I put in a call to Terry Finchley at the police department. He’d been Mary Louise’s commanding officer her last three years on the force and was the person she still turned to for inside information on police investigations. I knew he wasn’t involved in the Sommers murder directly, but he knew about the investigation because he’d been getting information about it to Mary Louise. He wasn’t in, either. I hesitated, then left a message for him with the desk sergeant: Colby Sommers is a hanger-on with the EYE team. He knows something about Howard Fepple’s murder; he also was involved in the break-in in Hyde Park where you sent the forensics unit on Wednesday. The sergeant promised to pass it on.
When I switched on my computer, I felt unreasonably let down that Morrell hadn’t responded to my e-mail. Of course, it was the middle of the night in Kabul. And who knew where he was-if he’d gone into the backcountry already, he wouldn’t be anywhere near a phone hookup. Lotty off in some desolate place that I couldn’t penetrate, Morrell at the ends of the earth. I felt horribly alone and sorry for myself.
The fax of Anna Freud’s article on the six toddlers from Terezin had come in. I turned to it resolutely, determined not to wallow in self-pity.
The article was long, but I read it through with total attention. Despite the clinical tone of the piece, the heartbreaking destruction of the children came through clearly-deprived of everything, from parental love to language, fending for themselves as toddlers in a concentration camp, somehow coming together to support one another.
After the war, when the British admitted a number of children from the camps to help them learn to live in a terror-free world, Freud took over the care of these six: they were far too young for any of the other programs. And they were such a tight little group that the social workers were afraid of separating them, afraid of the added trauma that separation would create in their young lives. They were all close, but two had formed a special bond with each other: Paul and Miriam.
Paul and Miriam. Anna Freud, whom Paul Hoffman called his savior in England, cutting her photograph from her biography to hang in his chamber of secrets. Freud’s Paul, born in Berlin in 1942, sent to Terezin at twelve months, just as Paul Hoffman had claimed for himself in the interview on television. The only one of the six about whose family nothing was known. So if your name was Paul, and your father was a German who brutalized you, locked you in a closet, beat you for any signs of feminine character, maybe you would start to think, This is my story, the children in the camps.
But Paul and Miriam weren’t Anna Freud’s children’s real names. In a study of real people, Freud had used code names to protect their privacy. Paul Hoffman hadn’t understood that. He’d read the article, absorbed the story, imagined his little playmate Miriam for whom he cried so piteously on television last week.
The hairs stood up on the back of my neck. I felt an overwhelming desire for my own home and bed, for privacy away from other people’s soul-sickening traumas. I wasn’t up to driving north to Evanston. I put Ninshubur’s little collar in a padded mailer, addressed it to Michael Loewenthal’s London home with a note for customs, used goods, no declared value, and dropped it in a mailbox with some airmail postage. I kept an eye out on the street all the way home, but neither Fillida nor the EYE team seemed to be stalking me.
I was happy when Mr. Contreras waylaid me as I came into the lobby. When he learned I hadn’t eaten all day, except for my apple, he exclaimed, “No wonder you’re discouraged, doll. I got spaghetti on the stove. It ain’t homemade, like you’re used to, but it’s plenty good enough for an empty stomach.”
It was, indeed-I ate two bowls of it. We drove the dogs to a park and let them romp in the dark.
I fell early to sleep. In the night, I had my most dreaded nightmare, the one where I was trying to find my mother and only came on her as she was lowered into her grave, wrapped in so many bandages, with tubes coming from every arm, that she couldn’t see me. I knew she was alive, I knew she could hear me, but she gave no sign. I woke from it weeping, saying Lotty’s name aloud to myself. I lay awake for an hour, listening to sounds from the world outside, wondering what the Rossys were doing, before falling back at last into a fitful sleep.
At seven, I got up to run to the lake with the dogs while Mr. Contreras followed us in my Mustang. The idea that I might be in danger worried him powerfully; I could see he was going to stick close at hand until the Edelweiss business was resolved.
The lake was still warm, even though the September days were drawing short; I went into the water with the dogs. While Mr. Contreras threw sticks for them I swam to the next rock outcropping and back. When I rejoined the three of them I was tired but refreshed, the misery of the previous night eased from my mind.
As we drove home I turned on the radio to catch the news at the top of the hour. Presidential election blah-blah, violence on the West Bank and Gaza blah-blah.
In our top local story, police have released the identity of a woman whose body was found early this morning in the Sundown Meadow Forest Preserve. A Countryside couple came on the body when they were running their dogs in the woods a little before six this morning. Countryside police now tell us that her name was Connie Ingram, thirty-three, of LaGrange. She lived with her mother, who became worried when her daughter did not return from work last night.
“She doesn’t have a boyfriend,” Mrs. Ingram said. “She often stayed late on Fridays to go for a drink with her girlfriends at work, but she always caught the 7:03.”
When her daughter failed to come home by the last train, Mrs. Ingram called local police, who told her they didn’t take a missing person’s report until someone had been gone for seventy-two hours. Still, by the time Mrs. Ingram talked to LaGrange police, her daughter was already dead: the Cook County Medical Examiner estimates that she was strangled around eight P.M.
Ingram had worked at Ajax Insurance in the Loop since graduating from high school. Coworkers say she had recently been troubled by accusations from Chicago police that she was involved in the murder of longtime Ajax insurance agent Howard Fepple earlier this week. Countryside and LaGrange authorities are cooperating fully with the Chicago police in the investigation.
In other local news, a South Side man was shot and killed in an apparent drive-by shooting as he was walking home from the L last night. Colby Sommers had been involved in Alderman Louis Durham’s Empower Youth Energy program as a boy; the alderman said he is sending condolences to the family.
Is the end of summer getting you down? Turn to-
I turned off the radio and pulled over to the curb.
Mr. Contreras looked at me in alarm. “What’s up, doll? She a friend of yours? You’re white as my hair right now.”
“Not a friend-the young woman in the claims department I’ve been telling you about. Yesterday morning when I went down to Ajax, Ralph Devereux taxed her with knowing something about these wretched old journals that Lotty’s wandered off with.”
Connie Ingram disappeared for a few minutes on her way to the elevator. I thought she was hiding from me, but maybe she was in Bertrand Rossy’s office, seeking advice.
Fepple must have sent a sample of his goods to the company: how else had they known he really could blackmail them? He’d sent them to poor little Connie Ingram, because she was in touch with him. She went directly to Bertrand Rossy because Rossy was taking a personal interest in the work she was doing on the Sommers file. It must have been almost unbearably exciting for a claims handler to be pulled out of the pit by the glamorous young executive from the new owners in Zurich. He swore her to secrecy; he knew she wouldn’t betray his interest in the case to Ralph, to her boss Karen Bigelow, to anyone, because he could gauge her excitement pretty clearly.
But she was a company woman; she was worried when she left Ralph’s office. She wanted to be loyal to the claims department, but she needed to consult Rossy first. So what did Rossy do? Arranged a secret meeting with her at the end of the day. (“We can’t talk now, my schedule is full
; I’ll pick you up at the bar across the street after work. But don’t tell anyone. We don’t know who in this company we can trust.”) Something like that. Taken her to the forest preserve, where she might have imagined sex with the boss, and strangled her when she turned to smile at him.
The scenario made me shudder in disgust. If I was right. Peppy leaned her head across the backseat and nuzzled me, whimpering. My neighbor wrapped a towel around me.
“You get into the passenger seat, doll, I’m driving you home. Tea, honey, milk, you need that and a hot bath right now.”
I didn’t fight him, even though I knew I couldn’t afford to sit around for very long. While he boiled water for tea and fussed around with bread and eggs I went upstairs to shower.
Standing under the hot water, drifting, my mind turned up what Ralph had said yesterday to Connie. Something like, I didn’t think we ever deep-sixed papers in an insurance company. If Fepple had sent her samples of his wares, so to speak, she’d have kept them.
I turned off the water abruptly and dried myself quickly. Say Rossy took care of the claims master file, cleaning out anything in Ulrich’s handwriting. He’d found the microfiche copy-nothing simpler than for him to roam the floors of the building after hours: just checking on local operations. Hunt for the right drawer, abstract the fiche, and destroy it.
But I’d guess Connie had a desk file-the documents she needed to consult every day on a case while she was actively working on it. It probably hadn’t occurred to Rossy-he’d never done a day’s clerical work in his life. And I bet Fepple’s stuff was in it.
I scrambled into my clothes: jeans, running shoes, and the softly cut blazer to conceal my gun. I ran down the stairs to Mr. Contreras’s place, where I took the time to drink the hot, sweet tea he’d made and eat scrambled eggs. I was impatient to be going-but I owed him the courtesy to sit at the table for fifteen minutes.
While I ate I explained what I wanted to do, muting his protest at my taking off again. The clinching argument in his eyes was that the sooner I got going on Rossy and Ajax, the sooner I’d be able to start looking for Lotty.
XLIX Clerical Work
I ran back up to my apartment to collect my bag-and to call Ralph, so I’d know where he was instead of bouncing around town hunting for him. My phone was ringing when I got upstairs. It stopped before I got my door opened but started again as I rummaged in my briefcase for my Palm Pilot.
“Vic!” It was Don Strzepek. “Don’t you ever check your messages? I’ve left four in the last hour.”
“Don, knock it off. Two people connected with my investigation were murdered last night, which is way bigger in my mind than returning your phone calls.”
“Well, Rhea was lucky she wasn’t murdered last night. A masked gunman broke into her place, looking for those damned books of Ulrich Hoffman’s. So if you can clean the snot off your nose and be responsive, go get them back from Dr. Herschel before someone else is hurt.”
“Broke into her home?” I was horrified. “How do you know they were after Ulrich’s books?”
“The attacker demanded them. Rhea was terrified: the bastard tied her up, held a gun on her, started tossing stuff out of her bookshelves, going through her personal things. She had to say that Lotty had them.”
I felt the air drain from me, as if I’d been kicked in the solar plexus. “Yes, I can see that.”
My voice was as dry as the dust under my dresser, but Don was full of his own alarms and didn’t notice. At four this morning, Rhea woke to find someone standing over her with a gun. The person was completely covered in a ski mask, gloves, a bulky jacket. Rhea couldn’t tell if it was a man or a woman, a black person or a white, but the attacker’s size and ferocity made her think it was a man. He pulled a gun on her, forced her downstairs, taped her hands and feet to a dining-room chair.
The intruder had said, “You know what we want. Tell us where you’ve hidden them.” She protested that she didn’t know, so the man had growled out: the books of her patient Paul Hoffman.
Don’s voice shook. “Prick said he’d already searched her office. She says it was the worst part, in a way, that she had to keep asking him to repeat what he was saying-he apparently spoke in a kind of growl that was hard to understand. Something deep in the throat; that’s why she couldn’t even tell the sex of the speaker. Also, well, you know how it is when you’re terrified, especially if you’re not used to physical attacks-your brain doesn’t process stuff normally. And this-people look so horrible in ski masks and everything. It’s paralyzing to see someone in that getup. They don’t look human.”
It flitted through my mind that Rhea could test her own theories by getting herself hypnotized, to see what she could recall of her assailant, but the episode had been too traumatic for me to make sport of her. “So she said, Don’t shoot me, Dr. Herschel took the books?”
“The assailant was tossing her china on the floor. She watched him smash a teapot that her grandmother’s great-grandmother brought from England in 1809.” Don’s voice took on a sharp edge. “He said he-she-whoever-knew Rhea was the person closest to Paul Hoffman-he knew his name and everything-and she was the only person Hoffman would have given the books to. So Rhea said someone else had taken the books from the hospital last night. When the bastard threatened her, she gave them Dr. Herschel’s name. Not everyone has your physical stamina, Vic,” he added when I didn’t say anything.
“It may be okay,” I said slowly. “Lotty’s disappeared and taken the books with her. If they’re still looking for Ulrich’s journals, it confirms that Lotty disappeared on her own, that she wasn’t coerced. The police have been around, I presume? Did she tell them about the connection to Paul Hoffman?”
“Oh, yeah.” I could hear him sucking in a mouthful of smoke, then Rhea, plaintive in the background, reminding him that she hated cigarette smoke, and his “Sorry, sweet,” into the mouthpiece, although not addressed to me.
Was that where Fillida Rossy had been going so fast with her gym bag yesterday afternoon? Down to Water Tower Place to search Rhea Wiell’s office? No Ulrich journals in the office, so the Rossys waited until the middle of the night, after the end of their dinner party. Rossy returned from murdering Connie, the two of them entertained, Bertrand sparkling with wit, and then went off to terrorize Rhea Wiell in her home.
“What did Rhea say to the cops?” I asked.
“She told them you’d been in Paul’s house Thursday, so you may get a visit from the investigating team.”
“She’s a never-ending ray of sunshine.” Then I remembered my carefully worded message to Ralph yesterday afternoon-that I didn’t have Ulrich’s books, that someone else had taken them away. I’d been trying to protect Lotty, but all I’d done was expose Rhea Wiell. Naturally the Rossys-or whoever was after the books-had looked first for the person Hoffman was closest to. I could hardly complain if she’d sicced them onto me in turn.
“Hell, Don, I’m sorry.” I cut short his expostulation. “Look, whoever is after these books is lethal. I’m totally, utterly thankful that they didn’t shoot Rhea. But-if they go to Lotty’s and don’t find the notebooks there, they may think Rhea was lying. They may come after her again and be more ferocious this time. Or they may think she gave them to you. Can you go away for the weekend? Go to New York, go to London, go somewhere where you can feel reasonably safe?”
He was shaken. We talked about the possibilities for several minutes, but before he hung up I said, “Look, Don. I’ve got more bad news for you on your recovered memory project. I know seeing those books of Ulrich’s already raised some doubts in your mind, but this story of Paul’s, that he was a kid in Terezin who was taken to England, where Hoffman scooped him up, I’m afraid he may have adapted that from someone else’s history.”
I told him about Anna Freud’s article. “If you can find out what happened to the real ‘Paul’ and ‘Miriam’ in that article-well, I’d hate for you to take your Paul’s history public. A lot of readers would recog
nize Freud’s article and know he had appropriated the story of those kids.”
“Maybe the evidence will prove he’s right.” Don spoke without much conviction. “The children couldn’t have stayed with Anna Freud’s staff forever; they have to have grown up somewhere. One of them could well have come to America with Ulrich, who might have called him Paul, thinking that was his real name.” He was trying hard to hang on to the shreds of his belief in his book-and in Rhea.
“Maybe,” I said doubtfully. “I’ll send you a copy of the article. The children were placed in adoptive homes through a foster parents’ organization under Freud’s supervision. I have a feeling they would have made sure Paul went to a stable two-parent home, not into the custody of a widowed immigrant, even if he wasn’t an Einsatzgruppenführer.”
“You’re trying to ruin my book just because you don’t like Rhea,” he grumbled.
I kept my temper with an effort. “You’re a well-respected writer. I’m trying to keep you from making a fool out of yourself with a book that would be poked full of holes the minute it hit the street.”
“It seems to me that’s my lookout, mine and Rhea’s.”
“Oh, boil your head, Don,” I said, my sympathy gone. “I have two murders to attend to: I don’t have time for this kind of crap.”
I hung up and found Ralph Devereux’s home number. He’d moved away from the Gold Coast apartment where he’d lived when I used to know him, but he was still in the city, in the trendy new neighborhood on South Dearborn. I got his voice mail. On a Saturday he might be out running errands, or playing golf, but someone on his staff had been murdered. I bet he was in the office.
Total Recall Page 42