Sara Paretsky - Total Recall

Rhea shook her head, a contemptuous little smile at the corners of her mouth. “You really don’t give up, do you? I am not going to let you have my client’s home number or address. He sees you as the person who’s keeping him from his family. If you were to show up on his front step, it would be a major disintegrating event to his fragile sense of self.”

I felt all the muscles in my neck clench with the effort not to lose my temper openly. “I’m not challenging the work you’ve done with him, Rhea. But if I could see the documents he found in his father’s-foster father’s-papers, I could use them to track down who in London might have been part of his family. The journey he thinks he made, from his unknown birthplace to Terezin, and then to London and Chicago, is so tortuous that we might never be able to follow it. But at least the documents that told him his birth name might give a skilled investigator a place to start.”

“You say you’re not challenging my work, but in the next sentence you refer to the journey Paul thinks he made. This is a journey he did make, even though the details were blocked from his conscious mind for fifty years. Like you, I am a skilled investigator, but one with greater experience than you in exploring the past.”

The discreet temple bell chimed; she turned to look at a clock on her desktop. “I need to clear my mind of all this conflict before my next patient arrives. I’ll be certain to tell Paul that he can only expect hostility if he keeps trying to see Max Loewenthal.”

“That will be helpful to all of us,” I said. “I have someone showing Radbuka’s photograph to neighbors of families named Ulrich in the hopes of finding his childhood home. So if he reports back to you that someone is spying on him-it’s true.”

“Families named Ulrich? Why would you want-” She broke off, her dark soft eyes widening, first in bewilderment, then amusement. “If that’s your best investigative effort, Vic, then Paul Radbuka is definitely safe from you.”

I studied her for a moment, chin on hand, trying to decipher what lay behind her amusement. “So Ulrich wasn’t his father’s name after all? I’ll keep that in mind. Don, where should I leave a message for you about whether Max is free to talk to you tonight? At Morrell’s?”

“I’ll ride down with you, Vic, give Rhea a chance to center herself. I have a cell-phone number I can give you.”

He got up with me but lingered inside her consulting room for a private leave-taking. As I left, I noticed another young woman in the waiting room looking eagerly toward the inner door. It was a pity Rhea and I had gotten off to such a bad start: I would have liked to experience her hypnotic techniques to see whether they gave me the same rush they did her patients.

Don caught up with me outside the elevators. When I asked if he knew what the inside joke was about the name Ulrich, he shifted uncomfortably. “Not exactly.”

“Not exactly? You mean you know sort of?”

“Only that it wasn’t his father’s-foster father’s-last name. Not what the name really was. And don’t ask me to find out: Rhea won’t tell me because she knows you’ll try to wheedle it out of me.”

“I guess I should feel flattered that she thinks I’d be able to. Give me your cell-phone number. I’ll call Max and get back to you, but I have to run: like Rhea, I need to center myself before my next appointment.”

In the L going back to my car, I called Mary Louise to tell her she didn’t have to go door-to-door with Radbuka’s picture after all. I couldn’t recap the whole conversation over the noise of the train but told her that it apparently wasn’t his childhood name. She had started south, working her way west and north, and had only reached her third address, so she was happy to call it a day.

As I picked up my car at the Western L stop, I wondered idly what would happen if Rhea Wiell hypnotized Lotty. Where would an elevator to the past take Lotty? From her behavior on Sunday, the monsters on those lower floors were pretty ferocious. It seemed to me, though, that Lotty’s problem wasn’t that she couldn’t remember her monsters but that she couldn’t forget them.

I stopped in the office to check on mail and messages and whether I had any appointments for tomorrow that I’d forgotten. A couple of new things had come up. I entered them into my computer and pulled out my Palm Pilot to download them to the handheld device. As I did so I suddenly thought of Fepple’s mother telling me her gadget-happy son used a device like mine for a diary. If he’d kept his appointments up to date, they should still be sitting in that machine in his office. And I had a key: I could go in happy and legal, with the implicit consent of Rhonda Fepple.

I quickly returned a few phone calls, looked at my e-mail, pulled up the missing persons bulletin board to see that Questing Scorpio hadn’t answered my message, and went south again, to Hyde Park.

Collins, the four-to-midnight guard, recognized me. “Got some other tenants here we could do without if you want a hit list,” he said with heavy humor as I passed.

I smiled weakly and rode up to the sixth floor. I had a hard time getting myself to open the door, not because of the yellow crime-scene tape sealing it, but because I didn’t want to face the remains of Fepple’s life again. I took a breath and tried the handle. A woman in a nurse’s uniform heading to the elevator stopped to watch me. The police or the building management had locked the office. I took out my key and unlocked the door, breaking the yellow tape as I pushed it open.

“I thought that meant you can’t go in,” the woman said.

“You thought right, but I’m a detective.”

She walked over to peer around me into the room, then backed away, her face turning grey. “Oh, my God. Is that what happened in there? Oh, my God, if this is what can go on in this building, I’m getting a job at the hospital, hours or no hours. This is terrible.”

I was just as appalled as she was, even though I more or less knew what to expect. Fepple’s body was gone, but no one had bothered to clean up after him. Pieces of brain and bone had hardened on the chair and desk. Those weren’t visible from the door, but what you could see was the mess of papers, and on top of it, grey fingerprint powder showing up nests of footprints on the floor. The powder had drifted like dirty snow onto the desk, the computer, the strewn papers. I thought briefly of poor Rhonda Fepple, trying to sort through the wreckage. I hoped she had the sense to hire help.

The police hadn’t bothered to shut down the computer. Using a Kleenex to protect my fingers, I hit the ENTER key and brought the system back up. I couldn’t bring myself to sit on Fepple’s chair, or even touch it, so I leaned across the desk to operate the keyboard. Even in my awkward posture, it only took a few minutes to retrieve his computer datebook. On Friday, he’d had a dinner date with Connie Ingram. He’d even added a note: says she wants to discuss Sommers, but she sounds hot for me.

I printed out the entry and scuttled out of the office as fast as I could move. The foul scene, the fetid air, the horrible image of Connie Ingram sounding hot for Fepple, all made me feel like throwing up again. I found a women’s bathroom, which was locked. I stuck Fepple’s door key in, which didn’t turn the lock but did get someone on the inside to open it for me. I swayed over one of the sinks, washing my face in cold water, rinsing my mouth, pushing the worst of the images out of my mind-away from my stomach.

Connie Ingram, the earnest round-faced claims clerk whose company loyalty wouldn’t let me look at her files? Or who was so loyal that she would date a recalcitrant agent and set him up for a hit?