Sara Paretsky - V.I. Warshawski 10 (34 page)

“You say you’re not challenging my work, but in the
next sentence you refer to the journey Paul
thinks
he made. This is a
journey he did make, even though the details were blocked from his conscious
mind for fifty years. Like you, I am a skilled investigator, but one with
greater experience than you in exploring the past.”

The discreet temple bell chimed; she turned to look at
a clock on her desktop. “I need to clear my mind of all this conflict before my
next patient arrives. I’ll be certain to tell Paul that he can only expect
hostility if he keeps trying to see Max Loewenthal.”

“That will be helpful to all of us,” I said. “I have
someone showing Radbuka’s photograph to neighbors of families named Ulrich in
the hopes of finding his childhood home. So if he reports back to you that
someone is spying on him—it’s true.”

“Families named Ulrich? Why would you want—” She broke
off, her dark soft eyes widening, first in bewilderment, then amusement. “If
that’s your best investigative effort, Vic, then Paul Radbuka is definitely
safe from you.”

I studied her for a moment, chin on hand, trying to
decipher what lay behind her amusement. “So Ulrich wasn’t his father’s name
after all? I’ll keep that in mind. Don, where should I leave a message for you
about whether Max is free to talk to you tonight? At Morrell’s?”

“I’ll ride down with you, Vic, give Rhea a chance to
center herself. I have a cell-phone number I can give you.”

He got up with me but lingered inside her consulting
room for a private leave-taking. As I left, I noticed another young woman in
the waiting room looking eagerly toward the inner door. It was a pity Rhea and
I had gotten off to such a bad start: I would have liked to experience her
hypnotic techniques to see whether they gave me the same rush they did her
patients.

Don caught up with me outside the elevators. When I
asked if he knew what the inside joke was about the name Ulrich, he shifted
uncomfortably. “Not exactly.”

“Not exactly? You mean you know sort of?”

“Only that it wasn’t his father’s—foster father’s—last
name. Not what the name really was. And don’t ask me to find out: Rhea won’t
tell me because she knows you’ll try to wheedle it out of me.”

“I guess I should feel flattered that she thinks I’d
be able to. Give me your cell-phone number. I’ll call Max and get back to you,
but I have to run: like Rhea, I need to center myself before my next
appointment.”

In the L going back to my car, I called Mary Louise to
tell her she didn’t have to go door-to-door with Radbuka’s picture after all. I
couldn’t recap the whole conversation over the noise of the train but told her
that it apparently wasn’t his childhood name. She had started south, working
her way west and north, and had only reached her third address, so she was
happy to call it a day.

As I picked up my car at the Western L stop, I wondered
idly what would happen if Rhea Wiell hypnotized Lotty. Where would an elevator
to the past take Lotty? From her behavior on Sunday, the monsters on those
lower floors were pretty ferocious. It seemed to me, though, that Lotty’s
problem wasn’t that she couldn’t remember her monsters but that she couldn’t
forget them.

I stopped in the office to check on mail and messages
and whether I had any appointments for tomorrow that I’d forgotten. A couple of
new things had come up. I entered them into my computer and pulled out my Palm
Pilot to download them to the handheld device. As I did so I suddenly thought
of Fepple’s mother telling me her gadget-happy son used a device like mine for
a diary. If he’d kept his appointments up to date, they should still be sitting
in that machine in his office. And I had a key: I could go in happy and legal,
with the implicit consent of Rhonda Fepple.

I quickly returned a few phone calls, looked at my
e-mail, pulled up the missing persons bulletin board to see that Questing Scorpio
hadn’t answered my message, and went south again, to Hyde Park.

Collins, the four-to-midnight guard, recognized me.
“Got some other tenants here we could do without if you want a hit list,” he
said with heavy humor as I passed.

I smiled weakly and rode up to the sixth floor. I had
a hard time getting myself to open the door, not because of the yellow
crime-scene tape sealing it, but because I didn’t want to face the remains of
Fepple’s life again. I took a breath and tried the handle. A woman in a nurse’s
uniform heading to the elevator stopped to watch me. The police or the building
management had locked the office. I took out my key and unlocked the door,
breaking the yellow tape as I pushed it open.

“I thought that meant you can’t go in,” the woman said.

“You thought right, but I’m a detective.”

She walked over to peer around me into the room, then
backed away, her face turning grey. “Oh, my God. Is that what happened in
there? Oh, my God, if this is what can go on in this building, I’m getting a
job at the hospital, hours or no hours. This is terrible.”

I was just as appalled as she was, even though I more
or less knew what to expect. Fepple’s body was gone, but no one had bothered to
clean up after him. Pieces of brain and bone had hardened on the chair and
desk. Those weren’t visible from the door, but what you could see was the mess
of papers, and on top of it, grey fingerprint powder showing up nests of
footprints on the floor. The powder had drifted like dirty snow onto the desk,
the computer, the strewn papers. I thought briefly of poor Rhonda Fepple,
trying to sort through the wreckage. I hoped she had the sense to hire help.

The police hadn’t bothered to shut down the computer.
Using a Kleenex to protect my fingers, I hit the ENTER key and brought the
system back up. I couldn’t bring myself to sit on Fepple’s chair, or even touch
it, so I leaned across the desk to operate the keyboard. Even in my awkward
posture, it only took a few minutes to retrieve his computer datebook. On
Friday, he’d had a dinner date with Connie Ingram. He’d even added a note:
says
she wants to discuss Sommers, but she sounds hot for me.

I printed out the entry and scuttled out of the office
as fast as I could move. The foul scene, the fetid air, the horrible image of
Connie Ingram sounding hot for Fepple, all made me feel like throwing up again.
I found a women’s bathroom, which was locked. I stuck Fepple’s door key in,
which didn’t turn the lock but did get someone on the inside to open it for me.
I swayed over one of the sinks, washing my face in cold water, rinsing my
mouth, pushing the worst of the images out of my mind—away from my stomach.

Connie Ingram, the earnest round-faced claims clerk
whose company loyalty wouldn’t let me look at her files? Or who was so loyal that
she would date a recalcitrant agent and set him up for a hit?

A sudden rage, the culmination of the week’s
frustrations, swept over me. Rhea Wiell, Fepple himself, my vacillating client,
even Lotty—I was fed up with all of them. And most of all with Ralph and Ajax.
Chewing me out for the Durham protest, stiffing me over my request to see the
company copy of Aaron Sommers’s file—and staging this charade. Which they’d
botched by stealing the guy’s handheld but not wiping the entry out of the
computer.

I shoved open the bathroom door and stalked to the
elevator, the blood roaring in my head. I zoomed to Lake Shore Drive, honking
impatiently at any car daring to turn in front of me, swooping through lights
as they turned red—behaving like a mad idiot. On the Drive I covered the five
miles to the Grant Park traffic lights in five minutes. The evening rush hour
had built in the park, stalling me. I earned the irate whistle of a traffic cop
by cutting recklessly around the stack of cars onto one of the side roads,
flooring the car up to the Inner Drive.

As I got to the corner of Michigan and Adams, I had to
stand on the brakes: the street was a mass of honking, unmoving cars. Now what?
I wasn’t going to get near the Ajax building in my car with this kind of blockage.
I made an illegal and highly dangerous U-turn and roared back to the Inner
Drive. By now I’d had so many near-misses I was coming to my senses. I could
hear my father lecturing me on the dangers of driving under the influence of
rage. In fact, once when he’d caught me in the act, he’d made me come with him
when he had to untangle a crumpled teenager from the steering wheel through his
chest. The memory of that made me take the next few blocks sedately. I left the
car in an underground garage and walked north to the Ajax building.

As I got to Adams Street, the congestion built. This
wasn’t the normal throng of homebound workers but a penned-up crowd. I threaded
my way into it with difficulty, moving along the edges of the buildings.
Through the jam of people I could hear the megaphones. The protestors had come
back to life.

“No deals with slaveowners!” they were shouting, mixed
with “No money to mass murderers!” “Economic justice for all” vied with
“Boycott Ajax! No deals with thieves.”

So Posner had arrived. In full throttle, by the sound
of it. And Durham had apparently come to rally his own troops in person. No
wonder the street was backed up. Sidling past the crowd, I climbed up the steps
to the Adams L platform so that I could see what was going on.

It wasn’t quite the mob that had created havoc outside
the Hotel Pleiades last week, but besides Posner with his Maccabees and Durham
with the EYE team, there were a couple of camera crews and a lot of unhappy
people who wanted to get home. These last pushed against me on the L steps,
snarling at both groups.

“I don’t care what happened a hundred years ago: I
want to get home today,” one woman was saying to her companions.

“Yeah. Durham’s got a point, but no one’s going to pay
attention to it if he makes you pay overtime to the day care because you can’t
get there on time.”

“And that other guy, that one in the funny hat and the
curls and all, what’s his problem?”

“He’s saying Ajax stole life insurance from the Jews,
but it all happened a long time ago, so who cares?”

I had thought I’d call Ralph from the street, but
there was no way I could carry on a phone conversation in this melee. I climbed
down from the platform and made my way along Wabash, past the cops who were
trying to keep traffic moving, past the entrances to Ajax where security guards
were letting frustrated commuters out one at a time, around the corner on
Jackson to the alley behind the building where the buildings had their loading
bays. The one for Ajax was still open.

I hoisted myself up to the metal lip where trucks
decanted cargo and went inside. An overweight man in Ajax’s blue security
uniform slid off a stool in front of a large console filled with TV screens
showing the alley and the building.

“You lost?”

“I’m a fraud investigator. Ralph Devereux—the head of
claims—wants to talk to me, but the mob out front is making it impossible to
get near the front entrance.”

He looked me over, decided I didn’t look like a
terrorist, and called up to Ralph’s office with my name. He grunted a few times
into the mouthpiece, then jerked his head to bring me over to the phone.

“Hello, Ralph. How glad I am you’re still here. We
need to have a little conversation about Connie Ingram.”

“We do indeed. I wasn’t going to call you until
tomorrow, but since you’re here we’ll talk now. And don’t imagine you can come
up with any excuse that will make your behavior acceptable.”

“I love you, too, Ralph: I’ll be right up.”

The guard tapped the screens on the console to show me
my route: a door at the rear of the loading bay led to a corridor which would
take me to the main lobby. Once inside, I paused on my way to the elevators to
stare at the dueling demonstrators. Durham, this time in executive navy, had
the larger crowd, but Posner was controlling the chanting. As his little band
of Maccabees circled past the door, I stood transfixed. Standing at Posner’s
left elbow, his childlike face beaming underneath his thinning curls, was Paul
Radbuka.

(Old) Lovers’ Quarrel

T
he elevator
whooshed me to sixty-three so fast my ears filled, but I barely noticed the
discomfort. Paul Radbuka with Joseph Posner. But why should I be startled? In a
way it was a natural fit. Two men obsessed with memories of the war, with their
identity as Jews, what could be more likely than that they’d get together?

The executive-floor attendant had left for the day. I
went to the windows behind her mahogany station where I could see past the Art
Institute to the lake. At the far horizon the soft blue became lost in clouds,
so you couldn’t tell where water ended and sky began. It looked almost
artificial, that horizon, as if some painter had started to stroke in a
dirty-white sky and then lost interest in the project.

I was due at the Rossys’ at eight; it was just on five
now. I wondered if I could tail Radbuka home from here—although perhaps he’d be
going back to Posner’s house tonight. Maybe he’d found a family who would take
him in, nurture him in the way he seemed to need. Maybe he’d start leaving Max
alone.

“Vic! What are you doing out here? You called from the
loading dock fifteen minutes ago.”