Total Recall

XXXIII Turmoil

I drummed a series of jangly chords on the piano after Margaret hung up. Lotty often criticizes me for what she calls my ruthless search for truth, knocking over people in my path without thinking about their wants and needs. If I’d known being so clever about Fepple’s death would get Isaiah Sommers arrested-but it was useless to beat myself up for pushing the cops to do a proper investigation. It had happened; now I had to deal with the aftermath.

Anyway, what if Isaiah Sommers really had shot Fepple? He’d told me on Monday he had an unlicensed Browning, but that didn’t preclude his also having an unlicensed SIG-although they’re pricey, not the gun of choice for your average homeowner.

I hit two adjacent keys so hard that Peppy backed away from me. Staging Fepple’s death to look like suicide? Too subtle for my client. Maybe his wife had engineered it-she certainly had a temper. I could see her growing furious enough to shoot Fepple or me or any number of people if they stepped in front of her gun.

I shook my head. The shot that killed Fepple hadn’t been fired in rage: someone had gotten close enough to put a gun in Fepple’s mouth. Stunning him first, or having an accomplice who stunned him first. Vishnikov told me the whole job had looked professional. That didn’t fit Margaret Sommers’s angry profile.

I had forgotten breakfast while I was talking to her. It was after ten; I was suddenly very hungry. I walked down the street to the Belmont Diner, the last vestige of the shops and eateries of Lakeview’s old working-class neighborhood. While I waited for a Spanish omelette, I called my lawyer, Freeman Carter. Isaiah Sommers’s most urgent need was for expert counsel, which I had promised Margaret Sommers before we hung up. She had bristled at my offer of help: they had a very good lawyer in their church who could take care of Isaiah.

“Which matters more to you? Saving your husband or saving your pride?” I’d asked; after a pregnant pause she muttered she guessed they’d take a look at my lawyer, but if they didn’t trust him right off they wouldn’t keep him.

Freeman quickly took in my sketch of the situation. “Right, Vic. I have an assistant who can go down to the Twenty-first District for the time being. You have an alternative theory of the murder?”

“Fepple’s last known appointment was on Friday night with a woman from Ajax Insurance. Connie Ingram.” I didn’t like tossing her to the wolves, but I wasn’t going to have the state’s attorney railroad my client, either. I told Freeman about the situation with the Sommers policy documents. “Someone in the company doesn’t want those papers around, but my client couldn’t possibly be the one who stole the microfiche out of the Ajax claims-department file cabinets. Of course, the company may say I did it for him-but we can cross that bridge if the road goes that far.”

“And did you, Vic?” Freeman was at his dryest.

“Scout’s honor, no, Freeman. I’m as hot to see those documents as every other person in this benighted town, but so far I’ve only looked at one sanitized version. I’ll keep sniffing around for evidence about the murder, in case the worst happens and we have to go to trial.”

Barbara, the waitress who’s worked at the Belmont Diner longest, brought my omelette as Freeman hung up. “You know, you look like every other Yuppie in Lakeview with that thing stuck to your ear, Vic.”

“Thanks, Barbara. I try to fit into my surroundings.”

“Well, don’t make a habit of it: we’re thinking of banning them altogether. I’m sick of people shouting their business to an empty table.”

“What can I say, Barbara? When you’re right, you’re right. You want to put my food under the heat lamp while I go outside for my next call?”

She snorted and moved to the next table: the place was filling with people on their morning coffee breaks-the mechanics and repairmen who keep the area Yuppies comfortable. I ate half the omelette quickly, taking the edge off my hunger, before phoning Amy Blount. A strange woman answered, checking my identity before passing me on to Ms. Blount.

Like Margaret Sommers, Amy Blount was angry, but she was more restrained about it: she wished I had gotten back to her sooner-she was under considerable stress and hated hanging about for my phone call. How soon could I get down to Hyde Park?

“I don’t know. What’s the problem?”

“Oh. I’ve told the story so many times I forgot you don’t know it. I had a break-in at my apartment.”

She had come home at ten last night from a lecture in Evanston to find her papers strewn about, her computer damaged, and her floppy disks missing. When she called the cops, they didn’t take it seriously.

“But those are my dissertation notes. They’re irreplaceable. I have the dissertation written up and bound, but the notes, I would use those for another book. The police don’t understand, they say it’s impossible to track down all the burglaries in the city, and since no valuables are missing-well, I don’t have valuables, just my computer.”

“How did the intruders get in?”

“Through the back door. Even though I have a gate across it, they broke through it without any of the neighbors paying the least attention. Hyde Park is supposed to be such a liberal neighborhood, but everyone scuttles away at the first sign that anyone around them is in trouble,” she added bitterly.

“Where are you?” I asked.

“At a friend’s. I couldn’t stay in the middle of all that mess, and I didn’t want to clean it up until someone saw it who would pay attention to the problem.”

I took her friend’s address and told her either I or Mary Louise would be there within the next two hours. She tried to argue me into coming sooner, but I explained that emergency detectives were like emergency plumbers: we had to fit the job in around all the other broken boilers.

I finished the omelette but skipped the steak fries-my usual weakness, but if I ate one I’d eat them all, and then I’d be too logy to think very fast. And the day was looking like one that would require Einstein-like thought. I didn’t wait for my bill but put fifteen dollars on the table and trotted back up Racine to my car.

I had a couple of errands to run in the financial district before going in to my office. As I drove downtown, I called Mary Louise to make sure she was able to work some more hours this afternoon so that she could go see Amy Blount’s apartment. She was pretty terse with me, but I told her she’d see me soon enough to off-load her complaints in person.

Since I was down by the City-County building anyway, I went inside to find Alderman Durham’s office. Naturally he had one on the South Side, in his own ward, but aldercreatures mostly hang out in the Loop, where the money and power are.

I scribbled a note on my card: In re the widow’s mite and Isaiah Sommers. After a mere fifteen minutes’ wait, the secretary scooted me ahead of other supplicants, who gave me dirty looks for jumping the queue.

The alderman had a young man with him wearing the navy blazer with the Empower Youth Energy insignia on it: a gold eye with EYE on Youth embroidered around it. The alderman himself was dressed in Harris tweed, his shirt having the palest green stripe in it to match the green in the tweed.

He shook my hand genially and waved me to a seat. “So you have something to say about the widow’s mite, Ms. Warshawski?”

“Have you kept up with that story, alderman? You know Margaret Sommers took your advice and insisted on a meeting with the agent, Howard Fepple, only to walk in and find him dead?”

“I’m sorry to hear it: that must have been a shock for her.”

“She got a worse one this morning. Her husband has been brought in for questioning-the cops got a tip. They think he murdered Fepple-out of outrage over the guy robbing his aunt of her mite, so to speak.”

He nodded slowly. “I can understand their reasoning, but I’m sure Isaiah wouldn’t have killed a man. I’ve known him for years, you see, for years, because his aunt, bless her, had a son who was one of my boys before he passed. Isaiah is a fine man, a churchgoing man. I don’t see him as a murdering man.”

“Do you see who might have phoned in an anonymous tip to the police, alderman? Their technicians say they’re pretty sure it was an African-American male who made the call.”

He gave a great mirthless smile. “And you thought to yourself, Who do I know who’s an African-American male? Louis Durham. We’re all alike, after all, we black men: animals at heart, aren’t we.”

I looked at him steadily. “I thought to myself, Who has been having surreptitious meetings with the European chief of the insurance company that holds the paper on Aaron Sommers? I thought to myself, I don’t see what enticements those two men could offer each other-kill the Holocaust Asset Recovery Act in exchange for shutting down the demonstrations outside the Ajax building? But what if Mr. Rossy wanted something more-what if he wanted Isaiah Sommers to take the fall for the murder so that he could close the claim file and get the mess out of his hair? What if in exchange for shutting off your demonstration and getting someone to finger Isaiah Sommers, Rossy said he’d fly to Springfield to kill the IHARA bill for you?”

“You have a reputation as an investigator, Warshawski. This isn’t worthy of you.” Durham stood and moved to the door; the young man in the EYE blazer followed him.

I perforce got up to leave, as well. “Yes, but remember, Durham, I’m shameless-you wrote that on your placards yourself.”

I picked up my car from the West Loop garage where I’d parked, more puzzled than angered by the encounter. What had he hoped to learn from me that got me in to see him so readily? What were he and Rossy doing together? Had one of his people really made that phone call that led to Isaiah Sommers’s arrest? I couldn’t put the pieces together in any meaningful way.

I was negotiating the tricky intersection at Armitage, where three streets come together underneath the Kennedy Expressway, when Tim Streeter called. “Vic, not to alarm you, but there’s a bit of a situation.”

My heart skipped a beat. “Calia? What’s happened? Where are you? Oh, help, hang on.” I laid down rubber under the Kennedy, forced a semi turning onto the expressway to stand on his brakes with a loud blaring of his horn, and pulled into a gas station on the other side.

“Vic, calm down. The kid’s here with me; we’re at the Children’s Museum in Wilmette. Agnes is fine. It’s at the hospital. This guy Posner, you know, the one who’s been-”

“Yeah, yeah, I know who he is.”

“Okay, he’s shown up at the hospital with a group of pickets denouncing Mr. Loewenthal and Dr. Herschel for keeping Jewish families apart. The kid and I were supposed to drop in on Mr. Loewenthal for a brown-bag lunch-Mom’s working on her presentation for the gallery-but when we got to the hospital, Posner and his gang were out in force.”

“Oh, damn him and the horse he rode in on, too.” So much adrenaline was running through me that I was ready to bounce up to Bryn Mawr Avenue and take Posner apart with my own hands. “Radbuka there?”

“Yeah. That’s when we got a bit of a situation: I didn’t realize what it was at first, thought it might be a labor dispute or right-to-lifers. Wasn’t until we got close up that I made out the signs. And then Radbuka saw the kid and wanted to make a move on her. I hustled her out of there but the cameras were rolling; she may be on TV tonight. Hard to say. Called Mr. Loewenthal from the car and came on up here.”

He interrupted himself briefly to talk to Calia, who was whining in the background that she needed to see her Opa now. “I’d better go, but I told Mr. Loewenthal if he needs extra support to call my brother. I’ll stick with the little one.”

When we’d hung up I sat with my head in my hands, trying to order my mind. I couldn’t just fly north to the hospital without doing something for Isaiah Sommers. I forced myself to continue to my office, where Mary Louise greeted me with a severe reprimand over once again making myself so inaccessible overnight: it was no way to run this kind of business. If I wanted to unplug myself from the world to sleep, I should let her know so she could cover for me.

“You’re right. It won’t happen again-put it down to sleep deprivation clouding my judgment. Here’s what’s going on, though.” I sketched out the situations with Sommers, with Amy Blount, and now the demonstration outside Beth Israel. “I can understand why Radbuka wants to hook up with Posner, but what does Posner get out of attacking Max and Lotty? He went to see Rossy last night-I’m wondering if Rossy somehow set him on to Beth Israel.”

“Who knows why someone like Posner does anything?” Mary Louise said impatiently. “Look, I only have two more hours to give you today. I don’t think it’s very helpful for you if I spend it going over conspiracy theories. And really, Vic-it makes sense for me to deal with Sommers’s situation-I can call the Finch to get the details of the investigation and give Freeman’s assistant some support. But why did you agree to go all the way down to the South Side for this Amy Blount? The cops are right, you know-this kind of B &E is a dime a dozen. We just file reports-they do, I mean-and keep a lookout for stolen goods. If she didn’t lose anything valuable, why waste your time on it?”

I grinned. “Conspiracy theory, Mary Louise. She wrote a history for Ajax. Ralph Devereux and Rossy are all hot on who’s stealing Ajax files, or leaking Ajax files to Durham -at least, they were worrying about that last week. Maybe Rossy’s spiked Durham ’s guns for now. If Amy Blount’s papers and floppies have been rifled, I want to know what’s missing. Is it something the alderman wanted for his campaign on slave reparations? Or is there really some junkie out there who’s so addled that he thinks he can sell history papers for enough money to buy a fix?”

She scowled. “It’s your business. Just remember when you’re writing the rent and insurance checks in two weeks why you don’t have more cash flow this month.”

“But you will go down to Hyde Park to look over Ms. Blount’s place? After you’ve gotten Sommers’s situation squared away with the Finch?”

“Like I said, Vic, it’s your business, it’s your money to waste. But quite frankly, I can’t see what good I’ll do you by going to Hyde Park, or what benefit you’ll get from joining Joseph Posner up at the hospital.”

“I’ll have a chance to talk to Radbuka, which I’ve been desperate for. And maybe I’ll find out what Rossy and Posner had to say to each other.”

She sniffed and turned to the phone. While she called the Finch-Terry Finchley, her old commanding officer from her days in the Central District-I went to my own desk. I had a handful of messages, one from an important client, and a half dozen e-mails. I dealt with them as quickly as I could and took off.