Sara Paretsky - V.I. Warshawski 10 (19 page)

“Or she. Lotty revealed no details at all. But she did
say it, said that the person no longer exists.” I thought about it. “It’s a
peculiar construction: that person no longer exists. It could mean several
things—the person died, the person changed identities, or maybe the person
betrayed her in some way so that someone she loved or who she thought loved her
never really existed.”

“Then the pain could come from the reminder of a
second loss. Don’t go sleuthing after her, Vic. Let her bring the story to you
when she’s strong enough to.”

I fixed my eyes on the road. “And if she never tells
me?”

He leaned over to wipe a tear from my cheek. “It’s not
your failure as a friend. These are her demons, not your failures.”

I didn’t speak much for the rest of the ride. We were
going about a hundred miles around the big U of Lake Michigan’s southern end; I
let the rhythm of car and road fill my mind.

Morrell had booked a room at a rambling stone inn
overlooking Lake Michigan. After checking in we took a walk along the beach. It
was hard to believe that this was the same lake that Chicago bordered—the long
stretches of dunes, empty of everything but birds and prairie grasses, were a
different world than the relentless noise and grime of the city.

Three weeks after Labor Day we had the lakefront to
ourselves. Feeling the wind from the lake in my hair, making the crystalline
sand along the shore sing by rubbing it with my bare heel, gave me a cocoon of
peace. I felt the tension lines smooth out of my cheeks and forehead.

“Morrell—it will be very hard for me to live without
you these next few months. I know this trip is exciting and that you’re eager
to go. I don’t grudge it to you. But it will be hard—especially right now—not
to have you here.”

He pulled me to him. “It will be hard for me to be
away from you, too,
pepaiola
. You keep me stirred up, sneezing, with
your vigorous remarks.”

I’d told Morrell once that my father used to call my
mother and me that—one of the few Italian words he’d picked up from my mother.
Pepper mill. My two
pepaiole,
he’d say, pretending to sneeze when we
were haranguing him over something. You’re making my nose red, okay, okay,
we’ll do it your way just to protect my nose. When I was a little girl he could
make me burst out laughing with his fake sneezes.

“
Pepaiola,
huh—sneeze at this!” I tossed a
little sand at Morrell and sprinted away from him down the beach. He chased
after me, which he normally wouldn’t do—he doesn’t like to run, and anyway, I’m
faster. I slowed so he could catch me. We spent the rest of the day avoiding
all difficult topics, including his imminent departure. The air was chilly, but
the lake was still warm: we swam naked in the dark, then huddled in a blanket
on the beach, making love with Andromeda overhead and Orion the hunter, my
talisman, rising in the east, his belt so close it seemed we might pluck it
from the sky. Sunday at noon we changed reluctantly into our dress clothes and
drove back into the city for the Cellini’s final Chicago concert.

When we stopped for gas near the entrance to the
tollway, the weekend felt officially over, so I bought the Sunday papers.
Durham’s protest led both the news and the op-ed sections in the
Herald-Star
.
I was glad to see that my interview with Blacksin and Murray had made Durham
cool his jets about me.

Mr. Durham has dropped one of his complaints, that
Chicago private investigator V I Warshawski confronted a bereaved woman in the
middle of her husband’s funeral. “My sources in the community were
understandably devastated by the terrible inhumanity of an insurance company
failing to keep its promise to pay to bury a loved one; in their agitation they
may have misspoken Ms. Warshawski’s role in the case.”

“
May
have misspoken? Can’t he come right out
and say he was wrong?” I snarled at Morrell.

Murray had added a few sentences saying that my
investigation was raising troubling questions about the role of both the Midway
Insurance Agency and the Ajax Insurance company. Midway owner Howard Fepple had
not returned phone calls. An Ajax spokesperson said the company had uncovered a
fraudulent death claim submitted ten years ago; they were trying to see how
that could have occurred.

The op-ed page had an article by the president of the
Illinois Insurance Institute. I read it aloud to Morrell.

Imagine that you go into Berlin, the capital of
Germany, and find a large museum dedicated to the horrors of three centuries of
African slavery in the United States. Then imagine that Frankfurt, Munich,
Cologne, Bonn all have smaller versions of American slavery museums. That’s
what it’s like for America to put up Holocaust museums while completely
ignoring atrocities committed here against Africans and Native Americans.

Now suppose Germany passed a law saying that any
American company which benefited from slavery couldn’t do business in Europe.
That’s what Illinois wants to do with German companies. The past is a tangled
country. No one’s hands are clean, but if we have to stop every ten minutes to
wash them before we can sell cars, or chemicals, or even insurance, commerce
will grind to a halt.

“And so on. Lotty isn’t alone in wanting the past to
stay good and buried. Pretty slick, in a superficial kind of way.”

Morrell grimaced. “Yes. It makes him sound like a
warmhearted liberal, worrying about African-Americans and Indians, when all he
really wants to do is keep anyone from inspecting life-insurance records to see
how many policies were sold which Illinois insurers don’t want to pay out.”

“Of course, the Sommers family also bought a policy
they can’t collect on. Although I don’t think it was the company that defrauded
them, but the agent. I wish I could see Fepple’s file.”

“Not today, Ms. Warshawski. I’m not giving back your
picklocks until I board that 777 on Tuesday.”

I laughed and subsided into the sports section. The
Cubs had gone so far into free fall that they’d have to send the space shuttle
to haul them back to the National League. The Sox, on the other hand, were
looking pretty, the best record in the majors going into the final week of the
season. Even though the pundits were saying they’d be eliminated in the first
round of the play-offs, it was still an amazing event in Chicago sports.

We reached Orchestra Hall seconds before the ushers
closed the doors. Michael Loewenthal had left tickets for Morrell and me. We
joined Agnes and Calia Loewenthal in a box, Calia looking angelic in white
smocking with gold roses embroidered on it. Her doll and dog, festooned with
ribbons in matching gold, were propped up in the chair next to hers.

“Where’re Lotty and Max?” I whispered as the musicians
took the stage.

“Max is getting ready for the party. Lotty came over to
help him, then got into a huge row with both him and Carl. She doesn’t look
well; I don’t know if she’ll even stay for the party.”

“Shh, Mommy, Aunt Vicory, you can’t talk when Daddy is
playing in public.” Calia looked at us sternly.

She had been warned against this sin many times in her
short life. Agnes and I obediently subsided, but my worries about Lotty rushed
back to the front of my mind. Also, if she was having a major fight with Max, I
wasn’t looking forward to the evening.

As the musicians took the stage they looked remote in
their formal wear, like strangers, not friends. For a moment I wished we’d
skipped the concert, but once the music began, with the controlled lyricism
that marked Carl’s style, the knots inside me began to unwind. In a Schubert
trio, the richness of Michael Loewenthal’s playing, and the intimacy he seemed
to feel—with his cello, with his fellow musicians—made me ache with longing.
Morrell took my fingers and squeezed them gently: separation will not part us.

During intermission, I asked Agnes if she knew why
Lotty and Max were fighting.

She shook her head. “Michael says they’ve been arguing
off and on all summer over this conference on Jews where Max spoke on
Wednesday. Now they seem to be fighting about a man Max met there, or heard
speak, or something, but I was trying to get Calia to hold still while I
braided the ribbons into her hair and didn’t really pay attention.”

After the concert Agnes asked if we would drive Calia
up to Evanston with us. “She’s been so good, sitting like a princess for three
hours. The sooner she can run around and let off steam the better. I’d like to
stay until Michael’s ready to leave.”

Calia’s angelic mood vanished as soon as we walked out
of Orchestra Hall. She ran shrieking down the street, shedding ribbons and even
Ninshubur, the blue stuffed dog. Before she actually careened into the street,
I caught up with her and scooped her up.

“I am not a baby, I do not get carried,” she yelled at
me.

“Of course not. No baby would be such a pain.” I was
panting with the exertion of carrying her down the stairs to the garage.
Morrell was laughing at both of us, which made Calia at once assume an icy
dignity.

“I am most annoyed at this behavior,” she said,
echoing her mother, her little arms crossed in front of her.

“Speaking for both of us,” I murmured, setting her
back on her feet.

Morrell handed her into the car and gravely offered
Ninshubur back to her. Calia wouldn’t allow me to fasten her seat belt but
decided Morrell was her ally against me and stopped squirming when he leaned in
to do the job. On the ride to Max’s, she scolded me through the medium of
lecturing her doll: “You are a very naughty girl, picking up Ninshubur and
carrying him down the stairs when he was running. Ninshubur is not a baby. He needs
to run and let off steam.” She certainly took my mind off any other worries.
Perhaps that would be a good reason to have a child: you wouldn’t have energy
left to fret about anything else.

A handful of cars were in Max’s drive when we got
there, including Lotty’s dark-green Infiniti, its battered fenders an eloquent
testimony to her imperious approach to the streets. She hadn’t learned to drive
until she arrived in Chicago at the age of thirty, when she apparently took
lessons from a NASCAR crash dummy. She must have patched up her disagreement
with Max if she was staying for the party.

A black-suited young man opened the door for us. Calia
ran down the hall, shrieking for her grandfather. When we moved more slowly
after her, we saw two other men in waiters’ costumes folding napkins in the
dining room. Max had set up a series of small tables there and in the adjacent
parlor so that people could eat dinner sitting down.

Lotty, her back to the door, was counting forks into
bundles and slapping them onto a sideboard. Judging from her rigid posture she
was still angry. We slipped by without saying anything.

“Not the best mood for a party,” I muttered.

“We can pay our respects to Carl and leave early,”
Morrell agreed.

We tracked Max down in the kitchen, where he was
conferring with his housekeeper on how to manage the party. Calia ran to tug at
his arm. He hoisted her up to the countertop but didn’t let her stop his
discussion with Mrs. Squires. Max has been an administrator for years—he knows
you never finish anything if you keep accepting interruptions.

“What’s going on with Lotty?” I asked when he and Mrs.
Squires were done.

“Oh, she’s having a temper tantrum. I wouldn’t pay
much attention to it,” he said lightly.

“This isn’t about the Radbuka business, is it?” I
asked, frowning.

“Opa, Opa,” Calia shouted, “I was quiet the whole
time, but Aunt Vicory and Mommy talked and then Aunt Vicory was very bad, she
hurted my tummy when she carried me down the stairs.”

“Terrible,
puppchen,
” Max murmured, stroking
her hair, adding to me, “Lotty and I have agreed to keep our disagreements to
one side for the evening. So I am not going to violate the concordat by giving
my views.”

One of the waiters brought a young woman in jeans into
the kitchen. Max introduced her as Lindsey, a local student who was going to
entertain the small ones at the party. When I told Calia I’d go upstairs to
help her put on play clothes, she told me scornfully it was a
formal
party, so she had to keep her party dress on, but she consented to go with
Lindsey to the garden.

Lotty swept into the kitchen, acknowledging Morrell
and me with a regal nod, and said she was going up to change. Despite her
daunting manner, it was a relief to see her imperious rather than anguished.
She reappeared in a crimson silk jacket and long skirt about the time the other
guests began to arrive.

Don Strzepek walked over from Morrell’s, actually
wearing an ironed shirt—Max had readily agreed to include Morrell’s old friend
in the invitation. The musicians showed up in a bunch. Three or four had
children around Calia’s age; the cheerful Lindsey scooped them all together and
took them upstairs to watch videos and eat pizza.

Carl had changed from his tails into a soft sweater
and trousers. His eyes were bright with pleasure in himself, his music, his
friends; the tempo of the party began to accelerate with the force of his
personality. Even Lotty was relaxing, laughing in one corner with the Cellini
bass player.