Sara Paretsky - V.I. Warshawski 10 (28 page)

“Somehow he made a lot of money doing it, money Mr.
Fepple sure never saw. Mr. Hoffman drove a big Mercedes, had a fancy apartment
someplace on the North Side.

“When I saw him show up with that Mercedes, I told Mr.
Fepple he must be embezzling, or part of the mob or something, but Mr. Fepple
always went through the books very carefully, no money was ever missing or
anything. When time went on, Mr. Hoffman got stranger and stranger, by what Mr.
Fepple said. He drove the girl who came there later on—after Howie was born,
after I quit to look after him—out of her mind. He was always fussing around
his papers, she said, taking them in and out of files. I think he kind of went
senile toward the end, but Mr. Fepple said he wasn’t doing any harm, let him
come into the office and shuffle his papers around.”

“Hoffman had a son, right? Did his boy and yours hang
out together?”

“Oh, goodness me, no—his boy started college the year
Howie was born. I don’t know if I ever even met him, it was just Mr. Hoffman
always talking about him, how everything he did was for his boy—of course, I
shouldn’t poke fun, I felt the same way about Howie. But somehow it griped me,
all the money he could come up with to spend on his son, while Mr. Fepple, who
owned the agency, didn’t have near as much. Mr. Hoffman sent his son off to
some fancy eastern school to college, someplace that sounded like Harvard but
wasn’t. But I never heard his boy amounted to anything much, even with all that
expensive education.”

“Do you know what became of him? The son, I mean?”

She shook her head. “I heard he was like a hospital
clerk or something, but after Mr. Hoffman passed away, we didn’t hear anything
about him. It wasn’t like we knew anyone who knew him, in a social way, I
mean.”

“Did your son talk about Hoffman lately?” I asked.
“Did he mention problems with any of Mr. Hoffman’s old clients? I’m wondering
in particular if any of them might have threatened him. Or maybe made him so
depressed about the business that he didn’t see how he could make it work.”

She shook her head, sniffling again as she thought of
her son’s last days. “But that’s why I don’t think he killed himself. He was,
oh, sort of excited, like he gets—got—when he had a new idea in mind. He said
he finally understood how Hoffman made so much money out of his list. He
figured he could get me a Mercedes of my own if I wanted. Pretty soon, he said.
Now, well, I do clerical work up in Western Springs, and I guess I’ll just keep
on until I retire.”

The bleakness of the prospect depressed me almost as
much as it did her. I asked abruptly when she’d last seen her son.

Tears leaked from the corners of her eyes. “Friday
morning. When I was leaving for work he was getting up. He said he had a dinner
meeting with a client, so he’d be home late. Then, when he didn’t come home, I
got worried. I called the office off and on on Saturday, but he does
sometimes—did sometimes—go to these table-tennis tournaments out of town. I
thought maybe he forgot to tell me. Or maybe he had a date—I did kind of
wonder, the way he dressed so carefully Friday morning. I try—tried—to remember
he’s not still a child, although it’s hard, when he’s living right here at
home.”

I tried to get a client name from her, wondering if
Isaiah Sommers had come around threatening him. But much as she would have
liked to blame Howie’s death on some black person from the South Side, Rhonda
Fepple couldn’t remember his mentioning any names.

“The officers who talked to you this morning, they
didn’t bother to search your son’s room, did they? No, I didn’t think they
would—they were too fixed on their suicide theory. Could I take a look?”

She still didn’t ask me for identification but led me
down the hall to her son’s room. She must have given him the master suite when
her husband died—it was a large room, with a king-size bed and a small desk.

The room smelled of sour sweat and other things I
didn’t want to think about. Mrs. Fepple murmured something apologetic about
laundry and tried to pick up some of the clothes from the floor. She stood
looking from a polka-dotted shirt in her left hand to a pair of shorts in her
right, as if trying to figure out what they were, then let them fall back to
the floor. After that she just stood, watching me as if I were the television
screen, a soothing but meaningless piece of motion in the room.

Rummaging through dresser and desk drawers, I found
cell phones from two earlier generations of models, a collection of startling
porn that Fepple had apparently printed off the Web, a half dozen broken
calculators, and three table-tennis paddles, but no documents of any kind. I
went through his closet and even looked between the mattress and box springs.
All I found was another collection of porn, this time magazines that dated back
several years—he must have forgotten about them when he learned how to cruise
the Net.

The only insurance documents in the room were company
pamphlets stacked on the desktop. Not the Sommers file nor even a
datebook—which hadn’t been in his briefcase or office—nor any more pages like
the one I’d found in his briefcase this morning.

I pulled one of the photocopies of the page from my
own case and showed it to her. “Do you know what this is? It was in your son’s
office.”

She looked at it with the same apathy she’d given my
search. “That? I couldn’t tell you.”

She started to hand it back to me, then said it might
be Mr. Hoffman’s handwriting. “He kept these leather books with his name
stamped on the cover in gold. He’d take them around with him to his customers
and check off when they paid, just like on here.”

She tapped the check marks with her index finger. “One
day I picked up his book when he was in the washroom, and when he came back
you’d think I was a Russian spy going after the atom bomb, the way he carried
on. Like I knew what any of it meant.”

“Does this writing look like Hoffman’s writing?”

She shrugged. “I haven’t seen it in years. I just
remember it was scrunched up like this, kind of hard to read, but real even,
like it was engraving.”

I looked around, discouraged. “What I hoped to find
was some kind of diary. Your son didn’t have one on his desk at the office, nor
in his briefcase. Do you know how he kept track of his appointments?”

“He had one of those handheld gadgets, one of those
electronic things. Yeah, like that,” she added when I showed her my Palm Pilot.
“If it wasn’t on him, then whoever killed him must’ve stolen it.”

Which either meant an appointment with his killer or—a
random attack where the killer stole pawnable electronics. The computer had
been left there—but it would have been hard to smuggle past the guard. I asked
Mrs. Fepple if the cops had returned her son’s possessions to her, but those
were still part of crime-scene evidence; the technicians were keeping them
until the autopsy gave them a definitive report of suicide.

“Was he renting month-by-month, or is there a lease?”

He’d gone to month-by-month. She agreed to lend me a
spare office key that she’d kept, but the thought of having to get all those
files packed up by the end of September, and of having to work with the various
companies to shift active policyholders to a new agency, made her droop further
into her yellow shirt.

“I don’t know what I thought you’d be able to tell me,
but it doesn’t seem like you’re going to be able to find who killed him. I
gotta lie down. Somehow, all this, it has me worn out. You’d think all you’d do
is cry, but it’s like all I can do is sleep.”

Fencing in the Dark

M
y long trek
north to Morrell’s took me through the disturbing vistas of the western
suburbs: no center, no landmarks, just endless sameness. Sometimes row on row
of ranch houses, sometimes of more-elaborate, more-affluent tracts, but all
punctuated with malls showing identical megastores. The third time I passed Bed
Bath & Beyond and Barnes & Noble I thought I was driving in circles.

“Sometimes I feel like a motherless child, a long way
from home,” I sang, as I sat in a stationary lane at one of the everlasting
tollbooths on the rim road around the city. I was motherless, after all, and
forty miles from Morrell’s home.

I flung my change into the box and scoffed at myself
for melodramatic self-pity. Real grief lay in Rhonda Fepple’s story: the
childless mother. It’s so out of the order of nature, and it exposes you as so
fundamentally powerless, to have a child die before you: you never really
recover from it.

Howie Fepple’s mother didn’t think her son had
committed suicide. No mother would want to believe that of her child, but in
Fepple’s case it was because he was excited—he finally understood how Rick
Hoffman had made enough money out of his book to drive a Mercedes—and he was
going to get one for Rhonda.

I pulled out my phone to call Nick Vishnikov, the
chief deputy medical examiner, but the traffic suddenly cleared; the SUV’s
around me quickly accelerated to eighty or ninety. The call could wait until it
didn’t put my life in danger to make it.

The dogs panted gently over my shoulder, reminding me
that it had been some hours since their last run. When I finally reached the
Dempster exit I pulled off at a forest preserve to let them out. It was dark
now, the park officially closed, with a piece of chain blocking me from going
farther than a few yards off the main road.

While Mitch and Peppy excitedly set off after rabbits
I stood at the chain with my cell phone, calling first Morrell to tell him we
were only eight miles away, then trying Lotty again. She had left the clinic,
her receptionist, Mrs. Coltrain, told me.

“How did she seem?”

“Dr. Herschel is working too hard: she needs to take
some time off for herself.” Mrs. Coltrain has known me for years, but she won’t
gossip about Lotty with anyone, not even to agree with Max when he mocks her
imperial manner.

I tapped the phone thoughtfully. If I was going to
have a heart-to-heart with Lotty I should do it sitting down at home, but this
was Morrell’s last night in Chicago. The dogs were crashing around somewhere
near me. I called to them, to remind them that I was here and in charge of the
pack. When they’d run up, sniffed my hands, and torn off again, I reached Lotty
at home.

She cut short my attempt to express concern at her
collapse yesterday. “I’d rather not discuss it, Victoria. I’m embarrassed that
I created such a disturbance in the middle of Max’s party and don’t want to be
reminded of it.”

“Maybe, oh physician, you should consult a doctor
yourself. Make sure you’re okay, that you didn’t hurt yourself when you
fainted.”

Her voice took on a sharper edge. “I’m perfectly fine,
thanks very much.”

I stared into the dark underbrush, as if seeing it
would enable me to penetrate Lotty’s mind. “I know you weren’t in the room with
Radbuka last night when he was going on about his past, but did Max tell you
Radbuka found a posting on a bulletin board from someone wanting information
about Sofie Radbuka? I went on the Web today and found the site. Radbuka is
convinced she must have been his mother or his sister; at least, he wrote a
long message to that effect. Lotty, who was she?”

“You found Sofie Radbuka on the Web? That’s
impossible!”

“I found someone who wanted information about her,
saying that she lived in England during the forties,” I repeated patiently.

“Max didn’t think fit to tell me that,” she snapped.
“Thank you very much.”

She hung up, leaving me uncomfortably alone in the
dark woods. A sense of being both forlorn and ridiculous made me call the dogs
back to me again. I could hear them thrashing around, but they wouldn’t come. I
had kept them penned up all day—they weren’t going to reward me by being good
dogs now.

Before going to the car for a flashlight so I could
track them, I made one last call—to Nick Vishnikov at the morgue. After all,
the place never closes. When I dialed the number—which I know by heart—I got
the one thin piece of luck the Fates were allowing me today: Vishnikov, who
pretty much chooses his hours, was still there.

“Vic. How’s Morrell? He in Kabul yet?”

“Tomorrow,” I said. “Nick—there’s a guy with a head
wound who came in this morning. The police are calling it suicide.”

“But you murdered him and you want to confess.”
Autopsies make him ferociously cheerful.

“Howard Fepple. I want to be a hundred-fifty percent
certain that he put that SIG Trailside to his head all by himself.”

He hadn’t done Fepple’s case. While he put me on hold
to check the files, I fiddled with the dogs’ leashes, wishing I hadn’t let them
disappear into the dark—I couldn’t hear them now.

“I handed it off to one of my juniors since it seemed
straightforward, and he treated it as routine suicide, but I see he didn’t
check the hands for gunpowder—he relied on the fact that the victim ate the
gun. We still have the body—I’ll review it before I leave. Do you have evidence
of murder?”

“People do the darnedest things, but I have a guy who
told his mother he was on to something hot, and I have a mystery visitor to his
office. I’d love it if the state’s attorney pulled Fepple’s phone logs.”