Sara Paretsky - V.I. Warshawski 10 (59 page)

“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
recognize 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.

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 burial 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.”