Total Recall

LI Wily Coyote

I sat on the edge of Ralph’s bed, holding his right hand between both of my own. It was late on Saturday night, but the charge nurse told me he wouldn’t sleep until he’d talked to me.

“I don’t have much luck with my corporate loyalties,” he said. “Why couldn’t I listen to you the second time around if I wouldn’t the first? So many people dead. Poor Connie. And me with another bullet in the shoulder. I guess I just can’t stand for you to be right, can I?”

“At least they got your left shoulder this time,” I said. “Now you’re symmetrical. Ralph, you’re a good guy and a team player. You wanted your team to be as good as you were, and I was telling you they weren’t. You’re too honest yourself to believe the worst of the people around you. And anyway, you saved my life. I can’t possibly feel anything but overflowing gratitude.” I brought his right hand to my lips.

“That’s generous.” His eyes flickered shut for a moment. “Connie. Why did she?”

“I don’t think she was being disloyal to you or to the company, but I imagine Rossy turned her head. There was the big boss in from the new owners in Switzerland, telling her to report directly to him, that she shouldn’t tell anyone what he said to her because someone in the company was embezzling, and it might be anyone, you, her immediate supervisor Karen. I imagine that was how he worked it. Anyone who had spent fourteen years toiling as a claims clerk would have been thrilled, but she had that extra quality of loyalty and reliability. He said not to talk, she kept quiet. And then, he was sophisticated, he was glamorous.”

“It’s a warning to me to cut out cheeseburgers,” Ralph said with a gleam of humor. “Guy’s only two years younger than me. I need to look more glamorous to my young claims handlers. So he romanced her and strangled her. What a horrible ending for her. Can they make it stick?”

“Terry Finchley, the detective in charge, he got a search warrant. They’re looking at Rossy’s clothes, fingerprints-they may get a match with the marks on her neck. He and Fillida were so single-mindedly arrogant, they probably didn’t try too hard to conceal evidence.

“Fillida, that’s another story. She could face a lot of charges-Fepple’s murder, attacking Paul Hoffman, attacking Rhea Wiell, but she’s attractive, rich. They’re searching for her prints or clothes fibers or anything at Paul’s house, but she’s going to be hard for the state’s attorney to nail down. At least those cheeseburgers of yours did some good: when you came down on her you cracked her pelvis. She won’t ski anywhere anytime soon.”

He smiled briefly, the twisted smile that reminded me of the old Ralph, and shut his eyes. I thought he had drifted off to sleep, but as I started to get up he looked up at me again.

“What was Alderman Durham doing at the clinic? I saw him as they were carrying me off on a stretcher.”

“Oh, Fillida and Bertrand had gone berserk,” I said. “They thought they’d get a bomb, blow the three of us up, make it look as though anti-abortion terrorists had been responsible. They told Durham to get one for them-they assumed that they’d bought him, that he was just another one of their servants who’d do what they wanted.

“See, Rossy had been doing favors for Durham in exchange for some muscle: Rossy got the legislature to block the Holocaust Asset Recovery Act unless it included slavery reparations, he gave Durham money so Durham could build a war chest to run for mayor-along with this high-profile issue, slavery reparations, to build a citywide platform on. In return for all this help, Durham directed Rossy to some South Side muscle when Rossy wanted to break in to Amy Blount’s apartment to see if she had the Hoffman notebooks. But he’s a wily coyote, the alderman-he never put anything in writing. He never directly told Rossy he could find muscle for him.

“Rossy thought he’d bought Durham. But the alderman wants to be mayor more than he wants to be Al Capone. He called the cops, told them the Rossys were trying to get a bomb at the clinic. So the cops were on their way, even though they got there kind of late.”

The alderman now looked like Mr. Virtue. He’d given me a bit of a smirk in passing, the smirk of the man who’d gotten clean away with having Colby Sommers killed and who had a nice stash to launch his citywide campaign besides. He’d confessed to Terry Finchley, more in sorrow than in outrage, that some of the young men on his EYE team weren’t as rehabilitated as he would have wished. And the Finch, normally one of the city’s straightest, levelest cops, had read me a lecture on my prejudice in flinging accusations at the alderman. If I had to win every match in order to be happy, I’d be a mighty sad detective-but this was one round where the loss stuck in my craw.

The charge nurse came into the room. “He’s recovering from trauma. You’ve had your five minutes twice over, out you go, now.”

Ralph was asleep. I bent to kiss his forehead where the shock of greying hair still flopped over.

Down in the Beth Israel parking lot, I dug my fingers into my shoulders before climbing into my car. They were still sore from being tied behind my back. I’d gone home to rest when I finally finished talking to the cops, but I was still beat.

At home I’d felt honor bound to tell Mr. Contreras what had happened, before stumbling up to bed. I slept a few hours, but I woke up still tired clear to the bone. All that death, all the energy I’d spent trying to figure it out, had turned on such sordidness. Fillida Rossy, protecting her great-grandfather’s company. Protecting her wealth and position. Not that she was the Lady Macbeth behind Bertrand-he didn’t need his wife to screw his courage to the sticking point. He’d had his own arrogance, his own sense of entitlement.

When I got up, before driving to the hospital to see Ralph, I’d gone to my office to e-mail Morrell: How I wish you were here. How I need your arms around me tonight.

He wrote back at once with love, commiseration-and a précis of the articles on Edelweiss I’d sent him yesterday. Not that it mattered now, just another little part of Fillida’s family’s wealth, Nesthorn had insured a lot of Nazi bigwigs during the war and had even forced people in occupied Holland and France to buy life insurance from them. In the sixties, they thought it would be prudent to change their name to Edelweiss because local resentment against the Nesthorn name still ran high in western Europe.

Standing in the parking lot, I gave a bark of mirthless laughter and shook my shoulders out again. A giant figure loomed out of the shadows and moved toward me.

“ Murray!” I gasped, my gun in my hand before I knew I’d drawn it. “Don’t freak me after a day like this one.”

He put an arm around me. “You’re getting too old for these tall buildings, Warshawski.”

“You’re right about that,” I agreed, putting my gun away. “Without Ralph and Mrs. Coltrain, I’d be on a slab about now.”

“Not to mention Durham,” he said.

“ Durham?” I snapped. “I know he’s painting himself as Mr. Clean, but that lying piece of politician knows he got away with murder!”

“Maybe. Maybe. But I had a few words with the aldercreature this afternoon. Off the record, unfortunately. But he said that last night he looked at you, looked at Rossy, figured he’d better bet on the local talent. Said he’d read some of your file, saw that you often got your butt whipped good but usually landed on top. Who knows, Warshawski-he gets to be mayor, maybe you’ll be police superintendent.”

“And you can run his press office,” I said dryly. “Guy did a lot of mean nasty stuff. Including cheerfully helping frame Isaiah Sommers for Howard Fepple’s murder.”

“He didn’t know it was Isaiah Sommers, not from what my gofers in the police department tell me. I mean, he didn’t know Isaiah was a relative of the Sommers family who he’d helped out back in the ’90’s.” Murray kept his arm around my shoulders. “When he found that out he forced Rossy to settle Gertrude Sommers’s claim. And he tried to get the cops to keep an open mind on the murder investigation. It’s why they didn’t charge Isaiah Sommers. Now it’s your turn. I want to see these mystery journals or ledgers or whatever that the Rossys were stampeding through town trying to find.”

“I want them, too.” I pulled away from his arm and turned to face him. “Lotty’s vanished with them.”

When I told Murray about Lotty’s disappearance after the fracas with Rhea at Paul Hoffman-Radbuka’s bedside, he looked at me somberly. “You’re going to find her, right? Why did she take the books away?”

I shook my head. “I don’t know. They told her… something that they didn’t tell anyone else.”

I leaned into my car for my briefcase and found a set of the photocopies I’d made of the journal pages. “You can have this. You can run it if you want.”

He squinted at the sheet in the dim light. “But what does it mean?”

I leaned wearily against my car and pointed at the line that read “Omschutz, K 30 Nestroy (2h.f) N-13426-Ö-L.” “As I understand it, we’re looking at a record for K. Omschutz, who lived at 30 Nestroy Street in Vienna. The 2h.f means he was in apartment 2f at the rear of the building. The numbers are the policy numbers, with a tag meaning it was an Austrian life-insurance policy-Ö for Österreich-the Austrian for Austria. Okay?”

After a minute’s squinting scrutiny he nodded.

“This other sheet just gives the face value of the policy in thousands of Austrian schillings, and the weekly payment schedule. It wasn’t a code. It meant something quite clear to Ulrich Hoffman: he knew he’d sold K. Omschutz a policy with a face value of fifty-four thousand schillings and a weekly payment of twenty schillings a week. As soon as Ralph Devereux at Ajax realized that it applied to prewar life-insurance claims, he put it together with the material that he found on his dead claims handler’s desk. That was what made him blow caution to the winds and storm into Bertrand Rossy’s office this morning.”

Ralph had gone over this with me when I got to the hospital tonight, his mouth twisted in bitter mockery over his recklessness. I was utterly weary of the entire business, but Murray was so excited at getting even a few pages of the Hoffman journals as a scoop that he could hardly contain himself.

“Thanks for letting me scoop the town, Warshawski: I knew you couldn’t stay mad at me forever. What about Rhea Wiell and Paul Hoffman or Radbuka? Beth Blacksin was feeling mighty peeved after she got to the clinic this afternoon and found out that whole business could turn out to be a fraud.”

Blacksin had been hovering behind the cops with the ubiquitous camera crews at the clinic. I’d answered as many questions then as I could so I wouldn’t have to face them later. I told them about the Rossys, about the Holocaust claims and Ulrich’s notebooks.

I didn’t know what Don was planning to do with his book, but I didn’t feel any special desire to protect him. I told the cameras about Paul Hoffman, about the Anna Freud material, about Paul’s chamber of secrets. When Beth’s eyes lit up at the thought of getting that scene on tape, I remembered Lotty’s fury at the way in which books and movies titillate us over the horrors of the past. Don, wanting to put it all in a book for Envision Press. Beth, knowing her contract was coming due, seeing her show’s ratings zoom if she filmed Paul’s private horrors. I told Murray I’d walked out on them mid-sentence.

“I don’t blame you. Getting the news doesn’t mean we have to carry on like jackals at suppertime.”

He opened the car door for me-an unusual act of gallantry. “Let’s go downtown to the Glow, V I. You and I have a lot of catching up to do-on life, not just life insurance.”

I shook my head. “I need to go up to Evanston to see Max Loewenthal. I’ll take a rain check, though.”

Murray leaned down and kissed me full on the lips, then quickly closed my car door. In my rearview mirror I watched him standing there, watching me, until my car had turned down the exit ramp.