Sara Paretsky - V.I. Warshawski 10 (3 page)

As I sat in the thicket of traffic waiting to move
back past the protest site toward Lake Shore Drive, I nodded off several times.
By the time I reached Isaiah Sommers’s house in Avalon Park, I was thick with
sleepiness. I was almost twenty minutes late, though. He swallowed his
annoyance as best he could, but it wouldn’t do for me to fall asleep in front
of him.

Cash on the Coffin

W
hen did
your aunt give the policy to the funeral home?” I shifted on the couch, the
heavy plastic covering the upholstery crinkling as I moved.

“On the Wednesday. My uncle passed on the Tuesday.
They came for the body in the morning, but before they would collect it, they
wanted proof that she could pay for the funeral. Which was scheduled for the
Saturday. My mother had gone over to be with my aunt, and she found the policy
in Uncle Aaron’s papers just like we knew it would be. He was methodical in
everything he did, great and small, and he was methodical in his documents, as
well.”

Sommers massaged his neck with his square hands. He
was a lathe operator for the Docherty Engineering Works; his neck and shoulder
muscles were bunched from leaning over a machine every day. “Then, like I said,
when my aunt got to the church on Saturday they told her they weren’t starting
the funeral until she came up with the money.”

“So after they took your uncle’s body on Wednesday,
the funeral parlor must have called the policy number in to the company, who
told them that the policy had already been cashed. What a horrible experience
for all of you. Did the funeral director know who the money had been paid to?”

“That’s just my point.” Sommers pounded his fist on
his knee. “They said it was to my aunt. And that they wouldn’t do the
funeral—well, I told you all that.”

“So how did you manage to get your uncle buried? Or
did you?” I had an uneasy vision of Aaron Sommers lying in cold storage until
the family shelled out three thousand dollars.

“I came up with the money.” Isaiah Sommers looked
reflexively toward the hall: his wife, who had let me in, had made clear her
disapproval of his exerting himself for his uncle’s widow. “And believe me, it
wasn’t so easy. If you’re worried about your fee, don’t be: I can take care of
that. And if you can find out who took the money, maybe we can get it back.
We’d even give you a finder’s fee. The policy was worth ten thousand dollars.”

“I don’t need a finder’s fee, but I will need to see
the policy.”

He lifted a presentation copy of
Roots
from the
coffee table. The policy was folded carefully underneath.

“Do you have a photocopy of it?” I asked. “No? I’ll
mail you one tomorrow. You know that my fee is a hundred dollars an hour, with
a minimum of five hours’ work, right? I charge for all non-overhead expenses,
as well.”

When he nodded that he understood, I pulled two copies
of my standard contract from my case. His wife, who had obviously been lurking
outside the door, came in to read it with him. While they slowly went through
each clause, I looked at the life-insurance policy. It had been sold to Aaron
Sommers by the Midway Agency, and it dated back, as Isaiah said, some thirty
years. It was drawn on the Ajax Life Insurance company. That was a help: I had
once dated the guy who now headed claims operations at Ajax. I hadn’t seen him
for a number of years, but I thought he would probably talk to me.

“This clause here,” Margaret Sommers said, “it says
you don’t refund money if we don’t get the results we’re looking for. Is that
right?”

“Yes. But you can halt the investigation at any point.
Also, I will report to you after my initial inquiries, and if it doesn’t seem
as though they’re going anywhere, I’ll tell you that frankly. But that’s why I
ask for a five-hundred-dollar earnest payment up front: if I start to look and
don’t find anything, people are tempted not to pay.”

“Hmmph,” she said. “It doesn’t seem right to me, you
taking money and not delivering.”

“I’m successful most of the time.” I tried not to let
fatigue make me cranky—she wasn’t the first person to raise this point. “But it
wouldn’t be fair to say I always am able to find out what someone wants to
know. After my first inquiry, I can estimate the amount of time it will take to
complete the investigation: sometimes people see that as more than they’re
willing to invest. You may decide that, too.”

“And you’d still keep Isaiah’s five hundred dollars.”

“Yes. He’s hiring my professional expertise. I get
paid for providing that. Just as a doctor does, even when she can’t cure you.”
It’s taken years in the business to become hard-hearted—or maybe headed—about
asking for money without embarrassment.

I told them if they wanted to talk it over some more
they could call me when they’d made a decision, but that I wouldn’t take the
uncle’s policy or make any phone calls until they’d signed a contract. Isaiah
Sommers said he didn’t need more time, that his cousin’s neighbor Camilla
Rawlings had vouched for me and that was good enough for him.

Margaret Sommers folded her arms across her chest and
announced that as long as Isaiah understood he was paying for it, he was free
to do as he pleased; she wasn’t keeping books for that mean old Jew Rubloff to
throw her money away on Isaiah’s useless family.

Isaiah gave her a hard look, but he signed both
contracts and pulled a roll from his trousers. He counted out five hundred
dollars in twenties, watching me closely while I wrote out a receipt. I signed
the contracts in turn, giving one back to Isaiah, putting the other with the
policy in my case. I jotted down his aunt’s address and phone number, took the
details for the funeral parlor, and got up to leave.

Isaiah Sommers escorted me to the door, but before he
could close it I heard Margaret Sommers say, “I just hope you don’t come to me
when you’ve found yourself throwing good money after bad.”

I turned down the walk on his angry response. I’d had
my fill of bitterness lately, what with Lotty’s arguing with Max, and now the
Sommerses taking each other on. Their snarling seemed endemic to the
relationship; it would be difficult to be around them often. I wondered if they
had friends and what the friends did when faced with this sniping. If Max and
Lotty’s quarrel hardened into the same kind of misery I would find it
intolerable.

Ms. Sommers’s gratuitous remark about the mean old Jew
she worked for also hit me hard. I don’t like mean-spirited remarks of any
kind, but this one jarred me, especially after listening to Max and Lotty go
ten rounds on whether he should speak at today’s conference. What would
Margaret Sommers say if she heard Max detail his life when the Nazis came to
power—forced to leave school, seeing his father compelled to kneel naked in the
street? Was Lotty right, was his speaking a demeaning exposure that would do no
good? Would it teach the Margaret Sommerses of the world to curb their careless
prejudices?

I’d grown up a few blocks south of here, among people
who would have used worse epithets than Margaret Sommers’s if she’d moved next
door. If she sat on a stage rehearsing the racial slurs that she probably grew
up hearing, I doubted that my old neighbors would change their thinking much.

I stood on the curb, trying to stretch out the knife
points in my trapezius before starting the long drive north. The curtains in
the Sommerses’ front window twitched. I got into my car. The September nights
were drawing in; only the faintest wisp of light still stained the horizon as I
turned north onto Route 41.

Why did people stay together to be unhappy? My own
parents hadn’t shown me a Harlequin picture of true love, but at least my
mother struggled to create domestic harmony. She had married my father out of
gratitude, and out of fear, an immigrant alone on the streets of the city, not
knowing English. He’d been a beat cop when he rescued her in a Milwaukee Avenue
bar where she’d thought she could use her grand opera training to get a job as
a singer. He’d fallen in love and never, to the best of my knowledge, fallen
out of it. She was affectionate toward him, but it seemed to me her true
passion was reserved for me. Of course, I wasn’t quite sixteen when she died:
what does one know of one’s parents at that age?

And what about my client’s uncle? Isaiah Sommers was
certain that if his uncle had cashed in his life-insurance policy, he would
have told his aunt. But people have many needs for money, some of them so
embarrassing that they can’t bring themselves to tell their families.

My melancholy reflections had carried me unnoticing
past the landmarks of my childhood, to where Route 41 became the gleaming
eight-lane drive skirting the lake shore. The last color had faded from the
sky, turning the lake to a spill of black ink.

At least I had a lover to turn to, even if only for a
few more days: Morrell, whom I’ve been seeing for the past year, was leaving on
Tuesday for Afghanistan. A journalist who often covers human-rights issues,
he’s been longing to see the Taliban up close and personal since they
consolidated their power several years back.

The thought of unwinding in the comfort of his arms
made me accelerate through the long dark stretch of South Lake Shore Drive, up
past the bright lights of the Loop to Evanston.

What
Is
in a Name?

M
orrell
greeted me at the door with a kiss and a glass of wine. “How’d it go, Mary
Poppins?”

“Mary Poppins?” I echoed blankly, then remembered
Calia. “Oh, that. It was great. People think day-care workers are underpaid but
that’s because they don’t know how much fun the job is.”

I followed him into the apartment and tried not to
groan out loud when I saw his editor on the couch. Not that I dislike Don
Strzepek, but I’d badly wanted an evening where my conversation could be
limited to an occasional snore.

“Don!” I said as he got up to shake hands. “Morrell
didn’t tell me to expect this pleasure. I thought you were in Spain.”

“I was.” He patted his shirt for cigarettes,
remembered he was in a no-smoking zone, and ran his fingers through his hair
instead. “I got back to New York two days ago and learned that the boy reporter
was leaving for the front. So I wangled a deal with
Maverick
magazine to
do a story on this Birnbaum conference and came out. Of course now I have to
work for the pleasure of bidding Morrell adieu. Which I won’t let you forget,
amigo.”

Morrell and Don had met in Guatemala when they were
both covering the dirty little war there a number of years back. Don had gone
on to an editorial job at Envision Press in New York, but he still undertook
some reporting assignments.
Maverick
magazine, a kind of edgier version
of
Harper’s,
published most of his work.

“Did you get here in time for the Maccabees–EYE-team
standoff?” I asked.

“I was just telling Morrell. I picked up literature
from both Posner and Durham.” He waved at a pile of pamphlets on the coffee
table. “I’ll try to talk to both of them, but of course that’s breaking news;
what I need is background. Morrell says you might be able to supply me with
some.”

When I looked a question, he added, “I’d like a chance
to meet Max Loewenthal, since he’s on the national committee dealing with
missing assets for Holocaust survivors. His Kinder transport story alone would
make a good sidebar, and Morrell tells me that you know two of his friends who
also came to England as children in the thirties.”

I frowned, thinking of Lotty’s furies with Max over
exposing the past. “Maybe. I can introduce you to Max, but I don’t know whether
Dr. Herschel would want to talk to you. And Carl Tisov, Max’s other friend,
he’s here from London on a concert tour, so whether he’d have the time, let
alone the interest—”

I broke off with a shrug and picked up the pamphlets
Don had brought back from the demonstrations. These included a flyer from Louis
Durham, printed expensively in three colors on glossy stock. The document
proclaimed opposition to the proposed Illinois Holocaust Asset Recovery Act,
unless it also covered descendants of African slaves in America. Why should
Illinois ban German companies who profited from the backs of Jewish and Gypsy
workers but accept American companies who grew rich on the backs of African
slaves?

I thought it was a good point, but I found some of the
rhetoric disturbing:
It’s not surprising Illinois is considering the IHARA.
Jews have always known how to organize around the issue of money, and this is
no exception.
Margaret Sommers’s casual comment about “the mean old Jew
Rubloff” echoed uncomfortably in my head.

I put the flyer back on the table and rifled through
Posner’s screed, which was irritating in its own way:
The day of the Jew as
victim is over. We will not sit idly by while German and Swiss firms pay their
shareholders with our parents’ blood.

“Ugh. Good luck in talking to these two specimens.” I
flipped through the rest of the literature and was surprised to see the company
history Ajax Insurance had recently printed: “One Hundred Fifty Years of Life
and Still Going Strong,” by Amy Blount, Ph.D.

“You want to borrow it?” Don grinned.