Sara Paretsky - V.I. Warshawski 10 (62 page)

The charge nurse came into the room. “He’s recovering
from trauma. You’ve had your five minutes twice over, out you go, now.”

Ralph was asleep. I bent to kiss his forehead where
the shock of greying hair still flopped over.

Down in the Beth Israel parking lot, I dug my fingers
into my shoulders before climbing into my car. They were still sore from being
tied behind my back. I’d gone home to rest when I finally finished talking to
the cops, but I was still beat.

At home I’d felt honor bound to tell Mr. Contreras
what had happened, before stumbling up to bed. I slept a few hours, but I woke
up still tired clear to the bone. All that death, all the energy I’d spent
trying to figure it out, had turned on such sordidness. Fillida Rossy, protecting
her great-grandfather’s company. Protecting her wealth and position. Not that
she was the Lady Macbeth behind Bertrand—he didn’t need his wife to screw his
courage to the sticking point. He’d had his own arrogance, his own sense of
entitlement.

When I got up, before driving to the hospital to see
Ralph, I’d gone to my office to e-mail Morrell:
How I wish you were here.
How I need your arms around me tonight.

He wrote back at once with love, commiseration—and a
précis of the articles on Edelweiss I’d sent him yesterday. Not that it
mattered now, just another little part of Fillida’s family’s wealth, Nesthorn
had insured a lot of Nazi bigwigs during the war and had even forced people in
occupied Holland and France to buy life insurance from them. In the sixties,
they thought it would be prudent to change their name to Edelweiss because
local resentment against the Nesthorn name still ran high in western Europe.

Standing in the parking lot, I gave a bark of
mirthless laughter and shook my shoulders out again. A giant figure loomed out
of the shadows and moved toward me.

“Murray!” I gasped, my gun in my hand before I knew
I’d drawn it. “Don’t freak me after a day like this one.”

He put an arm around me. “You’re getting too old for
these tall buildings, Warshawski.”

“You’re right about that,” I agreed, putting my gun
away. “Without Ralph and Mrs. Coltrain, I’d be on a slab about now.”

“Not to mention Durham,” he said.

“Durham?” I snapped. “I know he’s painting himself as
Mr. Clean, but that lying piece of politician knows he got away with murder!”

“Maybe. Maybe. But I had a few words with the
aldercreature this afternoon. Off the record, unfortunately. But he said that
last night he looked at you, looked at Rossy, figured he’d better bet on the
local talent. Said he’d read some of your file, saw that you often got your
butt whipped good but usually landed on top. Who knows, Warshawski—he gets to
be mayor, maybe you’ll be police superintendent.”

“And you can run his press office,” I said dryly. “Guy
did a lot of mean nasty stuff. Including cheerfully helping frame Isaiah
Sommers for Howard Fepple’s murder.”

“He didn’t know it was Isaiah Sommers, not from what
my gofers in the police department tell me. I mean, he didn’t know Isaiah was a
relative of the Sommers family who he’d helped out back in the ’90’s.” Murray
kept his arm around my shoulders. “When he found that out he forced Rossy to
settle Gertrude Sommers’s claim. And he tried to get the cops to keep an open
mind on the murder investigation. It’s why they didn’t charge Isaiah Sommers.
Now it’s your turn. I want to see these mystery journals or ledgers or whatever
that the Rossys were stampeding through town trying to find.”

“I want them, too.” I pulled away from his arm and
turned to face him. “Lotty’s vanished with them.”

When I told Murray about Lotty’s disappearance after
the fracas with Rhea at Paul Hoffman-Radbuka’s bedside, he looked at me
somberly. “You’re going to find her, right? Why did she take the books away?”

I shook my head. “I don’t know. They told her . . .
something that they didn’t tell anyone else.”

I leaned into my car for my briefcase and found a set
of the photocopies I’d made of the journal pages. “You can have this. You can
run it if you want.”

He squinted at the sheet in the dim light. “But what
does it mean?”

I leaned wearily against my car and pointed at the
line that read “Omschutz, K 30 Nestroy (2h.f) N–13426–Ö–L.” “As I understand
it, we’re looking at a record for K. Omschutz, who lived at 30 Nestroy Street
in Vienna. The 2h.f means he was in apartment 2f at the rear of the building.
The numbers are the policy numbers, with a tag meaning it was an Austrian
life-insurance policy—Ö for Österreich—the Austrian for Austria. Okay?”

After a minute’s squinting scrutiny he nodded.

“This other sheet just gives the face value of the
policy in thousands of Austrian schillings, and the weekly payment schedule. It
wasn’t a code. It meant something quite clear to Ulrich Hoffman: he knew he’d
sold K. Omschutz a policy with a face value of fifty-four thousand schillings
and a weekly payment of twenty schillings a week. As soon as Ralph Devereux at
Ajax realized that it applied to prewar life-insurance claims, he put it
together with the material that he found on his dead claims handler’s desk.
That was what made him blow caution to the winds and storm into Bertrand
Rossy’s office this morning.”

Ralph had gone over this with me when I got to the
hospital tonight, his mouth twisted in bitter mockery over his recklessness. I
was utterly weary of the entire business, but Murray was so excited at getting
even a few pages of the Hoffman journals as a scoop that he could hardly
contain himself.

“Thanks for letting me scoop the town, Warshawski: I
knew you couldn’t stay mad at me forever. What about Rhea Wiell and Paul
Hoffman or Radbuka? Beth Blacksin was feeling mighty peeved after she got to
the clinic this afternoon and found out that whole business could turn out to
be a fraud.”

Blacksin had been hovering behind the cops with the
ubiquitous camera crews at the clinic. I’d answered as many questions then as I
could so I wouldn’t have to face them later. I told them about the Rossys,
about the Holocaust claims and Ulrich’s notebooks.

I didn’t know what Don was planning to do with his
book, but I didn’t feel any special desire to protect him. I told the cameras
about Paul Hoffman, about the Anna Freud material, about Paul’s chamber of
secrets. When Beth’s eyes lit up at the thought of getting that scene on tape,
I remembered Lotty’s fury at the way in which books and movies titillate us
over the horrors of the past. Don, wanting to put it all in a book for Envision
Press. Beth, knowing her contract was coming due, seeing her show’s ratings
zoom if she filmed Paul’s private horrors. I told Murray I’d walked out on them
mid-sentence.

“I don’t blame you. Getting the news doesn’t mean we
have to carry on like jackals at suppertime.”

He opened the car door for me—an unusual act of
gallantry. “Let’s go downtown to the Glow, V I. You and I have a lot of
catching up to do—on life, not just life insurance.”

I shook my head. “I need to go up to Evanston to see
Max Loewenthal. I’ll take a rain check, though.”

Murray leaned down and kissed me full on the lips,
then quickly closed my car door. In my rearview mirror I watched him standing
there, watching me, until my car had turned down the exit ramp.

The Face in the Picture

B
eth Israel
was near enough to the expressway that I took it up to Evanston. It was past
ten now, but Max had wanted to talk things over. He was feeling deeply lonely
tonight, since Calia and Agnes had left for London and Michael and Carl had
flown west to rejoin the Cellini in San Francisco.

Max fed me cold roast chicken and a glass of St.
Emilion, something warm and red for comfort. I told him what I knew, what I was
guessing, what I thought the fallout would be. He was more philosophical than I
about Alderman Durham, but he was disappointed that Posner hadn’t been
implicated in any of the scandal.

“You’re sure he wasn’t playing a role somehow?
Something that you could expose that would force him away from the hospital?”

“He’s just a fanatic,” I said, accepting another glass
of wine. “Although they’re actually more dangerous than people like Durham, who
are playing the game—well, as a game—for power or position or money. But if we
catch up with Lotty and find those books of Ulrich’s, then we can publicize
those life-insurance policies that Edelweiss or Nesthorn sold during the
thirties. We can force the Illinois legislature to revisit the Holocaust Asset
Recovery Act. And Posner and his Maccabees will go back downtown to Ajax or the
State of Illinois building, which will get him out of your hair.”

“Lotty and the notebooks,” Max repeated, turning his
wineglass round and round in his hands. “Victoria, while Calia was here and I
was concerned about her safety, I wasn’t worrying so intensely about Lotty.
Also, I see now, now that he’s gone back to the tour, I was protecting myself
from Carl’s scorn. Lotty’s high flair for drama, he keeps calling her recent
behavior. The way she disappeared on Thursday—Carl says it’s the same thing she
did all those years ago in London. Turning her back, walking away without a
word. It’s what she did to him, you know, and he says I am a fool if I think
that isn’t what she’s doing to me. She leaves, she says nothing for weeks or
months, and then perhaps she returns, or perhaps not, but there’s never an
explanation.”

“And you think?” I prodded, when he was quiet.

“I think she’s disappeared now for the same reason she
disappeared then, whatever that was,” he burst out. “If I was twenty, as Carl
was then, I might be as hurt in my own sense of self and less worried about
her: one’s passions run higher at twenty. But I am very worried about her. I
want to know where she is. I called her brother Hugo in Montreal, but they’ve
never been close; he hasn’t heard from her in months and has no idea what’s
going through her head, or where she might have run to. Victoria, I know you
are worn, I see it in the fine lines around your mouth and eyes. But can you do
anything to find her?”

I massaged my sore shoulders again. “I’m going to the
clinic in the morning. Lotty actually did FedEx a packet of dictation to Mrs.
Coltrain—she was transcribing it when Fillida Rossy jumped her. Mrs. Coltrain
says there’s nothing to indicate where Lotty is—it’s a short tape, leaving
instructions about her surgical schedule. But Mrs. Coltrain is going to let me
into the clinic in the morning so I can listen to it myself and inspect the
wrapping. She hopes it will mean something to me. Also, she says Lotty left
papers on her desktop; maybe they’ll tell me something. Beyond that—I can try
to ask the Finch or Captain Mallory to pull Lotty’s phone records—they would
show who she called the night she disappeared. Airline lists. There are other
things I could do, but they won’t happen fast. We’ll hope for something in her
own papers.”

Max insisted that I stay the night. “You’re asleep on
your feet, Victoria. You shouldn’t be out driving. Unless you’re desperate to
go to your own home, you can sleep in my daughter’s old room. There’s even some
kind of nightshirt in there that’s clean.”

It was his own fear and loneliness that made him want
me there, as much as his concern for my well-being, but both were important
reasons to me. I called Mr. Contreras to reassure him of my safety and was
glad, actually, to climb one flight of stairs to a bed instead of spending
another half hour in my car to reach one.

In the morning, we drove down together to the clinic.
Mrs. Coltrain met us at nine, looking as sedately groomed as if Rossys and
attempted murder were no more harrowing than sick women and screaming children.
Fillida hadn’t broken her arm when she smashed it with the gun stock, but she
had given Mrs. Coltrain a deep bruise; her forearm was resting in a sling to
protect the damaged area.

She wasn’t quite as calm as she appeared: when she’d
settled us at her workstation with the tape player, she confided, “You know,
Miss Warshawski, I think I am going to get someone in on Monday to take the
doors off those closets in the examining rooms. I don’t think I can go in there
without being afraid someone is hiding behind the door.”

That was what Fillida had done: hidden in an
examining-room closet until she thought the clinic was empty, and then jumped
Mrs. Coltrain at her workstation. When Fillida realized that the notebooks
weren’t on the premises, she’d forced Mrs. Coltrain to bring me to the clinic.

Now Mrs. Coltrain played the tape for Max and me, but
although we listened to it clear to the end, through half an hour of staticky
silence on the second side, neither of us got anything out of it except that
Dr. Barber was to take Lotty’s two urgent surgical cases on Tuesday and Mrs.
Coltrain was to work with the chief of surgery to reschedule the others.

Mrs. Coltrain took us back to Lotty’s office so I
could inspect the papers Lotty had left on her desk. My stomach muscles
clenched as we walked down the hall. I expected to find the chaos we’d left
behind last night: broken chairs, blood, overturned lamps, and the police mess
on top of it. But the broken furniture was gone, the floor and desk were
scoured clean, the papers neatly laid on top.

When I exclaimed over the tidiness, Mrs. Coltrain said
she had come in early to make things right. “If Dr. Herschel showed up, she
would be so distressed to find all that wreckage. And anyway, I knew I couldn’t
face it for thirty seconds, so full of all that violence. Lucy Choi, the clinic
nurse, she came in at eight. We gave it a good going-over together. But I kept
out all the papers that were on Dr. Herschel’s desk yesterday. You sit down
here, Ms. Warshawski, and look them over.”