Sara Paretsky - V.I. Warshawski 10 (7 page)

The executive-floor attendant escorted me down a mile
of parquet to Ralph’s corner; his secretary pronounced my name perfectly and
buzzed the inner sanctum. Ralph emerged smiling, both arms held out in
greeting.

I took his hands in my own, smiling back, trying to
hide a twinge of sadness. When I’d met him, Ralph had been a slim-hipped,
ardent young man with a shock of black hair falling in his eyes and an engaging
grin. His hair was still thick, although liberally tinged with grey, but he had
jowls now, and while he wasn’t exactly fat, those slim hips had disappeared
into the same past as our brief affair.

I exchanged conventional greetings, congratulating him
on his promotion to head of the claims department. “It looks as though you
recovered full use of your arm,” I added.

“Just about. It still bothers me when the weather’s
damp. I got so depressed after that injury—waiting for it to heal, feeling like
a moron for letting it happen at all—that I took to cheeseburgers. The big
shake-ups here the last few years haven’t helped any, either. You look great,
though. You still running five miles every morning? Maybe I should hire you to
coach me.”

I laughed. “You’re already in your first meeting
before I get out of bed. You’d have to take a lower-pressure job. The shake-ups
you mentioned—those from Edelweiss acquiring Ajax?”

“That came at the end, really. We took a lot of hits
in the market at the same time that Hurricane Andrew overwhelmed us. While we
were dealing with that, and laying off a fifth of our workforce worldwide,
Edelweiss snapped up a chunk of our depressed stock. They were a hostile
suitor—I’m sure you followed that in the financial pages—but they certainly
haven’t been a hostile master. They seem quite eager to learn how we do things
here, rather than wanting to interfere. In fact, the managing director from
Zurich who’s looking after Ajax wanted to sit in on my meeting with you.”

His hand in the small of my back, he ushered me into
his office, where a man with tortoiseshell glasses, dressed in a pale wool suit
and a bold tie, stood when I entered. He was around forty, with a round merry
face that seemed to match the tie more than the suit.

“Vic Warshawski, Bertrand Rossy from Edelweiss Re in
Zurich. You two should get along well—Vic speaks Italian.”

“Oh, really?” Rossy shook hands. “With the name
Warshawski I would have assumed Polish.”

“My mother was from Pitigliano—
vicino
Orvieto,”
I said. “I can only stumble through a few stock phrases of Polish.”

Rossy and I sat in chrome tube chairs next to a
glass-topped table. Ralph himself, who had always had an incongruous-seeming
taste for modernism, leaned against the edge of the aluminum tabletop he used
as a desk.

I asked Rossy the usual things, about where he had
acquired his perfect English (he had gone to school in England) and how he
liked Chicago (very much). His wife, who was Italian, had found the summer
weather oppressive and had taken their two children to her family’s estate in
the hills above Bologna.

“She just returned this week with Paolo and Marguerita
for the start of the school year here and already I’m better dressed than I was
all summer, isn’t that right, Devereux? I could barely persuade her to let me
out the front door in this tie this morning.” He laughed loudly, showing
dimples at the corners of his mouth. “Now I make a campaign to persuade her to
try the Chicago opera: her family have been in the same box at La Scala since
it opened in 1778 and she can’t believe a raw young city like this can really
produce opera.”

I told him I went to a production once a year in
tribute to my mother, who had taken me every fall, but of course I couldn’t
compare it to a European opera company. “Nor do I have a family box: it’s the
upper gallery for me, what we call the nosebleed section.”

He laughed again. “Nosebleed section. My colloquial
American is going to improve for talking to you. We shall all go together one
evening, if you can condescend to climb down from the nosebleed section. But I
see Devereux looking at his watch—oh, very discreetly, don’t be embarrassed,
Devereux. A beautiful woman is an inducement to waste precious business
minutes, but Miss Warshawski must have come here for some other purpose than to
discuss opera.”

I pulled out the photocopy of the Aaron Sommers policy
and explained the events around his aborted funeral. “I thought if I came
straight to you with the situation, you could get me an answer fast.”

When Ralph took the photocopy out to his secretary, I
asked Rossy if he’d attended yesterday’s Birnbaum conference. “Friends of mine
were involved. I’m wondering if Edelweiss is concerned about the proposed
Holocaust Asset Recovery Act.”

Rossy put his fingertips together. “Our position is in
line with the industry, that however legitimate the grief and the grievances—of
both the Jewish and the African-American communities—the expense of a policy
search shall be most costly for all policyholders. For our own company, we
don’t worry about the exposure. Edelweiss was only a small regional insurer
during the war, so the likelihood of involvement with large numbers of Jewish
claimants is small.

“Of course, now I’m learning that we do have this
fifteen-year history of slavery still taking place in America while Ajax was in
its early days. And I am just now suggesting to Ralph that we get Ms. Blount,
the woman who wrote our little history, to look in the archives so we know who
our customers were in those very old days. Assuming she has not already decided
to send our archives to this Alderman Durham. But how expensive it is to go
back to the past. How very costly, indeed.”

“Your history? Oh, that booklet on ‘One Hundred Fifty
Years of Life.’ I have a copy—which I confess I’ve yet to read. Does it cover
Ajax’s pre-Emancipation years? Do you really think Ms. Blount would hand your
documents to an outsider?”

“Is this the true reason for your visit here? Ralph
says you are a detective. Are you doing something very subtle, very Humphrey
Bogart, pretending to care about the Sommers claim and trying to trick me with
questions about the Holocaust and slavery claims? I did think this little
policy was small, small potatoes for you to bring to the director of claims.”
He smiled widely, inviting me to treat this as a joke if I wanted to.

“I’m sure in Switzerland as well as here people call
on those they know,” I said. “Ralph and I worked together a number of years
ago, before he became so exalted, so I’m taking advantage of our relationship
in the hopes of a fast answer for my client.”

“
Exalted’
s the word for me,” Ralph came back
in. “And Vic has such a depressing habit of being right about financial crime
that it’s easier to go along with her from the start than fight her.”

“What crime surrounds this claim, then—what are you
correct about today?” Rossy asked.

“So far, nothing, but I haven’t had time to consult a
psychic yet.”

“Psychic?” he repeated doubtfully.

“
Indovina,”
I grinned. “They abound in the area
where I have my office.”

“Ah, psychic,” Rossy exclaimed. “I have been
pronouncing it wrong all these years. I must remember to tell my wife about
this. She is keenly interested in unusual events in my business day. Psychics
and nosebleeds. She will enjoy them so much.”

I was saved from trying to respond by Ralph’s
secretary, who ushered in a young woman clutching a thick file. She was wearing
khaki jeans and a sweater that had shrunk from too many washings.

“This is Connie Ingram, Mr. Devereux,” the secretary
said. “She has the information you wanted.”

Ralph didn’t introduce Rossy or me to Ms. Ingram. She
blinked at us unhappily but showed her packet to Ralph.

“This here is all the documents on L-146938-72. I’m
sorry about being in my jeans and all, but my supervisor is away, so they told
me to bring the file up myself. I printed the financials from off the
microfiche, so they aren’t as clear as they could be, but I did the best I
could.”

Bertrand Rossy joined me when I got up to look over
her shoulder at the papers. Connie Ingram flipped through the pages until she
came to the payment documents.

Ralph pulled them out of the file and studied them. He
looked at them for a long moment, then turned to me sternly. “It seems that
your client’s family was trying to collect twice on the same policy, Vic. We
frown on that here.”

I took the pages from him. The policy had been paid up
in 1986. In 1991, someone had submitted a death certificate. A photocopy of the
canceled check was attached. It had been paid to Gertrude Sommers, care of the
Midway Insurance Agency, and duly endorsed by them.

For a moment, I was too dumbfounded to speak. The
grieving widow must be quite a con artist to convince the nephew into shelling
out for his uncle’s funeral when she’d collected on the policy a decade ago.
But how on earth had she gotten a death certificate back then? My first
coherent thought was mean-spirited: I was glad I’d insisted on earnest money up
front. I doubted Isaiah Sommers would have paid to learn this bit of news.

“This isn’t your idea of a joke, is it, Vic?” Ralph
demanded.

He was angry because he thought he looked foolishly
incompetent in front of his new master: I wasn’t going to ride him. “Scout’s
honor, Ralph. The story I told you is the identical one I got from my client.
Have you ever seen something like this before? A fraudulent death certificate?”

“It happens.” He flicked a glance at Rossy. “Usually
it’s someone faking his own death to get away from creditors. And then the
circumstances of the policy—the size—the timing between when it was sold and
when it was cashed—make us investigate before we pay. For something like
this”—he snapped the canceled check with his middle finger—“we wouldn’t
investigate such a small face value—and one where we’d collected all the
premium years before.”

“So the possibility exists? The possibility that
people are submitting claims that aren’t rightfully theirs?” Rossy took the
whole file from Ralph and started going through it one page at a time.

“But the company would only pay once,” Ralph said. “As
you can see, we had all the information available when the funeral home
submitted the policy, so we didn’t pay the claim twice. I don’t suppose anyone
from the agency would have bothered to check whether the purchaser”—he looked
at the tab on the file—“whether Sommers was really dead when his wife filed the
claim.”

Connie Ingram asked doubtfully if she should talk to her
supervisor about calling the agency or the funeral home. Ralph turned to me.
“Are you going to talk to them anyway, Vic? Will you let Connie know what you
find out? The truth, I mean, not some version that you want Ajax to learn?”

“If Miss Warshawski is in the habit of hiding her
findings from the company, Ralph, perhaps we shouldn’t trust her with these
delicate questions.” Rossy gave me a little bow. “I’m sure you would ask your
questions so skillfully that our agent might be startled into telling you—what
he ought to keep between himself and the company.”

Ralph started to say that he was only trying to bait
me, then sighed and told Connie by all means to ask any questions she needed to
reclose the file.

“Ralph, what if someone else filed the claim, someone
pretending to be Gertrude Sommers,” I said. “Would the company make her whole?”

Ralph rubbed the deepening crease between his eyes.
“Don’t ask me to make moral decisions without the facts. What if it was her
husband—or her kid? He’s listed as a secondary beneficiary after her. Or her
minister? I’m not going to commit the company to anything until I know the
truth.”

He was talking to me but looking at Rossy, who was
looking at his watch, not at all discreetly. Ralph muttered something about
their next appointment. This made me more uneasy even than the fraud over the
claim: I don’t like my lovers, even long-former lovers, to feel the need to be
obsequious.

As I left the office, I asked Ralph for a photocopy of
the canceled check and the death certificate. Rossy answered for him. “These
are company documents, Devereux.”

“But if you don’t let me show them to my client, then
he has no way of knowing whether I’m lying to him,” I said. “You remember the
case this last spring, where various life-insurance companies admitted to
charging black customers as much as four times the amount they did whites? I
assure you, that will leap into my client’s mind. And then, instead of me
coming around asking for documents in a nice way, you might have a federal
lawsuit with a subpoena attached.”

Rossy stared at me, suddenly frosty. “If the threat of
a lawsuit seems to your mind to be ‘asking in a nice way,’ then I have to ask
myself questions about your business practices.”

With the dimples in abeyance, he showed he could be a
formidable corporate presence. I smiled and took his hand, turning it to look
at the palm. He was startled into standing motionless.

“Signor Rossy, I wasn’t threatening you with a
lawsuit: I was an
indovina,
reading your fortune, foreseeing an
inevitable future.”

The frost melted abruptly. “What other things do you
divine?”