Total Recall

by Sara Paretsky

  I clattered down the stairs, sketched a wave at Mr. Contreras, who stuck his head out the door when he heard me, and drove across Addison, past Wrigley Field, where the vendors were setting up their carts for one of the Cubs’-mercifully-final games of the season.

  From a marginally legal parking space outside their building, I called to the Rossy apartment. Fillida Rossy answered the phone. I hung up and leaned back in the front seat to wait. I could give the project until six, when I’d need to leave for my meeting with the alderman.

  At four-thirty, Fillida Rossy came through the front door with her children and their nanny, who was carrying a large gym bag. As she had on Tuesday evening, Fillida was fussing endlessly with their clothes, retying the girl’s sash, smoothing the collar outside the boy’s monogrammed sweater. When he jerked away, she started wrapping the girl’s long hair around her hands, all the time talking to the nanny. She herself was dressed in jeans with a crinkly warm-up jacket.

  Someone drove a black Lincoln Navigator to the entrance. While the driver put the gym bag into the back, Fillida held both children tightly, apparently giving some last instructions to the nanny. She climbed into the front seat, without acknowledging the man who held the door and put her bag into the car for her. I waited while the children disappeared up the street with the nanny before crossing over to go into the building.

  It was a different doorman on duty this afternoon than the one I’d met on Tuesday. “You just missed Mrs. Rossy; no one’s up there but the maid. She speaks English, but not too great,” he said. When I said that I’d lost one of my earrings at dinner and was hoping Mrs. Rossy had found it, he added, “You can see if she’ll understand you.”

  I tried to explain over the house phone who I was and what I wanted. My father’s mother spoke Polish, but my dad didn’t, so the language hadn’t been part of my childhood. Still, a few halting phrases got me upstairs, where I showed Irina the earring. She shook her head, starting to give me a long discourse in Polish. I had to apologize and tell her I didn’t understand.

  “I all clean on next day, and don’t see nothing. But at party, I hear you speak Italy, I ask why, if your name Warshawska.” She gave it the Polish pronunciation, with the appropriate ending for a woman.

  “My mother was Italian,” I explained. “My father was Polish.”

  She nodded. “I understand. Children talk like mother talk. In my family, same. In Mrs. Fillida’s family, same. Mr. Rossy, he speak Italy, English, Germania, France, but children, only Italy, English.”

  I clucked sympathetically over the fact that no one in the household could communicate with Irina. “Mrs. Rossy is a good mother, is she, always talking to her children?”

  Irina threw up her hands. “When she see children, she always holding, always-like-like cat or dog.” She mimed petting. “Clothes, oh, my God, they has beautiful clothes, much much money. I buy all for my children what she pay on one dress for Marguerita. Children much money but not happy. No has friend. Mister, he very good man, happy, always polite. She, no, she cold.”

  “But she doesn’t like to leave the children alone, does she?” I doggedly tried to keep the conversation on track. “I mean, they entertain here, but does she go out and leave the children behind?”

  Irina looked at me in surprise. Of course Mrs. Rossy left the children. She was rich, she went to the gym, to go shopping, to see friends. It was only when she was home…

  “Last Friday I thought I saw her at a dance at the Hilton Hotel. You know, for charity.” I had to repeat the sentence a couple of different ways before Irina understood me.

  She shrugged. “Is possible. Was not here, I not know where she and mister going. I in bed early. Not like today when many people coming for dinner.”

  My hint to leave. I tried offering her a tip for her help, but she flung up her hands in disgust. She was sorry about my earring: she would keep looking for it.

  As I drove up the street, I passed the children returning from their walk. They were punching at each other from either side of the nanny-happy families, as Tolstoy said.

  So the Rossys hadn’t been home on Friday night. That didn’t mean they’d been in Hyde Park shooting Howard Fepple. Still, I could see Fillida phoning him, saying her name was Connie Ingram, persuading him she was hot for him. I could see her coming in with him and all the Lamaze parents-perhaps her husband melting into the group as well-twining herself around Fepple in his chair. Bertrand slips into the office, whacks the back of his head, she puts the SIG’s barrel into his mouth. At the spray of blood and bone, she jumps off, places the gun under his chair. She’s cool, but not cool enough to remember to get his hand on the gun so that the morgue will find gunpowder residue on it.

  Then she and Bertrand search the office, find the Sommers file, and take off. Yesterday, Fillida went to Hoffman’s house. How had she found the address when I hadn’t been able to? Oh, of course, through Ulrich. They knew his name: they were looking for him, looking for those records of Edelweiss-Nesthorn sales. It must have made Rossy’s eyes jump out of their sockets when Connie Ingram brought the Sommers file up to Ralph’s office last week. The agent he was looking for, Ulrich Hoffman, right under his nose in Chicago. Maybe it took them a while to figure it out, but eventually they realized if he was dead they could still get his address a bunch of different ways. Old phone books, for instance.

  I could see all of this happening. But how could I prove any of it? If I had world enough and time, I could probably find they’d gone to Ameritech for old phone books. The cops hadn’t been able to trace the SIG that killed Fepple. Perhaps Fillida’s friend in the Italian consulate had brought it in with her under diplomatic cover. “Laura, darling, I want to bring my guns with me. The Americans are so bizarre about guns-they all carry them the way we do pocketbooks, but they will make my life a misery of forms if I try to carry my own through customs with me.”

  As I cruised down Lake Shore Drive for my meeting with Durham, I thought uneasily about Paul Hoffman in his hospital bed. Where had Fillida Rossy been going on a Friday afternoon with her gym bag? Did she work out this late in the day, or did the bag hold a gun for finishing the job on Paul?

  At the lights on Chicago Avenue, I called the hospital: there was a block on his room, so they wouldn’t connect me. That was good. Could they give me a status report? His condition had been upgraded to serious.

  When I’d found a meter a few blocks south of the Glow, I called Tim Streeter up at Max’s. Max hadn’t come home from work yet-Posner had been back at the hospital today. The demonstrations had been more subdued, but the board was meeting late to discuss the problem.

  Tim was bored; they really didn’t need him any longer. If I could get Calia Ninshubur’s collar they would all be happy.

  “Oh, that wretched collar.” I told Tim if I couldn’t get up to Evanston tonight, Calia would have to accept receiving it in the mail when she returned home. More important was my dilemma about Paul’s safety, which I explained to him.

  Tim said he’d talk to his brother to see if one of the women on their team would look after Paul for a few days. He himself needed a break from bodyguarding: four days of Calia had turned him prematurely white.

  When we finished, I leaned my head wearily against the steering wheel. Too much was going on that I didn’t understand and couldn’t control. Where had Lotty gone? She’d stalked angrily off into the night last night, driven home-and disappeared. I dialed her apartment, where her clipped voice came on again from the machine. “Lotty, please call me if you are picking up your messages. I’m seriously worried.” I called back up to Evanston, intending to leave a message for Max, but he’d just walked in the door.

  “ Victoria, have you had any word from Lotty? No? Mrs. Coltrain called, wanting to know if you had been able to get into her apartment.”

  “Oh, nuts-calling Mrs. Coltrain back went out of my head-I’m spinning in too many directions right now.” I told Max about my tour through the apartment this morning an
d asked if he could tell Mrs. Coltrain about it himself.

  “If Lotty disappeared of her own free will, how could she leave without letting us know?” I added. “Surely she must know how much this would upset all her friends, not to say Mrs. Coltrain and her clinic staff.”

  “She’s seriously disturbed,” Max said. “Something has knocked her off-balance, so that she’s thinking only of some small world, not the bigger one with her friends in it. Her whole behavior is-it’s frightening me, Victoria. I’m tempted to call it some kind of long-delayed post-traumatic breakdown, as if she held so much in for so many decades that it’s hitting her with the force of a tidal wave. If you get any kind of word from her, no matter the hour, let me know at once. As I will you.”

  It helped that Max was as troubled as I. Post-traumatic stress-it’s a diagnosis bandied about so glibly these days that one forgets how real and terrifying a condition it is. If Max was right, it could explain Lotty’s unbearable edginess lately, as well as her sudden evaporation. I wished I hadn’t gotten myself bogged down in the trailing tentacles of the investigation: I wanted to find her now. I wanted to console her if that lay within my power. I wanted to bring her back to life. But I was frighteningly aware that I had few powers. I wasn’t an indovina. I was barely making progress slogging through quicksand as an investigator.

  I climbed stiffly out of the car. It was six-thirty; I was late for my meeting with the alderman. I walked up the street to the Golden Glow. It’s the closest thing I have to a private club, not that it’s private, but I’ve been a regular for so many years that they let me run a tab that I pay once a month.

  Sal Barthele, who owns the place, flashed me a smile but didn’t have time to come around to say hello-the horseshoe mahogany bar, which her brothers and I had helped her retrieve from a Gold Coast mansion when it went under the wrecking ball ten years ago, was three-deep with weary traders. The half dozen little tables with their signature Tiffany lamps were also crowded. I scanned the room but didn’t spot the alderman.

  Durham came in just as Jacqueline, who was working the floor, whizzed past me with a full tray. She handed me a glass of Black Label without breaking stride and went on to a table where she served eight drinks without checking the order. I took a deep swallow of scotch, steadying myself from my worries about Lotty, bracing myself to talk to the alderman.

  Jacqueline saw me edge my way to the door to greet Durham: she flashed an arm at me, pointing to a table in the corner. Sure enough, just as Durham had given me an easy greeting, the five women clustered at the table hopped up to leave. By the time the alderman and I were sitting down, half the bar had emptied as people ran to catch seven-o’clock trains. I’d wondered if he would come with an escort; now that the room had cleared I could see two youths in their EYE blazers standing just inside the door.

  “So, Investigator Warshawski. You are still on your quest to link African-American men with any crime that floats by your nose.” It was a statement, not a question.

  “I don’t have to go on a quest,” I said with a gentle smile. “The news gets hand-delivered to me. Colby Sommers has not only been flashing a roll but telling everyone and their dog Rover what he did to-well, I hate to say earn, that demeans the hard work that most people do for a living. Let’s call it scoring.”

  “Call it what you want, Ms. Warshawski. Call it what you want, it doesn’t change the ugly truth behind the insinuations.” When Jacqueline hovered briefly in front of us, he ordered Maker’s Mark and a twist; I shook my head-one whisky is my limit when I’m in a tricky conversation.

  “People say you’re smart, alderman; people say you’re the one man who can give the mayor a run for his money in the next election cycle. I don’t see it myself. I know Colby Sommers was a lookout when a couple of EYE youths broke into Amy Blount’s apartment earlier this week. When you and I talked on Wednesday, I was wondering about an anonymous tip the cops got, one to frame Isaiah Sommers. Now I know Colby Sommers made that phone call. I know that Isaiah and Margaret Sommers went to Fepple’s agency the Saturday morning his body was lying there, brains and blood all over everything, on your advice. I guess what I don’t know is what Bertrand Rossy could possibly offer you to make you get up to your neck in his problems.”

  Durham smiled, a genial smile that didn’t reach his eyes. “You don’t know much, Ms. Warshawski, because there’s no way you can know folks in my ward. It’s no secret that Colby Sommers hates his cousin: everyone along Eighty-seventh Street knows that. If he tried to frame Isaiah for murder and if he got involved in the fringes of hard-core crime, it doesn’t shock me the way it might you: I understand all the indignities, all the centuries of injustice, that make black men turn on themselves, or turn on their own community. I doubt you could ever understand such things. But if Colby has tried to harm his cousin, I’ll make a call to the local police commander, see if I can’t help sort that out so that Isaiah doesn’t suffer needlessly.”

  “I hear things, too, alderman.” I twirled the last small mouthful of whisky in my glass. “One of the most interesting is about you and reparations for descendants of slaves. An important issue. A good one to put the mayor in a bind over-he can’t afford to alienate the international business community by pushing it; he can’t afford to look bad to his constituents by ignoring it, especially since he backed the City Council’s condemnation of slavery.”

  “So you understand local politics, detective. Maybe that means you’ll vote for me, if I ever run for an office that covers whatever chardonnay district you live in.”

  He was deliberately trying to goad me; I gave him a quizzical smile to show I understood the effort even if I didn’t get the reason. “Oh, yes, I understand local politics. I understand it might not look so good if people found out that you only started on your campaign when Bertrand Rossy came to town. When he-persuaded-you to take the spotlight off Joseph Posner and the Holocaust asset issue by banging the drum over reparations for slavery.”

  “Those are mighty ugly words, detective, and as you know, I am not a patient man when it comes to people like you slandering me.”

  “Slander. Now, that assumes a baseless accusation. If I wanted to take the trouble, or ask, say, Murray Ryerson at the Herald-Star to take the trouble, I’m betting we could find some substantial chunk of change moving from Rossy to you. Either something from him personally, or something on an Ajax corporate check. I’m betting from him personally. And maybe he was even savvy enough to give you cash. But someone will know about it. It’s just a question of digging deep enough.”

  He didn’t flinch. “Bertrand Rossy is an important businessman around town, even if he is from Switzerland. And like you say, one of these days I might want to run for mayor of Chicago. It can’t hurt me to have support in the business community. But most important to me is my own community. Where I grew up. And where I know most people by their first names. They’re the Chicagoans who need me, they’re the ones I work for, so I’d best be getting to a meeting with them.”

  He drained his glass and signaled for a check, but I waved a hand to Jacqueline, meaning Sal should add it to my bar tab. I didn’t want to be indebted to Alderman Durham for anything, not even one mouthful of scotch whisky.

  XLVIII Bodies Building

  At the end of the trading day, the South Loop empties fast. The streets take on the forlorn and tawdry look that human spaces acquire when they’ve been abandoned: every piece of garbage, every abandoned can and bottle, stood out on the empty streets. The L screeching overhead sounded as remote and wild as a coyote on the prairie.

  I walked the three blocks to my car very fast, looking around every few steps into doorways and alleys, zigging back and forth across the street. Who would come for me first-Fillida Rossy, or Durham ’s EYE gang?

  Durham had not only brushed me off, he’d done so with a studied offensiveness that was designed to make me angry. As if he hoped that focusing on racial injustice would keep me from thinking about the specifics of the crim
es Colby Sommers was involved in.

  So what wasn’t I supposed to think about? It seemed to me I was getting a tolerably clear picture of why Ulrich’s journals mattered. And of how Howard Fepple had been killed. I was also starting to see the connection between Durham and Rossy. They had a beautifully dovetailed set of needs: Rossy handed Durham an attention-getting campaign issue, gave him the cash to fund it, and manipulated the legislature into linking the Holocaust with slave reparations, making it too big an issue for them to touch. Durham in exchange took the spotlight away from Ajax, Edelweiss, and Holocaust asset recovery. It was lovely, in a perverted way.

  What I didn’t understand was what Howard Fepple had seen in the Sommers file that made him think he had a big payday coming. I supposed it could have been something to do with Ulrich’s European life-insurance book-that Fepple, like me, like anyone in insurance, knew Edelweiss couldn’t afford an exposure on Holocaust life-insurance policies.

  But that didn’t explain how Ulrich had made his money. Thirty years ago he wouldn’t have been blackmailing his Swiss employers, because thirty years ago Holocaust bank accounts and Holocaust life-insurance policies didn’t matter to state legislatures or the U.S. Congress. Ulrich must have been doing something more local. He didn’t seem like a criminal mastermind, just an ugly guy who horribly abused his son and found a quiet way to turn a plug nickel into a silver dollar.

  A man lurched out of the shadows in front of me. I didn’t know I could get my hand inside my shoulder holster so fast. When the man asked for the price of a meal, old Ezra filling the air around him, sweat trickled down the back of my neck. I stuck the gun in my jacket pocket and fished in my bag for a dollar, but he’d seen the gun and ran down a side street on unsteady legs.

  I drove back to my office, keeping an uneasy eye on the rearview mirror, checking for tails. When I got to Tessa’s and my warehouse, I parked away from the building. I had my gun in my hand when I let myself in. Before settling at my desk, I searched Tessa’s studio, the hall, the bathroom, and all the subdivisions of my office-it’s hard to break in to our building but not impossible.