Sara Paretsky - Total Recall

The elevator dinged to a stop behind me. Before I could get on, Ralph grabbed my arm.

“Since you’re already here, give me two more minutes. I want you to talk to someone in my office.”

“If I lose my chance to tail a guy who’s in your demonstration, I am going to be one very cross detective, Ralph, so make it succinct for me, okay? Which raises another question in my mind: why are you focusing on your wretched microfiche when the building is under siege?”

He ignored my question, moving fast along the rosy carpets to his office. His secretary, Denise, was still at her post. Connie Ingram and a strange black woman were sitting stiffly on the tubular chairs. They looked nervously at Ralph when we came in.

Ralph introduced the strange woman-Karen Bigelow, who was Connie’s supervisor in claims. “Just tell Vic here what you told me, Karen.”

She nodded, turning to face me. “I know about the whole Sommers situation. I was on vacation last week, but Connie explained how she’d had to leave the file up here with Mr. Rossy. And how this private detective might try to get her to reveal confidential company information. So when she-when you-came around asking to see the fiche, Connie came straight to me. Neither of us was too surprised. As you know, of course, Connie here stood her ground, but she got kind of worried and went to check the microfiche. The card that included the Sommers file has gone missing. Not checked out or anything. Disappeared. And I understand you were alone on the floor for some time, miss.”

I smiled pleasantly. “I see. I have to confess I don’t know where the fiche are stored, or you might have legitimate grounds for suspicion. To you, who knows that rabbit warren on thirty-nine, it’s all familiar, but to a stranger it’s impenetrable. But there’s one easy thing to do: check for fingerprints. Mine are on file with the secretary of state, because I’m a licensed investigator as well as an officer of the court. Get the cops in, treat it like a real theft.”

The room was silent for a minute, then Ralph said, “If you were in that cabinet, Vic, you’d have wiped it clean.”

“All the more reason to dust it. If it’s covered with prints-besides Connie’s, which belong there since she just checked the drawer-or claims she did-you’ll know I wasn’t in there.”

“What do you mean, claims she did, Miss Detective?” Karen Bigelow gave me a hard look.

“It’s like this, Ms. Supervisor: I don’t know what kind of game Ajax is playing with the Sommers family claim, but it’s a game whose stakes are mighty high, now that a man’s been killed. Fepple’s mother gave me a key to the agency office. I went down there today to see if I could find any trace of his appointment calendar.”

I paused to stare hard at Connie Ingram, but her round face didn’t show any special anxiety. “Now, whoever killed Howard Fepple swiped the Sommers file. They swiped his handheld electronic diary. But they didn’t think to wipe out the appointment from his computer. Or-they were even more squeamish than I was about getting near the machine since it had his brains and blood all over it.”

Both Bigelow and Connie flinched at that, which only proved they didn’t like the idea of brains and blood and computers all mixed together. “Well, guess who had an appointment with Howard Fepple last Friday night? Young Connie Ingram here.”

Her mouth widened in a giant O of protest. “I never. I never made an appointment to see him. If he put that in his diary, he’s lying!”

“Someone is,” I agreed. “I was with him Friday afternoon, and some very sophisticated person gave him a simple but slick method for ditching me. This person came back in with him under cover of a group of Lamaze parents and left with them. Probably after killing him. Connie Ingram is the only appointment he showed for Friday. And next to it he’d written, says she wants to discuss Sommers, but she sounds hot for me.” I pulled the diary printout from my bag and waved it at her.

“He wrote that down about me? I only ever talked to him on the phone, to ask him to double-check about the payment. And that was last week right after you first came here. Mr. Rossy asked me to. I live at home. I live with my mother. I would never-I never made that kind of phone call.” She buried her face in her hands, crimson with shame.

Ralph snatched the printout from me. He looked at it, then tossed it contemptuously aside. “I have a Palm. You can enter events after the date-anyone could have typed that in. Including you, Vic. To deflect criticism away from your helping yourself to our microfiche.”

“Another thing for technicians to look at,” I snapped. “You can back-enter dates, but you can’t fool the machine: it will tell you what day those keystrokes were typed. It seems to me we’ve just about covered anything useful here: I need to get these technical problems to the cops before little Miss Innocence here goes down and wipes out the hard drive.”

Tears were streaming down Connie’s face. “Karen, Mr. Devereux, honest, I was never down in that agent’s office. I never said I’d go out with him, even though he asked me to, why would I? He didn’t sound like a nice person on the phone.”

“He asked you out on a date?” I interrupted her wailing. “When was that?”

“When I called down there. After you were here last week I called him, like I said, like Mr. Rossy and Mr. Devereux asked me to. To find out what he had in his files, and he said, he talked in this kind of nasty way, he said, ‘Lots of juicy stuff. Wouldn’t you like to see it? We could share a bottle of wine and go over the file together.’ And I said, ‘No, sir, I just want you to send me copies of all your relevant documents so I can find out how this policy got a check issued on it when the policyholder was still alive.’ And then he said more stuff, really, I can’t repeat it, and he seemed to think it would be fun to have a date, but honestly, I know I still live with my mother and I’m thirty-three, but I’m not a desperate virgin like-anyway, I never said I would see him. If he put it in his calendar, he was a liar and I’m not sorry he’s dead, so there!” She ran sobbing from the room.

“Does that satisfy you, Miss Detective?” Karen Bigelow said coldly. “Seems to me you could find something better to do than bully an honest, hardworking girl like Connie Ingram. Excuse me, Mr. Devereux, I’d better make sure she’s all right.”

She started to sail majestically from the room, but I moved to block her path. “Ms. Claims Supervisor, it’s great that you support your staff, but you came up here to accuse me of theft. Before you go off to mop up Connie Ingram’s tears, I want that accusation cleared up.”

She breathed heavily at me. “I heard from the girl who took you over to Connie’s workstation that you were wandering around the floor. You could have been in those files.”

“Then we’ll call the cops. I won’t have this kind of accusation made lightly about me. Besides which, someone is trying to make sure no copies of that file remain. I may be advising my client to sue Ajax. In which case, if you can’t find the documents you’re going to look mighty stupid in court.”

“If that’s your goal, you’d have all the more motive for stealing the fiche,” Ralph said.

Red lights of anger were starting to dance in front of me. “And I’ll bring an action for slander.”

I moved to his desk and started pressing keys on the phone. It had been a long time since I’d dialed the work number for my dad’s oldest friend on the force, but I still knew it by heart. Bobby Mallory has made a reluctant adjustment to my career as a detective, but he still prefers that when we meet it be for family events.