Sara Paretsky - Total Recall

We were treated to a close-up of Durham outside the Ajax building in his beautifully cut jacket. “Ideally, we want to see compensation for victims of African slavery in this country. Or at the very least in this state. But we appreciate Chairman Janoff’s sensitivity to the issue, to not letting Jews dominate a discussion of reparations in Illinois. We will take our fight for reparations for the victims of slavery directly to the legislature now, and we will fight until we win.”

When the evening news anchor, sitting next to Murray in the studio, came on the screen saying, “In other news, the Cubs lost their thirteenth straight today at Wrigley,” Janoff’s secretary switched off the set.

“This is wonderful news-Mr. Janoff will be terrifically pleased,” she said. “He hadn’t heard the vote when he and Mr. Rossy left Springfield. Chick, can you go on-line and find out who voted with us? I’ll call him in his car: he was going straight from Meigs to a dinner meeting.”

A fresh-faced young man obediently left the room.

“Was Mr. Rossy going to dinner with him?” I asked.

The rest of the room turned to stare at me as if I had dropped in from Pluto. Rossy’s secretary, an extremely glossy specimen with shiny black hair and a tailored navy dress, asked who I was and why I wanted to know. I introduced myself, explaining that Rossy had invited me to dinner in his home this evening. When Rossy’s secretary took me back to her own desk to check her calendar, the room started buzzing behind us: if I’d been invited to the Rossy home, I must be powerful; they needed to know who I was.

Rossy’s secretary tapped rapidly across the corridor on very high heels. Ralph and I trailed in her wake.

“Yes, Ms. Warshawski: I remember getting your number for Mr. Rossy yesterday morning, but he didn’t tell me he’d invited you to dinner-it’s not in my book. Shall I check with Mrs. Rossy for you? She is the decision-maker on his social calendar.”

Her hand was already poised over the phone. She hit a speed-dial button, talked briefly with Mrs. Rossy, and assured me that they were expecting me.

“Suzanne,” Ralph said as she started to pack up her desk. “Bertrand took a claims file away to study last week. We’re anxious to get it back-there’s an open investigation going on with it.”

Suzanne tapped into Rossy’s inner office and came back almost immediately with the Sommers file. “I’m so sorry, Mr. Devereux. He left a message in his dictation that I was to get this back to you, but he decided at the last minute to go to Springfield with Mr. Janoff; in the flurry of getting him down there, the file slipped my mind. Mr. Rossy wanted to make sure you knew how much he appreciated the work Connie Ingram did for him on this.”

Ralph grunted unenthusiastically. He didn’t want to admit doubts about his staff, but my finding Connie Ingram’s name in Fepple’s diary was clearly troubling him.

“I know Connie Ingram was helpful in tracking down the agent’s copy of the paper trail on this file,” I said. “Did Mr. Rossy ask her to call on Fepple-the agent-in person?”

Suzanne lifted her perfectly tweezed eyebrows, as if astonished that a peon would try to worm her boss’s secrets out of her. “You’d have to ask Mr. Rossy that. Perhaps you’ll have a chance to do so at dinner.”

“Really, Vic,” Ralph spluttered as we got back to his office. “What are you trying to suggest? That Connie Ingram was involved in killing an insurance agent? That Rossy somehow ordered her to do it? Get a grip on yourself.”

I thought of Connie Ingram’s round, earnest face and had to admit she didn’t seem likely either as a murderer or a murderer’s tool. “But I want to know how her name got into Fepple’s diary if she didn’t make the appointment or if she didn’t go down herself to his office and back-enter it,” I added stubbornly.

Ralph bared his teeth in a snarl. “I wouldn’t put it past you to do it. If you thought that would get you in the door.”

“That brings us back to where we started. Why don’t you let me thumb through the Sommers file so I can get out of here and leave you in peace.”

“Somehow peace is not what you ever leave me in, V I.”

There was just enough of a double edge to his tone that I hastily took the file from him and started thumbing through the contents. He stood over me while I carefully looked at each page. I couldn’t see anything odd, either in the client payment reports or the claim-payment record. Aaron Sommers had started paying weekly installments on May 13, 1971, and had paid the policy in full in 1986. Then a death claim, signed by the widow, and notarized, had been filed in September 1991 and duly paid a few days later. There were two copies of the canceled check-the one Connie had originally printed from the fiche, and one which Fepple had faxed to her from his files. They looked identical.

A copy of Rick Hoffman’s worksheet, where he’d typed up the figures for the weekly payments, was attached to a letter to Ajax alerting them to the sale. I had hoped the signature would be in the same ornate writing as the document I’d found in Fepple’s briefcase, but it was a very ordinary, nondescript hand.

Ralph inspected each document as I finished with it. “I guess it’s okay,” he said when we got to the end.

“Guess? Is there something wrong?”

He shook his head, but he still looked puzzled. “Everything’s here. Everything’s in order. It’s like ten thousand other claim folders I’ve inspected in the last twenty years. I don’t know why something doesn’t seem quite right. You run along: I’m going to stand over Denise while she copies every document, so that there are two witnesses to the contents.”

It was after six now. In the event that Posner was still out front, I wanted to get downstairs to see if I could pick up Radbuka’s trail. I was almost at the elevators when Ralph caught up with me.

“Vic-sorry. I was out of line earlier. But the coincidence of you being on the floor, the fiche missing, and knowing that you sometimes use, well, unorthodox methods-”

I made a wry face. “You’re right, Ralph. But I really swear, scout’s honor, that I was nowhere near your fiche.”

“I wish I knew what in hell was so important about this one lousy life-insurance case.” He slammed the flat of his hand against the elevator wall.

“The agent who sold it-Rick Hoffman-he’s been dead for seven years now. Would the company still have a record of his home address, his family, anything about him? He had a son-guy who’d be, I don’t know, close to sixty now-maybe he has papers that would shed some light on the situation.” It was a straw, but we didn’t have any more substantial building material right now.

Ralph pulled a small notebook from his breast pocket and scribbled a note. “I start the afternoon accusing you of theft and end it as your errand boy. I’ll see what I can find out. I wish you hadn’t called the cops, though. Now they’ll be around wanting to interrogate Connie. Who I refuse to believe killed the guy. She might have shot him-if she had a gun-if she’d agreed to go see him-and if he’d stepped across the line. But can you picture her scheming to make a murder look like suicide?”

“I’ve always been way too impulsive, Ralph, but-you can’t fling accusations at me without something more to go on than my unorthodox methods. Also, you need to face the fact that someone was in that drawer. Your and Ms. Bigelow’s solution is a Band-Aid: the team investigating Fepple’s murder should know that someone stole that microfiche. You should get them in here, regardless of the PR consequences. As for Connie Ingram, she should answer those questions, but you can show you’re a good guy by alerting Ajax ’s legal team. Make sure senior counsel is with her when she’s questioned. She seems to trust Ms. Bigelow; have Bigelow sit in on the interrogation. A lot will hinge on when her name was entered into Fepple’s computer. And whether she has an alibi for last Friday night.”