Total Recall

by Sara Paretsky

  Sure enough, when I called over to Ajax, Ralph’s secretary answered the phone. “Denise, V I Warshawski. I was very sorry to hear about Connie Ingram. Is Ralph in? I’m going to be there in about twenty minutes to talk to him about the situation.”

  She tried to protest: he was down the hall meeting with Mr. Rossy and the chairman; he’d called all his claims supervisors to come in and they were waiting in his conference room; the police were there right now interrogating the staff-there was no way he could fit me in. I told her I was on my way.

  When I got to Ajax I had a bit of luck. Detective Finchley was in the lobby, talking to one of his juniors. The Finch, a slender black man in his late thirties, is always perfectly turned out; even on a Saturday morning his shirt was ironed to knife creases along the collar. He called me over as soon as he saw me.

  “Vic, I didn’t get your message about Colby Sommers until this morning. Idiot on duty last night didn’t think it was important enough to page me at home, and now the dirtbag is dead. Drive-by, they’re calling it. What do you know about him?”

  I repeated what Gertrude Sommers had told me. “It was all based on word from the reverend at her church. Trouble is, I talked to Louis Durham about it last night.”

  “You’re not saying Durham ’s responsible for this, are you?” He was indignant.

  “Ms. Sommers’s reverend says the left hand of Durham ’s left hand isn’t always as well washed as it should be. If Durham talked it over with someone on his EYE team, maybe they felt the heat was getting too close. I’d check with Ms. Sommers, find out who this reverend is-he seems pretty well plugged into the neighborhood.”

  “Anytime you’re within five miles of a case it gets totally screwed up,” Terry complained. “Why are you here this morning? Don’t tell me you think Alderman Durham shot Connie Ingram!”

  “I’m here to see the head of the claims department-he values my opinion more than you do.” That was a lie-but Terry’d gone out of his way to hurt my feelings: I wasn’t going to expose myself to more insults by telling him my theories about Fepple, Ulrich, and the Swiss.

  The insult was worth it, though: when I moved past him to the elevators, the security staff didn’t challenge me-they figured I was one of Terry’s detectives.

  I rode up to the sixty-third floor, where the executive-floor attendant was at her station even though it was a Saturday morning. Poor Connie Ingram: in life she’d been a minor cog in the large corporate engine. In death she caused senior executives to devote their weekends to her care.

  “Detective Warshawski,” I said to the attendant. “Mr. Devereux is expecting me.”

  “The police? I thought you were finished up here.”

  “That was Detective Finchley’s team, but I’m overseeing the whole case, including the agency murder. You don’t need to call-I know my way to Devereux’s office.”

  She didn’t try to stop me. When an employee has been murdered and the police are in, even executive-floor staff lose their poise. Ralph’s secretary looked at me with a worried frown, but she also didn’t try to send me away.

  “He’s still with Mr. Rossy and the chairman. You can wait out here if you want.”

  “Is Karen Bigelow in the conference room? I can talk to her in the meantime.”

  Denise’s frown deepened, but she got up from her desk to escort me to the conference room. When I went in, the seven people at the long oval table were talking in a jerky, desultory way. They looked up eagerly but sank back in their seats when they saw it was me, not Ralph. Karen Bigelow, Connie’s supervisor, recognized me after a moment and pinched her lips together in a scowl.

  “Karen, you remember Ms. Warshawski? She’d like a word.”

  When the boss’s secretary says that, it’s tantamount to a command. Bigelow didn’t like it, but she pushed away from the table and came with me to the outer office. I made the conventional overtures-I was very sorry to hear of the death, I knew it must be quite a shock-but she wasn’t going to unbend for me.

  My own lips tightened. “All right, let’s do this the hard painful way. We all know Connie was in touch with Howard Fepple before he died and that he sent her copies of documents from his agency file. I want to see her desk file. I want to see what he sent her.”

  “So you can go to the police and blame this poor dead girl some more? Thank you, no.”

  I smiled grimly. “So there is a desk file-I wasn’t sure. If we could go see it, we’ll find in it the reason for Howard Fepple’s death, and for her own. Not because she had-”

  “I don’t have to listen to this.” Bigelow turned on her heel.

  I shouted over her own raised voice. “Not because she had anything to do with his death. But because the documents were dangerous in a way that she didn’t understand.”

  Ralph walked into his office at that unfortunate moment. “Vic!” he snarled in fury. “What the hell are you doing here? No, don’t bother answering. Karen, what’s Warshawski trying to persuade you to do?”

  The other six supervisors had come to the conference-room door at my shout. The expression on Ralph’s face made them scuttle back to their seats before he had time to order them to move.

  “She wants to see poor little Connie’s desk file on the Sommers case, Ralph,” Karen Bigelow said.

  Ralph turned a ferocious glare onto me: someone must have been chewing him out down in the chairman’s office. “Don’t you ever dare-dare-come into this building and try to suborn my staff behind my back again!”

  “You have a right to be angry, Ralph,” I said quietly. “But two people are dead and a third is in critical condition because of whatever scam the Midway Agency was working around the Aaron Sommers claim. I’m trying to find out what it was before anyone else is shot.”

  “The Chicago cops are working on it.” His mouth was tight with anger. “Just leave them to it.”

  “I would if they were getting anywhere close, but I know things they don’t, or at least I’m putting together things that they aren’t.”

  “Then tell them about it.”

  “I would if I had any real evidence. That’s why I want to see Connie’s desk file.”

  He stared at me bleakly, then said, “Karen, go back to the conference room-tell the rest of the team I’ll be with you in two minutes. Denise, do we have coffee, rolls, whatever? Could you get on that, please?”

  Anger was still making a pulse throb in his temple, but he was trying hard not to take it out on his staff. He motioned me to his inner office with a jerk of his head-I didn’t need nice treatment.

  “All right. Two minutes to sell me and then I’m meeting with my staff.” He shut the door and stared pointedly at his watch.

  “The agent who originally sold Aaron Sommers his policy in 1971 was involved in something illegal,” I said. “Howard Fepple apparently didn’t know about it until he looked up Aaron Sommers’s file. I was in the office with him when he did: it was clear it held something-documents, notes, I don’t know what-that grabbed his attention. When he faxed his agency material to Connie, I’m presuming he included something that he thought gave him a way to blackmail the company.

  “No one knows what the original agent, Ulrich Hoffman, was up to. All the copies of the original Sommers policy documents have disappeared. The only thing left is the sanitized version. You yourself said yesterday that there should be handwritten notes from the agent in it, but those have all disappeared. If Connie kept a desk copy, it’s gold. And it’s dynamite.”

  “So?” His arms were crossed in an uncompromising attitude.

  I took a deep breath. “I believe Connie was reporting directly, privately, to Bertrand Ros-”

  “Goddamn you, no!” he bellowed. “What the hell are you up to?”

  “Ralph, please. I know this must seem like déjà vu all over again, me coming in, accusing your boss. But listen for just one minute. Ulrich Hoffman used to be an agent for Edelweiss in Vienna during the thirties, back when it was called Nesthorn. He sold bur
ial policies to poor Jews. Came the war, who knows what he did for eight years, but in 1947 Ulrich landed in Baltimore, somehow moved on to Chicago, and started doing the only work he knew, selling burial policies to poor people, in this case African-Americans on Chicago’s South Side.”

  “I’m sure all this history is fascinating,” Ralph interrupted me with heavy sarcasm, “but my staff is waiting for me.”

  “Old Ulrich kept a list of his Viennese clients. The life-insurance policies that Edelweiss claims they never sold,” I hissed. “Their line has been they were a small regional company, they weren’t involved with people who died in the Holocaust. Edelweiss was a small company back then, but Nesthorn was the biggest player in Europe. If Ulrich’s books come to light, then this charade Rossy and Janoff played in Springfield on Tuesday-getting the legislature to kill the Holocaust Asset Recovery Act-is going to cause a backlash the size of a tidal wave.”

  “Damn you, Vic, you can’t prove any of this!” Ralph smacked his aluminum desktop so hard he winced in pain.

  “No, because those wretched journals of Ulrich’s keep disappearing. But believe me, Rossy is hot on their trail. The head office in Zurich can’t afford for this to come to light. Edelweiss can’t afford for anyone to see those books of Ulrich’s. I’m betting Rossy and his wife engineered Howard Fepple’s death. I’m betting he killed poor little Connie. I’m betting he told her she was on a top-secret project, working just for him, that she couldn’t tell anyone, not Karen, not you, not her mother. He was handsome, rich, powerful; she was a plain little Cinderella toiling in the ranks. He probably was her Prince Charming fantasy come to life. She was loyal to Ajax, and he was Ajax -no conflict for her there, but a lot of excitement.”

  Ralph was very white. He unconsciously massaged his right shoulder, where he’d taken a bullet from his old boss ten years ago.

  “I presume the police are connecting Connie’s murder to Ajax, or you all wouldn’t be gathered here on a Saturday,” I said.

  “The girls-women-she usually had a drink with on Friday nights say she canceled because she had to work late,” Ralph said leadenly. “She certainly left the building when everyone else did, according to her coworkers. When one of them teased her about having a date that she didn’t want to tell them about, she became very embarrassed, said it wasn’t like that, but she’d been asked to keep it confidential. The cops are looking at the company.”

  “So will you let me take a look at Connie’s desk file?”

  “No.” His voice was barely above a whisper now. “I want you to leave the building. And in case you’re imagining stopping on thirty-nine to hunt for it yourself, don’t: I’m sending Karen down to Connie’s desk right now to collect all her papers and bring them up here. I’m not going to have you riding through my department like a cowgirl herding mavericks.”

  “Will you promise me one thing? Two things, actually. Will you look through Connie’s papers without telling Bertrand Rossy about it? And will you let me know what you find?”

  “I’m not promising you anything, Warshawski. But you can rest assured that I’m not jeopardizing what’s left of my career by taking this story to Rossy.”

  L Jumped for Joy

  Before I left Ralph’s office, I gave Denise another copy of my card. “He’s going to want to get in touch with me,” I said with more confidence than I felt. “Make sure he knows he can reach me on my cell phone anytime this weekend.”

  I almost couldn’t bear not seeing Connie Ingram’s desk file myself, but Karen Bigelow rode with me as far as the thirty-ninth floor, assuring me that she would summon building security if I followed her to Connie’s workstation.

  When I left the building, I turned into a whirlwind of useless activity. Don Strzepek had decided not to take my advice on leaving town; I got him to persuade Rhea to let me visit her in her town house on Clarendon, hoping a firsthand description of her attacker would tell me one way or another if it had been one of the Rossys.

  That was my first wasted hour. Don let me into the house, past a waterfall with lotus flowers floating in it, to a solarium, where Rhea sat in a large armchair. Her luminous eyes peered at me from a cocoon of shawls. While she sipped herbal tea and Don held her hand, she stepped me through the events of the night before. When I tried to press her on anything-the height, the build, the accent, the strength, of her assailant, she leaned back in the chair, a hand over her forehead.

  “Vic, I know you mean well, but I have been over this ground, not just with Donald and the police, but with myself. I put myself in a light trance and spoke the whole incident into a tape recorder, which you may listen to-if any detail had stuck out I would have recalled it then.”

  I listened to the tape, but she refused to reinduce a trance so that I could question her myself. I suggested that she might have noticed the color of the eyes glittering through the ski mask, the color of the mask or of the bulky jacket the person wore-her trance recital didn’t cover any of those points. At that she became wearily belligerent: if she had thought such questions would produce useful answers, she would have asked them herself.

  “Don, could you help Vic find her way out. I’m exhausted.”

  I didn’t have time to waste on anger or arguments. I went back past the lotus petals, only venting my feelings by pinging a penny against the Buddha at the top of the waterfall.

  I next drove down to the South Side, to Colby Sommers’s mother, to try to gather any information about Isaiah’s cousin’s last evening on the planet. Various relations were comforting her, including Gertrude Sommers, who talked with me softly in one corner. Colby had been a weak boy and a weak man; he had liked to feel important by hanging out with dangerous people, and now, sadly, he’d paid the price. But Isaiah, Isaiah was a different story: she wanted to make sure I knew that I could not let Isaiah share Colby’s fate.

  I nodded bleakly and turned to Colby’s mother. She hadn’t seen her son for a week or two, she didn’t know what he’d been up to. She did give me the names of some of Colby’s friends.

  When I tracked them to a local pool hall, they put their cues aside, watching me with a glittering hostility. Even when I broke through the haze of reefer and bitterness that enveloped them, they didn’t tell me much. Yes, Colby had hung with some brothers who did sometimes run errands for Durham ’s EYE team. Yes, he’d been flashing a roll for a few days, Colby was like that. When he was in the money, everyone got a share. When he was flat, everyone else was expected to ante up. Last night he’d said he was going to be doing something with the EYE brothers, but names? No, they knew no names. Neither bribes nor threats could shake them.

  I left, frustrated. Terry didn’t want to suspect Alderman Durham, and the guys on the South Side were too intimidated by the EYE team to rat them out. I could go see Durham again myself, but that would be wasted energy when I didn’t have a viable lever. And anyway, right now my worries about Lotty, and Ulrich’s journals, made it more important that I try to figure out a way to get to the Rossys.

  I was wondering if there was some way I could start checking their alibis for last night without showing myself too obviously when my cell phone rang. I was northbound on the Ryan, in that stretch where sixteen lanes cross each other again and again in something like a maypole dance-not the place to distract myself. I pulled off at the nearest exit to answer.

  I’d hoped for Ralph, but it was my answering service. Mrs. Coltrain had called me from Lotty’s clinic. It was urgent, I should get back to her at once.

  “She’s at the clinic?” I looked at the dashboard clock-Lotty’s Saturday hours were nine-thirty to one; it was past two now.

  I don’t know the weekend operators at my service; this man read me the number Mrs. Coltrain had given him and hung up. It was the clinic, all right-perhaps she’d stayed on to do some paperwork.

  Mrs. Coltrain is usually calm, even majestic-in all the years she’s managed the flow of people at Lotty’s storefront, I’ve only seen her flustered once, and that w
as when the clinic was invaded by an angry mob. When I called back today, she sounded as agitated as she had that day six years ago.

  “Oh, Ms. Warshawski, thank you for calling. I-something strange has come up-I didn’t know what to do-I hope you-it would be good if you-I don’t want to impose. Are you busy?”

  “What’s wrong, Mrs. Coltrain? Has someone broken in?”

  “It’s-it’s something from Dr. Herschel. She-she-uh-sent a packet of dictation.”

  “From where?” I demanded sharply.

  “It doesn’t say on the packet. It came Federal Express. I’ve been-trying to listen to it. Something strange has happened. But I don’t want to bother you.”

  “I’ll be there as fast as I can. Half an hour at the outside.” I made a U on Pershing and accelerated back on-to the Ryan, calculating route, calculating time. I was ten miles south of the clinic here, but the expressway curved sharply west before it reached the Irving Park Road exit. Better to get off on Damen and drive straight north. Eight miles to Damen, eight minutes unless the traffic glued. Then three miles on city streets to Irving, another fifteen minutes.

  My knuckles were white on the steering wheel, I was clutching it so hard. What was wrong? What was in the tape? Lotty was dead? Lotty was a hostage somewhere and Mrs. Coltrain couldn’t bear to tell me on the phone?

  The light at Damen was interminable. Steady, Old Paint, I admonished myself. No need to shoot out the tires on the Beemer that crowded around me to prove I had a right to the intersection. When I finally got to the clinic, I parked at a reckless angle and jumped out.

  Mrs. Coltrain’s silver Eldorado was the only car in the tiny parking strip Lotty had installed on the clinic’s north edge. The whole street had a Saturday afternoon sleepiness to it: a woman with three small children and a large trolley of laundry was the only person I saw.

  I ran to the front and tried the door, but it was locked. I pushed the after-hours bell. After a long pause, Mrs. Coltrain asked in a quavering, tinny voice who it was. When I identified myself, there was another long pause before she buzzed me in.