Sara Paretsky - Total Recall

He sucked in another lungful of smoke. “I’d forgotten that. I can try to ask her again tonight, but-Vic, I’m not going to play man in the middle between you and Rhea.”

“No, Don, I don’t expect you to.” All I wanted him to do was be on my side, pump her for information, and feed it to me. That wasn’t really asking him to be in the middle. “But if you can persuade her that Max isn’t related to the Radbuka family, maybe she in turn can persuade Paul to stop making a scene up at Beth Israel. Only, Don, for God’s sake, please don’t feed Lotty to Rhea as a substitute for Max. I don’t know if the Radbukas were cousins or patients or enemy aliens in London whom Lotty was close to, but she won’t survive the kind of harassment Paul’s been giving Max.”

I waited for his response, but he wouldn’t promise me anything. I ended up slamming the phone down in disgust.

Before giving up detecting for the day, I also phoned Amy Blount. Mary Louise’s report had said that the break-in at her place had been the work of a pro, not a random smash-and-grab. The padlock on the gate was intact, Mary Louise had written.

Someone had run a torch around it, taking the gate apart: the scorch marks on the kitchen door were obvious. Because you were interested in her connection to Ajax, I asked her specifically about any Ajax documents. She didn’t have originals; she had scanned various 19th-century files to a floppy, which was missing. In fact, all her dissertation notes were missing. The perps damaged her computer as well. Nothing else was gone, not even her sound system. I talked Terry into sending down a proper forensics crew, but we’re still not likely to find the perps.

I commiserated with Ms. Blount over her misery, then asked if her paper files had been tampered with.

“Oh, yes, those are gone, too, all my research notes. Who could want them? If I’d known I was sitting on such hot material I’d have published my dissertation by now; I’d have a real job, instead of hanging on in this rathole writing diddly corporate histories.”

“Ms. Blount, what papers had you copied from the Ajax files?”

“I did not take classified internal documents. I did not hand confidential company information to Alderman Durham-”

“Ms. Blount, please, I know this has been a tough twenty-four hours, but don’t jump on me. I’m asking for quite a different reason. I’m trying to figure out what is going on at Ajax Insurance these days.”

I explained what had been happening since I’d visited her on Friday-primarily Fepple’s death, Sommers’s problems, Connie Ingram’s name appearing on Fepple’s appointment register. “The real oddity was the fragment of a document I found.”

She listened carefully to everything I said, but my description of the handwritten document didn’t sound like anything she’d seen. “I’ll be glad to look at it-I could come by your office tomorrow sometime. Offhand it sounds like something out of an old ledger, but I can’t interpret all those marks unless I see them. If it has your client’s name on it, it would be recent, at least by my standards. The papers I copied dated from the 1850’s, because my research is on the economics of slavery.”

She was suddenly depressed again. “All that material is missing. I suppose I can go back to the archives and recopy it. It’s the sense of violation that gets me down. And the pointlessness of it all.”

Melancholy gave me a restless night’s sleep. I got up at six to run the dogs. I was in my office by eight-thirty, even though I stopped for breakfast again at the diner, even though I made a detour to Lotty’s clinic on my way down. I didn’t see her-she was still at the hospital making rounds.

As soon as Mary Louise came in, I sent her to the South Side to see if any of Sommers’s friends could help figure out who had fingered him. I called Don Strzepek back, to see if he’d had any luck-or I’d had any luck-in getting Rhea to take Paul’s harassment of Max seriously.

He gave an embarrassed cough. “She said she thought it was a sign of strength in him that he was making new friends, but she could see that he might need a greater sense of proportion.”

“So she’ll talk to him?” I couldn’t keep the impatience out of my voice.

“She says she’ll bring it up at his next regular appointment, but she can’t take on the role of managing her patients’ lives: they need to function in the real world, fall, pick themselves up, like everyone else. If they can’t do that, then they need more help than she can give them. She’s so amazing,” he crooned, “I’ve never known anyone like her.”

I cut him short halfway through his love song, asking him if that high-six-figure book advance was clouding his objectivity on Paul Radbuka. He hung up, hurt: I wasn’t willing to discover Rhea’s good points.

I was still snarling to myself over that conversation when Murray Ryerson called from the Herald-Star. Beth Blacksin had told him about my private conversation with Posner yesterday at the demonstration.

“For old times’ sake, V I,” he wheedled me. “Far off the record. What was that about?”

“Far off the record, Murray? May Horace Greeley rise from the dead and wither your testicles if you talk even to your mother about this, let alone Blacksin?”

“Scout’s honor, Warshawski.”

He had never betrayed such a confidence in the past. “Off the record, I don’t know what it means, but Posner and Durham both had private audiences with Bertrand Rossy, the managing director of Edelweiss Re, who’s in Chicago overseeing their takeover of Ajax. I was wondering if Rossy had offered Posner something to get him to stop protesting at Ajax and move on to Beth Israel, but I didn’t get anywhere with asking Posner. He might talk to you-women scare him.”

“Maybe it’s just you, V I-you scare me and I’m twice Posner’s size. Durham, though-no one’s ever pinned anything on him, even though the mayor has the cops sticking to him like his underwear. Guy’s one smooth operator. But if I learn something splendid about either of them I promise I’ll share.”

I felt a little better when I’d hung up: it was good to have some kind of ally. I took the L downtown to meet with clients who actually were paying me to do sophisticated work on their behalf and got back to my office a little before two. The phone was ringing as I unlocked the door. I got to it just as the answering service did. It was Tim Streeter; in the background I could hear Calia howling.

“Tim-what’s going on?”

“We have a small situation here, Vic. I’ve been trying to call you for the last few hours, but you didn’t have your phone on. Our pal was back this morning. I have to admit, my guard was down; I assumed he was concentrating on Posner these days. Anyway, you know he goes everywhere by bicycle? Calia and I were in the park on the swings, when he came roaring across the grass on his bike. He grabbed at Calia. Of course I had her in my arms before he touched her, but he got that Nibusher, you know, that little blue dog she takes everywhere.”

Behind him I could hear Calia scream, “Not Nibusher, he’s Ninshubur the faithful hound. He misses me, he needs me right now, I want him now, Tim!”

“Oh, hell,” I said. “Max needs to get a restraining order on this guy-he’s like a disintegrating Roman candle these days. And that damned therapist is zero help-not to mention Strzepek. I should have been following Paul, made sure I got his home address. Will you call your brother and tell him I want him ready to tail Radbuka home from Posner’s office or Rhea Wiell’s, or wherever he next pops up?”

“Will do. I couldn’t follow him out of the park, of course, because I needed to stay with the kid. This is not a good situation.”