Sara Paretsky - V.I. Warshawski 10 (40 page)

I slid Peppy’s silky ears through my fingers. “That’s
possible. If that were the case I can see Ralph Devereux being protective of
her—but I have to confess, I can’t see that it would matter much to Rossy or
his wife. Not enough for them to invite me to dinner to pump me. He said it was
because his wife was lonely and wanted me to talk Italian to her, but she was
surrounded by friends, or sycophants at any rate, and she didn’t need me,
except to get information from.”

I frowned, thinking it over. “The news of Fepple’s
body must have come in, so Rossy could have called to see how much I know—but I
can’t see why. Unless the company is more worried about this Sommers claim than
they’re admitting—which means it’s the tip of some ugly iceberg that I’m not
seeing.

“It was such a last-minute invitation—I wonder whether
tonight’s cast of characters was already in place or if the Rossys pulled them
together on the spot, knowing they’d play along. Especially Laura Bugatti—she’s
the wife of the Italian cultural attaché. Her job was to be the excited
ingenue.”

“What’s that supposed to mean?”

“She was the breathless airhead who could ask crude
questions without seeming to know what she was doing. Although that could be
her real personality. The truth is, they all made me feel big and crude, even
the American who was there, some very acidulated writer. I hope I’ve never
spent money on any of her books. It’s almost like I was invited to be the
entertainment. There was a show going on which I was starring in, but I was the
only one who hadn’t seen the script.”

“Whether money buys happiness or not I couldn’t say,
but one thing I’ve known for years, cookie, and that’s that money sure don’t
buy character. Which you’ve got ten times more of than any set of got-rocks who
want to invite you to dinner just so they can jerk you around.”

I kissed his cheek and got up: I was too bleary-eyed
to think, let alone talk. Moving almost as stiffly as the old man, I went
upstairs to bed, taking Peppy with me: both of us needed extra petting tonight.

The message light on my home machine was flashing. I
was so exhausted I thought I’d let it go, but then I wondered if Morrell had
tried to reach me. The first message was indeed from him, missing me, loving
me, bone-tired but too excited to sleep. “Me, too,” I muttered, replaying his
voice several times.

The second message was from my answering service. Amy
Blount had called, twice: “She’s angry and insisting that you get in touch with
her at once but wouldn’t give details.” Amy Blount? Oh, yes, the young woman
who’d written a hundred fifty years of Ajax history.

At once. Not now, though. Not at one in the morning on
a day that had started twenty hours ago. I switched off my phone, shed my suit,
and tumbled into bed without taking off the camisole or my mother’s diamond
drop earrings.

For the first time in over a week I slept through the
night, finally staggering out of bed when Peppy nosed me awake a little after
eight. My right ear hurt from where my mother’s earring had pressed into it in
my sleep; the left one was lost in the bedding. I fumbled around until I found
it and got both of them back in my safe, next to my gun. Diamonds from my
mother, handguns from my father. Perhaps Fillida Rossy’s writer friend could
turn that into a poem.

While I’d been sleeping, my answering service and Mary
Louise had both left messages saying that Amy Blount had again demanded to
speak to me. I groaned and went to the kitchen to make coffee.

I sat on the back porch nursing a double espresso
while Peppy sniffed around the yard, until I felt awake enough to stretch out
my stiff joints. Finally, after doing a full workout—including a fast four
miles over to the lake and back, with the dogs protesting at the speed I made
them go—I reconnected myself to the outside world.

I reached Christie Weddington at my answering service.
“Vic, Mary Louise has been trying to reach you, along with a bunch of other
people. Amy Blount called again, and someone named Margaret Sommers.”

Margaret Sommers. My client’s wife who thought I was
out to rob or maim her husband. I took the details of my messages and told
Christie she could switch urgent calls over to my cell phone. I wandered into
the kitchen with my portable phone, prepared to make breakfast while talking to
Margaret Sommers. I called her office, where they told me she’d gone home for a
family emergency. I went back to the living room to get the home number from my
Palm Pilot.

She answered on the first ring, shouting at me, “What
did you say to the police about Isaiah?”

“Nothing.” The unexpected attack took me off-guard.
“What’s happened to him?”

“You’re lying, aren’t you? They came and got him this
morning, right out of the Docherty Works. In front of his buddies and
everything, saying he had to talk to them about Howard Fepple. Now who but you
would have turned them on to my husband?”

I wished I’d stayed in bed. “Mrs. Sommers. I have not
discussed your husband with the police. And I know nothing about what happened
this morning. If you want to talk to me about it, start at the beginning,
without hurling accusations at me: is he under arrest? Or just brought into the
station for questioning?”

She was angry and upset, but she did her best to choke
back her invective. Isaiah had called her from work to say the cops were taking
him in for Fepple’s murder. She didn’t know the station number but it was the one
at Twenty-ninth and Prairie, because she’d rushed up there but they hadn’t let
her see Isaiah.

“Did you talk to any of the detectives who are
questioning him? Can you give me their names?”

There were two, whose names she’d managed to get even
though they were acting like God Almighty, not having to tell her anything.

I didn’t recognize either of them. “Did they tell you
anything? Like why they brought your husband in to begin with?”

“Oh, they were so mean, I could kill them myself and
not think twice about it. Treating me like it was all a big joke. ‘You want to
stick around and yell at us, honey, we could lock you up right next to him.
Listen to you two make up lies together.’ Those were their very words.”

I could easily imagine the exchange, as well as
Margaret Sommers’s impotent fury. “But they must have had some grounds for
arresting him. Were you able to figure that out?”

“I told you. Because you talked to them.”

“I know this has all been a horrible shock,” I said
gently. “I don’t blame you for your anger. But try to think of a different
reason, because truly, Ms. Sommers, I didn’t say anything to the police about
your husband. Indeed, I had nothing to say to them.”

“What—you didn’t tell them about him being in the
office on Saturday?”

I felt a chill in my stomach. “He was? He went to
Fepple’s office? Why did he do that? When did he go there?”

We went back and forth a few times, but she finally
seemed to accept that I hadn’t known about it. Margaret Sommers had pushed
Isaiah into going to see Fepple in person. That was what it boiled down to,
although she tried to dress it up as my fault: they couldn’t trust me, I wasn’t
doing anything but cozying up to the insurance company. She’d talked to the
alderman—seeing Fepple was actually his suggestion. So when Isaiah wouldn’t set
up an appointment, she did it herself from the office on Friday afternoon.

“The alderman?” I asked. “Which alderman would this
be?”

“Alderman Durham, of course. On account of Isaiah’s
cousin being part of the EYE movement and all, he’s always been very helpful to
us. Only Fepple said we couldn’t come on Friday because he was completely
booked. He tried to put us off, but I pointed out we worked all week, we
couldn’t meet some university professor’s schedule, hopping in and out of our jobs.
So he acted like I was trying to make him give me a million dollars, but he
said if I was going to make such a big deal out of it, calling the alderman,
like I threatened to do, we could see him on Saturday morning. So we drove up
there together: I’m tired of Isaiah letting people push him around like he
does. There wasn’t any answer when we knocked, and I was furious, thinking he’d
made the appointment without any intention of keeping it. But when we opened
the door we saw him laying there dead. Not right away, mind you, because the
office was dark. But pretty soon.”

“Just a minute,” I said. “When you called, you accused
me of siccing the cops on your husband. What made you say that?”

She didn’t think she was going to tell me, but then
she blurted out that the cops had gotten a call. “They said it was from a man,
a black man, but I figured that was just their talk, their way of trying to get
under my skin. No brother I know of would accuse my husband of murder.”

Maybe the detectives had been trying to ride her and
Isaiah, but maybe it was a brother who’d phoned in the tip. I let it pass: in
her current distress, Margaret Sommers needed to blame someone. It might as
well be me.

I went back to their visit to Fepple’s office on
Saturday. “When you were in there, did you look for Mr. Sommers’s uncle’s file?
Did you take any papers away with you?”

“No! Once we got into the office and saw him lying
there? With his—oh, I can’t stand even to say it. We left as fast as we could.”

But they’d touched enough. My client must have left
his fingerprints somewhere in the room. And thanks to me, the police had
stopped looking at Fepple’s death as a suicide. So Margaret Sommers wasn’t
completely wrong: I had ensured her husband’s arrest.

Turmoil

I
drummed a
series of jangly chords on the piano after Margaret hung up. Lotty often
criticizes me for what she calls my ruthless search for truth, knocking over
people in my path without thinking about their wants and needs. If I’d known
being so clever about Fepple’s death would get Isaiah Sommers arrested—but it
was useless to beat myself up for pushing the cops to do a proper
investigation. It had happened; now I had to deal with the aftermath.

Anyway, what if Isaiah Sommers really had shot Fepple?
He’d told me on Monday he had an unlicensed Browning, but that didn’t preclude
his also having an unlicensed SIG—although they’re pricey, not the gun of
choice for your average homeowner.

I hit two adjacent keys so hard that Peppy backed away
from me. Staging Fepple’s death to look like suicide? Too subtle for my client.
Maybe his wife had engineered it—she certainly had a temper. I could see her
growing furious enough to shoot Fepple or me or any number of people if they
stepped in front of her gun.

I shook my head. The shot that killed Fepple hadn’t
been fired in rage: someone had gotten close enough to put a gun in Fepple’s
mouth. Stunning him first, or having an accomplice who stunned him first.
Vishnikov told me the whole job had looked professional. That didn’t fit
Margaret Sommers’s angry profile.

I had forgotten breakfast while I was talking to her.
It was after ten; I was suddenly very hungry. I walked down the street to the
Belmont Diner, the last vestige of the shops and eateries of Lakeview’s old
working-class neighborhood. While I waited for a Spanish omelette, I called my
lawyer, Freeman Carter. Isaiah Sommers’s most urgent need was for expert
counsel, which I had promised Margaret Sommers before we hung up. She had
bristled at my offer of help: they had a very good lawyer in their church who
could take care of Isaiah.

“Which matters more to you? Saving your husband or
saving your pride?” I’d asked; after a pregnant pause she muttered she guessed
they’d take a look at my lawyer, but if they didn’t trust him right off they
wouldn’t keep him.

Freeman quickly took in my sketch of the situation.
“Right, Vic. I have an assistant who can go down to the Twenty-first District
for the time being. You have an alternative theory of the murder?”

“Fepple’s last known appointment was on Friday night
with a woman from Ajax Insurance. Connie Ingram.” I didn’t like tossing her to
the wolves, but I wasn’t going to have the state’s attorney railroad my client,
either. I told Freeman about the situation with the Sommers policy documents.
“Someone in the company doesn’t want those papers around, but my client
couldn’t possibly be the one who stole the microfiche out of the Ajax
claims-department file cabinets. Of course, the company may say I did it for
him—but we can cross that bridge if the road goes that far.”

“And did you, Vic?” Freeman was at his dryest.

“Scout’s honor, no, Freeman. I’m as hot to see those
documents as every other person in this benighted town, but so far I’ve only
looked at one sanitized version. I’ll keep sniffing around for evidence about
the murder, in case the worst happens and we have to go to trial.”

Barbara, the waitress who’s worked at the Belmont
Diner longest, brought my omelette as Freeman hung up. “You know, you look like
every other Yuppie in Lakeview with that thing stuck to your ear, Vic.”

“Thanks, Barbara. I try to fit into my surroundings.”

“Well, don’t make a habit of it: we’re thinking of
banning them altogether. I’m sick of people shouting their business to an empty
table.”