Total Recall

VI Staking a Claim

I originally met Ralph Devereux early in my life as an investigator. It hasn’t been so many years, but at the time I was the first woman in Chicago, maybe even the country, with a PI license. It was a struggle to get clients or witnesses to treat me seriously. When Ralph took a bullet in his shoulder because he couldn’t believe his boss was a crook, our relationship fractured as abruptly as his scapula.

I hadn’t seen him since; I admit I felt a little nervous anticipation as I rode the L down to Ajax ’s headquarters on Adams Street. When I got off the elevator at the sixty-third floor, I even stopped in the ladies’ room to make sure my hair was combed and my lipstick tidily confined to my mouth.

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?”

I put his hand down. “My powers are limited. But you seem to have a long lifeline. Now, with your permission may I copy the canceled check and the death certificate?”

“Forgive my Swiss habits of being unwilling to part with official documents. By all means, make copies of these two papers. But the file as a whole I think I’ll keep with me. Just in case your charm makes you more persuasive with this young lady than her normal loyalties would allow you to be.”

He gestured at Connie Ingram, who blushed. “Sir, I’m really sorry, sir, but can you fill out a slip for me? I can’t let a claim file stay out of our area without a notice of the number and of who has it.”

“Ah, so you have respect for documents as well. Excellent. You write down what you need, and I will sign it. Will that fulfill the requirements?”

Her color spreading to her collarbone, Connie Ingram went out to Ralph’s secretary to type up what she needed. I followed with the documents I was allowed to have; Ralph’s secretary copied them for me.

Ralph walked partway down the hall with me. “Stay in touch, Vic, okay? I would be grateful to hear from you if you learn anything about this business.”

“You’ll be the second to know,” I promised. “You going to be equally forthcoming?”

“Naturally.” He grinned, briefly showing a trace of the old Ralph. “And if I remember right, I’m likely to be much more forthcoming than you.”

I laughed, but I still felt sad as I waited for the elevator. When the doors finally opened with a subdued ding, a young woman in a prim tweed suit stepped off, clutching a tan briefcase to her side. The dreadlocks tidily pulled away from her face made me blink in recognition.

“Ms. Blount-I’m V I Warshawski-we met at the Ajax gala a month ago.”

She nodded and briefly touched my fingertips. “I need to be in a meeting.”

“Ah, yes: with Bertrand Rossy.” I thought of putting her on her guard against Rossy’s accusation that she was siphoning off company documents for Bull Durham, but she whisked herself down the hall toward Ralph’s office before I could make up my mind.

The elevator that brought her had left. Before another arrived, Connie Ingram joined me, her paperwork apparently finished.

“Mr. Rossy seems very protective of his documents,” I commented.

“We can’t afford to misplace any paper around here,” she said primly. “People can sue us if we don’t have our records in tiptop shape.”

“Are you worried about a suit from the Sommers family?”

“Mr. Devereux said the agent was responsible for the claim. So it’s not our problem here at the company, but of course he and Mr. Rossy-”

She stopped, red-faced, as if remembering Rossy’s comment about my persuasive charms. The elevator arrived and she scurried into it. It was twelve-forty, heart of the lunch hour. The elevator stopped every two or three floors to take in people before making its express descent from forty to the ground. I wondered what indiscretion she had bitten back, but there wasn’t any way I could pump her.