mr. Janoff will be terrifically pleased,” she said. “He hadn’t heard the vote when he and Mr. Rossy left Springfield. Chick, can you go on-line and find out who voted with us? I’ll call him in his car: he was going straight from Meigs to a dinner meeting.”

  A fresh-faced young man obediently left the room.

  “Was Mr. Rossy going to dinner with him?” I asked.

  The rest of the room turned to stare at me as if I had dropped in from Pluto. Rossy’s secretary, an extremely glossy specimen with shiny black hair and a tailored navy dress, asked who I was and why I wanted to know. I introduced myself, explaining that Rossy had invited me to dinner in his home this evening. When Rossy’s secretary took me back to her own desk to check her calendar, the room started buzzing behind us: if I’d been invited to the Rossy home, I must be powerful; they needed to know who I was.

  Rossy’s secretary tapped rapidly across the corridor on very high heels. Ralph and I trailed in her wake.

  “Yes, Ms. Warshawski: I remember getting your number for Mr. Rossy yesterday morning, but he didn’t tell me he’d invited you to dinner-it’s not in my book. Shall I check with Mrs. Rossy for you? She is the decision-maker on his social calendar.”

  Her hand was already poised over the phone. She hit a speed-dial button, talked briefly with Mrs. Rossy, and assured me that they were expecting me.

  “Suzanne,” Ralph said as she started to pack up her desk. “Bertrand took a claims file away to study last week. We’re anxious to get it back-there’s an open investigation going on with it.”

  Suzanne tapped into Rossy’s inner office and came back almost immediately with the Sommers file. “I’m so sorry, Mr. Devereux. He left a message in his dictation that I was to get this back to you, but he decided at the last minute to go to Springfield with Mr. Janoff; in the flurry of getting him down there, the file slipped my mind. Mr. Rossy wanted to make sure you knew how much he appreciated the work Connie Ingram did for him on this.”

  Ralph grunted unenthusiastically. He didn’t want to admit doubts about his staff, but my finding Connie Ingram’s name in Fepple’s diary was clearly troubling him.

  “I know Connie Ingram was helpful in tracking down the agent’s copy of the paper trail on this file,” I said. “Did Mr. Rossy ask her to call on Fepple-the agent-in person?”

  Suzanne lifted her perfectly tweezed eyebrows, as if astonished that a peon would try to worm her boss’s secrets out of her. “You’d have to ask Mr. Rossy that. Perhaps you’ll have a chance to do so at dinner.”

  “Really, Vic,” Ralph spluttered as we got back to his office. “What are you trying to suggest? That Connie Ingram was involved in killing an insurance agent? That Rossy somehow ordered her to do it? Get a grip on yourself.”

  I thought of Connie Ingram’s round, earnest face and had to admit she didn’t seem likely either as a murderer or a murderer’s tool. “But I want to know how her name got into Fepple’s diary if she didn’t make the appointment or if she didn’t go down herself to his office and back-enter it,” I added stubbornly.

  Ralph bared his teeth in a snarl. “I wouldn’t put it past you to do it. If you thought that would get you in the door.”

  “That brings us back to where we started. Why don’t you let me thumb through the Sommers file so I can get out of here and leave you in peace.”

  “Somehow peace is not what you ever leave me in, V I.”

  There was just enough of a double edge to his tone that I hastily took the file from him and started thumbing through the contents. He stood over me while I carefully looked at each page. I couldn’t see anything odd, either in the client payment reports or the claim-payment record. Aaron Sommers had started paying weekly installments on May 13, 1971, and had paid the policy in full in 1986. Then a death claim, signed by the widow, and notarized, had been filed in September 1991 and duly paid a few days later. There were two copies of the canceled check-the one Connie had originally printed from the fiche, and one which Fepple had faxed to her from his files. They looked identical.

  A copy of Rick Hoffman’s worksheet, where he’d typed up the figures for the weekly payments, was attached to a letter to Ajax alerting them to the sale. I had hoped the signature would be in the same ornate writing as the document I’d found in Fepple’s bri
efcase, but it was a very ordinary, nondescript hand.

  Ralph inspected each document as I finished with it. “I guess it’s okay,” he said when we got to the end.

  “Guess? Is there something wrong?”

  He shook his head, but he still looked puzzled. “Everything’s here. Everything’s in order. It’s like ten thousand other claim folders I’ve inspected in the last twenty years. I don’t know why something doesn’t seem quite right. You run along: I’m going to stand over Denise while she copies every document, so that there are two witnesses to the contents.”

  It was after six now. In the event that Posner was still out front, I wanted to get downstairs to see if I could pick up Radbuka’s trail. I was almost at the elevators when Ralph caught up with me.

  “Vic-sorry. I was out of line earlier. But the coincidence of you being on the floor, the fiche missing, and knowing that you sometimes use, well, unorthodox methods-”

  I made a wry face. “You’re right, Ralph. But I really swear, scout’s honor, that I was nowhere near your fiche.”

  “I wish I knew what in hell was so important about this one lousy life-insurance case.” He slammed the flat of his hand against the elevator wall.

  “The agent who sold it-Rick Hoffman-he’s been dead for seven years now. Would the company still have a record of his home address, his family, anything about him? He had a son-guy who’d be, I don’t know, close to sixty now-maybe he has papers that would shed some light on the situation.” It was a straw, but we didn’t have any more substantial building material right now.

  Ralph pulled a small notebook from his breast pocket and scribbled a note. “I start the afternoon accusing you of theft and end it as your errand boy. I’ll see what I can find out. I wish you hadn’t called the cops, though. Now they’ll be around wanting to interrogate Connie. Who I refuse to believe killed the guy. She might have shot him-if she had a gun-if she’d agreed to go see him-and if he’d stepped across the line. But can you picture her scheming to make a murder look like suicide?”