Total Recall

XLIX Clerical Work

I ran back up to my apartment to collect my bag-and to call Ralph, so I’d know where he was instead of bouncing around town hunting for him. My phone was ringing when I got upstairs. It stopped before I got my door opened but started again as I rummaged in my briefcase for my Palm Pilot.

“Vic!” It was Don Strzepek. “Don’t you ever check your messages? I’ve left four in the last hour.”

“Don, knock it off. Two people connected with my investigation were murdered last night, which is way bigger in my mind than returning your phone calls.”

“Well, Rhea was lucky she wasn’t murdered last night. A masked gunman broke into her place, looking for those damned books of Ulrich Hoffman’s. So if you can clean the snot off your nose and be responsive, go get them back from Dr. Herschel before someone else is hurt.”

“Broke into her home?” I was horrified. “How do you know they were after Ulrich’s books?”

“The attacker demanded them. Rhea was terrified: the bastard tied her up, held a gun on her, started tossing stuff out of her bookshelves, going through her personal things. She had to say that Lotty had them.”

I felt the air drain from me, as if I’d been kicked in the solar plexus. “Yes, I can see that.”

My voice was as dry as the dust under my dresser, but Don was full of his own alarms and didn’t notice. At four this morning, Rhea woke to find someone standing over her with a gun. The person was completely covered in a ski mask, gloves, a bulky jacket. Rhea couldn’t tell if it was a man or a woman, a black person or a white, but the attacker’s size and ferocity made her think it was a man. He pulled a gun on her, forced her downstairs, taped her hands and feet to a dining-room chair.

The intruder had said, “You know what we want. Tell us where you’ve hidden them.” She protested that she didn’t know, so the man had growled out: the books of her patient Paul Hoffman.

Don’s voice shook. “Prick said he’d already searched her office. She says it was the worst part, in a way, that she had to keep asking him to repeat what he was saying-he apparently spoke in a kind of growl that was hard to understand. Something deep in the throat; that’s why she couldn’t even tell the sex of the speaker. Also, well, you know how it is when you’re terrified, especially if you’re not used to physical attacks-your brain doesn’t process stuff normally. And this-people look so horrible in ski masks and everything. It’s paralyzing to see someone in that getup. They don’t look human.”

It flitted through my mind that Rhea could test her own theories by getting herself hypnotized, to see what she could recall of her assailant, but the episode had been too traumatic for me to make sport of her. “So she said, Don’t shoot me, Dr. Herschel took the books?”

“The assailant was tossing her china on the floor. She watched him smash a teapot that her grandmother’s great-grandmother brought from England in 1809.” Don’s voice took on a sharp edge. “He said he-she-whoever-knew Rhea was the person closest to Paul Hoffman-he knew his name and everything-and she was the only person Hoffman would have given the books to. So Rhea said someone else had taken the books from the hospital last night. When the bastard threatened her, she gave them Dr. Herschel’s name. Not everyone has your physical stamina, Vic,” he added when I didn’t say anything.

“It may be okay,” I said slowly. “Lotty’s disappeared and taken the books with her. If they’re still looking for Ulrich’s journals, it confirms that Lotty disappeared on her own, that she wasn’t coerced. The police have been around, I presume? Did she tell them about the connection to Paul Hoffman?”

“Oh, yeah.” I could hear him sucking in a mouthful of smoke, then Rhea, plaintive in the background, reminding him that she hated cigarette smoke, and his “Sorry, sweet,” into the mouthpiece, although not addressed to me.

Was that where Fillida Rossy had been going so fast with her gym bag yesterday afternoon? Down to Water Tower Place to search Rhea Wiell’s office? No Ulrich journals in the office, so the Rossys waited until the middle of the night, after the end of their dinner party. Rossy returned from murdering Connie, the two of them entertained, Bertrand sparkling with wit, and then went off to terrorize Rhea Wiell in her home.

“What did Rhea say to the cops?” I asked.

“She told them you’d been in Paul’s house Thursday, so you may get a visit from the investigating team.”

“She’s a never-ending ray of sunshine.” Then I remembered my carefully worded message to Ralph yesterday afternoon-that I didn’t have Ulrich’s books, that someone else had taken them away. I’d been trying to protect Lotty, but all I’d done was expose Rhea Wiell. Naturally the Rossys-or whoever was after the books-had looked first for the person Hoffman was closest to. I could hardly complain if she’d sicced them onto me in turn.

“Hell, Don, I’m sorry.” I cut short his expostulation. “Look, whoever is after these books is lethal. I’m totally, utterly thankful that they didn’t shoot Rhea. But-if they go to Lotty’s and don’t find the notebooks there, they may think Rhea was lying. They may come after her again and be more ferocious this time. Or they may think she gave them to you. Can you go away for the weekend? Go to New York, go to London, go somewhere where you can feel reasonably safe?”

He was shaken. We talked about the possibilities for several minutes, but before he hung up I said, “Look, Don. I’ve got more bad news for you on your recovered memory project. I know seeing those books of Ulrich’s already raised some doubts in your mind, but this story of Paul’s, that he was a kid in Terezin who was taken to England, where Hoffman scooped him up, I’m afraid he may have adapted that from someone else’s history.”

I told him about Anna Freud’s article. “If you can find out what happened to the real ‘Paul’ and ‘Miriam’ in that article-well, I’d hate for you to take your Paul’s history public. A lot of readers would recognize Freud’s article and know he had appropriated the story of those kids.”

“Maybe the evidence will prove he’s right.” Don spoke without much conviction. “The children couldn’t have stayed with Anna Freud’s staff forever; they have to have grown up somewhere. One of them could well have come to America with Ulrich, who might have called him Paul, thinking that was his real name.” He was trying hard to hang on to the shreds of his belief in his book-and in Rhea.

“Maybe,” I said doubtfully. “I’ll send you a copy of the article. The children were placed in adoptive homes through a foster parents’ organization under Freud’s supervision. I have a feeling they would have made sure Paul went to a stable two-parent home, not into the custody of a widowed immigrant, even if he wasn’t an Einsatzgruppenführer.”

“You’re trying to ruin my book just because you don’t like Rhea,” he grumbled.

I kept my temper with an effort. “You’re a well-respected writer. I’m trying to keep you from making a fool out of yourself with a book that would be poked full of holes the minute it hit the street.”

“It seems to me that’s my lookout, mine and Rhea’s.”

“Oh, boil your head, Don,” I said, my sympathy gone. “I have two murders to attend to: I don’t have time for this kind of crap.”

I hung up and found Ralph Devereux’s home number. He’d moved away from the Gold Coast apartment where he’d lived when I used to know him, but he was still in the city, in the trendy new neighborhood on South Dearborn. I got his voice mail. On a Saturday he might be out running errands, or playing golf, but someone on his staff had been murdered. I bet he was in the office.

Sure enough, when I called over to Ajax, Ralph’s secretary answered the phone. “Denise, V I Warshawski. I was very sorry to hear about Connie Ingram. Is Ralph in? I’m going to be there in about twenty minutes to talk to him about the situation.”

She tried to protest: he was down the hall meeting with Mr. Rossy and the chairman; he’d called all his claims supervisors to come in and they were waiting in his conference room; the police were there right now interrogating the staff-there was no way he could fit me in. I told her I was on my way.

When I got to Ajax I had a bit of luck. Detective Finchley was in the lobby, talking to one of his juniors. The Finch, a slender black man in his late thirties, is always perfectly turned out; even on a Saturday morning his shirt was ironed to knife creases along the collar. He called me over as soon as he saw me.

“Vic, I didn’t get your message about Colby Sommers until this morning. Idiot on duty last night didn’t think it was important enough to page me at home, and now the dirtbag is dead. Drive-by, they’re calling it. What do you know about him?”

I repeated what Gertrude Sommers had told me. “It was all based on word from the reverend at her church. Trouble is, I talked to Louis Durham about it last night.”

“You’re not saying Durham ’s responsible for this, are you?” He was indignant.

“Ms. Sommers’s reverend says the left hand of Durham ’s left hand isn’t always as well washed as it should be. If Durham talked it over with someone on his EYE team, maybe they felt the heat was getting too close. I’d check with Ms. Sommers, find out who this reverend is-he seems pretty well plugged into the neighborhood.”

“Anytime you’re within five miles of a case it gets totally screwed up,” Terry complained. “Why are you here this morning? Don’t tell me you think Alderman Durham shot Connie Ingram!”

“I’m here to see the head of the claims department-he values my opinion more than you do.” That was a lie-but Terry’d gone out of his way to hurt my feelings: I wasn’t going to expose myself to more insults by telling him my theories about Fepple, Ulrich, and the Swiss.

The insult was worth it, though: when I moved past him to the elevators, the security staff didn’t challenge me-they figured I was one of Terry’s detectives.

I rode up to the sixty-third floor, where the executive-floor attendant was at her station even though it was a Saturday morning. Poor Connie Ingram: in life she’d been a minor cog in the large corporate engine. In death she caused senior executives to devote their weekends to her care.

“Detective Warshawski,” I said to the attendant. “Mr. Devereux is expecting me.”

“The police? I thought you were finished up here.”

“That was Detective Finchley’s team, but I’m overseeing the whole case, including the agency murder. You don’t need to call-I know my way to Devereux’s office.”

She didn’t try to stop me. When an employee has been murdered and the police are in, even executive-floor staff lose their poise. Ralph’s secretary looked at me with a worried frown, but she also didn’t try to send me away.

“He’s still with Mr. Rossy and the chairman. You can wait out here if you want.”

“Is Karen Bigelow in the conference room? I can talk to her in the meantime.”

Denise’s frown deepened, but she got up from her desk to escort me to the conference room. When I went in, the seven people at the long oval table were talking in a jerky, desultory way. They looked up eagerly but sank back in their seats when they saw it was me, not Ralph. Karen Bigelow, Connie’s supervisor, recognized me after a moment and pinched her lips together in a scowl.

“Karen, you remember Ms. Warshawski? She’d like a word.”

When the boss’s secretary says that, it’s tantamount to a command. Bigelow didn’t like it, but she pushed away from the table and came with me to the outer office. I made the conventional overtures-I was very sorry to hear of the death, I knew it must be quite a shock-but she wasn’t going to unbend for me.

My own lips tightened. “All right, let’s do this the hard painful way. We all know Connie was in touch with Howard Fepple before he died and that he sent her copies of documents from his agency file. I want to see her desk file. I want to see what he sent her.”

“So you can go to the police and blame this poor dead girl some more? Thank you, no.”

I smiled grimly. “So there is a desk file-I wasn’t sure. If we could go see it, we’ll find in it the reason for Howard Fepple’s death, and for her own. Not because she had-”

“I don’t have to listen to this.” Bigelow turned on her heel.

I shouted over her own raised voice. “Not because she had anything to do with his death. But because the documents were dangerous in a way that she didn’t understand.”

Ralph walked into his office at that unfortunate moment. “Vic!” he snarled in fury. “What the hell are you doing here? No, don’t bother answering. Karen, what’s Warshawski trying to persuade you to do?”

The other six supervisors had come to the conference-room door at my shout. The expression on Ralph’s face made them scuttle back to their seats before he had time to order them to move.

“She wants to see poor little Connie’s desk file on the Sommers case, Ralph,” Karen Bigelow said.

Ralph turned a ferocious glare onto me: someone must have been chewing him out down in the chairman’s office. “Don’t you ever dare-dare-come into this building and try to suborn my staff behind my back again!”

“You have a right to be angry, Ralph,” I said quietly. “But two people are dead and a third is in critical condition because of whatever scam the Midway Agency was working around the Aaron Sommers claim. I’m trying to find out what it was before anyone else is shot.”

“The Chicago cops are working on it.” His mouth was tight with anger. “Just leave them to it.”

“I would if they were getting anywhere close, but I know things they don’t, or at least I’m putting together things that they aren’t.”

“Then tell them about it.”

“I would if I had any real evidence. That’s why I want to see Connie’s desk file.”

He stared at me bleakly, then said, “Karen, go back to the conference room-tell the rest of the team I’ll be with you in two minutes. Denise, do we have coffee, rolls, whatever? Could you get on that, please?”

Anger was still making a pulse throb in his temple, but he was trying hard not to take it out on his staff. He motioned me to his inner office with a jerk of his head-I didn’t need nice treatment.

“All right. Two minutes to sell me and then I’m meeting with my staff.” He shut the door and stared pointedly at his watch.

“The agent who originally sold Aaron Sommers his policy in 1971 was involved in something illegal,” I said. “Howard Fepple apparently didn’t know about it until he looked up Aaron Sommers’s file. I was in the office with him when he did: it was clear it held something-documents, notes, I don’t know what-that grabbed his attention. When he faxed his agency material to Connie, I’m presuming he included something that he thought gave him a way to blackmail the company.

“No one knows what the original agent, Ulrich Hoffman, was up to. All the copies of the original Sommers policy documents have disappeared. The only thing left is the sanitized version. You yourself said yesterday that there should be handwritten notes from the agent in it, but those have all disappeared. If Connie kept a desk copy, it’s gold. And it’s dynamite.”

“So?” His arms were crossed in an uncompromising attitude.

I took a deep breath. “I believe Connie was reporting directly, privately, to Bertrand Ros-”

“Goddamn you, no!” he bellowed. “What the hell are you up to?”

“Ralph, please. I know this must seem like déjà vu all over again, me coming in, accusing your boss. But listen for just one minute. Ulrich Hoffman used to be an agent for Edelweiss in Vienna during the thirties, back when it was called Nesthorn. He sold burial policies to poor Jews. Came the war, who knows what he did for eight years, but in 1947 Ulrich landed in Baltimore, somehow moved on to Chicago, and started doing the only work he knew, selling burial policies to poor people, in this case African-Americans on Chicago’s South Side.”

“I’m sure all this history is fascinating,” Ralph interrupted me with heavy sarcasm, “but my staff is waiting for me.”

“Old Ulrich kept a list of his Viennese clients. The life-insurance policies that Edelweiss claims they never sold,” I hissed. “Their line has been they were a small regional company, they weren’t involved with people who died in the Holocaust. Edelweiss was a small company back then, but Nesthorn was the biggest player in Europe. If Ulrich’s books come to light, then this charade Rossy and Janoff played in Springfield on Tuesday-getting the legislature to kill the Holocaust Asset Recovery Act-is going to cause a backlash the size of a tidal wave.”

“Damn you, Vic, you can’t prove any of this!” Ralph smacked his aluminum desktop so hard he winced in pain.

“No, because those wretched journals of Ulrich’s keep disappearing. But believe me, Rossy is hot on their trail. The head office in Zurich can’t afford for this to come to light. Edelweiss can’t afford for anyone to see those books of Ulrich’s. I’m betting Rossy and his wife engineered Howard Fepple’s death. I’m betting he killed poor little Connie. I’m betting he told her she was on a top-secret project, working just for him, that she couldn’t tell anyone, not Karen, not you, not her mother. He was handsome, rich, powerful; she was a plain little Cinderella toiling in the ranks. He probably was her Prince Charming fantasy come to life. She was loyal to Ajax, and he was Ajax -no conflict for her there, but a lot of excitement.”

Ralph was very white. He unconsciously massaged his right shoulder, where he’d taken a bullet from his old boss ten years ago.

“I presume the police are connecting Connie’s murder to Ajax, or you all wouldn’t be gathered here on a Saturday,” I said.

“The girls-women-she usually had a drink with on Friday nights say she canceled because she had to work late,” Ralph said leadenly. “She certainly left the building when everyone else did, according to her coworkers. When one of them teased her about having a date that she didn’t want to tell them about, she became very embarrassed, said it wasn’t like that, but she’d been asked to keep it confidential. The cops are looking at the company.”

“So will you let me take a look at Connie’s desk file?”

“No.” His voice was barely above a whisper now. “I want you to leave the building. And in case you’re imagining stopping on thirty-nine to hunt for it yourself, don’t: I’m sending Karen down to Connie’s desk right now to collect all her papers and bring them up here. I’m not going to have you riding through my department like a cowgirl herding mavericks.”

“Will you promise me one thing? Two things, actually. Will you look through Connie’s papers without telling Bertrand Rossy about it? And will you let me know what you find?”

“I’m not promising you anything, Warshawski. But you can rest assured that I’m not jeopardizing what’s left of my career by taking this story to Rossy.”