Sara Paretsky - V.I. Warshawski 10 (44 page)

Ralph brushed that aside. “Karen Bigelow—Connie’s
supervisor, remember?—Karen sat in on the interrogation along with one of our
lawyers. Connie was extremely upset, but the police seemed to believe her, or
at least they didn’t arrest her. The trouble is, Vic, they pulled phone records
for Fepple’s office and found several calls from her extension, including one the
day before he was killed. She says she did call him, several times, to get him
to fax his copies of the Sommers documents to her. But Janoff is pissed at
having cops in the place, Rossy is pissed, and frankly, Vic, I’m not very happy
myself.”

I put down the notes to give him my full attention.
“Poor Connie: it’s a hard reward for doing your duty, to be grilled by the
cops. I hope the company doesn’t abandon her.

“Ralph, what deal did Rossy do with Durham and Posner
to get them to call off their protests?”

“What the hell are you talking about?” He suddenly was
really angry, not just blustering.

“I mean that Rossy swung down Adams Street yesterday
while I was upstairs with you. He called Durham over to his car, met with him
an hour later at his home, and finished up by talking privately to Joseph
Posner. Today Posner was picketing Beth Israel Hospital, while Durham’s left
the arena. I called City Hall just now—Durham was in his office listening to
pleas for exceptions to zoning ordinances in Stewart Ridge.”

Ralph blew frosty air across the line to me. “Is it so
strange that the managing director tries for a one-on-one with the guys who
want to shut down his company? He’s stuck in traffic like every other stiff in
the Loop last night and sees his chance. Don’t try to spin that into a
conspiracy for me.”

“Ralph, remember when we met? Remember how you got
that bullet in your shoulder?”

The memory still rankled, how his boss had betrayed
both him and the company. “What could Rossy possibly be doing that would involve
a worthless agent on Chicago’s South Side? Edelweiss couldn’t have anything to
do with Howard Fepple. Use your head, Vic.”

“I’m trying, but it isn’t telling me anything very
intelligible. Listen, Ralph, I know you have mixed feelings about me, but you’re
a savvy insurance guy. Put these things together for me: all the Sommers
documents disappear, except for the paper file—about which you think there’s
something amiss, although you can’t put your finger on it—and that file spent a
week in Rossy’s office.

“Throw this in: either Connie Ingram or someone
pretending to be her set up a date with Fepple for last Friday night. Who
besides Ajax personnel knew she’d been talking to him? Next, Fepple’s dead, and
his copy of the file disappears, and Rossy invites me to dinner, very much on
the spur of the moment. Whereupon Fillida and her Italian friends pump me in
concert about Fepple, his death, and his files. And finally, there’s that odd
document I found in Fepple’s papers, the one I showed you with Sommers’s name
on it. What does all this add up to in your mind?”

“That we dropped the ball on Sommers, and on Fepple,”
Ralph said coldly. “Preston Janoff’s been over this with the head of agency
management, wanting to know why we kept a relationship with a guy who produced
a policy a month for us in his good years. Janoff’s agreed to make the Sommers
family whole: we’ll send out a check tomorrow. On a total exception basis, as I
said. But other than that—Vic, the Rossys’ guests know you’re a detective,
they’re avid about American crime, it’s natural they should pump you. And tell
me this: what earthly reason could Bertrand Rossy have for getting involved
with a loser like Fepple, whom he never even heard of before last week?”

He was right. That was the crux of the problem. I
couldn’t think of a reason.

“Ralph, I was hearing last night that it’s Fillida’s
money that runs Edelweiss, that Bertrand married the boss’s daughter.”

“That’s not news. Her mother’s family founded the
company in the 1890’s. They were Swiss, and they’re still the majority
shareholders.”

“She’s a funny woman. Very chic, very soft-spoken, but
definitely in charge of what’s said and done in the Rossy home. I gather she
keeps close watch on what happens on Adams Street as well.”

“Rossy’s a substantial guy. Just because he married up
doesn’t mean he doesn’t do the job well. Anyway, I don’t have time for gossip
about my managing director’s wife. I have work to do.”

“Oh, kiss my mistletoe,” I said, but the line was
dead.

I dialed back into Ajax and asked for Rossy’s office.
His secretary, the cool, well-groomed Suzanne, put me on hold. Rossy came on in
a surprisingly short time.

When I thanked him for last night’s dinner, he said,
“My wife so enjoyed meeting you last night. She says you are refreshing and
original.”

“I’ll add that to my resumé,” I said politely, which
earned me one of his hearty laughs. “You must be pleased that Joseph Posner’s
stopped haunting the Ajax premises.”

“Of course we are. Any day without a disturbance in a
big company is a good one,” he agreed.

“Yep. It may not surprise you to learn he’s moved his
protesters up to Beth Israel Hospital. He spun me some rigmarole, which he says
you gave him, about you promising a private search of the Edelweiss and Ajax
policies if he’d leave Ajax alone and haunt Beth Israel instead.”

“I’m sorry? This word is new to me, rigmarole.”

“Farrago—a bunch of nonsense. What could the hospital
possibly have to do with missing Holocaust assets?”

“That I don’t know, Ms. Warshawski, or Vic—I feel I
can call you Vic after our friendly evening last night. About the hospital and
Holocaust assets you would have to talk to Max Loewenthal. Is that all? Did you
discover any new or unusual information about that unusual piece of paper from
Mr. Fepple’s office?”

I sat up very straight: I could not afford to be
inattentive. “The paper is at a lab, but they tell me it was made at a plant
outside Basel sometime in the thirties. Does that ring a bell with you?”

“My mother was only just born in 1931, Ms. Warshawski,
so paper from that era means very little to me. Does it mean anything to you?”

“Nothing yet, Mr. Rossy, but I’ll keep your intense
interest in it in mind. By the way, there’s a rumor floating around the street.
That Alderman Durham only started his campaign on slave reparations after Ajax
got worried about the Holocaust Asset Recovery pressure. Have you heard that?”

His laugh bounced along the line again. “The bad thing
about being a senior officer is that one becomes too isolated. I don’t hear
rumors, which is a pity as they are after all the oil that turns the industrial
engine, are they not? That is an interesting rumor, certainly, definitely, but
it is also news to me.”

“I wonder if it’s also news to Signora Rossy?”

This time he paused fractionally before continuing. “It
will be when I tell her. As you gathered last night, no affair of Ajax is too
small for her keen interest. And I will tell her we have another new English
expression from you. Rigmarole. I left a meeting for this rigmarole. Good-bye.”

What had that netted me? Just about nothing, but I
dictated it to my word-processing center at once, so I could study it when I
wasn’t feeling so overwhelmed—I still had a bunch more calls to make.

I went back to Mary Louise’s notes first, before
calling my lawyer. Freeman, on the run as usual, said he was convinced
personally of Isaiah Sommers’s innocence, but the anonymous phone tip and the
fingerprints weren’t good signs.

“Then I guess we need to find the real killer,” I said
with dogged cheerfulness.

“I don’t think the guy can afford your fee, Vic.”

“He can’t afford yours, either, Freeman, but I’m still
asking you to look after him.”

Freeman chuckled. “So this will get added to your
unpaid balance?”

“I send you a big chunk of change every month,” I
protested.

“Yep. You’ve gotten the balance down to thirteen
thousand—before Sommers’s fees, of course. But you’ll go find me some evidence?
Excellent. I was sure we could count on you. In the meantime I keep reminding
the state’s attorney that Fepple had a date Friday night with someone using the
name Connie Ingram. Whom he was anxious to keep you from seeing. I’m running,
Vic—we’ll talk tomorrow.”

That outstanding balance at Freeman’s was one of my
biggest headaches. It had gotten out of hand last year when I’d had serious
legal troubles, but even before that it had always hovered in the four-figure
range. I’ve been putting a thousand on it every month, but it seems like every
month I also generate some new need for his billable hours.

I called Isaiah Sommers. When I told him that someone
had ratted him out to the cops, he was flabbergasted. “Who could have done
that, Ms. Warshawski?”

“How do you know she didn’t do it herself?” Margaret
Sommers hissed on the extension.

“The cops had a tip. From a man, by the way, Ms.
Sommers, who sounded African-American to them on the replay. My sources in the
department say they’re pretty sure the call really was anonymous. I will keep
looking into the situation, but it would be helpful if you could tell me of
anyone who hates you enough to turn you in for murder.”

“You can’t keep looking,” he mumbled. “I can’t afford
to pay you.”

“Don’t worry about that part. The investigation is
getting big enough that someone else will pay the bill.” He didn’t need to know
the someone would be me. “By the way, not that it’s much consolation when
you’re worrying about a murder charge, but Ajax is going to pay your aunt the
value of the policy.”

“Funny how that happened just as your bill was going
to grow,” Margaret snapped.

“Maggie, Maggie, please—she just said someone else
would be taking care of her bill. Ms. Warshawski, this is wonderful news;
Margaret, she’s just worried. Like I am, too, of course, but Mr. Carter, he
seems like a good lawyer. A real good lawyer. And he’s sure you and he together
can get this bad business straightened out.”

It’s good when the client is happy. Trouble was, he
seemed to be alone in his good cheer. His wife was miserable. As was Amy
Blount. And Paul Radbuka. Me. Max. And most especially Lotty.

She had left the hospital for her clinic after her
confrontation with Posner, but when I phoned, Mrs. Coltrain said Dr. Herschel
wouldn’t interrupt her schedule to talk to me. I thought of her vehement outcry
yesterday evening, that she’d never stinted a patient, that it was a relief to
be in the hospital, to be the doctor, not the friend or the wife or the
daughter.

“Oh, Lotty, who were the Radbukas?” I cried to the
empty room. “Whom do you feel you betrayed?” Not a patient, she’d said that
last night. Someone she’d turned her back on whose death consumed her with
guilt. It had to have been someone in England—otherwise how had Questing
Scorpio gotten the name? A relative was all I could imagine, perhaps a relative
who appeared in England after the war that Lotty couldn’t cope with. Someone
she had loved in Vienna, but whom the horrors of war had so damaged that Lotty
turned away from her. I could see it, could see doing it myself. So why
couldn’t she talk to me about it? Did she really think I would judge her?

I checked Questing Scorpio again, but there was still
no response to my posting. What else could I do—besides go home to walk the
dogs, make dinner, go to bed. Sometimes routine is soothing, but at other times
it’s a burden. I searched for Edelweiss on the Web to see if I could come up
with any information about Fillida Rossy’s family. I sent the query through
both Lexis and ProQuest and went back to the phone, calling Don Strzepek.

He answered my greeting cautiously, remembering that
we hadn’t parted very cordially yesterday. “Any word from the intrepid
journalist?”

“He’s made it as far as Rome without a scratch. I
guess they’re off to Islamabad tomorrow.”

“Don’t worry about him, Vic: he’s been in worse places
than Kabul, hard as it is for me to think of any offhand. I mean, it’s not a
war zone these days—no one’s going to shoot at him. He may get heckled, but
he’s more likely to be the object of curiosity, at least among the kids.”

I felt a little better. “Don, on a different
subject—what did you think after you saw Max’s notebooks last night? Do you
agree that he didn’t know the Radbukas before he made that trip to Vienna after
the war?”

“Yes, it was clearly Dr. Herschel’s connection, more
than Max’s. Especially since it was she who fainted at the party on Sunday when
she heard Sofie Radbuka’s name. She seemed to have an awful lot of detail about
exactly how to hunt down the apartment on the Leopoldsgasse,” he added
hesitantly. “I’m wondering if the Radbukas were her family.”

“So Radbuka can start stalking her instead of Max? You
know he was at Beth Israel today, with Posner and his Maccabees, screaming to
the world that Lotty and Max were trying to keep Holocaust survivors from their
birth families?”

“I know it must be painful for them, but Paul really
is a tormented spirit, Vic. If he could just find someplace to anchor himself
it would calm him down.”

“Have you actually talked to the recovered-memory
poster boy yourself?” I asked. “Is there any hope of getting him to show you
those papers his father left behind? The ones that proved to him that his
father was with the
Einsatzgruppen
and that he himself was a camp
survivor named Radbuka?”