Sara Paretsky - Total Recall

Ajax Insurance cashed her husband’s life-insurance policy ten years ago. When he died last week, they sent their tame detective, V I Warshawski, to accuse Sister Sommers of stealing it. In the middle of the funeral, in front of her friends and loved ones, they shamed her.

Warshawski, we all have to make a living, but must you do it on the bodies of the poor? Ajax, make good the wrong. Pay the widow her mite. Repair the damage you have done to the grandchildren of slaves. Birnbaum, give back the money you made with Ajax on the backs of slaves. No Holocaust restitution until you make the African-American community whole.

I could feel the blood drumming in my head. No wonder Ralph was angry-but why should he take it out on me? It wasn’t his name that was being slandered. I almost jumped out of the line to tackle Alderman Durham, but in the nick of time I imagined the scene on television-the EYE team wrestling with me as I screamed invective, the alderman shaking his head more in sorrow than anger and declaiming something sanctimonious to the camera.

I watched, fuming, as the circle of marchers brought Durham parallel to me. He was a big, broad-shouldered man in a black-and-tan houndstooth jacket which looked as though it had been made to measure, so carefully did the checks line up along the smooth-fitting seams. His face gleamed with excitement behind his muttonchop whiskers.

Since I couldn’t punch him, I folded the broadsheet into my purse and ran down Adams toward my car. A cab would have been faster, but my rage needed a physical outlet. By the time I reached Canal Street, the soles of my feet throbbed from running in pumps on city pavement. I was lucky I hadn’t sprained an ankle. I stood outside my car gulping in air, my throat dry.

As my pulse returned to normal, I wondered where Bull Durham had gotten the money for custom tailoring. Was someone paying him to harass Ajax and the Birnbaums-not to mention me? Of course, all aldercreatures have plenty of chances to stick their fingers in the till in perfectly legal ways-I was so furious with him I wanted to assume the worst.

I needed a phone, and I needed water. As I looked for a convenience store where I could buy a bottle, I passed a wireless shop. I bought another in-car charger: my life would be easier this afternoon if I was plugged in.

Before I got onto the expressway to track down my client-ex-client-I called Mary Louise on my private office line. She was understandably upset at my leaving her holding the bag. I explained how that had happened, then read her Bull Durham’s broadsheet.

“Good grief, he’s got a nerve! What do you want to do about it?”

“Start with a statement. Something like this:

“In his zeal to make political hay out of Gertrude Sommers’s loss, Alderman Durham overlooked a few things, including the facts. When Gertrude Sommers’s husband died last week, the Delaney Funeral Parlor humiliated her by halting the funeral just as she took her seat in the chapel. They did so because her husband’s life-insurance policy had been cashed some years ago. The family briefly employed investigator V I Warshawski to get at the facts of what happened. Contrary to Alderman Durham’s claims, Ajax Insurance did not hire Warshawski. Warshawski was not at Aaron Sommers’s funeral and did not see or meet the unfortunate widow until the following week. It is inconceivable that Warshawski would ever interrupt a funeral in the fashion the alderman is claiming. If Alderman Durham was utterly mistaken about the facts of Warshawski’s involvement in the case, are his other statements open to the same questions?”

Mary Louise read it back to me. We tweaked it a few times, then she agreed to phone or e-mail it to the reporters who had been calling. If Beth Blacksin or Murray wanted to talk to me in person, she should tell them to come to my office around six-thirty-although if they were like the rest of the Chicago media, they would probably be camped outside the doors of members of the Birnbaum family, hoping to accost them.

A cop tapped my parking meter and made an ugly comment. I put the car in gear and started down Madison toward the expressway.

“Do you know what the Birnbaum part of Durham ’s handout is about?” Mary Louise asked.

“Apparently Ajax insured the Birnbaums back in the 1850’s. Part of the vast Birnbaum holdings came from something in the South. Ajax execs are steaming over how Durham got that information.”

As I oozed onto the expressway I was glad I’d bought the water: traffic seems to run freely these days only between ten at night and six the next morning. At two-thirty, the trucks heading south on the Ryan formed a solid wall. I put Mary Louise on hold while I slid my Mustang in between an eighteen-wheel UPS truck and a long flatbed with what looked like a reactor coil strapped to it.

Before hanging up, I asked her to dig up Amy Blount’s home phone number and address. “Phone them to me here in my car, but don’t call her yourself. I don’t know yet if I want to talk to her.”

The flatbed behind me gave a loud hoot that made me jump: I had let three car lengths open up in front of me. I scooted forward.

Mary Louise said, “Before you go, I tracked down those men Aaron Sommers worked with at South Branch Scrap Metal. The ones who bought life insurance from Rick Hoffman along with Mr. Sommers.”

The Durham attack on me personally had driven the earlier business from my mind. I’d forgotten to tell Mary Louise the client had fired me, so she’d gone ahead with the investigation and had found three of the four men still alive. Claiming to be doing an independent quality check for the company, she’d persuaded the policyholders to call the Midway Agency. The men said their policies were still intact; she’d double-checked with the carrier. The third man had died eight years ago. His funeral had been duly paid for by Ajax. So whatever fraud had been committed, it wasn’t some wholesale looting by Midway or Hoffman of those particular burial policies. Not that it really mattered at this point, but I thanked her for the extra effort-she’d done a lot in a short morning-and turned my attention to the traffic.

When I reached the Stevenson cutoff, my motion slowed to something more like a turtle on Valium than a pinball-construction, now in its third year, cut off half the lanes. The Stevenson Expressway is the key to the industrial zone along the city’s southwest corridor. Truck traffic along it is always heavy; with the construction and the afternoon rush building, we all bumped along at about ten miles an hour.

At Kedzie I was glad to leave the expressway for the maze of plants and scrap yards alongside it. Even though the day was clear, down here among the factories the air turned blue-grey from smoke. I passed yards full of rusting cars, yards making outboard motors, a rebar mill, and a mountain of yellowish salt, ominous portent of the winter ahead. The roads were deeply rutted. I drove cautiously, my car slung too low to the ground for the axle to survive a major hole. Trucks jumped past me with a happy disregard of any traffic signs.

Even with a good detail map I blundered a few times. It was a quarter past three, fifteen minutes after Isaiah Sommers’s shift ended, before I jolted into the yard of the Docherty Engineering Works. A roughly graveled area, it was as scarred by heavy trucks as the surrounding streets. A fourteen-wheeler was snorting at a loading dock when I got out of the Mustang.

It was my lucky afternoon-it looked as though the seven-to-three shift was just leaving the shop. I leaned against my car, watching men straggle through a side door. Isaiah Sommers appeared about halfway through the exodus. He was talking to a couple of other men, laughing in an easy way that took me by surprise: when I’d met him he’d been hunched and surly. I waited until he’d clapped his coworkers on the shoulder and gone on to his own truck before straightening up to follow him.