Sara Paretsky - V.I. Warshawski 10 (31 page)

I could hardly talk to Carl these days. Anyway, he
wasn’t much in London for me to talk to. In the spring the orchestra went to
Holland to perform; he’d spent most of June and July in Bournemouth and
Brighton, where his fledgling chamber group was engaged to play a series of
promenade concerts. The few nights we’d had together this summer ended with my
walking away, walking across London from his little flat to my bed-sitter,
walking away from an energy and optimism that seemed incomprehensible to me.

Only on the wards did the images recede. When I
changed the dressings on an old man’s ulcerated wound or carefully cut open the
newspapers in which some East End mother had stitched her sick baby, I could be
present, in London, with people whose needs I could meet. When five of my
classmates were on medical leave that winter I’d stepped up my work pace to
pick up the slack. The teaching staff didn’t like me: I was too serious, too
intense. But they recognized my skill with patients, even in my second year.

I think that was why Claire had come looking for me.
She’d shown up at the Royal Free for a conference—actually on the new drugs
that were starting to come in for tuberculosis. Afterward, some professor
probably suggested that a word from her might carry weight with me: get Miss
Herschel to relax, take part in some of her year’s sports or dramatics. It will
make her a better-rounded person and ultimately a better doctor.

In the normal round of life our paths no longer crossed.
Claire still lived with her mother, but since I’d left Cousin Minna’s I never
ran into her. Claire was doing her senior houseman’s year at St. Anne’s in
Wembley, which meant long days covering casualty as well as the post-op and
disease wards—women, even women like Claire Tallmadge, got the dregs of the
housemen’s jobs in those days. When I looked up and saw her across the room, I
collapsed.

Carl often accused me of being in love with Claire.
Oh, I was, but not in the way he imagined: not erotically, but with the
infatuation a child has for an adulated adult. I suppose the flattery of my
mimicry, even to the point of following her to the Royal Free, kept Claire
paying a kind of attention to me. That was why it was so painful later, when
she cut me off. But at that particular moment, it was more our different
schedules, our different homes, that kept us apart.

Still, I was startled when she wrote me the following
week, the week after I’d collapsed in front of her, to offer me the cottage.
When I crossed London by train and bus to meet her for tea, she told me Ted
Marmaduke and his brother Wallace had bought the cottage to use when they went
sailing. After Wallace was killed at El Alamein, Ted didn’t sail much. Vanessa
hated boats; the country, real country, bored her. But Ted wouldn’t sell the
place; he even paid a local farm couple to keep the yard and premises in some
kind of order. Claire said he imagined using it again when he and Vanessa had
children—he pictured five or six children who would grow up to share his love
of sports. Since they’d been married a decade now without even one robust blond
child, I had a feeling that Vanessa’s will would prevail here as in other
matters, but it wasn’t my business. I didn’t care much about Ted and Vanessa’s lives.

“Ted never liked me,” I said, when Claire explained
that her brother-in-law was offering me the place so that I could get the fresh
air and food I needed. “Why would he let me have his country house? Isn’t that
the kind of encroachment he always warned you against?”

I used to hear Ted criticizing Claire for her
involvement with me. Crouching behind the garden wall, I’d hear him say she
should be careful, my kind would only take advantage, Claire replying that I
was a funny little monkey without a mother, and what possible advantage could I
take? Ted’s brother Wallace, another tall blond man with a hearty laugh,
putting in that she’d be surprised, people like me were always encroaching:
You’re young, Claire, inclined to think you know better than the rest of us. I
assure you when you’ve seen the world a bit you’ll think differently.

Should I be embarrassed at how much I heard from the
other side of the garden wall? I suppose, I suppose—it was only my childish
infatuation with Claire that made me creep down there when I saw them all in
the garden on Sunday afternoons.

Now Claire flushed slightly. “War matured Ted. That,
and losing Wallace. You haven’t seen him, have you, since he got back? I expect
he’ll be quite a power in the city one of these days, but at home he’s much
gentler than he used to be. Anyway, when he and Vanessa were over for dinner on
Sunday and I explained how ill you were, how you needed rest and fresh air,
they both immediately thought of Axmouth.

“A local farmer named Jessup will probably sell you
food cheaply; there’s a decent doctor in Axmouth, you should be able to manage
on your own. I’ll come in December when my tour at St. Anne’s ends, but if you
feel desperate before that you can send me a telegram; I could probably get
away for a day in an emergency.”

Just as she’d got me to school, to the scholarships
I’d needed, she now organized all the details of my life. She even validated my
request for medical leave due to tuberculosis. And persuaded the registrar that
I would recover faster in the country, with fresh food, than at a sanitorium. I
felt powerless to resist her, powerless to say I’d rather take my chances in
London.

When the time came to leave town, I didn’t know what
to say to Carl. He’d returned to London from Brighton a week earlier, a
succès
fou,
in a state of such forceful energy that I could hardly bear to be
around him. In ten days he and the other Cellini players were leaving for the
second Edinburgh arts festival. His successes, his plans, his vision of chamber
music, these were so consuming that he didn’t even notice how ill I was. I
finally wrote him a very awkward letter:

Dear Carl, I am taking medical leave from the Royal
Free. I wish you great success in Edinburgh.

I tried to think of some sweet way to close, something
that would evoke the evenings perched in the top balcony at the opera, our long
walks along the Embankment, the pleasure we’d shared in his narrow bed at the
hostel, before he started making enough money for a real flat. Those times all
seemed dead to me now, as remote as my Oma and my Bobe. In the end I only added
my name, putting the letter in the post outside Waterloo before boarding the
train to Axmouth.

Paper Trail

A
s soon as I
got to Morrell’s I returned Nick Vishnikov’s call. He came on the line with his
usual abrupt staccato.

“Vic! Was that witchcraft? Or did you have some kind
of evidence?”

“So it wasn’t suicide.” I stood at the kitchen
counter, letting out a long breath.

“No gunpowder residue on the hand was the first
pointer. And then a blow to the cranium, which must have stunned him long
enough for the perp to shoot him—the junior who did the first autopsy didn’t
bother to check for other injuries. What did you notice?”

“Oh, the blow to the head,” I said airily. “No,
actually, I saw the details of his life, not those of his death.”

“Well, whatever, congratulations—although Commander
Purling at the Twenty-first District isn’t happy. Since his team didn’t spot
the problem on site, he doesn’t want it to be homicide. But as I told him, the
SOC photos show the gun just below the vic’s hand. If he’d killed himself, he
would have lost the gun up around his head and it would have fallen away from
his arm, not right under his hand. So Purling’s assigned the case. Got to run.”

Before he could hang up, I quickly asked if they were
sure the SIG Trailside on the scene had killed Fepple.

“More witchcraft, Warshawski? I’ll pass the question
on to the lab. Later.”

As I filled a bowl with water for the dogs, I wondered
if I should call Commander Purling at the Twenty-first District to report what
I knew. But it was so little—the mystery phone call on Friday night, the
mystery visitor to Fepple’s office—the cops would get all that from the bank
guard and Fepple’s phone logs. And anyway, if I called him, it would mean at
best hours of explaining why I was involved. At worst—I could find myself in
more trouble than I needed for having explored the scene of the crime on my
own.

Besides, this wasn’t my case, it wasn’t my problem. My
only problem was to try to get Ajax to pay the Sommers family what they were
owed on Aaron Sommers’s life insurance. Aaron Sommers, whose name appeared on
an old ledger sheet in Howard Fepple’s briefcase with two crosses next to it.

I called Cheviot Labs and asked for Kathryn Chang.

“Oh, yes: Barry gave me your sheet of paper. I took a
preliminary look at it. From the watermark I’m saying it’s of Swiss
manufacture, the Baume Works outside Basel. It’s a kind of cotton weave that
they didn’t make during the Second World War because of the shortage of raw
material, so it dates from somewhere between 1925 and 1940. I can give you more
precise dating than that when I’ve studied the ink—that will make it easier for
me to date when the words were written. I can’t make that a priority, though: it
will be at least a week because of other jobs I have ahead of you.”

“That’s fine; this is enough for me for now,” I said
slowly, trying to turn the information over in my mind. “Do you know—would this
paper have been used primarily or exclusively in Switzerland?”

“Oh, no, by no means. The Baume Works aren’t so
important now, but well into the 1960’s they were one of the biggest makers of
fine paper and business paper in the world. This particular stock was widely
used for things like address books, personal journals, that kind of thing. It
is very unusual to see it treated like this, as accounting paper. The person
who used it must have been very—oh, let me say, fond of himself. It would be
helpful, of course, if I could see the book this was torn from.”

“That would help me, too. But one thing I’d like to
know in particular: can you tell when the different entries were written? Not
the exact year—but, well, if some are more recent than others I’d like to know
that.”

“Right. We’ll include that in your report, Ms.
Warshawski.”

It seemed to me it was time to visit Ralph again. His
secretary remembered me from last week, but I couldn’t see Ralph: his schedule
was packed until six-thirty tonight. However, when I said I might be able to
defuse Alderman Durham’s protest, she put me on hold—as it turned out, long
enough for me to read the entire sports section of the
Herald-Star
. When
she came back, she said Ralph could squeeze me in for five minutes at noon if I
got there on the dot.

“On the dot it is.” I hung up and turned to the dogs.
“That means we go back home, where you can lounge around the garden and I can
put on panty hose. I know you will feel bereft, but ask yourselves—who really
will be having more fun?”

It was ten-thirty now. I’d had a wistful hope of climbing
into Morrell’s bed for a nap, but I still had to drop photos of Radbuka off at
Max’s for Tim Streeter. And I wanted to get back to my own place to change into
something more appropriate than jeans for a Loop meeting. “Life’s just a wheel
and I’m caught in the spokes,” I sang as I shepherded the dogs once more back
to the car. All was still quiet at Max’s when I stopped to drop off Radbuka’s
photographs. I zipped down the drive to Belmont, dumped the dogs with Mr.
Contreras, and ran up the stairs to my own apartment.

Tonight was my dinner with the Rossys, my chance to
chatter Italian to cheer up Bertrand’s homesick wife. I put on a soft black
trouser suit that could take me from meetings to dinner. A turtleneck that I
could remove when I got to the Rossys’ so that the rose silk camisole
underneath dressed up the outfit. My mother’s diamond-drop earrings I buttoned
into a pocket. Pumps in my briefcase, the crepe-soled shoes I’d worn yesterday
morning to step in Fepple’s—I broke off the thought without completing it and
ran back down the stairs. The pinball back in action.

I drove down to my office, then took the L into the
Loop. At the Ajax building on Adams, a small band of protesters was still
circling the sidewalk near the entrance. Without Alderman Durham there to lead
the charge, the troops looked bedraggled. Every now and then they’d rouse
themselves to chant something at the herd of people on their way from office to
lunch, but for the most part they merely talked among themselves, posters
drooping against their shoulders. These seemed to be the same signs they had
carried on Friday—no reparations for slaveowners, no high-rises on the bones of
slaves, and so on, but the flyer a dogged young man handed me on my way in had
cut out the attacks on me. Literally cut out—the middle header asking me if I
had no shame was gone, leaving a gap between the merciless Ajax and the
compassionless Birnbaums. The text looked strange:

Ajax Insurance cashed her husband’s life-insurance
policy ten years ago. When he died last week, they sent their tame detective to
accuse Sister Sommers of stealing it.

I guess this way they could just type my name back in
if I reverted to chief villain. I tucked the flyer into my briefcase.

At noon on the dot, the executive-floor attendant
brought me to Ralph’s antechamber. Ralph himself was still in a meeting in his
conference room, but his secretary buzzed him and after the briefest wait he
emerged. This time I got a grim nod, not a grin and a hug.