Total Recall

by Sara Paretsky

  She snorted and moved to the next table: the place was filling with people on their morning coffee breaks-the mechanics and repairmen who keep the area Yuppies comfortable. I ate half the omelette quickly, taking the edge off my hunger, before phoning Amy Blount. A strange woman answered, checking my identity before passing me on to Ms. Blount.

  Like Margaret Sommers, Amy Blount was angry, but she was more restrained about it: she wished I had gotten back to her sooner-she was under considerable stress and hated hanging about for my phone call. How soon could I get down to Hyde Park?

  “I don’t know. What’s the problem?”

  “Oh. I’ve told the story so many times I forgot you don’t know it. I had a break-in at my apartment.”

  She had come home at ten last night from a lecture in Evanston to find her papers strewn about, her computer damaged, and her floppy disks missing. When she called the cops, they didn’t take it seriously.

  “But those are my dissertation notes. They’re irreplaceable. I have the dissertation written up and bound, but the notes, I would use those for another book. The police don’t understand, they say it’s impossible to track down all the burglaries in the city, and since no valuables are missing-well, I don’t have valuables, just my computer.”

  “How did the intruders get in?”

  “Through the back door. Even though I have a gate across it, they broke through it without any of the neighbors paying the least attention. Hyde Park is supposed to be such a liberal neighborhood, but everyone scuttles away at the first sign that anyone around them is in trouble,” she added bitterly.

  “Where are you?” I asked.

  “At a friend’s. I couldn’t stay in the middle of all that mess, and I didn’t want to clean it up until someone saw it who would pay attention to the problem.”

  I took her friend’s address and told her either I or Mary Louise would be there within the next two hours. She tried to argue me into coming sooner, but I explained that emergency detectives were like emergency plumbers: we had to fit the job in around all the other broken boilers.

  I finished the omelette but skipped the steak fries-my usual weakness, but if I ate one I’d eat them all, and then I’d be too logy to think very fast. And the day was looking like one that would require Einstein-like thought. I didn’t wait for my bill but put fifteen dollars on the table and trotted back up Racine to my car.

  I had a couple of errands to run in the financial district before going in to my office. As I drove downtown, I called Mary Louise to make sure she was able to work some more hours this afternoon so that she could go see Amy Blount’s apartment. She was pretty terse with me, but I told her she’d see me soon enough to off-load her complaints in person.

  Since I was down by the City-County building anyway, I went inside to find Alderman Durham’s office. Naturally he had one on the South Side, in his own ward, but aldercreatures mostly hang out in the Loop, where the money and power are.

  I scribbled a note on my card: In re the widow’s mite and Isaiah Sommers. After a mere fifteen minutes’ wait, the secretary scooted me ahead of other supplicants, who gave me dirty looks for jumping the queue.

  The alderman had a young man with him wearing the navy blazer with the Empower Youth Energy insignia on it: a gold eye with EYE on Youth embroidered around it. The alderman himself was dressed in Harris tweed, his shirt having the palest green stripe in it to match the green in the tweed.

  He shook my hand genially and waved me to a seat. “So you have something to say about the widow’s mite, Ms. Warshawski?”

  “Have you kept up with that story, alderman? You know Margaret Sommers took your advice and insisted on a meeting with the agent, Howard Fepple, only to walk in and find him dead?”

  “I’m sorry to hear it: that must have been a shock for her.”

  “She got a worse one this morning. Her husband has been brought in for questioning-the cops got a tip. They think he murdered Fepple-out of outrage over the guy robbing his aunt of her mite, so to speak.”

  He nodded slowly. “I can understand their reasoning, but I’m sure Isaiah wouldn’t have killed a man. I’ve known him for years, you see, for years, because his aunt, bless her, had a son who was one of my boys before he passed. Isaiah is a fine man, a churchgoing man. I don’t see him as a murdering man.”

  “Do you see who might have phoned in an anonymous tip to the police, alderman? Their technicians say they’re pretty sure it was an African-American male who made the call.”

  He gave a great mirthless smile. “And you thought to yourself, Who do I know who’s an African-American male? Louis Durham. We’re all alike, after all, we black men: animals at heart, aren’t we.”

  I looked at him steadily. “I thought to myself, Who has been having surreptitious meetings with the European chief of the insurance company that holds the paper on Aaron Sommers? I thought to myself, I don’t see what enticements those two men could offer each other-kill the Holocaust Asset Recovery Act in exchange for shutting down the demonstrations outside the Ajax building? But what if Mr. Rossy wanted something more-what if he wanted Isaiah Sommers to take the fall for the murder so that he could close the claim file and get the mess out of his hair? What if in exchange for shutting off your demonstration and getting someone to finger Isaiah Sommers, Rossy said he’d fly to Springfield to kill the IHARA bill for you?”

  “You have a reputation as an investigator, Warshawski. This isn’t worthy of you.” Durham stood and moved to the door; the young man in the EYE blazer followed him.

  I perforce got up to leave, as well. “Yes, but remember, Durham, I’m shameless-you wrote that on your placards yourself.”

  I picked up my car from the West Loop garage where I’d parked, more puzzled than angered by the encounter. What had he hoped to learn from me that got me in to see him so readily? What were he and Rossy doing together? Had one of his people really made that phone call that led to Isaiah Sommers’s arrest? I couldn’t put the pieces together in any meaningful way.

  I was negotiating the tricky intersection at Armitage, where three streets come together underneath the Kennedy Expressway, when Tim Streeter called. “Vic, not to alarm you, but there’s a bit of a situation.”

  My heart skipped a beat. “Calia? What’s happened? Where are you? Oh, help, hang on.” I laid down rubber under the Kennedy, forced a semi turning onto the expressway to stand on his brakes with a loud blaring of his horn, and pulled into a gas station on the other side.

  “Vic, calm down. The kid’s here with me; we’re at the Children’s Museum in Wilmette. Agnes is fine. It’s at the hospital. This guy Posner, you know, the one who’s been-”

  “Yeah, yeah, I know who he is.”

  “Okay, he’s shown up at the hospital with a group of pickets denouncing Mr. Loewenthal and Dr. Herschel for keeping Jewish families apart. The kid and I were supposed to drop in on Mr. Loewenthal for a brown-bag lunch-Mom’s working on her presentation for the gallery-but when we got to the hospital, Posner and his gang were out in force.”

  “Oh, damn him and the horse he rode in on, too.” So much adrenaline was running through me that I was ready to bounce up to Bryn Mawr Avenue and take Posner apart with my own hands. “Radbuka there?”

  “Yeah. That’s when we got a bit of a situation: I didn’t realize what it was at first, thought it might be a labor dispute or right-to-lifers. Wasn’t until we got close up that I made out the signs. And then Radbuka saw the kid and wanted to make a move on her. I hustled her out of there but the cameras were rolling; she may be on TV tonight. Hard to say. Called Mr. Loewenthal from the car and came on up here.”

  He interrupted himself briefly to talk to Calia, who was whining in the background that she needed to see her Opa now. “I’d better go, but I told Mr. Loewenthal if he needs extra support to call my brother. I’ll stick with the little one.”

  When we’d hung up I sat with my head in my hands, trying to order my mind. I couldn’t just fly north to the hos
pital without doing something for Isaiah Sommers. I forced myself to continue to my office, where Mary Louise greeted me with a severe reprimand over once again making myself so inaccessible overnight: it was no way to run this kind of business. If I wanted to unplug myself from the world to sleep, I should let her know so she could cover for me.

  “You’re right. It won’t happen again-put it down to sleep deprivation clouding my judgment. Here’s what’s going on, though.” I sketched out the situations with Sommers, with Amy Blount, and now the demonstration outside Beth Israel. “I can understand why Radbuka wants to hook up with Posner, but what does Posner get out of attacking Max and Lotty? He went to see Rossy last night-I’m wondering if Rossy somehow set him on to Beth Israel.”

  “Who knows why someone like Posner does anything?” Mary Louise said impatiently. “Look, I only have two more hours to give you today. I don’t think it’s very helpful for you if I spend it going over conspiracy theories. And really, Vic-it makes sense for me to deal with Sommers’s situation-I can call the Finch to get the details of the investigation and give Freeman’s assistant some support. But why did you agree to go all the way down to the South Side for this Amy Blount? The cops are right, you know-this kind of B &E is a dime a dozen. We just file reports-they do, I mean-and keep a lookout for stolen goods. If she didn’t lose anything valuable, why waste your time on it?”

  I grinned. “Conspiracy theory, Mary Louise. She wrote a history for Ajax. Ralph Devereux and Rossy are all hot on who’s stealing Ajax files, or leaking Ajax files to Durham -at least, they were worrying about that last week. Maybe Rossy’s spiked Durham ’s guns for now. If Amy Blount’s papers and floppies have been rifled, I want to know what’s missing. Is it something the alderman wanted for his campaign on slave reparations? Or is there really some junkie out there who’s so addled that he thinks he can sell history papers for enough money to buy a fix?”

  She scowled. “It’s your business. Just remember when you’re writing the rent and insurance checks in two weeks why you don’t have more cash flow this month.”

  “But you will go down to Hyde Park to look over Ms. Blount’s place? After you’ve gotten Sommers’s situation squared away with the Finch?”

  “Like I said, Vic, it’s your business, it’s your money to waste. But quite frankly, I can’t see what good I’ll do you by going to Hyde Park, or what benefit you’ll get from joining Joseph Posner up at the hospital.”

  “I’ll have a chance to talk to Radbuka, which I’ve been desperate for. And maybe I’ll find out what Rossy and Posner had to say to each other.”

  She sniffed and turned to the phone. While she called the Finch-Terry Finchley, her old commanding officer from her days in the Central District-I went to my own desk. I had a handful of messages, one from an important client, and a half dozen e-mails. I dealt with them as quickly as I could and took off.

  XXXIV Road Rage, Hospital Rage, Any Old Rage

  The hospital was on the city’s northwest side, far enough from the trendy neighborhoods that nearby traffic usually flowed fast. Today, though, when I was about a mile away, the main road got so heavy I tried the side streets. Five blocks from Beth Israel, I came to a total halt. I looked around frantically for an alley so I could escape to an alternate route, but as I was about to make a U-turn, it dawned on me that if the jam came from gapers rubbernecking at Posner’s demonstrators, traffic would be blocked on all sides of Beth Israel. I pulled over to an empty meter and sprinted the last half mile.

  Sure enough, I found Posner and several dozen protesters in the middle of the kind of crowd he seemed to adore. Chicago cops were furiously directing traffic at the intersection; staff in green-and-gold hospital security blazers were trying to guide patients to side entrances; television crews were filming. The last had attracted a crowd of gawkers. It was just on one-anyone coming back from lunch had probably stopped to enjoy the show.

  I was too far back to read the signs, but I could hear a chant that chilled my heart: Max and Lotty, have a heart! Don’t smash survivors’ lives apart!

  I ran around to the back, to the service entrance, where I opened my wallet and flashed my PI license in the face of a security guard so fast he couldn’t tell whether it was an FBI badge or a credit card. By the time he’d figured that out, I had disappeared into the labyrinth of halls and stairwells that make security at any hospital a nightmare.

  I tried to keep my bearings but still ended up in radiation oncology and file storage before finding the main lobby. I could hear shouting from the group outside, but I couldn’t see anything: Beth Israel is an old brick building, without a plate-glass front or even any windows low enough to see outside. Hospital guards, who were completely unused to this kind of chaos, were doing an ineffectual job of keeping gawkers from blocking the main entrance. An older woman sobbed helplessly to one side that she’d just had outpatient surgery, that she needed a taxi to get home, while a second woman with a newborn looked around anxiously for her husband.

  I stared at the scene for an appalled moment, then told the guards to keep people away from the door. “Tell them that anyone who obstructs the entryway is facing a fine. The back exit is free and clear-get these patients out through there. Send an SOS to the cab companies to use the rear.”

  I watched until the startled guard started giving orders through his walkie-talkie before I marched down the corridor to Max’s office. Cynthia Dowling, Max’s secretary, interrupted a heated telephone exchange when she saw me.

  “Cynthia, why doesn’t Max get the cops to arrest that group of yahoos?”

  She shook her head. “The board’s afraid of alienating major donors. Beth Israel is one of the big Jewish charities in town. Most of the calls we’ve been getting since Posner hit the news have agreed with you, but old Mrs. Felstein is one of Posner’s supporters-she survived the war in hiding in Moldavia, you know, but when she came here she made a fortune in gum balls. Lately she’s been active in lobbying Swiss banks to release Holocaust victims’ assets. And she’s pledged twenty million dollars for our new oncology wing.”

  “So if she sees Posner carried off to a paddy wagon she’ll cancel? But if someone who’s having a heart attack dies because they can’t get here, you’d face a lawsuit that would more than offset any pledge she made.”

  “That’s Max’s decision. His and the board’s, and of course they’re aware of the pitfalls.” Her phone console started to blink; she pressed a button. “Mr. Loewenthal’s office… No, I know you have a one-thirty deadline. As soon as Mr. Loewenthal is available I’ll let him have your message… Yes, I wish we weren’t in the business of saving lives here; it would make us better able to drop everything to respond to media deadlines. Mr. Loewenthal’s office, please hold… Mr. Loewenthal’s office, please hold.” She looked at me, distracted, with her hand over the phone. “This place is so inefficient. The stupid temp the clerical pool sent me went to lunch an hour ago. She’s probably out front enjoying the show, and even though I’m the executive director’s secretary, the clerical office won’t send me another backup.”

  “Okay, okay, I’ll leave you to it. I have some questions for Posner-tell Max if you see him that I won’t implicate the hospital.”

  When I got to the main lobby, I elbowed my way through to the front of the crowd, which was once again pushing against the revolving doors. As soon as I got outside I saw the reason for their avidity: the demonstrators had stopped marching and were clumped together behind Joseph Posner, who was shouting at a small woman in a hospital coat, “You’re the worst kind of anti-Semite, a traitor to your own people.”

  “And you, Mr. Posner, are the worst kind of abuser of human emotion, exploiting the horrors of Treblinka for your own aggrandizement.”

  I would have known that voice anywhere, anger making her clip off words like so many cigar ends. I pushed past two of Posner’s Maccabees to reach her side. “Lotty, what are you doing here? This is a losing battle-attention is this guy’s meat and drink
.”

  Posner, his nostrils flaring with anger, his mouth distorted in defiance, looked like a picture captioned The gladiator waiting for the lion in my childhood Illustrated History of Rome.

  Lotty, a small but ferocious lion, shook me off. “Mind your own business for once, Victoria. This man is defaming the dead for his own glory. And he’s defaming me.”

  “Then we’ll take it to a court of law,” I said. “There are television cameras catching every word on tape.”

  “Go ahead, take me to court, if you dare.” Posner turned as he spoke, to make sure both his supporters and the reporters heard him. “I don’t care if I spend five years in jail, if that will make the world understand my people’s cause.”

  “Your people?” I kept my voice light, scornful. “Are you Moses now?”

  “Will it make you happier if I call them my ‘followers,’ or my ‘team’? Whatever you call them, they understand that it may be necessary to suffer or make sacrifices to get where we want to be. They understand that some of that suffering can take the form of ridicule from ignorant secularists like yourself, or this doctor here.”

  “What about the suffering of patients?” I asked. “An elderly woman can’t get home after surgery because you’ve blocked the front door. If her family sues you for millions in damages, will ‘your people’ understand that?”

  “ Victoria, I don’t need you to fight my battles for me,” Lotty said, her voice tight with anger. “Or to draw this imbecile’s fire.”

  I ignored her. “By the way, Mr. Posner, you know that ‘your people’ have to keep moving-they can be arrested if they stand around gawking.”

  “I hardly need a strange woman to instruct me in the law,” Posner said, but he gestured to his followers to start circling again.

  Paul Radbuka was hovering near Posner’s elbow, his mobile clown’s face registering first delight at Posner’s rebuttal, derision as Lotty spoke-and anger as he suddenly recognized me. “Reb Joseph, this woman-she’s a detective, she’s my enemy, she’s the person who’s turning my family against me.”