Sara Paretsky - Total Recall

“More witchcraft, Warshawski? I’ll pass the question on to the lab. Later.”

As I filled a bowl with water for the dogs, I wondered if I should call Commander Purling at the Twenty-first District to report what I knew. But it was so little-the mystery phone call on Friday night, the mystery visitor to Fepple’s office-the cops would get all that from the bank guard and Fepple’s phone logs. And anyway, if I called him, it would mean at best hours of explaining why I was involved. At worst-I could find myself in more trouble than I needed for having explored the scene of the crime on my own.

Besides, this wasn’t my case, it wasn’t my problem. My only problem was to try to get Ajax to pay the Sommers family what they were owed on Aaron Sommers’s life insurance. Aaron Sommers, whose name appeared on an old ledger sheet in Howard Fepple’s briefcase with two crosses next to it.

I called Cheviot Labs and asked for Kathryn Chang.

“Oh, yes: Barry gave me your sheet of paper. I took a preliminary look at it. From the watermark I’m saying it’s of Swiss manufacture, the Baume Works outside Basel. It’s a kind of cotton weave that they didn’t make during the Second World War because of the shortage of raw material, so it dates from somewhere between 1925 and 1940. I can give you more precise dating than that when I’ve studied the ink-that will make it easier for me to date when the words were written. I can’t make that a priority, though: it will be at least a week because of other jobs I have ahead of you.”

“That’s fine; this is enough for me for now,” I said slowly, trying to turn the information over in my mind. “Do you know-would this paper have been used primarily or exclusively in Switzerland?”

“Oh, no, by no means. The Baume Works aren’t so important now, but well into the 1960’s they were one of the biggest makers of fine paper and business paper in the world. This particular stock was widely used for things like address books, personal journals, that kind of thing. It is very unusual to see it treated like this, as accounting paper. The person who used it must have been very-oh, let me say, fond of himself. It would be helpful, of course, if I could see the book this was torn from.”

“That would help me, too. But one thing I’d like to know in particular: can you tell when the different entries were written? Not the exact year-but, well, if some are more recent than others I’d like to know that.”

“Right. We’ll include that in your report, Ms. Warshawski.”

It seemed to me it was time to visit Ralph again. His secretary remembered me from last week, but I couldn’t see Ralph: his schedule was packed until six-thirty tonight. However, when I said I might be able to defuse Alderman Durham’s protest, she put me on hold-as it turned out, long enough for me to read the entire sports section of the Herald-Star. When she came back, she said Ralph could squeeze me in for five minutes at noon if I got there on the dot.

“On the dot it is.” I hung up and turned to the dogs. “That means we go back home, where you can lounge around the garden and I can put on panty hose. I know you will feel bereft, but ask yourselves-who really will be having more fun?”

It was ten-thirty now. I’d had a wistful hope of climbing into Morrell’s bed for a nap, but I still had to drop photos of Radbuka off at Max’s for Tim Streeter. And I wanted to get back to my own place to change into something more appropriate than jeans for a Loop meeting. “Life’s just a wheel and I’m caught in the spokes,” I sang as I shepherded the dogs once more back to the car. All was still quiet at Max’s when I stopped to drop off Radbuka’s photographs. I zipped down the drive to Belmont, dumped the dogs with Mr. Contreras, and ran up the stairs to my own apartment.

Tonight was my dinner with the Rossys, my chance to chatter Italian to cheer up Bertrand’s homesick wife. I put on a soft black trouser suit that could take me from meetings to dinner. A turtleneck that I could remove when I got to the Rossys’ so that the rose silk camisole underneath dressed up the outfit. My mother’s diamond-drop earrings I buttoned into a pocket. Pumps in my briefcase, the crepe-soled shoes I’d worn yesterday morning to step in Fepple’s-I broke off the thought without completing it and ran back down the stairs. The pinball back in action.

I drove down to my office, then took the L into the Loop. At the Ajax building on Adams, a small band of protesters was still circling the sidewalk near the entrance. Without Alderman Durham there to lead the charge, the troops looked bedraggled. Every now and then they’d rouse themselves to chant something at the herd of people on their way from office to lunch, but for the most part they merely talked among themselves, posters drooping against their shoulders. These seemed to be the same signs they had carried on Friday-no reparations for slaveowners, no high-rises on the bones of slaves, and so on, but the flyer a dogged young man handed me on my way in had cut out the attacks on me. Literally cut out-the middle header asking me if I had no shame was gone, leaving a gap between the merciless Ajax and the compassionless Birnbaums. The text looked strange:

Ajax Insurance cashed her husband’s life-insurance policy ten years ago. When he died last week, they sent their tame detective to accuse Sister Sommers of stealing it.

I guess this way they could just type my name back in if I reverted to chief villain. I tucked the flyer into my briefcase.

At noon on the dot, the executive-floor attendant brought me to Ralph’s antechamber. Ralph himself was still in a meeting in his conference room, but his secretary buzzed him and after the briefest wait he emerged. This time I got a grim nod, not a grin and a hug.

“Does trouble always follow you, Vic?” he said when we were in his office with the door shut. “Or does it just jump up to bite me anytime you’re in the vicinity?”

“If you really only have five minutes, don’t spend it blaming me for Alderman Durham’s pickets.” I sat on one of the hard tubular chairs, while Ralph leaned against the edge of his desk. “I came to suggest that you make the Sommers family whole. Then you can issue a big PR statement about how your respect for the widow’s grief-”

He cut me short. “We paid them ten thousand dollars in 1991. I won’t double-pay a life-insurance policy.”

“The question is, who got that money back in 1991? Personally, I don’t think anyone in the Sommers family ever saw it. That check started and stopped at the agency door.”

He folded his arms in an uncompromising line. “Do you have proof of this?”

“You know, don’t you, that Howard Fepple is dead? There’s no one-”

“He committed suicide because his agency was going down the toilet. It was in our executive briefing this morning.”

I shook my head. “Old news. He was murdered. The Sommers family file has disappeared. There’s no one from the agency left to explain what really happened.”

Ralph stared at me in angry disbelief. “What do you mean, he was murdered? The cops found his body, they found the suicide note. It was in the papers.”

“Ralph, listen to me: barely an hour ago, the medical examiner called to tell me the autopsy proves murder. Don’t you think it was funny that the Sommers family file disappeared at the same time Fepple was killed?”

“What are you trying to do to me? Am I supposed to believe this on your say-so?”

I shrugged. “Call the medical examiner. Call the watch commander at the Twenty-first District. I’m not trying to do anything but help my client-and give you a way of defusing the protest down there on Adams.”

“All right: let’s hear it.” The scowl emphasized his incipient jowls.