Total Recall

XLV Heard on the Street

The doorman at Lotty’s building had seen me a number of times, but he and Gerry, the building super, still insisted on proof of my identity before Gerry took me up to the eighteenth floor. The precaution, which would normally have made me impatient, gave me some reassurance about Lotty’s safety.

When we got to her apartment, Gerry rang the bell several times before undoing her locks. He went with me through the rooms, but there was no sign of Lotty, and no sign that any violent struggle had taken place.

While Gerry watched in mounting disapproval, I looked through the drawers in the side room that Lotty uses as a home office, and then in Lotty’s bedroom, for Ulrich’s journals. Gerry followed me from room to room while I imagined the places that people conceal things-behind clothes, under rugs and mattresses, inside kitchen cabinets, behind pictures on the wall, slipped in among the books on her own shelves.

“You don’t have a right to be doing that, miss,” he said when I was poking through Lotty’s underwear drawer.

“You married, Gerry? Kids? You know if your wife or one of your daughters was having a dangerous pregnancy who everyone would tell you she should see? Dr. Herschel. Who takes her duties so seriously she never even calls in sick unless she’s running a fever that she thinks would affect her judgment. Now she’s suddenly vanished. I’m hoping for any sign that would tell me whether she left voluntarily or not, whether she packed a bag, anything.”

He wasn’t sure he believed me, but he didn’t make further efforts to stop me. Of Ulrich’s journals there wasn’t a sign, so she must have taken them with her. She had left under her own steam. She must have.

“Is her car in the garage?” I asked.

He called down to the doorman on his walkie-talkie; Jason said he’d go out to look. That’s how an intruder could infiltrate: wait until the doorman goes to the garage, then follow another tenant inside.

When we got downstairs, Jason was back at his station. Dr. Herschel’s car was here-he once again abandoned his station to take me out to look. It was locked, and I didn’t want to show off my parlor tricks by opening it in front of him, so I peered through the tinted windshield. Unlike me, Lotty doesn’t leave her car strewn with papers, old towels, and stinking T-shirts. There wasn’t anything on the seats.

I gave each of them my card and asked Jason to question people as they came home about whether anyone had seen her leave. “That way we can keep it casual,” I said when he started to object. “Otherwise I’ll have to bring the police in, which I’m very reluctant to do.”

The two men exchanged glances: the building management would be annoyed if the cops came around to question the tenants. They pocketed their tens with suitable dignity and agreed not to let anyone up to Dr. Herschel’s apartment unless Max or I was here.

“And you do keep an eye on the lobby, even when you’re running another errand?” I persisted.

“We don’t leave the lobby unattended, ma’am.” Jason was annoyed. “I can always see it on the TV monitor in the garage. And when I go on break, Gerry stays here to cover for me.”

I knew it wasn’t a foolproof system, but I’d lose their cooperation if I criticized it any further. I sat in the Mustang for a bit, massaging the back of my neck. What had happened to her? That Lotty had a life of which I knew nothing had become abundantly clear in the last ten days. Just because she’d hugged her secrets to herself, did that mean I had to respect this secrecy? But conversely, did my friendship, my love, my concern, any of those give me the right to invade a privacy she’d gone to such lengths to protect? I thought it over. Probably not. As long as those damned books of Ulrich’s weren’t going to put her at risk. But they might. If only I could find someone who could interpret them for me. Maybe they would mean something to Bertrand Rossy.

I slowly put the car into gear and made the difficult drive to the South Side. Every week it gets harder to cross the heart of Chicago. Too many people like me, sitting one to a car. At the entrance to the expressway at North Avenue, I stopped for gas. Price was still going up. I know we pay less than half what they do in Europe, but when you’re used to cheap fuel a thirty-dollar fill-up is a jolt. I crawled down the Ryan to Eighty-seventh, the exit nearest Gertrude Sommers’s.

At her building, nothing seemed to have changed from two weeks ago, from the derelict Chevy out front to the despairing wail of the baby within. Mrs. Sommers herself was still rigidly erect in a dark, heavily ironed dress, her expression as forbidding as before.

“I told that other girl she might as well go,” she said when I asked if Mary Louise was still there. “I don’t like to talk to the police about my family. Even though she says she’s private, not with the police anymore, she looks and talks like police.”

She gave the word a heavy first-syllable stress. I made an effort to put Lotty out of my mind, to concentrate on what Gertrude Sommers had decided to tell me.

She waved me to a chair at the pressed-wood table along the far wall, then seated herself, with the sighing sound of stiff fabric against stocking. Her back was rigidly upright, her hands folded in her lap, her expression so forbidding that it was hard for me to meet her gaze.

“At Bible study on Wednesday night the reverend spoke to me. About my nephew. Not my nephew Isaiah, the other one. Colby. Do you think if his father had named him for a prophet, like Mr. Sommers’s other brother named Isaiah, Colby would be an upright man, as well? Or would other temptations have always proved too strong for him?”

Whether this was a rhetorical question or not, I knew better than to try to answer. She was going to need time to come to the point. I would have to let her get there on her own. I slipped a hand into my pocket to turn off my cell phone: I didn’t want its ringing to interrupt her.

“I’ve been worried about Isaiah since Mr. Sommers passed. He found money for the funeral out of his own pocket. He took it on himself to hire you, with money out of his own pocket, to find out what happened to Mr. Sommers’s life-insurance money. Now, for acting like that good Samaritan, the police are hounding him, with that wife of his gnawing on him from behind. That’s a good job he has at the engineering works, a fine job. She’s lucky to have a man who’s a hardworking churchgoer, like Mr. Sommers was before him. But she’s like a baby, wanting what she can’t have.”

She looked at me sternly. “In my heart I’ve been blaming you for Isaiah’s troubles. Even though Isaiah kept saying you were trying to end them, not foment them. So when the reverend spoke to me about my nephew Colby, I didn’t want to hear, but the reverend reminded me, ‘Ears they have and hear not, eyes they have and see not.’ So I knew the time had come for me to listen. Um-hmm.”

She nodded, as if she were lecturing herself in that little grunt. “So I listened to the reverend telling me that Colby was flashing money around the neighborhood, and I thought, What are you trying to tell me-that Colby has my husband’s insurance money? But the reverend said, nothing like that. Colby got paid for helping do a job.

“‘A job,’ I said. ‘If my nephew Colby is getting money for working, then I’m on my knees to praise Jesus.’ But the reverend told me, not that kind of job. The reverend said, ‘He’s been hanging out with some of those Empower Youth men.’ And I said, ‘The alderman does a lot of good in this neighborhood, I won’t believe any ill of him.’ And the reverend said, ‘I hear you, Sister Sommers, and I don’t believe ill of him, either. I know what he did for your son when he was a boy, what he did for you and Mr. Sommers when your boy was afflicted with the scourge of muscular dystrophy. But a man doesn’t always know what the left hand of his left hand is doing. And some of the alderman’s left hands are finding their way into people’s pocketbooks and cash registers.’”

She gave another little grunt, “un-hnnh,” her lips folded over in bitterness at having to repeat ill of her family to me, a stranger, a white woman. “So the reverend says, ‘I’ve been hearing that your nephew Colby got paid good money to make a telephone call to the police. To tell them his cousin Isaiah had been in the office of that insurance agent who defrauded you of your husband’s money and then got murdered. And if ever Cain hated Abel for being righteous in the eyes of the Lord, your nephew Colby has always hated his cousin Isaiah with that same hatred. I hear,’ the reverend said, ‘I hear he gladly made that phone call. And I hear that when these same left hands of the alderman’s left hand wanted a gun, that Colby knew where to find it. And when they went breaking into an apartment in Hyde Park with a blowtorch, Colby was glad to stand lookout for them.’

“‘I won’t go to the police against my own family,’ I told the reverend. ‘But it’s not right for Isaiah to lie in jail, as he will if the worst comes about from these police questions, because of the hatred of his cousin.’ So when the other girl came around this morning, wanting to ask me about Colby-because someone had been telling her stories about him as well-I remembered you. And I saw the time had come to talk to you.”

The news was so startling that I hardly knew what to say. Alderman Durham’s EYE team deployed to kill Howard Fepple? That hardly seemed possible. In fact, I didn’t think it could be possible, because the guard at the Hyde Park Bank would have noticed them-you wouldn’t mistake Durham ’s EYE troops for expectant parents going up to a Lamaze class. But it must have been some EYE hangers-on who broke into Amy Blount’s apartment.

I pressed my palms against my eyes, as if that would bring any clarity to my vision. Finally I decided to tell Gertrude Sommers a good deal of the events of the last week and a half, including the old journals that Ulrich Hoffman entered his payments in.

“I don’t understand any of this,” I finished. “But I will have to talk to Alderman Durham. And then-I may have to talk to the police, as well. One man is dead, another critically wounded. I don’t understand what possible connection there is here between these old books of Hoffman’s and the alderman-”

I halted. Except that Rossy had singled out Durham on the street on Tuesday. He was just back from Springfield, where they’d killed the Holocaust Asset Recovery Act, where Ajax had thrown its weight behind Durham ’s slave-reparations rider. And the demonstrations had stopped.

Rossy was from a European insurance company. Carl had thought Ulrich’s records looked similar to the ones a European insurance agent had kept on his father many years ago. Was that what connected Rossy to the Midway Insurance Agency?

I picked up my briefcase and pulled out the photocopies of Ulrich’s journal. Mrs. Sommers watched me, affronted at first by my inattention, then interested in the papers.

“What is that? It looks like Mr. Hoffman’s handwriting. Is this his record of Mr. Sommers’s insurance?”

“No. But I’m wondering if it’s a record of someone else’s insurance that he sold in Europe sixty-five years ago. Look at this.”

“But it isn’t an E, it’s an N. So it can’t be an Edelweiss policy number. Or it is, but they have their own company code.”

“I suppose you know what you’re talking about, young lady. But it doesn’t mean a thing to me. Not one thing.”

I shook my head. “These numbers don’t mean anything to me. But other things are starting to make a horrible kind of sense.”

Except for what her husband’s insurance policy had to do with all this. I would give a month’s pay, and put icing on it, if I could see what Howard Fepple had found when he looked at Aaron Sommers’s file. But if Ulrich had sold insurance for Edelweiss before the war, if he’d been one of those men coming into the ghetto on his bicycle on Friday afternoons, as Carl had been describing last night-but Edelweiss had been a small regional carrier before the war. So they said. So they said in “One Hundred Fifty Years of Life.”

I got up abruptly. “I will get your nephew Isaiah cleared of all charges against him, one way or another, although exactly how I’ll do that I have to say I honestly don’t know right this minute. As for your nephew Colby-I’m not a fan of housebreaking, or people supplying others with guns for crimes. However, I have a feeling that Colby’s in more danger from his accomplices than he is from the law. I have to go now. If my suspicions are correct, the heart of this mystery is downtown, or maybe in Zurich, not here.”