Sara Paretsky - Total Recall

Someone was passing bottles of champagne through the crowd. Max and the rest of our group put our personal worries to one side and became riotous with the other revelers. No more bombs, no more blackouts, no more minuscule bits of butter once a week-although of course that was ignorant optimism; rationing went on for years.

Carl eventually found us sitting on an overturned barrow in St. Martin ’s Lane. The owner, who sold fruit, was a little drunk. He was carving apples carefully into slices and feeding them to me and another girl in our group, who later became utterly suburban, bred corgis, and voted Conservative. At the time she was the most sophisticated of our set, wearing lipstick, dating American servicemen, and getting nylons for her pains, while I darned my cotton stockings, feeling like a dowdy schoolgirl next to her.

Carl bowed grandly to the barrow owner and took a slice of apple out of the man’s hand. “I will feed Miss Herschel,” he said, and held the piece of apple out to me. I suddenly became aware of his fingers, as if they were actually touching my body. I put my hand around his wrist to guide the apple to my mouth.

The dreams woke me in the grey light of predawn. Nightmares of Lotty lost, my mother dying, faceless figures chasing me through tunnels, while Paul Radbuka watched, alternating between weeping and manic laughter. I lay sweating, my heart pounding. Next to me, Morrell slept, his breath coming out in soft little snorts, like a horse clearing its nose. I moved into the shelter of his arms. He clung to me in sleep for a few minutes, then rolled over without waking.

By and by my heart rate returned to normal, but despite yesterday’s fatigues I couldn’t get back to sleep. All of last night’s tormented confessions churned in my head like clothes pounding in a washing machine. Paul Radbuka’s emotions were so slippery, so intense, that I couldn’t figure out how to respond to him; Lotty and Carl’s history was just as overwhelming.

It didn’t surprise me to hear that Max wanted to marry Lotty, although neither of them had ever mentioned it around me. I seized on the small problem instead of the large, wondering if Lotty was so used to her solitary life that she preferred to be on her own. Morrell and I had talked about living together, but even though we’d both been married in our younger days, we couldn’t quite agree on giving up our privacy. For Lotty, who’d always lived on her own, it would be an even harder move.

It was clear that Lotty was hiding something about the Radbuka family, but I had no way of knowing what. It wasn’t her mother’s family-she’d been startled by that suggestion, almost affronted. Perhaps some poor immigrant family whose fate had mattered terribly to her? People have unexpected sources of shame and guilt, but I couldn’t imagine something that would shock me so much it would make me turn against her… something she wouldn’t even tell Max.

What if Sofie Radbuka had been a patient whose care she had bungled during her medical training? Sofie Radbuka had died, or was in a vegetative coma; Lotty blamed herself and pretended to have tuberculosis so she could go to the country to recuperate. She’d taken Radbuka’s name in some kind of guilt storm that had her overidentifying with the patient. Aside from the fact that it contradicted everything I knew about Lotty, it still wouldn’t turn me from her.

The notion that she’d pretended to have TB so she could go to the country and carry on an affair with a Sofie Radbuka-or anyone-was ludicrous. She could have had an affair in London without jeopardizing a training program that women in the forties entered only with great difficulty.

It unnerved me to see Lotty teetering on the edge of collapse. I tried to recite Morrell’s good advice: that I should not sleuth after her; that if she didn’t want to tell me her secrets, it was her demons, not my failure, that made her keep them to herself.

I should stick to my business, anyway, to exploring the kind of financial shenanigan that Isaiah Sommers had hired me to untangle. Not that I’d done much about that situation, either, other than get him to stir up Bull Durham to denounce me in public.

It was only five-forty. I could do one little thing for Isaiah Sommers. Which Morrell would holler about if he knew. I sat up. Morrell sighed but didn’t move. Pulling on the jeans and sweatshirt out of my overnight bag, I tiptoed out of the room with my running shoes. Morrell had absconded with my cell phone and picklocks. I went back to the room for his backpack, which I took to his study with me-I didn’t want the clanking of keys to wake him. I left a note on his laptop: Gone to the city for an early appointment. See you tonight for supper? Love, V.

Morrell’s place was only six blocks from the Davis L stop. I walked across, in company with other early commuters, joggers, people out with their dogs. Amazing how many people were on the streets, and how many looked fresh and fit. The sight of my own red-stained eyes in the bathroom mirror had made me flinch-the Madwoman of Chaillot let loose upon the town.

The express trains for the morning rush were running; in twenty minutes I was at my own stop, Belmont, a few blocks from my apartment. My car was out front, but I needed to shower and change so that I looked less like the ghost of my own nightmares. I crept in quietly, hoping the dogs wouldn’t recognize my step. Trouser suit, crepe-soled shoes. Peppy gave a sharp bark as I tiptoed back outside, but I didn’t slow down.

I stopped at a coffee bar on my way to Lake Shore Drive for a large orange juice and an even larger cappuccino. It was almost seven now; the morning commute had begun in earnest, but I still made it to Hyde Park before seven-thirty.

I gave a perfunctory nod to the guard at the entrance to the Hyde Park Bank building. It wasn’t the same man Fepple had warned against me on Friday. This man gave me a cursory glance over his newspaper but didn’t challenge me: I was professionally dressed, I knew where I was going. To the sixth floor, where I pulled on latex gloves to start work on Fepple’s locks. I was so tense, listening for the elevator, that it took me a moment to realize the locks were already open.

I slipped into the office, snarling as I tripped once more on the torn corner of linoleum. Fepple was behind his desk. In the pale light coming through the window, I thought he’d fallen asleep in his chair. I hesitated at the door, then decided to put a bold face on it, wake him, force him to hand over the Sommers file. I switched on the overhead light. And saw that Fepple would never speak to anyone again. His mouth was missing. The side of his head, the carpet of freckled skin, nothing left of them but a smear of bone and brain and blood.

I sat abruptly on the floor. Head between my knees. Even with my nose muffled I thought I could smell blood. My gorge rose. I willed my mind to other matters: I couldn’t add my vomit to the crime scene.

I don’t know how long I sat like that, until voices in the hall made me realize how precarious my position was: in an office with a dead man, with picklocks in my pocket and latex gloves on my hands. I stood up, so fast that my head swam again, but I shook off the faintness and turned the dead bolt to lock myself in.

Trying to make it a clinical exercise, I edged around the desk to look at Fepple. A gun had fallen to the floor just below where his right arm dangled. I squinted at it: a twenty-two SIG Trailside. So he had shot himself? Because whatever he’d seen in the Sommers file had unbalanced his mind? His computer was still on, in a suspend state. Suppressing my nausea, I gingerly stretched an arm past his left side, using a picklock to bring up the screen so that I wouldn’t disturb any evidence. A block of text came back to life.