Total Recall

XXII Grieving Mother

Howard Fepple had lived with his mother a few blocks west of Harlem Avenue. These weren’t the suburbs of great wealth but of the working middle class, where ranch houses and colonials sit on modest plots and neighborhood children play in each other’s yards.

When I pulled up in front of the Fepple home, only one car, a late-model navy Oldsmobile, sat in the drive. Neither news crews nor neighbors were paying their respects to Rhonda Fepple. The dogs strained to follow me from the car. When I locked them in, they barked their disapproval.

A flagstone path, whose stones were cracked and overgrown with weeds, curved away from the driveway to a side entrance. When I rang the bell, I saw that the paint on the front door had peeled loose in a number of places.

After a long wait, Rhonda Fepple came to the door. Her face, with the same carpet of freckles as her son’s, held the blank, stunned look most people wear after a harsh blow. She was younger than I’d expected. Despite the grief that was collapsing her inside her clothes, she had only a few lines around her red-stained eyes, and her sandy hair was still thick.

“Mrs. Fepple? I’m sorry to bother you, but I’m a detective from Chicago with a few questions about your son.”

She accepted my identity without even wanting a name, let alone some identification. “Did you find out who shot him?”

“No, ma’am. I understand you told the officers on the morning shift that Mr. Fepple didn’t own a gun.”

“I wanted him to, if he was going to stay in that creepy old building, but he just laughed and said there wasn’t anything in the agency anyone would want to steal. I always hated that bank, those halls with all the little turnings off them, anyone could lie in wait for you there.”

“The agency wasn’t doing very well these days, I understand. Was it more prosperous when your husband was alive?”

“You’re not trying to say what they told me this morning, are you? That Howie was so depressed he took his own life? Because he wasn’t that kind of boy. Young man. You forget they grow up.” She patted the corners of her eyes with a tissue.

It was comforting somehow to know that even a dreary specimen like Howard Fepple had someone who mourned his death. “Ma’am, I know this is a really hard time for you to try to talk about your son, with the loss so fresh, but I want to explore a third possibility-besides suicide or a random break-in. I’m wondering if there was anyone who might have specifically had a quarrel with your son. Had he talked to you about any conflicts with clients lately?”

She stared at me blankly: thinking new thoughts was hard in her grief-drained state. She stuffed the tissue back into the pocket of the old yellow shirt she was wearing. “I suppose you better come in.”

I followed her into the living room, where she sat on the edge of a sofa whose cabbage roses had faded to a dull pink. When I took a matching armchair at right angles to her, dust bunnies bounced along the walls. The new piece in the room, a tan Naugahyde recliner parked in front of the thirty-four-inch television, had probably belonged to Howard.

“How long had your son been working at the agency, Mrs. Fepple?”

She twisted her wedding ring. “Howie wasn’t much interested in insurance, but Mr. Fepple insisted he learn the business. You can always make a living in insurance, no matter how bad times are, he always said. That’s how the agency survived the Depression, he was always telling Howie that, but Howie wanted to do something-well, more interesting, more like what the boys-men-he went to school with were doing. Computers, finance, that kind of thing. But he couldn’t make a go of it, so when Mr. Fepple passed away and left the agency to him, Howie went ahead and tried to make it work. But that neighborhood has gone steep downhill since when we used to live there. Of course, we moved out here in ’59, but all Mr. Fepple’s clients were on the South Side; he didn’t see how he could move the agency and look after them.”

“So you lived in Hyde Park when you were growing up?” I asked, to keep the conversation going.

“ South Shore, really, just south of Hyde Park. Then when I got out of high school I went off to work as a secretary to Mr. Fepple. He was quite a bit older, but, well, you know how these things go, and when we found Howie was on the way, well, we got married. He had never married before-Mr. Fepple, I mean-and I guess he was excited at the idea of a boy to carry on-his father started the agency-you know how men are about things like that. When the baby came, I stayed at home to look after him-back then we didn’t have day care, you know, not like now. Mr. Fepple always said I spoiled him, but he was fifty by then, not much interested in children.” Her voice trailed away.

“So Mr. Howard Fepple only started work at the agency when his father died?” I prompted. “How did he learn the business?”

“Oh, well, Howie used to work there weekends and summers, and he spent four years there after college. He went out to Governors State, got a degree in business. But like I said, insurance wasn’t really his cup of tea.”

The mention of tea galvanized her into thinking we should have something to drink. I followed her into the kitchen, where she pulled a Diet Coke out of the refrigerator for herself and handed me a glass of tap water.

I sat at the kitchen table, pushing aside a banana peel. “What about the agent who worked for your husband, what was his name? Rick Hoffman? Your son seemed to admire his work.”

She made a face. “I never took to him. He was such a fussy man. Everything had to be just so. When I worked there he was always criticizing me because I didn’t keep the file drawers the way he wanted them organized. It was Mr. Fepple’s agency, I told him, and Mr. Fepple had a right to set up files the way he wanted them, but Mr. Hoffman insisted I get all his files arranged in this special way, like it was some big deal. He did these little sales, burial policies, that kind of thing, but the way he acted you’d think he was insuring the pope.” She waved her arm in a vague gesture, making the dust bunnies bounce.

“Somehow he made a lot of money doing it, money Mr. Fepple sure never saw. Mr. Hoffman drove a big Mercedes, had a fancy apartment someplace on the North Side.

“When I saw him show up with that Mercedes, I told Mr. Fepple he must be embezzling, or part of the mob or something, but Mr. Fepple always went through the books very carefully, no money was ever missing or anything. When time went on, Mr. Hoffman got stranger and stranger, by what Mr. Fepple said. He drove the girl who came there later on-after Howie was born, after I quit to look after him-out of her mind. He was always fussing around his papers, she said, taking them in and out of files. I think he kind of went senile toward the end, but Mr. Fepple said he wasn’t doing any harm, let him come into the office and shuffle his papers around.”

“Hoffman had a son, right? Did his boy and yours hang out together?”

“Oh, goodness me, no-his boy started college the year Howie was born. I don’t know if I ever even met him, it was just Mr. Hoffman always talking about him, how everything he did was for his boy-of course, I shouldn’t poke fun, I felt the same way about Howie. But somehow it griped me, all the money he could come up with to spend on his son, while Mr. Fepple, who owned the agency, didn’t have near as much. Mr. Hoffman sent his son off to some fancy eastern school to college, someplace that sounded like Harvard but wasn’t. But I never heard his boy amounted to anything much, even with all that expensive education.”

“Do you know what became of him? The son, I mean?”

She shook her head. “I heard he was like a hospital clerk or something, but after Mr. Hoffman passed away, we didn’t hear anything about him. It wasn’t like we knew anyone who knew him, in a social way, I mean.”

“Did your son talk about Hoffman lately?” I asked. “Did he mention problems with any of Mr. Hoffman’s old clients? I’m wondering in particular if any of them might have threatened him. Or maybe made him so depressed about the business that he didn’t see how he could make it work.”

She shook her head, sniffling again as she thought of her son’s last days. “But that’s why I don’t think he killed himself. He was, oh, sort of excited, like he gets-got-when he had a new idea in mind. He said he finally understood how Hoffman made so much money out of his list. He figured he could get me a Mercedes of my own if I wanted. Pretty soon, he said. Now, well, I do clerical work up in Western Springs, and I guess I’ll just keep on until I retire.”

The bleakness of the prospect depressed me almost as much as it did her. I asked abruptly when she’d last seen her son.

Tears leaked from the corners of her eyes. “Friday morning. When I was leaving for work he was getting up. He said he had a dinner meeting with a client, so he’d be home late. Then, when he didn’t come home, I got worried. I called the office off and on on Saturday, but he does sometimes-did sometimes-go to these table-tennis tournaments out of town. I thought maybe he forgot to tell me. Or maybe he had a date-I did kind of wonder, the way he dressed so carefully Friday morning. I try-tried-to remember he’s not still a child, although it’s hard, when he’s living right here at home.”

I tried to get a client name from her, wondering if Isaiah Sommers had come around threatening him. But much as she would have liked to blame Howie’s death on some black person from the South Side, Rhonda Fepple couldn’t remember his mentioning any names.

“The officers who talked to you this morning, they didn’t bother to search your son’s room, did they? No, I didn’t think they would-they were too fixed on their suicide theory. Could I take a look?”

She still didn’t ask me for identification but led me down the hall to her son’s room. She must have given him the master suite when her husband died-it was a large room, with a king-size bed and a small desk.

The room smelled of sour sweat and other things I didn’t want to think about. Mrs. Fepple murmured something apologetic about laundry and tried to pick up some of the clothes from the floor. She stood looking from a polka-dotted shirt in her left hand to a pair of shorts in her right, as if trying to figure out what they were, then let them fall back to the floor. After that she just stood, watching me as if I were the television screen, a soothing but meaningless piece of motion in the room.

Rummaging through dresser and desk drawers, I found cell phones from two earlier generations of models, a collection of startling porn that Fepple had apparently printed off the Web, a half dozen broken calculators, and three table-tennis paddles, but no documents of any kind. I went through his closet and even looked between the mattress and box springs. All I found was another collection of porn, this time magazines that dated back several years-he must have forgotten about them when he learned how to cruise the Net.

The only insurance documents in the room were company pamphlets stacked on the desktop. Not the Sommers file nor even a datebook-which hadn’t been in his briefcase or office-nor any more pages like the one I’d found in his briefcase this morning.

I pulled one of the photocopies of the page from my own case and showed it to her. “Do you know what this is? It was in your son’s office.”

She looked at it with the same apathy she’d given my search. “That? I couldn’t tell you.”

She started to hand it back to me, then said it might be Mr. Hoffman’s handwriting. “He kept these leather books with his name stamped on the cover in gold. He’d take them around with him to his customers and check off when they paid, just like on here.”

She tapped the check marks with her index finger. “One day I picked up his book when he was in the washroom, and when he came back you’d think I was a Russian spy going after the atom bomb, the way he carried on. Like I knew what any of it meant.”

“Does this writing look like Hoffman’s writing?”

She shrugged. “I haven’t seen it in years. I just remember it was scrunched up like this, kind of hard to read, but real even, like it was engraving.”

I looked around, discouraged. “What I hoped to find was some kind of diary. Your son didn’t have one on his desk at the office, nor in his briefcase. Do you know how he kept track of his appointments?”

“He had one of those handheld gadgets, one of those electronic things. Yeah, like that,” she added when I showed her my Palm Pilot. “If it wasn’t on him, then whoever killed him must’ve stolen it.”

Which either meant an appointment with his killer or-a random attack where the killer stole pawnable electronics. The computer had been left there-but it would have been hard to smuggle past the guard. I asked Mrs. Fepple if the cops had returned her son’s possessions to her, but those were still part of crime-scene evidence; the technicians were keeping them until the autopsy gave them a definitive report of suicide.

“Was he renting month-by-month, or is there a lease?”

He’d gone to month-by-month. She agreed to lend me a spare office key that she’d kept, but the thought of having to get all those files packed up by the end of September, and of having to work with the various companies to shift active policyholders to a new agency, made her droop further into her yellow shirt.

“I don’t know what I thought you’d be able to tell me, but it doesn’t seem like you’re going to be able to find who killed him. I gotta lie down. Somehow, all this, it has me worn out. You’d think all you’d do is cry, but it’s like all I can do is sleep.”