Total Recall

by Sara Paretsky

  “I know they entertain a lot. I kind of expected to see Alderman Durham at dinner, since he’d been over here earlier. Or Joseph Posner.” I casually left the ten on the marble console where he had television screens showing him the elevators and the street.

  “Posner? Oh, you mean the Jewish guy.” The doorman gracefully pocketed the ten without pausing for air. “Not likely the missus would let either of them at the dinner table. Around six-thirty she comes sailing in, talking on her cell phone. I figure it’s to the mister, since it’s in Italian, but she hangs up and turns to me, she never shouts, but she still gets the message across that she is PO’d big time: ‘my husband has invited some business associate to do business here tonight. It will be a black man arriving, who is to wait in the lobby until my husband gets here. I am not able to entertain a strange man while I try to get ready for my guests.’ By which she means her makeup and so forth.”

  “So Mr. Rossy was expecting Alderman Durham. Did he invite Posner, too?”

  The doorman shook his head. “Posner showed up unexpected and got into quite a shouting match with me when I wouldn’t let him go sailing up on his own. Mr. Rossy agreed to see him as soon as the alderman had left, but Posner only stayed up there fifteen minutes or so.”

  “So Posner must have been pretty angry at getting such a short audience, huh?”

  “Oh, Mr. Rossy’s a good guy, not like the missus-he’s always good for a joke or a tip, at least when she isn’t looking-you’d think if you had a bundle you could spare a buck now and then when a guy runs all the way down to Belmont for a cab-anyway, Mr. Rossy managed to calm the Jewish guy down in fifteen minutes. I don’t get the funny dress, though, do you? We have a lot of Jews in this building and they’re just as normal as you or me. What’s the point of the hat and the scarf and all that?”

  A taxi pulling up in front saved me from having to think of a response. The doorman sprang into action as the taxi decanted a woman with several large suitcases. I figured I’d learned what I could, although it wasn’t as much as I wanted to know; I went out with him and crossed the street to my car.

  I drove home across Addison, trying to make sense of the situation. Rossy had invited Durham to see him. Before the demonstration? After he got back from Springfield? And somehow Posner knew about it, so he’d followed Durham up here. Where Rossy calmed his angry suspicions.

  I didn’t know anything specific about Alderman Durham’s cupidity-although those expensive suits wouldn’t leave much left over for groceries if he bought them on his alderman’s pay-but most Chicago pols have a price, and it usually isn’t very high. Presumably Rossy had invited Durham to his home to buy him off. But what could Rossy offer Posner that would get that fanatic off his back?

  It was close to midnight when I finally found a parking space on one of the side streets near my home. I lived three miles west of the Rossys. When I moved into my little co-op, the neighborhood was a peaceful, mostly blue-collar place, but it’s become so crowded now with trendy restaurants and boutiques that even this late at night the traffic made the drive tedious. An SUV swerving around me in front of Wrigley Field reminded me to stop thinking and concentrate on traffic.

  Late as it was, my neighbor and the dogs were still awake. Mr. Contreras must have been sitting next to his front door waiting for me, because I was barely inside when he came out with Mitch and Peppy. The dogs dashed around the tiny foyer snapping at me, showing they were miffed at my long absence.

  Mr. Contreras was feeling lonely and neglected, as was I. Even though I was exhausted, after giving the dogs a short run around the block, I joined the old man in his cluttered kitchen. He was drinking grappa; I opted for chamomile tea with a shot of brandy. The enamel on the kitchen table was chipped, the only picture was a calendar from the Humane Society showing a bundle of puppies, the brandy was young and raw, but I felt more at ease here than in the Rossys’ ornate drawing room.

  “Morrell take off today?” the old man asked. “I could kind of tell you was feeling blue. Everything okay?”

  I grunted noncommittally, then found myself telling him in detail about coming on Fepple’s body, about the Sommers family, the missing money, the missing documents, and tonight’s dinner party. He was annoyed that I hadn’t told him sooner about Fepple-“after all, doll, you was in the kitchen with me when his murder come on the news”-but he let me get on with my tale after only a perfunctory grumble.

  “I’m tired. I’m not thinking clearly. But it seemed to me tonight’s dinner was a carefully orchestrated event,” I said. “At the time I got swept along on the conversational tide, but now I feel as though they were herding me, corralling me into talking about something very specific, but whether it was finding Fepple’s body or what I’d seen in the Sommers file I don’t know.”

  “Maybe both,” my neighbor suggested. “You say this gal in the claims department, her name was in the agent’s computer, but she’s saying she never was near the place. Maybe she was. Maybe she was down there after he got shot and she’s scared to admit it.”

  I slid Peppy’s silky ears through my fingers. “That’s possible. If that were the case I can see Ralph Devereux being protective of her-but I have to confess, I can’t see that it would matter much to Rossy or his wife. Not enough for them to invite me to dinner to pump me. He said it was because his wife was lonely and wanted me to talk Italian to her, but she was surrounded by friends, or sycophants at any rate, and she didn’t need me, except to get information from.”

  I frowned, thinking it over. “The news of Fepple’s body must have come in, so Rossy could have called to see how much I know-but I can’t see why. Unless the company is more worried about this Sommers claim than they’re admitting-which means it’s the tip of some ugly iceberg that I’m not seeing.

  “It was such a last-minute invitation-I wonder whether tonight’s cast of characters was already in place or if the Rossys pulled them together on the spot, knowing they’d play along. Especially Laura Bugatti-she’s the wife of the Italian cultural attaché. Her job was to be the excited ingenue.”

  “What’s that supposed to mean?”

  “She was the breathless airhead who could ask crude questions without seeming to know what she was doing. Although that could be her real personality. The truth is, they all made me feel big and crude, even the American who was there, some very acidulated writer. I hope I’ve never spent money on any of her books. It’s almost like I was invited to be the entertainment. There was a show going on which I was starring in, but I was the only one who hadn’t seen the script.”

  “Whether money buys happiness or not I couldn’t say, but one thing I’ve known for years, cookie, and that’s that money sure don’t buy character. Which you’ve got ten times more of than any set of got-rocks who want to invite you to dinner just so they can jerk you around.”

  I kissed his cheek and got up: I was too bleary-eyed to think, let alone talk. Moving almost as stiffly as the old man, I went upstairs to bed, taking Peppy with me: both of us needed extra petting tonight.

  The message light on my home machine was flashing. I was so exhausted I thought I’d let it go, but then I wondered if Morrell had tried to reach me. The first message was indeed from him, missing me, loving me, bone-tired but too excited to sleep. “Me, too,” I muttered, replaying his voice several times.

  The second message was from my answering service. Amy Blount had called, twice: “She’s angry and insisting that you get in touch with her at once but wouldn’t give details.” Amy Blount? Oh, yes, the young woman who’d written a hundred fifty years of Ajax history.

  At once. Not now, though. Not at one in the morning on a day that had started twenty hours ago. I switched off my phone, shed my suit, and tumbled into bed without taking off the camisole or my mother’s diamond drop earrings.

  For the first time in over a week I slept through the night, finally staggering out of bed when Peppy nosed me awake a little after eight. My right ear hurt from where my mothe
r’s earring had pressed into it in my sleep; the left one was lost in the bedding. I fumbled around until I found it and got both of them back in my safe, next to my gun. Diamonds from my mother, handguns from my father. Perhaps Fillida Rossy’s writer friend could turn that into a poem.

  While I’d been sleeping, my answering service and Mary Louise had both left messages saying that Amy Blount had again demanded to speak to me. I groaned and went to the kitchen to make coffee.

  I sat on the back porch nursing a double espresso while Peppy sniffed around the yard, until I felt awake enough to stretch out my stiff joints. Finally, after doing a full workout-including a fast four miles over to the lake and back, with the dogs protesting at the speed I made them go-I reconnected myself to the outside world.

  I reached Christie Weddington at my answering service. “Vic, Mary Louise has been trying to reach you, along with a bunch of other people. Amy Blount called again, and someone named Margaret Sommers.”

  Margaret Sommers. My client’s wife who thought I was out to rob or maim her husband. I took the details of my messages and told Christie she could switch urgent calls over to my cell phone. I wandered into the kitchen with my portable phone, prepared to make breakfast while talking to Margaret Sommers. I called her office, where they told me she’d gone home for a family emergency. I went back to the living room to get the home number from my Palm Pilot.

  She answered on the first ring, shouting at me, “What did you say to the police about Isaiah?”

  “Nothing.” The unexpected attack took me off-guard. “What’s happened to him?”

  “You’re lying, aren’t you? They came and got him this morning, right out of the Docherty Works. In front of his buddies and everything, saying he had to talk to them about Howard Fepple. Now who but you would have turned them on to my husband?”

  I wished I’d stayed in bed. “Mrs. Sommers. I have not discussed your husband with the police. And I know nothing about what happened this morning. If you want to talk to me about it, start at the beginning, without hurling accusations at me: is he under arrest? Or just brought into the station for questioning?”

  She was angry and upset, but she did her best to choke back her invective. Isaiah had called her from work to say the cops were taking him in for Fepple’s murder. She didn’t know the station number but it was the one at Twenty-ninth and Prairie, because she’d rushed up there but they hadn’t let her see Isaiah.

  “Did you talk to any of the detectives who are questioning him? Can you give me their names?”

  There were two, whose names she’d managed to get even though they were acting like God Almighty, not having to tell her anything.

  I didn’t recognize either of them. “Did they tell you anything? Like why they brought your husband in to begin with?”

  “Oh, they were so mean, I could kill them myself and not think twice about it. Treating me like it was all a big joke. ‘You want to stick around and yell at us, honey, we could lock you up right next to him. Listen to you two make up lies together.’ Those were their very words.”

  I could easily imagine the exchange, as well as Margaret Sommers’s impotent fury. “But they must have had some grounds for arresting him. Were you able to figure that out?”

  “I told you. Because you talked to them.”

  “I know this has all been a horrible shock,” I said gently. “I don’t blame you for your anger. But try to think of a different reason, because truly, Ms. Sommers, I didn’t say anything to the police about your husband. Indeed, I had nothing to say to them.”

  “What-you didn’t tell them about him being in the office on Saturday?”

  I felt a chill in my stomach. “He was? He went to Fepple’s office? Why did he do that? When did he go there?”

  We went back and forth a few times, but she finally seemed to accept that I hadn’t known about it. Margaret Sommers had pushed Isaiah into going to see Fepple in person. That was what it boiled down to, although she tried to dress it up as my fault: they couldn’t trust me, I wasn’t doing anything but cozying up to the insurance company. She’d talked to the alderman-seeing Fepple was actually his suggestion. So when Isaiah wouldn’t set up an appointment, she did it herself from the office on Friday afternoon.

  “The alderman?” I asked. “Which alderman would this be?”

  “Alderman Durham, of course. On account of Isaiah’s cousin being part of the EYE movement and all, he’s always been very helpful to us. Only Fepple said we couldn’t come on Friday because he was completely booked. He tried to put us off, but I pointed out we worked all week, we couldn’t meet some university professor’s schedule, hopping in and out of our jobs. So he acted like I was trying to make him give me a million dollars, but he said if I was going to make such a big deal out of it, calling the alderman, like I threatened to do, we could see him on Saturday morning. So we drove up there together: I’m tired of Isaiah letting people push him around like he does. There wasn’t any answer when we knocked, and I was furious, thinking he’d made the appointment without any intention of keeping it. But when we opened the door we saw him laying there dead. Not right away, mind you, because the office was dark. But pretty soon.”

  “Just a minute,” I said. “When you called, you accused me of siccing the cops on your husband. What made you say that?”

  She didn’t think she was going to tell me, but then she blurted out that the cops had gotten a call. “They said it was from a man, a black man, but I figured that was just their talk, their way of trying to get under my skin. No brother I know of would accuse my husband of murder.”

  Maybe the detectives had been trying to ride her and Isaiah, but maybe it was a brother who’d phoned in the tip. I let it pass: in her current distress, Margaret Sommers needed to blame someone. It might as well be me.

  I went back to their visit to Fepple’s office on Saturday. “When you were in there, did you look for Mr. Sommers’s uncle’s file? Did you take any papers away with you?”

  “No! Once we got into the office and saw him lying there? With his-oh, I can’t stand even to say it. We left as fast as we could.”

  But they’d touched enough. My client must have left his fingerprints somewhere in the room. And thanks to me, the police had stopped looking at Fepple’s death as a suicide. So Margaret Sommers wasn’t completely wrong: I had ensured her husband’s arrest.

  XXXIII Turmoil

  I drummed a series of jangly chords on the piano after Margaret hung up. Lotty often criticizes me for what she calls my ruthless search for truth, knocking over people in my path without thinking about their wants and needs. If I’d known being so clever about Fepple’s death would get Isaiah Sommers arrested-but it was useless to beat myself up for pushing the cops to do a proper investigation. It had happened; now I had to deal with the aftermath.

  Anyway, what if Isaiah Sommers really had shot Fepple? He’d told me on Monday he had an unlicensed Browning, but that didn’t preclude his also having an unlicensed SIG-although they’re pricey, not the gun of choice for your average homeowner.

  I hit two adjacent keys so hard that Peppy backed away from me. Staging Fepple’s death to look like suicide? Too subtle for my client. Maybe his wife had engineered it-she certainly had a temper. I could see her growing furious enough to shoot Fepple or me or any number of people if they stepped in front of her gun.

  I shook my head. The shot that killed Fepple hadn’t been fired in rage: someone had gotten close enough to put a gun in Fepple’s mouth. Stunning him first, or having an accomplice who stunned him first. Vishnikov told me the whole job had looked professional. That didn’t fit Margaret Sommers’s angry profile.

  I had forgotten breakfast while I was talking to her. It was after ten; I was suddenly very hungry. I walked down the street to the Belmont Diner, the last vestige of the shops and eateries of Lakeview’s old working-class neighborhood. While I waited for a Spanish omelette, I called my lawyer, Freeman Carter. Isaiah Sommers’s most urgent need was for
expert counsel, which I had promised Margaret Sommers before we hung up. She had bristled at my offer of help: they had a very good lawyer in their church who could take care of Isaiah.

  “Which matters more to you? Saving your husband or saving your pride?” I’d asked; after a pregnant pause she muttered she guessed they’d take a look at my lawyer, but if they didn’t trust him right off they wouldn’t keep him.

  Freeman quickly took in my sketch of the situation. “Right, Vic. I have an assistant who can go down to the Twenty-first District for the time being. You have an alternative theory of the murder?”

  “Fepple’s last known appointment was on Friday night with a woman from Ajax Insurance. Connie Ingram.” I didn’t like tossing her to the wolves, but I wasn’t going to have the state’s attorney railroad my client, either. I told Freeman about the situation with the Sommers policy documents. “Someone in the company doesn’t want those papers around, but my client couldn’t possibly be the one who stole the microfiche out of the Ajax claims-department file cabinets. Of course, the company may say I did it for him-but we can cross that bridge if the road goes that far.”

  “And did you, Vic?” Freeman was at his dryest.

  “Scout’s honor, no, Freeman. I’m as hot to see those documents as every other person in this benighted town, but so far I’ve only looked at one sanitized version. I’ll keep sniffing around for evidence about the murder, in case the worst happens and we have to go to trial.”

  Barbara, the waitress who’s worked at the Belmont Diner longest, brought my omelette as Freeman hung up. “You know, you look like every other Yuppie in Lakeview with that thing stuck to your ear, Vic.”

  “Thanks, Barbara. I try to fit into my surroundings.”

  “Well, don’t make a habit of it: we’re thinking of banning them altogether. I’m sick of people shouting their business to an empty table.”

  “What can I say, Barbara? When you’re right, you’re right. You want to put my food under the heat lamp while I go outside for my next call?”