Total Recall

XX Hunter in the Middle

Back home, I scrubbed my shoes obsessively, but all the perfumes of Dow Chemical wouldn’t wipe them clean. I couldn’t afford to throw them out, but I didn’t think I could bear to wear them again, either.

I took off the suit, inspecting every inch under a strong light. There didn’t seem to be anything of Fepple on the fabric, but I bundled it up for the dry cleaner anyway.

I had stopped at a pay phone on Lake Shore Drive to call in the news of a dead body in the Hyde Park Bank building. By now the police machinery should be in motion. I walked restlessly to the kitchen door and back. I could call one of my old friends on the force for an inside report on the investigation, but then I’d have to reveal that I’d found the body. Which would mean I’d spend the day answering questions. I tried calling Morrell, hoping for comfort, but he’d already left for his meeting at the State Department.

I wondered what Fepple had done with my business card. I hadn’t seen it on his desk, but I wasn’t looking for anything that small. The cops would come after me if they figured out I was the detective mentioned in Fepple’s suicide note. If it was a suicide note.

Of course it was. The gun had fallen from his hand to the floor underneath, after he shot himself. He felt like a failure and couldn’t face himself any longer, so he shot away the lower half of his face. I stopped at the kitchen window to stare at the dogs, which Mr. Contreras had let into the garden. I should take them for a run.

As if catching my gaze, Mitch looked up at me and grinned wolfishly. That nasty little smile of Fepple’s when he’d read the Sommers file, when he said he was going to take over Rick Hoffman’s client list. That was the smile of someone who thought he could capitalize on another person’s weakness, not the smile of a man who hated himself so much he was going to commit suicide.

This morning he’d been in the same suit and tie he’d worn on Friday. Who had he dressed up for? A woman, as he had implied? Someone he tried to romance, but who told him horrible things about himself, so horrible that he came back to the office and committed suicide? Or had he dressed for the person who’d called him when he was talking to me? The person who told him how to ditch me: go to a pay phone, await further instructions. Fepple cut through the little shopping center, where his mystery caller picked him up. Fepple figured he could cash in on some secret he’d seen in the Sommers file.

He tried to blackmail his mystery caller, who told Fepple they needed to talk privately in his office-where he shot Fepple, staging it to look like suicide. Very Edgar Wallace. In either case, the mystery caller had taken the Sommers file. I moved restlessly back to the living room. More likely Fepple had left the file on his bedside table, along with old copies of Table-Tennis Tips.

I wished I knew what the police were doing, whether they were accepting the suicide, whether they were testing for gunpowder residue on Fepple’s hands. Finally, for want of something better to do, I went down to the yard to collect the dogs. Mr. Contreras had his back door open; when I went up the half flight of stairs to tell him I was going to take the dogs with me for a run and then to my office, I could hear the radio.

Our top local story: the body of insurance agent Howard Fepple was found in his Hyde Park office this morning following an anonymous tip to police. The forty-three-year-old Fepple apparently killed himself because the Midway Insurance Agency, started by his grandfather in 1911, was on the brink of bankruptcy. His mother, Rhonda, with whom he lived, was stunned by the news. “Howie didn’t even own a gun. How can the police go around saying he shot himself with a gun he didn’t have? Hyde Park is real dangerous. I kept telling him to move the agency out here to Palos, where people actually want to buy insurance; I think someone broke in and murdered him and dressed it up to look like he killed himself.”

Area Four police say they will not rule out the possibility of murder, but until the autopsy report is complete they are treating Fepple’s death as a suicide. This is Mark Santoros, Global News, Chicago.

“Ain’t that something, cookie.” Mr. Contreras looked up from the Sun-Times, where he was circling racing results. “Guy shooting himself just because he come on hard times? No stamina, these young fellas.”

I muttered a weak agreement-ultimately I would tell him that I’d found Fepple, but that would be a long conversation which I didn’t feel up to holding today. I drove the dogs over to the lake, where we ran up to Montrose Harbor and back. Sleep deprivation made my sinuses ache, but the three-mile run loosened my tight muscles. I took the dogs with me down to the office, where they raced around, sniffing and barking as if they had never been inside the place before. Tessa yelled out at me from her studio to get them under control at once before she took a sculpting mallet to them.

When I had them corralled inside my own place, I sat at my desk for a long while without actually moving. When I was little, my granny Warshawski had a wooden toy she’d get out for me when we went to visit. A hunter was in the middle, with a bear on one side and a wolf on the other. When you pushed the button once, the hunter swung around to point his rifle at the wolf while the bear jumped up to threaten him. If you pushed it again, he turned to the bear while the wolf jumped up. Sommers. Lotty. Lotty. Sommers. It was as if I were the hunter in the middle, who kept swerving between the two images. I couldn’t keep track of either one’s problem long enough to focus on it before the other popped up again.

Finally, wearily, I switched on my computer. Sofie Radbuka. Paul had found her in a chat room on the Web. While I was searching, Rhea Wiell called.

“Ms. Warshawski, what did you do to Paul last night? He was waiting outside my office this morning when I got in, weeping, saying you had ridiculed him and kept him from his family.”

“Maybe you could hypnotize him and get him to recover a memory of the truth,” I said.

“If you imagine that is funny, you have such a perverse sense of humor I would believe anything of you.” The vestal virgin had turned so icy her voice could have put out the sacred fire.

“Ms. Wiell, didn’t we agree on as much privacy for Mr. Loewenthal as you demanded for Paul Radbuka? But Paul tracked Max Loewenthal down in his home. Did he think of that all by himself?”

She was human enough to be embarrassed and answered more quietly, “I didn’t give him Max Loewenthal’s name. Paul unfortunately saw it himself in my desk file. When I said you might know one of his relatives, he put two and two together: he’s very quick. But that doesn’t mean he should have been subjected to taunting,” she added, trying to regain the upper hand.

“Paul barged in on a private party, and unnerved everyone by making up three different versions of his life story in as many minutes.” I knew I shouldn’t lose my temper, but I couldn’t keep myself from snapping, “He’s dangerously unstable; I’ve been wanting to ask why you found him a good candidate for hypnotherapy.”

“You didn’t tell me you had special clinical skills when we met on Friday,” Wiell said in a honeyed voice even more irritating than her icy fury. “I didn’t know you could evaluate whether someone was a good candidate for hypnosis. Do you think he was dangerously unstable because he threatened the peace of mind of people who are embarrassed to claim a relationship with him? This morning, Paul told me that they all know who Sofie Radbuka was, but that they refused to tell him, and that you goaded them on. To me this is heartless.”

I took a deep breath, trying to tamp down my annoyance-I needed her help, which would never be forthcoming if I kept her pissed off at me. “Fifty years ago, Mr. Loewenthal looked for a Radbuka family who had lived in Vienna before the war. He didn’t know the family personally: they were acquaintances of Dr. Herschel’s. Mr. Loewenthal undertook to search for any trace of them when he went back to central Europe in 1947 or ’48 to hunt for his own family.”

Mitch gave a short bark and ran to the door. Mary Louise came in, calling out to me about Fepple. I waved to her but kept my attention on the phone.

“When Paul said he was born in Berlin, Mr. Loewenthal said that made it extremely unlikely that Paul was related to the Radbukas he’d looked for all those years back. So Paul instantly offered two alternative possibilities-that he’d been born in Vienna, or even in the Lodz ghetto, where the Viennese Radbukas had been sent in 1941. We all-Mr. Loewenthal, me, and a human-rights advocate named Morrell-thought that if we could see the documents Paul found in his father’s-foster father’s-papers after his death, we could work out whether there was any possibility of a relationship. We also suggested DNA testing. Paul rejected both suggestions with equal vehemence.”

Wiell paused, then said, “Paul says you tried to keep him out of the house, then you brought in a group of children to taunt him by calling him names.”

I tried not to screech into the mouthpiece. “Four little ones came pelting downstairs, caught sight of your patient, and began yelling that he was the big bad wolf. Believe me, every adult within a twenty-foot radius moved rapidly to break that up, but it upset Paul-it would unnerve anyone to have a group of strange kids mock him, but I gather it awoke unpleasant associations in Paul’s mind to his father-foster father… Ms. Wiell, could you persuade Paul to let me or Mr. Loewenthal look at these documents he found in his father’s papers? How else can we trace the connection Paul is making between himself and Mr. Loewenthal?”

“I’ll consider it,” she said majestically, “but after last night’s debacle I don’t trust you to consider the best interests of my patient.”

I made the rudest face I could muster but kept my voice light. “I wouldn’t deliberately do anything that might harm Paul Radbuka. It would be a big help if Mr. Loewenthal could see these documents, since he’s the person with the most knowledge of the history of his friends’ families.” When she hung up, with a tepid response to think about it, I let out a loud raspberry.

Mary Louise looked at me eagerly. “Was that Rhea Wiell? What’s she like in person?”

I blinked, trying to remember back to Friday. “Warm. Intense. Very convinced of her own powers. She was human enough to be excited by Don’s book proposal.”

“Vic!” Mary Louise’s face turned pink. “She is an outstanding therapist. Don’t go attacking her. If she’s a little aggressive in believing her own point of view-well, she’s had to stand up to a lot of public abuse. Besides,” she added shrewdly, “you’re that way yourself. That’s probably why you two rub each other the wrong way.”

I curled my lip. “At least Paul Radbuka shares your view. Says she saved his life. Which makes me wonder what kind of shape he was in before she fixed him: I’ve never been around anyone that frighteningly wobbly.” I gave her a thumbnail sketch of Radbuka’s behavior at Max’s last night, but I didn’t feel like adding Lotty and Carl’s part of the story.

Mary Louise frowned over my report but insisted Rhea would have had a good reason for hypnotizing him. “If he was so depressed that he couldn’t leave his apartment, this at least is a step forward.”

“Stalking Max Loewenthal and claiming to be his cousin is a step forward? Toward what? A bed in a locked ward? Sorry,” I added hastily as Mary Louise huffily turned her back on me. “She clearly has his best interests close at heart. We were all rather daunted by his showing up uninvited at Max’s last night, that’s all.”

“All right.” She hunched a shoulder but turned back to me with a determined smile, changing the subject to ask what I knew about Fepple’s death.

I told her about finding the body. After wasting time lecturing me on breaking into the office, she agreed to call her old superior in the department to find out how the police were treating the case. Her criticism reminded me that I’d stuffed some of Rick Hoffman’s other old files into Fepple’s briefcase, which I’d dumped into the trunk and forgotten. Mary Louise said she supposed she could check up on the beneficiaries, to see whether they’d been properly paid by the company, as long as she didn’t have to answer any questions about where she’d gotten their names.

“Mary Louise, you’re not cut out for this work,” I told her when I’d brought Fepple’s canvas case in from my car. “You’re used to the cops, where people are so nervous over your power to arrest that they answer your questions without you needing any finesse.”

“I’d think you could find finesse without lying,” she grumbled, taking the files from me. “Oh, gross, V I. Did you have to spill your breakfast on them?”

One of the folders had a smear of jelly on it, which was now on my hands as well. When I looked deeper into the bag, I saw the remains of a jelly donut mushed up with the papers and other detritus. It was gross. I washed my hands, put on latex gloves, and emptied the case onto a piece of newspaper. Mitch and Peppy were extremely interested, especially in the donut, so I lifted the newspaper onto a credenza.

Mary Louise’s interest was caught; she put on her own pair of gloves to help me sort through the rubble. It wasn’t a very appetizing-or informative-haul. An athletic supporter, so grey and misshapen it was hard to recognize, jumbled in with company reports and Ping-Pong balls. The jelly donut. Another open box of crackers. Mouthwash.

“You know, it’s interesting that there’s no diary, either in here or on his desk,” I said when we’d been through everything.

“Maybe he had so few appointments he didn’t bother with a diary.”

“Or maybe the guy he was seeing Friday night took the diary so no one would see Fepple had an appointment with him. He took that when he grabbed the Sommers file.”

I wondered if wiping the jelly out of the interior of the case would destroy vital clues, but I couldn’t bring myself to dump the contents back into the mess.

Mary Louise pretended to be excited when I went to the bathroom for a sponge. “Gosh, Vic, if you can clean out a briefcase, maybe you can learn to put papers into file jackets.”

“Let’s see: first you get a bucket of water, right?-oh, my, what’s this?” The jelly had glued a thin piece of paper to one side of the case. I had almost pulped it running the sponge over the interior. Now I took the case over to a desk lamp so I could see what I was doing. I turned the case inside out and carefully peeled the page off the side.

It was a ledger sheet, with what looked like a list of names and numbers in a thin, archaic script-which had bloomed like little flowers in the places it was wet. Jelly mixed with water had made the top left part of the page unreadable, but what we could make out looked like this:

“This is why it’s such a mistake to be a housecleaning freak,” I said severely. “We’ve lost part of the document.”

“What is it?” Mary Louise leaned over the desk to see it. “That isn’t Howard Fepple’s handwriting, is it?”

“This script? It’s so beautiful, it’s like engraving-I don’t see him doing it. Anyway, the paper looks old.” It had gilt edging; around the lower right, which had escaped damage, the paper had turned brown with age. The ink itself was fading from black to green.

“I can’t make out the names,” Mary Louise said. “They are names, don’t you think? Followed by a bunch of numbers. What are the numbers? They can’t be dates-they’re too weird. But it can’t be money, either.”

“They could be dates, if they were written European style-that’s how my mother did it-day first, followed by month. If that’s the case, this is a sequence of six weeks, from June 29 to August 3 in an unknown year. I wonder if we could read the names if we enlarged them. Let’s lay this on the copier, where the heat will dry it faster.”

While Mary Louise took care of that, I looked through every page of the company reports in Fepple’s bag, hoping to find another sheet from the ledger, but this was the only one.