Sara Paretsky - V.I. Warshawski 10 (16 page)

His phone rang. He jumped on it so fast it might have
been a hundred-dollar bill on the sidewalk.

“There’s someone with me right now,” he blurted into
the mouthpiece. “Right, the woman detective.” He listened for a minute, said,
“Okay, okay,” jotted what looked like numbers on a scrap of paper, and hung up.

He turned off his desk lamp and made a big show of
locking his filing cabinets. When he came around to open the door, I had no choice
but to get up, as well. We rode the elevator down to the lobby, where he
surprised me by going up to the guard.

“See this lady, Collins? She’s been coming around my
office, making threats. Can you make sure she doesn’t get into the building
again tonight?”

The guard looked me up and down before saying, “Sure
thing, Mr. Fepple,” without much enthusiasm. Fepple went outside with me. When
I congratulated him on a successful tactic, he smirked before striding off down
the street. I watched him go into the pizza restaurant on the corner. They had
a phone in the entryway, which he stopped to use.

I joined a couple of drunks outside a convenience
store across the street. They were arguing about a man named Clive and what
Clive’s sister had said about one of them, but they broke off to try to cadge
the price of a bottle from me. I moved away from them, still watching Fepple.

After about five minutes he came out, looked around
cautiously, saw me, and darted toward a shopping center on the north side of
the street. I started after him, but one of the drunks grabbed me, telling me
not to be such a stuck-up bitch. I stuck a knee in his stomach and jerked my
arm free. While he shouted obscenities I ran north, but I was still in my
pumps. This time the left heel gave and I tumbled to the concrete. By the time
I got myself collected, Fepple had disappeared.

I cursed myself, Fepple, and the drunks with equal
ferocity. By a miracle, damage was limited to the shreds in my panty hose and a
bloody scrape on my left leg and thigh. In the fading daylight I couldn’t tell
if I’d ruined my skirt, a silky black number that I was rather fond of. I
limped back to my car, where I used part of my bottle of water to clean the
blood from my leg. The skirt had some dirt ground into it, fraying the fabric
surface. I picked at the gravel bits disconsolately. Maybe when it was cleaned
the torn threads wouldn’t show.

Leaning back in the front seat with my eyes shut, I
wondered whether it was worthwhile trying to get back into the Hyde Park Bank building.
Even if I could charm my way past the guard in my current disarray, if I took
anything, Fepple would know it had been me. That project could wait until
Monday.

I still had over an hour before I was due to meet Beth
Blacksin—I should just go home and clean up properly for my interview. On the
other hand, Amy Blount, Ph.D., the young woman who’d written Ajax’s history,
lived only three blocks from the bank. I called the number Mary Louise had dug
up for me.

Ms. Blount was home. In her polite, aloof way she
acknowledged that we’d met. When I explained that I wanted to ask some
questions about Ajax, she turned from aloof to frosty.

“Mr. Rossy’s secretary has already asked me those
questions. I find them offensive. I won’t answer them from you any more than
from him.”

“Sorry, Ms. Blount, I wasn’t very clear. Ajax didn’t
send me to you. I don’t know what questions Rossy wants to ask you, but they’re
probably different from mine. Mine come from a client who’s trying to find out
what happened to a life-insurance policy. I don’t think you know the answer,
but I’d like to talk to you because—” Because of what? Because I was so
frustrated at being stiffed by Fepple, defamed by Durham, that I was clutching
at any straw? “Because I cannot figure out what’s going on and I’d like to talk
to someone who understands Ajax. I’m in the neighborhood; I could stop by now
for ten minutes if you can spare the time.”

After a pause, she said coldly she would hear what I
had to say but couldn’t promise she’d answer any questions.

She lived in a shabby courtyard building on Cornell,
the kind of haphazardly maintained property that students can afford. Even so,
as I knew from the plaint of an old friend whose son was starting medical
school down here, Blount probably paid six or seven hundred a month for the
broken glass on the sidewalk, her badly hung lobby door, and the hole in the
stairwell wall.

Blount stood in the open door to her studio apartment,
watching while I climbed the third flight of stairs. Here at home, her dreadlocks
hung loosely about her face. Instead of the prim tweed suit she’d worn to Ajax,
she had on jeans and a big shirt. She ushered me in politely but without
cordiality, waving a hand at a hardwood chair while seating herself in the
swivel desk chair at her work station.

Except for a futon with a bright kente cover and a
print of a woman squatting behind a basket, the room was furnished with
monastic severity. It was lined on all sides by white pasteboard bookshelves.
Even the tiny eating alcove had shelves fitted around a clock.

“Ralph Devereux told me you had a degree in economic
history. Is that how you came to be involved with writing the Ajax history?”

She nodded without speaking.

“What did you do your dissertation on?”

“Is this relevant to your client’s story, Ms.
Warshawski?”

I raised my brows. “Polite conversation, Ms. Blount.
But that’s right, you said you wouldn’t answer any questions. You said you had
already heard from Bertrand Rossy, so you know that Alderman Durham has had
Ajax under—”

“His secretary,” she corrected me. “Mr. Rossy is too
important to call me himself.”

Her voice was so toneless that I couldn’t be sure
whether her intent was ironic. “Still, he made the questions take place. So you
know Durham’s picketing the Ajax building, claiming that Ajax and the Birnbaums
owe restitution to the African-American community for the money they both made
from slavery. I suppose Rossy accused you of supplying Durham the information
out of the Ajax archives.”

She nodded fractionally, her eyes wary.

“The other piece of Durham’s protest concerns me
personally. Have you encountered the Midway Insurance Agency over in the bank
building? Howard Fepple is the rather ineffectual present owner, but thirty
years ago one of his father’s agents sold a policy to a man named Sommers.” I
outlined the Sommers family problem. “Now Durham has hold of the story. Based
on your work at Ajax, I’m wondering if you have any ideas on who might give the
alderman such detailed inside information about both the company history and this
current claim. Sommers complained to the alderman, but the Durham protest had
one detail that I don’t think Sommers would have known: the fact that Ajax
insured the Birnbaum Corporation in the years before the Civil War. I’m
assuming that information is accurate, or Rossy wouldn’t have called you. Had
his secretary call you.”

When I paused, Blount said, “It is, sort of. That is,
the original Birnbaum, the one who started the family fortune, was insured by
Ajax in the 1850’s.”

“What do you mean, sort of?” I asked.

“In 1858, Mordecai Birnbaum lost a load of steel plows
he was sending to Mississippi when the steamship blew up on the Illinois River.
Ajax paid for it. I suppose that’s what Alderman Durham is referring to.” She
spoke in a rapid monotone. I hoped when she lectured to students she had more
animation, or they’d all be asleep.

“Steel plows?” I repeated, my attention diverted.
“They existed before the Civil War?”

She smiled primly. “John Deere invented the steel plow
in 1830. In 1847 he set up his first major plant and retail store here in
Illinois.”

“So the Birnbaums were already an economic power in
1858.”

“I don’t think so. I think it was the Civil War that
made the family fortune, but the Ajax archives didn’t include a lot of
specifics—I was guessing from the list of assets being insured. The Birnbaum
plows were only a small part of the ship’s cargo.”

“In your opinion, who could have told Durham about
Birnbaum’s plow shipment?”

“Is this a subtle way to get me to confess?”

She could have asked the question in a humorous
vein—but she didn’t. I made an effort not to lose my own temper in return. “I’m
open to all possibilities, but I have to consider the available facts. You had
access to the archives. Perhaps you shared the data with Durham. But if you
didn’t, perhaps you have some ideas on who did.”

“So you did come here to accuse me.” She set her jaw
in an uncompromising line.

I sank my face into my hands, suddenly tired of the
matter. “I came here hoping to get better information than I have. But let it
be. I have an interview with Channel Thirteen to discuss the whole sorry
business; I need to go home to change.”

She tightened her lips. “Do you plan to accuse me on
air?”

“I actually didn’t come here to accuse you of anything
at all, but you’re so suspicious of me and my motives that I can’t imagine
you’d believe any assurances I gave you. I came here hoping that a trained
observer like you would have seen something that would give me a new way to
think about what’s going on.”

She looked at me uncertainly. “If I told you I didn’t
give Durham the files, would you believe me?”

I spread my hands. “Try me.”

She took a breath, then spoke rapidly, looking at the
books over her computer. “I happen not to support Mr. Durham’s ideas. I am
fully cognizant of the racial injustices that still exist in this country. I
have researched and written about black economic and commercial history, so I
am more familiar with the history of these injustices than most: they run deep,
and they run wide. I took the job of writing that Ajax history, for instance,
because I’m having a hard time getting academic history or economics programs
to pay attention to me, outside of African-American studies, which are too
often marginalized for me to find interesting. I need to earn something while
I’m job-hunting. Also, the Ajax archives will make an interesting monograph.
But I don’t believe in focusing on African-Americans as victims: it makes us
seem pitiable to white America, and as long as we are pitiable we will not be
respected.” She flushed, as if embarrassed to reveal her beliefs to a stranger.

I thought of Lotty’s angry vehemence with Max on the
subject of Jews as victims. I nodded slowly and told Blount that I could
believe her.

“Besides,” she added, her color still deepened, “it
would seem immoral to me to make the Ajax files available to an outsider, when
they had trusted me with their private documents.”

“Since you didn’t feed inside Ajax information to the
alderman, can you think who might have?”

She shook her head. “It’s such a big company. And the
files aren’t exactly secret, at least they weren’t when I was doing my
research. They keep all of the old material in their company library, in boxes.
Hundreds of boxes, as a matter of fact. Recent material they guarded carefully,
but the first hundred years—it was more a question of having the patience to
wade through it than any particular difficulty gaining access to it. Although
you do have to ask the librarian to see it—still, anyone who wanted to study
those papers could probably get around that difficulty.”

“So it might be an employee, someone with a grudge, or
someone who could be bribed? Or perhaps a zealous member of Alderman Durham’s
organization?”

“Any or all of those could be reasonable
possibilities, but I have no names to put forward. Still, thirty-seven hundred
people of color hold low-level clerical or manual-laboring positions in the
company. They are underpaid, underrepresented in supervisory positions, and
often are treated to overt racial slurs. Any of them could become angry enough
to undertake an act of passive sabotage.”

I stood up, wondering if someone in the Sommers
extended family was among the low-level clerks at Ajax. I thanked Amy Blount
for being willing to talk to me and left her one of my cards, in case anything
else occurred to her. As she walked me to the door I stopped to admire the
picture of the squatting woman. Her head was bent over the basket in front of
her; you didn’t see her face.

“It’s by Lois Mailou Jones,” Ms. Blount said. “She
also refused to be a victim.”

Running the Tape

L
ate that
night, I lay in the dark next to Morrell, fretting uselessly, endlessly, about
the day. My mind bounced—like a pinball—from Rhea Wiell to Alderman Durham, my
fury with him rising each time I thought of that flyer he was handing out in
the Ajax plaza. When I tried to put that to rest I’d go back to Amy Blount, to
Howard Fepple, and finally to my gnawing worries about Lotty.

When I’d gone to my office from Amy Blount’s place,
I’d found the copies of the Paul Radbuka video the Unblinking Eye had made for
me, along with the stills of Radbuka.

My long afternoon dealing with Sommers and Fepple had
pushed Radbuka out of my mind. At first I only stared at the packet, trying to
remember what I’d wanted from the Eye. When I saw the stills of Radbuka’s face,
I recalled my promise to Lotty to get her a copy of the video today. Numb with
fatigue, I was thinking I might hang on to it until I saw her on Sunday at
Max’s, when she phoned.