Sara Paretsky - Total Recall

I went back to Mary Louise’s notes first, before calling my lawyer. Freeman, on the run as usual, said he was convinced personally of Isaiah Sommers’s innocence, but the anonymous phone tip and the fingerprints weren’t good signs.

“Then I guess we need to find the real killer,” I said with dogged cheerfulness.

“I don’t think the guy can afford your fee, Vic.”

“He can’t afford yours, either, Freeman, but I’m still asking you to look after him.”

Freeman chuckled. “So this will get added to your unpaid balance?”

“I send you a big chunk of change every month,” I protested.

“Yep. You’ve gotten the balance down to thirteen thousand-before Sommers’s fees, of course. But you’ll go find me some evidence? Excellent. I was sure we could count on you. In the meantime I keep reminding the state’s attorney that Fepple had a date Friday night with someone using the name Connie Ingram. Whom he was anxious to keep you from seeing. I’m running, Vic-we’ll talk tomorrow.”

That outstanding balance at Freeman’s was one of my biggest headaches. It had gotten out of hand last year when I’d had serious legal troubles, but even before that it had always hovered in the four-figure range. I’ve been putting a thousand on it every month, but it seems like every month I also generate some new need for his billable hours.

I called Isaiah Sommers. When I told him that someone had ratted him out to the cops, he was flabbergasted. “Who could have done that, Ms. Warshawski?”

“How do you know she didn’t do it herself?” Margaret Sommers hissed on the extension.

“The cops had a tip. From a man, by the way, Ms. Sommers, who sounded African-American to them on the replay. My sources in the department say they’re pretty sure the call really was anonymous. I will keep looking into the situation, but it would be helpful if you could tell me of anyone who hates you enough to turn you in for murder.”

“You can’t keep looking,” he mumbled. “I can’t afford to pay you.”

“Don’t worry about that part. The investigation is getting big enough that someone else will pay the bill.” He didn’t need to know the someone would be me. “By the way, not that it’s much consolation when you’re worrying about a murder charge, but Ajax is going to pay your aunt the value of the policy.”

“Funny how that happened just as your bill was going to grow,” Margaret snapped.

“Maggie, Maggie, please-she just said someone else would be taking care of her bill. Ms. Warshawski, this is wonderful news; Margaret, she’s just worried. Like I am, too, of course, but Mr. Carter, he seems like a good lawyer. A real good lawyer. And he’s sure you and he together can get this bad business straightened out.”

It’s good when the client is happy. Trouble was, he seemed to be alone in his good cheer. His wife was miserable. As was Amy Blount. And Paul Radbuka. Me. Max. And most especially Lotty.

She had left the hospital for her clinic after her confrontation with Posner, but when I phoned, Mrs. Coltrain said Dr. Herschel wouldn’t interrupt her schedule to talk to me. I thought of her vehement outcry yesterday evening, that she’d never stinted a patient, that it was a relief to be in the hospital, to be the doctor, not the friend or the wife or the daughter.

“Oh, Lotty, who were the Radbukas?” I cried to the empty room. “Whom do you feel you betrayed?” Not a patient, she’d said that last night. Someone she’d turned her back on whose death consumed her with guilt. It had to have been someone in England -otherwise how had Questing Scorpio gotten the name? A relative was all I could imagine, perhaps a relative who appeared in England after the war that Lotty couldn’t cope with. Someone she had loved in Vienna, but whom the horrors of war had so damaged that Lotty turned away from her. I could see it, could see doing it myself. So why couldn’t she talk to me about it? Did she really think I would judge her?

I checked Questing Scorpio again, but there was still no response to my posting. What else could I do-besides go home to walk the dogs, make dinner, go to bed. Sometimes routine is soothing, but at other times it’s a burden. I searched for Edelweiss on the Web to see if I could come up with any information about Fillida Rossy’s family. I sent the query through both Lexis and ProQuest and went back to the phone, calling Don Strzepek.

He answered my greeting cautiously, remembering that we hadn’t parted very cordially yesterday. “Any word from the intrepid journalist?”

“He’s made it as far as Rome without a scratch. I guess they’re off to Islamabad tomorrow.”

“Don’t worry about him, Vic: he’s been in worse places than Kabul, hard as it is for me to think of any offhand. I mean, it’s not a war zone these days-no one’s going to shoot at him. He may get heckled, but he’s more likely to be the object of curiosity, at least among the kids.”

I felt a little better. “Don, on a different subject-what did you think after you saw Max’s notebooks last night? Do you agree that he didn’t know the Radbukas before he made that trip to Vienna after the war?”

“Yes, it was clearly Dr. Herschel’s connection, more than Max’s. Especially since it was she who fainted at the party on Sunday when she heard Sofie Radbuka’s name. She seemed to have an awful lot of detail about exactly how to hunt down the apartment on the Leopoldsgasse,” he added hesitantly. “I’m wondering if the Radbukas were her family.”

“So Radbuka can start stalking her instead of Max? You know he was at Beth Israel today, with Posner and his Maccabees, screaming to the world that Lotty and Max were trying to keep Holocaust survivors from their birth families?”

“I know it must be painful for them, but Paul really is a tormented spirit, Vic. If he could just find someplace to anchor himself it would calm him down.”

“Have you actually talked to the recovered-memory poster boy yourself?” I asked. “Is there any hope of getting him to show you those papers his father left behind? The ones that proved to him that his father was with the Einsatzgruppen and that he himself was a camp survivor named Radbuka?”

Don paused to make a hissing noise-presumably inhaling smoke. “I did meet him briefly this morning-I guess before he joined Posner at the hospital. He’s pretty agitated these days. Rhea wouldn’t let me ask him too many questions for fear of getting him more upset. He won’t let me see the papers-he seems to think I might be a rival for Rhea’s affection, so he’s clamming up on me.”

I couldn’t suppress a snort of laughter. “I’ve got to hand it to Rhea for sticking with the guy. He’d have me in the locked ward at Elgin within a week if I tried to follow his gyrations around the dance floor. Although of course you are a rival, I can see his point of view. What does Rhea say?”

“She says she can’t betray a patient confidence, which of course I respect her for. Although my old reporter’s instincts make that hard to do.” He gave a little laugh that managed to sound both rueful and admiring. “She encouraged his involvement with Posner because Posner’s giving him a sense of real family. But of course we didn’t know when we saw him they were going to go picket Max at the hospital. I’m seeing her for dinner tonight, so I’ll talk to her about it then.”

I made a little structure out of paper clips while I chose my words. “Don, I asked Radbuka today who Ulrich was, and he had kind of a fit on the street, saying it was his foster father’s name and that I was accusing Rhea of being a liar. But you know, yesterday she made quite a point that Ulrich wasn’t the guy’s name. She even seemed to be laughing at me a little over that.”