Sara Paretsky - Total Recall

“Of course, now I’m learning that we do have this fifteen-year history of slavery still taking place in America while Ajax was in its early days. And I am just now suggesting to Ralph that we get Ms. Blount, the woman who wrote our little history, to look in the archives so we know who our customers were in those very old days. Assuming she has not already decided to send our archives to this Alderman Durham. But how expensive it is to go back to the past. How very costly, indeed.”

“Your history? Oh, that booklet on ‘One Hundred Fifty Years of Life.’ I have a copy-which I confess I’ve yet to read. Does it cover Ajax ’s pre-Emancipation years? Do you really think Ms. Blount would hand your documents to an outsider?”

“Is this the true reason for your visit here? Ralph says you are a detective. Are you doing something very subtle, very Humphrey Bogart, pretending to care about the Sommers claim and trying to trick me with questions about the Holocaust and slavery claims? I did think this little policy was small, small potatoes for you to bring to the director of claims.” He smiled widely, inviting me to treat this as a joke if I wanted to.

“I’m sure in Switzerland as well as here people call on those they know,” I said. “Ralph and I worked together a number of years ago, before he became so exalted, so I’m taking advantage of our relationship in the hopes of a fast answer for my client.”

“Exalted’s the word for me,” Ralph came back in. “And Vic has such a depressing habit of being right about financial crime that it’s easier to go along with her from the start than fight her.”

“What crime surrounds this claim, then-what are you correct about today?” Rossy asked.

“So far, nothing, but I haven’t had time to consult a psychic yet.”

“Psychic?” he repeated doubtfully.

“Indovina,” I grinned. “They abound in the area where I have my office.”

“Ah, psychic,” Rossy exclaimed. “I have been pronouncing it wrong all these years. I must remember to tell my wife about this. She is keenly interested in unusual events in my business day. Psychics and nosebleeds. She will enjoy them so much.”

I was saved from trying to respond by Ralph’s secretary, who ushered in a young woman clutching a thick file. She was wearing khaki jeans and a sweater that had shrunk from too many washings.

“This is Connie Ingram, Mr. Devereux,” the secretary said. “She has the information you wanted.”

Ralph didn’t introduce Rossy or me to Ms. Ingram. She blinked at us unhappily but showed her packet to Ralph.

“This here is all the documents on L-146938-72. I’m sorry about being in my jeans and all, but my supervisor is away, so they told me to bring the file up myself. I printed the financials from off the microfiche, so they aren’t as clear as they could be, but I did the best I could.”

Bertrand Rossy joined me when I got up to look over her shoulder at the papers. Connie Ingram flipped through the pages until she came to the payment documents.

Ralph pulled them out of the file and studied them. He looked at them for a long moment, then turned to me sternly. “It seems that your client’s family was trying to collect twice on the same policy, Vic. We frown on that here.”

I took the pages from him. The policy had been paid up in 1986. In 1991, someone had submitted a death certificate. A photocopy of the canceled check was attached. It had been paid to Gertrude Sommers, care of the Midway Insurance Agency, and duly endorsed by them.

For a moment, I was too dumbfounded to speak. The grieving widow must be quite a con artist to convince the nephew into shelling out for his uncle’s funeral when she’d collected on the policy a decade ago. But how on earth had she gotten a death certificate back then? My first coherent thought was mean-spirited: I was glad I’d insisted on earnest money up front. I doubted Isaiah Sommers would have paid to learn this bit of news.

“This isn’t your idea of a joke, is it, Vic?” Ralph demanded.

He was angry because he thought he looked foolishly incompetent in front of his new master: I wasn’t going to ride him. “Scout’s honor, Ralph. The story I told you is the identical one I got from my client. Have you ever seen something like this before? A fraudulent death certificate?”

“It happens.” He flicked a glance at Rossy. “Usually it’s someone faking his own death to get away from creditors. And then the circumstances of the policy-the size-the timing between when it was sold and when it was cashed-make us investigate before we pay. For something like this”-he snapped the canceled check with his middle finger-“we wouldn’t investigate such a small face value-and one where we’d collected all the premium years before.”

“So the possibility exists? The possibility that people are submitting claims that aren’t rightfully theirs?” Rossy took the whole file from Ralph and started going through it one page at a time.

“But the company would only pay once,” Ralph said. “As you can see, we had all the information available when the funeral home submitted the policy, so we didn’t pay the claim twice. I don’t suppose anyone from the agency would have bothered to check whether the purchaser”-he looked at the tab on the file-“whether Sommers was really dead when his wife filed the claim.”

Connie Ingram asked doubtfully if she should talk to her supervisor about calling the agency or the funeral home. Ralph turned to me. “Are you going to talk to them anyway, Vic? Will you let Connie know what you find out? The truth, I mean, not some version that you want Ajax to learn?”

“If Miss Warshawski is in the habit of hiding her findings from the company, Ralph, perhaps we shouldn’t trust her with these delicate questions.” Rossy gave me a little bow. “I’m sure you would ask your questions so skillfully that our agent might be startled into telling you-what he ought to keep between himself and the company.”

Ralph started to say that he was only trying to bait me, then sighed and told Connie by all means to ask any questions she needed to reclose the file.

“Ralph, what if someone else filed the claim, someone pretending to be Gertrude Sommers,” I said. “Would the company make her whole?”

Ralph rubbed the deepening crease between his eyes. “Don’t ask me to make moral decisions without the facts. What if it was her husband-or her kid? He’s listed as a secondary beneficiary after her. Or her minister? I’m not going to commit the company to anything until I know the truth.”

He was talking to me but looking at Rossy, who was looking at his watch, not at all discreetly. Ralph muttered something about their next appointment. This made me more uneasy even than the fraud over the claim: I don’t like my lovers, even long-former lovers, to feel the need to be obsequious.

As I left the office, I asked Ralph for a photocopy of the canceled check and the death certificate. Rossy answered for him. “These are company documents, Devereux.”

“But if you don’t let me show them to my client, then he has no way of knowing whether I’m lying to him,” I said. “You remember the case this last spring, where various life-insurance companies admitted to charging black customers as much as four times the amount they did whites? I assure you, that will leap into my client’s mind. And then, instead of me coming around asking for documents in a nice way, you might have a federal lawsuit with a subpoena attached.”

Rossy stared at me, suddenly frosty. “If the threat of a lawsuit seems to your mind to be ‘asking in a nice way,’ then I have to ask myself questions about your business practices.”

With the dimples in abeyance, he showed he could be a formidable corporate presence. I smiled and took his hand, turning it to look at the palm. He was startled into standing motionless.