Sara Paretsky - Total Recall

At noon, when Mary Louise left for class, she said all six policies I’d brought with me from Midway were in order: for the four where the purchaser was dead, the beneficiaries had duly received their benefits. For the two still living, no one had submitted a claim. Three of the policies had been on Ajax paper. Two other companies had issued the other three. So if the Sommers claim had been fraudulently submitted by the agency, it wasn’t a regular occurrence.

Exhaustion made it hard for me to think-about that, or anything else. When Mary Louise had left, waves of fatigue swept over me. I moved on leaden legs to the cot in my supply room, where I fell into a feverish sleep. It was almost three when the phone pulled me awake again. I stumbled out to my desk and mumbled something unintelligible.

A woman asked for me, then told me to hold for Mr. Rossy. Mr. Rossy? Oh, yes, the head of Edelweiss’s U.S. operations. I rubbed my forehead, trying to make blood flow into my brain, then, since I was still on hold, went to the little refrigerator in the hall, which I share with Tessa, for a bottle of water. Rossy was calling my name sharply when I picked up the phone again.

“Buon giorno,” I said, with a semblance of brightness. “Come sta? Che cosa posso fare per Lei?”

He exclaimed over my Italian. “Ralph told me you were fluent; you speak it beautifully-almost without an accent. Actually, that’s why I called.”

“To speak Italian to me?” I was incredulous.

“My wife-she gets homesick. When I told her I’d met an Italian speaker who shared her love of opera, she wondered if you’d do us the honor of coming to dinner. She was especially fascinated, as I was sure she would be, by the idea of your office among the indovine-p-suchics,” he added in English, correcting himself immediately to “sychics.” “Do I have this correct now?”

“Perfect,” I said absently. I looked at the Isabel Bishop painting on the wall by my desk, but the angular face staring at a sewing machine told me nothing. “It would be a pleasure to meet Mrs. Rossy,” I finally said.

“Is it possible that you could join us tomorrow evening?”

I thought of Morrell, leaving for Rome on a ten A.M. flight, and the hollow I would feel when I saw him off. “As it happens, I’m free.” I copied the address-an apartment building near Lotty’s on Lake Shore Drive -into my Palm Pilot. We hung up on mutual protestations of goodwill, but I frowned at the painted seamstress a long moment, wondering what Rossy really wanted.

The page I’d found in Fepple’s briefcase was dry now. I set the machine to enlarge the copy and came up with letters big enough to read. The original I tucked into a plastic sleeve.

The script was still hard to make out, but I could read Hillel Brodsky, I or G Herstein, and Th. and Aaron Sommers-although it looked like Pommers I knew it had to be my client’s uncle. So this was a list of clients from the Midway Agency-that seemed like a reasonable assumption. What did the crosses mean? That they were dead? That their families had been defrauded? Or both? Perhaps Th. Sommers was still alive.

The dogs, restless from five hours inside, got up and wagged their tails at me. “You guys think we should get in motion? You’re right. Let’s go.” I shut down my system, carefully slid the original of the fragment into my own case, and took Fepple’s briefcase with me back to the car.

The clock was ticking and I had business-hours errands to run. I gave the dogs a chance to relieve themselves but didn’t take the time to run them before driving out the O’Hare corridor to Cheviot Labs, a private forensics lab I often use. I showed the fragment of paper to the engineer who’s helped me in the past.

“I know metal, not paper, but we’ve got someone on staff here who can do it,” he said.

“I’m willing to pay for a priority job,” I said.

He grunted. “I’ll talk to her. Kathryn Chang. One of us’ll call you tomorrow.”

I was just ahead of the afternoon rush, so I kept the increasingly restless dogs in the car until we got to Hyde Park, where I threw sticks into the lake for them for half an hour. “Sorry, guys: bad timing to take you two today. Back in the car with you.”

It was four, when a lot of duty rosters change; I drove over to the Hyde Park Bank building. Sure enough, the same man who’d been here Friday was on duty. He looked at me without interest when I stopped in front of his station.

“We kind of met on Friday afternoon,” I said.

He looked at me more closely. “Oh, yeah. Fepple said you’d been harassing him. You harass him to death?”

He seemed to be joking, so I smiled. “Not me. It was on the news that he’d been shot, or shot himself.”

“That’s right. They say the business was going down the toilet, which doesn’t surprise me. I’ve worked here nine years. Since the old man died I bet I could count the evenings the young one worked late. Must have been disappointed with the client he saw on Friday.”

“He came back with someone after I left?”

“That’s right. But must not have amounted to anything after all. I suppose that’s why I didn’t see him leave: he stayed up there and killed himself.”

“The man who came in with him-when did he leave?”

“Not sure it was a man or a woman-Fepple came back along with a Lamaze class. I think he was talking to someone, but I can’t say I was paying close attention. Cops think I’m derelict because I don’t photograph every person that passes through here, but, hell, the building doesn’t even have a sign-in policy. If Fepple’s visitor left at the same time as the pregnant couples, I wouldn’t have noticed them special.”

I had to give up on it. I handed him Fepple’s canvas bag, telling him I’d found it on the curb.

“I think it might belong to Fepple, judging by the stuff inside. Since the cops are being a pain, maybe you could just drop it in his office-their problem to sort out if they ever come back here again.” I gave him my card, just in case something occurred to him, along with my most dazzling smile, and headed for the western suburbs.

Unlike my beloved old Trans Am, the Mustang didn’t handle well at high speeds-which wasn’t a problem this afternoon, because we weren’t going anywhere very fast. As the evening rush built, I sat for long periods without moving at all.

The first leg of the trip was on the same expressway I’d taken when I went to see Isaiah Sommers on Friday. The air thickened along the industrial corridor, turning the bright September sky to a dull yellowish grey. I took out my phone and tried Max, wondering how Lotty and he were faring after last night’s upheavals. Agnes Loewenthal answered the phone.

“Oh, Vic-Max is still at the hospital. We’re expecting him around six. But that horrid man who came to the house last night was around today.”

I inched forward behind a waste hauler. “He came to the house?”

“No, it was worse in a way. He was in the park across the street. When I took Calia out for a walk this afternoon he came over to try to talk to us, saying he wanted Calia to know he wasn’t really a big bad wolf, that he was her cousin.”

“What did you do?”

“I said he was quite mistaken and to leave us alone. He tried to follow us, arguing with me, but when Calia got upset and began to cry he started to shout at us-imploring me to let him talk to Calia by himself. We ran back to the house. Max-I called Max; he called the Evanston police, who sent a squad car around. They moved him off, but-Vic, it’s really frightening. I don’t want to be alone in the house-Mrs. Squires didn’t come in today because of the party yesterday.”