Total Recall

XXVIII (Old) Lovers’ Quarrel

The elevator whooshed me to sixty-three so fast my ears filled, but I barely noticed the discomfort. Paul Radbuka with Joseph Posner. But why should I be startled? In a way it was a natural fit. Two men obsessed with memories of the war, with their identity as Jews, what could be more likely than that they’d get together?

The executive-floor attendant had left for the day. I went to the windows behind her mahogany station where I could see past the Art Institute to the lake. At the far horizon the soft blue became lost in clouds, so you couldn’t tell where water ended and sky began. It looked almost artificial, that horizon, as if some painter had started to stroke in a dirty-white sky and then lost interest in the project.

I was due at the Rossys’ at eight; it was just on five now. I wondered if I could tail Radbuka home from here-although perhaps he’d be going back to Posner’s house tonight. Maybe he’d found a family who would take him in, nurture him in the way he seemed to need. Maybe he’d start leaving Max alone.

“Vic! What are you doing out here? You called from the loading dock fifteen minutes ago.”

Ralph’s angry, anxious voice jolted me back to the present. He was in shirtsleeves, his tie loosened, his eyes worried underneath his angry facade. It was the worry that made me keep my own voice level when I answered him.

“Admiring the view: it would be wonderful to leave all this turmoil and follow the horizon, wouldn’t it? I know why I’m peeved about Connie Ingram, but I don’t have any idea what’s got you so upset.”

“What did you do with the microfiche?”

“Oo-lu-lah vishti banko.”

His mouth set in a thin line. “What the hell is that supposed to mean?”

“Your question made just as little sense to me. I don’t know any microfiche, personally or by reputation, so you’d better start at the beginning-” I broke off. “Don’t tell me your microfiche for the Sommers file is damaged?”

“Very nice, Vic: surprised innocence. I’m almost convinced.”

At that my calm disappeared. I pushed past him to the elevator and hit the call button.

“Where are you going?”

“Home.” I bit off my words. “I wanted to ask you why Connie Ingram was the last person to see Howard Fepple alive, and why she made him think she’d be a hot date, and why after that really hot date, Fepple was dead and the agency copy of Sommers’s file had vanished. But I don’t need the garbage you’re flinging at me. I can take my questions directly to the cops. Believe me, they’ll talk to little Miss Company Loyalty in a way that will get her to respond.”

The elevator dinged to a stop behind me. Before I could get on, Ralph grabbed my arm.

“Since you’re already here, give me two more minutes. I want you to talk to someone in my office.”

“If I lose my chance to tail a guy who’s in your demonstration, I am going to be one very cross detective, Ralph, so make it succinct for me, okay? Which raises another question in my mind: why are you focusing on your wretched microfiche when the building is under siege?”

He ignored my question, moving fast along the rosy carpets to his office. His secretary, Denise, was still at her post. Connie Ingram and a strange black woman were sitting stiffly on the tubular chairs. They looked nervously at Ralph when we came in.

Ralph introduced the strange woman-Karen Bigelow, who was Connie’s supervisor in claims. “Just tell Vic here what you told me, Karen.”

She nodded, turning to face me. “I know about the whole Sommers situation. I was on vacation last week, but Connie explained how she’d had to leave the file up here with Mr. Rossy. And how this private detective might try to get her to reveal confidential company information. So when she-when you-came around asking to see the fiche, Connie came straight to me. Neither of us was too surprised. As you know, of course, Connie here stood her ground, but she got kind of worried and went to check the microfiche. The card that included the Sommers file has gone missing. Not checked out or anything. Disappeared. And I understand you were alone on the floor for some time, miss.”

I smiled pleasantly. “I see. I have to confess I don’t know where the fiche are stored, or you might have legitimate grounds for suspicion. To you, who knows that rabbit warren on thirty-nine, it’s all familiar, but to a stranger it’s impenetrable. But there’s one easy thing to do: check for fingerprints. Mine are on file with the secretary of state, because I’m a licensed investigator as well as an officer of the court. Get the cops in, treat it like a real theft.”

The room was silent for a minute, then Ralph said, “If you were in that cabinet, Vic, you’d have wiped it clean.”

“All the more reason to dust it. If it’s covered with prints-besides Connie’s, which belong there since she just checked the drawer-or claims she did-you’ll know I wasn’t in there.”

“What do you mean, claims she did, Miss Detective?” Karen Bigelow gave me a hard look.

“It’s like this, Ms. Supervisor: I don’t know what kind of game Ajax is playing with the Sommers family claim, but it’s a game whose stakes are mighty high, now that a man’s been killed. Fepple’s mother gave me a key to the agency office. I went down there today to see if I could find any trace of his appointment calendar.”

I paused to stare hard at Connie Ingram, but her round face didn’t show any special anxiety. “Now, whoever killed Howard Fepple swiped the Sommers file. They swiped his handheld electronic diary. But they didn’t think to wipe out the appointment from his computer. Or-they were even more squeamish than I was about getting near the machine since it had his brains and blood all over it.”

Both Bigelow and Connie flinched at that, which only proved they didn’t like the idea of brains and blood and computers all mixed together. “Well, guess who had an appointment with Howard Fepple last Friday night? Young Connie Ingram here.”

Her mouth widened in a giant O of protest. “I never. I never made an appointment to see him. If he put that in his diary, he’s lying!”

“Someone is,” I agreed. “I was with him Friday afternoon, and some very sophisticated person gave him a simple but slick method for ditching me. This person came back in with him under cover of a group of Lamaze parents and left with them. Probably after killing him. Connie Ingram is the only appointment he showed for Friday. And next to it he’d written, says she wants to discuss Sommers, but she sounds hot for me.” I pulled the diary printout from my bag and waved it at her.

“He wrote that down about me? I only ever talked to him on the phone, to ask him to double-check about the payment. And that was last week right after you first came here. Mr. Rossy asked me to. I live at home. I live with my mother. I would never-I never made that kind of phone call.” She buried her face in her hands, crimson with shame.

Ralph snatched the printout from me. He looked at it, then tossed it contemptuously aside. “I have a Palm. You can enter events after the date-anyone could have typed that in. Including you, Vic. To deflect criticism away from your helping yourself to our microfiche.”

“Another thing for technicians to look at,” I snapped. “You can back-enter dates, but you can’t fool the machine: it will tell you what day those keystrokes were typed. It seems to me we’ve just about covered anything useful here: I need to get these technical problems to the cops before little Miss Innocence here goes down and wipes out the hard drive.”

Tears were streaming down Connie’s face. “Karen, Mr. Devereux, honest, I was never down in that agent’s office. I never said I’d go out with him, even though he asked me to, why would I? He didn’t sound like a nice person on the phone.”

“He asked you out on a date?” I interrupted her wailing. “When was that?”

“When I called down there. After you were here last week I called him, like I said, like Mr. Rossy and Mr. Devereux asked me to. To find out what he had in his files, and he said, he talked in this kind of nasty way, he said, ‘Lots of juicy stuff. Wouldn’t you like to see it? We could share a bottle of wine and go over the file together.’ And I said, ‘No, sir, I just want you to send me copies of all your relevant documents so I can find out how this policy got a check issued on it when the policyholder was still alive.’ And then he said more stuff, really, I can’t repeat it, and he seemed to think it would be fun to have a date, but honestly, I know I still live with my mother and I’m thirty-three, but I’m not a desperate virgin like-anyway, I never said I would see him. If he put it in his calendar, he was a liar and I’m not sorry he’s dead, so there!” She ran sobbing from the room.

“Does that satisfy you, Miss Detective?” Karen Bigelow said coldly. “Seems to me you could find something better to do than bully an honest, hardworking girl like Connie Ingram. Excuse me, Mr. Devereux, I’d better make sure she’s all right.”

She started to sail majestically from the room, but I moved to block her path. “Ms. Claims Supervisor, it’s great that you support your staff, but you came up here to accuse me of theft. Before you go off to mop up Connie Ingram’s tears, I want that accusation cleared up.”

She breathed heavily at me. “I heard from the girl who took you over to Connie’s workstation that you were wandering around the floor. You could have been in those files.”

“Then we’ll call the cops. I won’t have this kind of accusation made lightly about me. Besides which, someone is trying to make sure no copies of that file remain. I may be advising my client to sue Ajax. In which case, if you can’t find the documents you’re going to look mighty stupid in court.”

“If that’s your goal, you’d have all the more motive for stealing the fiche,” Ralph said.

Red lights of anger were starting to dance in front of me. “And I’ll bring an action for slander.”

I moved to his desk and started pressing keys on the phone. It had been a long time since I’d dialed the work number for my dad’s oldest friend on the force, but I still knew it by heart. Bobby Mallory has made a reluctant adjustment to my career as a detective, but he still prefers that when we meet it be for family events.

“What do you think you’re doing?” Ralph demanded, as an officer answered the phone.

“I’m doing what you should have done, calling the cops.” I turned to the phone. “Officer Bostwick, it’s V I Warshawski: is Captain Mallory in?”

Ralph’s eyes glittered. “You have no authority to bring the cops into this building. I will speak to this officer and tell him so.”

It was a sign of the change in Bobby’s attitude toward me that although I’d never met Officer Bostwick he recognized my name. He told me that Bobby was unavailable; was there a message?

“A murder in the Twenty-first District, officer-there’s evidence in the computer, which was left running and left in the vic’s office.” I gave him Fepple’s address and date of death. “Commander Purling may not have realized the importance of the computer. But I’m at the Ajax Insurance company, where the vic did a lot of business, and there may be a question of checking the time when data was entered.”

“ Ajax?” Bostwick said. “They’re having a lot of trouble these days- Durham and Posner are out front right now, aren’t they?”

“Yes, indeed, the building is surrounded by demonstrators, but the claims vice president thinks this agent’s death merits more of his attention than a few protesters.”

“Doesn’t sound like a few to me, miss, the way they were asking for backup out there on Adams. But give me the details about this computer-I’ll make sure a forensics unit gets down to it. Commander Purling, well, with the Robert Taylor Homes in his district, he doesn’t have time to do a lot of finesse work.”

A discreet way of saying the guy was a lazy jerk. I gave Bostwick the details about Fepple and the importance of the date, adding that I had seen the victim shortly before he left for an appointment on Friday evening. Bostwick repeated back what I said, double-checked the spelling of my name, and asked where Captain Mallory could reach me if he wanted to discuss the situation.

I hung up and glared at Ralph. “I’m respecting the privacy of your company and your authority over it, but you had damned well better make a call like that yourself if you want to find out who really was in your microfiche cabinet. Especially if you’re going to keep accusing me of theft. We should know by the end of the day tomorrow, or Thursday at the latest, when that date with Connie Ingram was entered in Fepple’s computer. If it was before I last saw him on Friday, then Ms. Ingram’s going to be crying for a bigger audience than us. By the way, what happened to your paper file? The one Rossy hung on to last week?”

Ralph and Karen Bigelow exchanged startled glances. “I guess he still has it,” the supervisor said. “It hasn’t been checked back into our unit.”

“Is his office up here? Let’s go ask him about it-unless you think I wandered in and stole it after we spoke at noon, Ralph.”

He flushed. “No, I don’t imagine you did. But why did you go down to the thirty-ninth floor at noon without telling me? You’d been with me seconds earlier.”

“It was an impulse; it only occurred to me when I got to the elevators. You had pretty much stiffed me on the file, and I was hoping Ms. Ingram would let me see it. Can we at least go see Rossy, get the paper file back from him?”

“The chairman went down to Springfield today. The Holocaust Recovery Act is coming up in front of the banking and insurance committee-he wanted to testify against it. Rossy went with him.”

“Really.” My brows went up. “He’d invited me to dinner tonight.”

“What’d he do that for?” Ralph’s flush deepened into resentment.

“When he called yesterday to invite me, he said it was because his wife was homesick and wanted someone she could speak Italian with.”

“Are you making that up?”

“No, Ralph. I’m not making up anything I said this afternoon. But maybe he forgot about the invitation. When did he decide to go to Springfield?”

Resentment was still uppermost in Ralph’s mind. “Hey, I just run the claims department. Apparently not too well if people make off with our files. No one talks to me about deep subjects like legislative hearings. Rossy’s got an office on the other side of the floor. His secretary’s probably here: you can ask her if he’s coming back tonight. I’ll walk you over to see if he’s still got the file.”

“I should find Connie, Mr. Devereux,” Karen Bigelow said. “But what should I do about the microfiche? Should I report the theft to security?”

Ralph hesitated, then told her she should lock the cabinet and declare it off-limits. “Conduct a desk-by-desk search of your unit tomorrow. Someone may have inadvertently kept the fiche after looking up some other file. If you don’t find it by the end of the day, let me know: I’ll call security.”

“Look, you two,” I said, impatient with this futile proposal, “Connie’s name in Fepple’s calendar is serious. If she didn’t set up the date, someone did it using her name. Which means it was someone who knows her as a claims handler. And that means a very limited universe, especially since it wasn’t me.”

Ralph knotted his tie and unrolled his cuffs. “According to you, anyway.”