Sara Paretsky - Total Recall

“What do you think you’re doing?” Ralph demanded, as an officer answered the phone.

“I’m doing what you should have done, calling the cops.” I turned to the phone. “Officer Bostwick, it’s V I Warshawski: is Captain Mallory in?”

Ralph’s eyes glittered. “You have no authority to bring the cops into this building. I will speak to this officer and tell him so.”

It was a sign of the change in Bobby’s attitude toward me that although I’d never met Officer Bostwick he recognized my name. He told me that Bobby was unavailable; was there a message?

“A murder in the Twenty-first District, officer-there’s evidence in the computer, which was left running and left in the vic’s office.” I gave him Fepple’s address and date of death. “Commander Purling may not have realized the importance of the computer. But I’m at the Ajax Insurance company, where the vic did a lot of business, and there may be a question of checking the time when data was entered.”

“ Ajax?” Bostwick said. “They’re having a lot of trouble these days- Durham and Posner are out front right now, aren’t they?”

“Yes, indeed, the building is surrounded by demonstrators, but the claims vice president thinks this agent’s death merits more of his attention than a few protesters.”

“Doesn’t sound like a few to me, miss, the way they were asking for backup out there on Adams. But give me the details about this computer-I’ll make sure a forensics unit gets down to it. Commander Purling, well, with the Robert Taylor Homes in his district, he doesn’t have time to do a lot of finesse work.”

A discreet way of saying the guy was a lazy jerk. I gave Bostwick the details about Fepple and the importance of the date, adding that I had seen the victim shortly before he left for an appointment on Friday evening. Bostwick repeated back what I said, double-checked the spelling of my name, and asked where Captain Mallory could reach me if he wanted to discuss the situation.

I hung up and glared at Ralph. “I’m respecting the privacy of your company and your authority over it, but you had damned well better make a call like that yourself if you want to find out who really was in your microfiche cabinet. Especially if you’re going to keep accusing me of theft. We should know by the end of the day tomorrow, or Thursday at the latest, when that date with Connie Ingram was entered in Fepple’s computer. If it was before I last saw him on Friday, then Ms. Ingram’s going to be crying for a bigger audience than us. By the way, what happened to your paper file? The one Rossy hung on to last week?”

Ralph and Karen Bigelow exchanged startled glances. “I guess he still has it,” the supervisor said. “It hasn’t been checked back into our unit.”

“Is his office up here? Let’s go ask him about it-unless you think I wandered in and stole it after we spoke at noon, Ralph.”

He flushed. “No, I don’t imagine you did. But why did you go down to the thirty-ninth floor at noon without telling me? You’d been with me seconds earlier.”

“It was an impulse; it only occurred to me when I got to the elevators. You had pretty much stiffed me on the file, and I was hoping Ms. Ingram would let me see it. Can we at least go see Rossy, get the paper file back from him?”

“The chairman went down to Springfield today. The Holocaust Recovery Act is coming up in front of the banking and insurance committee-he wanted to testify against it. Rossy went with him.”

“Really.” My brows went up. “He’d invited me to dinner tonight.”

“What’d he do that for?” Ralph’s flush deepened into resentment.

“When he called yesterday to invite me, he said it was because his wife was homesick and wanted someone she could speak Italian with.”

“Are you making that up?”

“No, Ralph. I’m not making up anything I said this afternoon. But maybe he forgot about the invitation. When did he decide to go to Springfield?”

Resentment was still uppermost in Ralph’s mind. “Hey, I just run the claims department. Apparently not too well if people make off with our files. No one talks to me about deep subjects like legislative hearings. Rossy’s got an office on the other side of the floor. His secretary’s probably here: you can ask her if he’s coming back tonight. I’ll walk you over to see if he’s still got the file.”

“I should find Connie, Mr. Devereux,” Karen Bigelow said. “But what should I do about the microfiche? Should I report the theft to security?”

Ralph hesitated, then told her she should lock the cabinet and declare it off-limits. “Conduct a desk-by-desk search of your unit tomorrow. Someone may have inadvertently kept the fiche after looking up some other file. If you don’t find it by the end of the day, let me know: I’ll call security.”

“Look, you two,” I said, impatient with this futile proposal, “Connie’s name in Fepple’s calendar is serious. If she didn’t set up the date, someone did it using her name. Which means it was someone who knows her as a claims handler. And that means a very limited universe, especially since it wasn’t me.”

Ralph knotted his tie and unrolled his cuffs. “According to you, anyway.”

We found Rossy’s secretary in the chairman’s conference room, watching the early-evening news with the chairman’s secretary, the head of the marketing department-whom I’d met at Ajax’s hundred-fiftieth-birthday celebration-and five other people who were never introduced.

“We are demanding a boycott of all Ajax insurance by America ’s Jewish community,” Posner was proclaiming to the camera. “Preston Janoff insulted the whole Jewish community, he insulted the sacred memories of the dead, by his remarks in Springfield today.”

Beth Blacksin’s face replaced Posner’s on the screen. “Preston Janoff is the chairman of the Ajax Insurance group. He testified today against adoption of a bill that would require life-insurance companies to scan their books to see if they have any outstanding obligations to families of Holocaust victims.”

The camera switched to Janoff, standing in front of the legislative chamber in Springfield. He was tall, silver-haired, somber in a charcoal suit that suggested, but didn’t emphasize, mourning.

“We understand the pain of those who lost loved ones in the Holocaust, but we believe it would be an insult to the African-American, to the Native American, and to other communities who have suffered greatly in this country, to single out for special treatment people whose families were killed in Europe. And Ajax did not sell life insurance in Europe in the decades before the Second World War. For us to turn our files inside out on the off chance that one or two policies might come to light would place an extraordinary burden on our shareholders.”

One of the legislators rose to ask if it wasn’t true that Edelweiss Re of Switzerland was now the owner of Ajax. “Our committee wants to know about Edelweiss’s life-insurance policies.”

Janoff held up a copy of Amy Blount’s history, “One Hundred Fifty Years of Life and Still Going Strong.” “I believe this booklet will show the committee that Edelweiss was a small regional player in the life-insurance business in Switzerland during the war. The company has made copies available to all members of the legislature. Again, any involvement with consumers in Germany or eastern Europe would have been very small.”

A babble erupted as various members sprang to their microphones, but the program returned us to the Global studio, where Murray Ryerson, who occasionally did political commentary for Global, was speaking. “Later this afternoon, the House Insurance Committee voted eleven-to-two to table the proposed bill, which effectively kills it. Joseph Posner has been leafletting, telephoning, and picketing in an effort to start a nationwide boycott of all Ajax Insurance products in retaliation. It’s too early to tell if he’s succeeding, but we have heard that the Birnbaum family will continue to use Ajax for their workers’ compensation coverage, business reputedly worth sixty-three million dollars in premiums to Ajax this year. Alderman Louis Durham hailed Janoff’s speech and the vote with mixed reactions.”