Sara Paretsky - Total Recall

“I don’t know. What’s the problem?”

“Oh. I’ve told the story so many times I forgot you don’t know it. I had a break-in at my apartment.”

She had come home at ten last night from a lecture in Evanston to find her papers strewn about, her computer damaged, and her floppy disks missing. When she called the cops, they didn’t take it seriously.

“But those are my dissertation notes. They’re irreplaceable. I have the dissertation written up and bound, but the notes, I would use those for another book. The police don’t understand, they say it’s impossible to track down all the burglaries in the city, and since no valuables are missing-well, I don’t have valuables, just my computer.”

“How did the intruders get in?”

“Through the back door. Even though I have a gate across it, they broke through it without any of the neighbors paying the least attention. Hyde Park is supposed to be such a liberal neighborhood, but everyone scuttles away at the first sign that anyone around them is in trouble,” she added bitterly.

“Where are you?” I asked.

“At a friend’s. I couldn’t stay in the middle of all that mess, and I didn’t want to clean it up until someone saw it who would pay attention to the problem.”

I took her friend’s address and told her either I or Mary Louise would be there within the next two hours. She tried to argue me into coming sooner, but I explained that emergency detectives were like emergency plumbers: we had to fit the job in around all the other broken boilers.

I finished the omelette but skipped the steak fries-my usual weakness, but if I ate one I’d eat them all, and then I’d be too logy to think very fast. And the day was looking like one that would require Einstein-like thought. I didn’t wait for my bill but put fifteen dollars on the table and trotted back up Racine to my car.

I had a couple of errands to run in the financial district before going in to my office. As I drove downtown, I called Mary Louise to make sure she was able to work some more hours this afternoon so that she could go see Amy Blount’s apartment. She was pretty terse with me, but I told her she’d see me soon enough to off-load her complaints in person.

Since I was down by the City-County building anyway, I went inside to find Alderman Durham’s office. Naturally he had one on the South Side, in his own ward, but aldercreatures mostly hang out in the Loop, where the money and power are.

I scribbled a note on my card: In re the widow’s mite and Isaiah Sommers. After a mere fifteen minutes’ wait, the secretary scooted me ahead of other supplicants, who gave me dirty looks for jumping the queue.

The alderman had a young man with him wearing the navy blazer with the Empower Youth Energy insignia on it: a gold eye with EYE on Youth embroidered around it. The alderman himself was dressed in Harris tweed, his shirt having the palest green stripe in it to match the green in the tweed.

He shook my hand genially and waved me to a seat. “So you have something to say about the widow’s mite, Ms. Warshawski?”

“Have you kept up with that story, alderman? You know Margaret Sommers took your advice and insisted on a meeting with the agent, Howard Fepple, only to walk in and find him dead?”

“I’m sorry to hear it: that must have been a shock for her.”

“She got a worse one this morning. Her husband has been brought in for questioning-the cops got a tip. They think he murdered Fepple-out of outrage over the guy robbing his aunt of her mite, so to speak.”

He nodded slowly. “I can understand their reasoning, but I’m sure Isaiah wouldn’t have killed a man. I’ve known him for years, you see, for years, because his aunt, bless her, had a son who was one of my boys before he passed. Isaiah is a fine man, a churchgoing man. I don’t see him as a murdering man.”

“Do you see who might have phoned in an anonymous tip to the police, alderman? Their technicians say they’re pretty sure it was an African-American male who made the call.”

He gave a great mirthless smile. “And you thought to yourself, Who do I know who’s an African-American male? Louis Durham. We’re all alike, after all, we black men: animals at heart, aren’t we.”

I looked at him steadily. “I thought to myself, Who has been having surreptitious meetings with the European chief of the insurance company that holds the paper on Aaron Sommers? I thought to myself, I don’t see what enticements those two men could offer each other-kill the Holocaust Asset Recovery Act in exchange for shutting down the demonstrations outside the Ajax building? But what if Mr. Rossy wanted something more-what if he wanted Isaiah Sommers to take the fall for the murder so that he could close the claim file and get the mess out of his hair? What if in exchange for shutting off your demonstration and getting someone to finger Isaiah Sommers, Rossy said he’d fly to Springfield to kill the IHARA bill for you?”

“You have a reputation as an investigator, Warshawski. This isn’t worthy of you.” Durham stood and moved to the door; the young man in the EYE blazer followed him.

I perforce got up to leave, as well. “Yes, but remember, Durham, I’m shameless-you wrote that on your placards yourself.”

I picked up my car from the West Loop garage where I’d parked, more puzzled than angered by the encounter. What had he hoped to learn from me that got me in to see him so readily? What were he and Rossy doing together? Had one of his people really made that phone call that led to Isaiah Sommers’s arrest? I couldn’t put the pieces together in any meaningful way.

I was negotiating the tricky intersection at Armitage, where three streets come together underneath the Kennedy Expressway, when Tim Streeter called. “Vic, not to alarm you, but there’s a bit of a situation.”

My heart skipped a beat. “Calia? What’s happened? Where are you? Oh, help, hang on.” I laid down rubber under the Kennedy, forced a semi turning onto the expressway to stand on his brakes with a loud blaring of his horn, and pulled into a gas station on the other side.

“Vic, calm down. The kid’s here with me; we’re at the Children’s Museum in Wilmette. Agnes is fine. It’s at the hospital. This guy Posner, you know, the one who’s been-”

“Yeah, yeah, I know who he is.”

“Okay, he’s shown up at the hospital with a group of pickets denouncing Mr. Loewenthal and Dr. Herschel for keeping Jewish families apart. The kid and I were supposed to drop in on Mr. Loewenthal for a brown-bag lunch-Mom’s working on her presentation for the gallery-but when we got to the hospital, Posner and his gang were out in force.”

“Oh, damn him and the horse he rode in on, too.” So much adrenaline was running through me that I was ready to bounce up to Bryn Mawr Avenue and take Posner apart with my own hands. “Radbuka there?”

“Yeah. That’s when we got a bit of a situation: I didn’t realize what it was at first, thought it might be a labor dispute or right-to-lifers. Wasn’t until we got close up that I made out the signs. And then Radbuka saw the kid and wanted to make a move on her. I hustled her out of there but the cameras were rolling; she may be on TV tonight. Hard to say. Called Mr. Loewenthal from the car and came on up here.”

He interrupted himself briefly to talk to Calia, who was whining in the background that she needed to see her Opa now. “I’d better go, but I told Mr. Loewenthal if he needs extra support to call my brother. I’ll stick with the little one.”

When we’d hung up I sat with my head in my hands, trying to order my mind. I couldn’t just fly north to the hospital without doing something for Isaiah Sommers. I forced myself to continue to my office, where Mary Louise greeted me with a severe reprimand over once again making myself so inaccessible overnight: it was no way to run this kind of business. If I wanted to unplug myself from the world to sleep, I should let her know so she could cover for me.