Sara Paretsky - V.I. Warshawski 10 (41 page)

“What can I say, Barbara? When you’re right, you’re
right. You want to put my food under the heat lamp while I go outside for my
next call?”

She snorted and moved to the next table: the place was
filling with people on their morning coffee breaks—the mechanics and repairmen
who keep the area Yuppies comfortable. I ate half the omelette quickly, taking
the edge off my hunger, before phoning Amy Blount. A strange woman answered,
checking my identity before passing me on to Ms. Blount.

Like Margaret Sommers, Amy Blount was angry, but she
was more restrained about it: she wished I had gotten back to her sooner—she
was under considerable stress and hated hanging about for my phone call. How
soon could I get down to Hyde Park?

“I don’t know. What’s the problem?”

“Oh. I’ve told the story so many times I forgot you
don’t know it. I had a break-in at my apartment.”

She had come home at ten last night from a lecture in
Evanston to find her papers strewn about, her computer damaged, and her floppy
disks missing. When she called the cops, they didn’t take it seriously.

“But those are my dissertation notes. They’re
irreplaceable. I have the dissertation written up and bound, but the notes, I
would use those for another book. The police don’t understand, they say it’s
impossible to track down all the burglaries in the city, and since no valuables
are missing—well, I don’t have valuables, just my computer.”

“How did the intruders get in?”

“Through the back door. Even though I have a gate
across it, they broke through it without any of the neighbors paying the least
attention. Hyde Park is supposed to be such a liberal neighborhood, but
everyone scuttles away at the first sign that anyone around them is in
trouble,” she added bitterly.

“Where are you?” I asked.

“At a friend’s. I couldn’t stay in the middle of all
that mess, and I didn’t want to clean it up until someone saw it who would pay
attention to the problem.”

I took her friend’s address and told her either I or
Mary Louise would be there within the next two hours. She tried to argue me
into coming sooner, but I explained that emergency detectives were like
emergency plumbers: we had to fit the job in around all the other broken
boilers.

I finished the omelette but skipped the steak fries—my
usual weakness, but if I ate one I’d eat them all, and then I’d be too logy to
think very fast. And the day was looking like one that would require
Einstein-like thought. I didn’t wait for my bill but put fifteen dollars on the
table and trotted back up Racine to my car.

I had a couple of errands to run in the financial
district before going in to my office. As I drove downtown, I called Mary
Louise to make sure she was able to work some more hours this afternoon so that
she could go see Amy Blount’s apartment. She was pretty terse with me, but I
told her she’d see me soon enough to off-load her complaints in person.

Since I was down by the City–County building anyway, I
went inside to find Alderman Durham’s office. Naturally he had one on the South
Side, in his own ward, but aldercreatures mostly hang out in the Loop, where
the money and power are.

I scribbled a note on my card:
In re the widow’s
mite and Isaiah Sommers.
After a mere fifteen minutes’ wait, the secretary
scooted me ahead of other supplicants, who gave me dirty looks for jumping the
queue.

The alderman had a young man with him wearing the navy
blazer with the Empower Youth Energy insignia on it: a gold eye with
EYE on
Youth
embroidered around it. The alderman himself was dressed in Harris
tweed, his shirt having the palest green stripe in it to match the green in the
tweed.

He shook my hand genially and waved me to a seat. “So
you have something to say about the widow’s mite, Ms. Warshawski?”

“Have you kept up with that story, alderman? You know
Margaret Sommers took your advice and insisted on a meeting with the agent,
Howard Fepple, only to walk in and find him dead?”

“I’m sorry to hear it: that must have been a shock for
her.”

“She got a worse one this morning. Her husband has
been brought in for questioning—the cops got a tip. They think he murdered Fepple—out
of outrage over the guy robbing his aunt of her mite, so to speak.”

He nodded slowly. “I can understand their reasoning,
but I’m sure Isaiah wouldn’t have killed a man. I’ve known him for years, you
see, for years, because his aunt, bless her, had a son who was one of my boys
before he passed. Isaiah is a fine man, a churchgoing man. I don’t see him as a
murdering man.”

“Do you see who might have phoned in an anonymous tip
to the police, alderman? Their technicians say they’re pretty sure it was an
African-American male who made the call.”

He gave a great mirthless smile. “And you thought to
yourself, Who do I know who’s an African-American male? Louis Durham. We’re all
alike, after all, we black men: animals at heart, aren’t we.”

I looked at him steadily. “I thought to myself, Who
has been having surreptitious meetings with the European chief of the insurance
company that holds the paper on Aaron Sommers? I thought to myself, I don’t see
what enticements those two men could offer each other—kill the Holocaust Asset
Recovery Act in exchange for shutting down the demonstrations outside the Ajax
building? But what if Mr. Rossy wanted something more—what if he wanted Isaiah
Sommers to take the fall for the murder so that he could close the claim file and
get the mess out of his hair? What if in exchange for shutting off your
demonstration
and
getting someone to finger Isaiah Sommers, Rossy said
he’d fly to Springfield to kill the IHARA bill for you?”

“You have a reputation as an investigator, Warshawski.
This isn’t worthy of you.” Durham stood and moved to the door; the young man in
the EYE blazer followed him.

I perforce got up to leave, as well. “Yes, but
remember, Durham, I’m shameless—you wrote that on your placards yourself.”

I picked up my car from the West Loop garage where I’d
parked, more puzzled than angered by the encounter. What had he hoped to learn
from me that got me in to see him so readily? What were he and Rossy doing
together? Had one of his people really made that phone call that led to Isaiah
Sommers’s arrest? I couldn’t put the pieces together in any meaningful way.

I was negotiating the tricky intersection at Armitage,
where three streets come together underneath the Kennedy Expressway, when Tim
Streeter called. “Vic, not to alarm you, but there’s a bit of a situation.”

My heart skipped a beat. “Calia? What’s happened?
Where are you? Oh, help, hang on.” I laid down rubber under the Kennedy, forced
a semi turning onto the expressway to stand on his brakes with a loud blaring
of his horn, and pulled into a gas station on the other side.

“Vic, calm down. The kid’s here with me; we’re at the
Children’s Museum in Wilmette. Agnes is fine. It’s at the hospital. This guy
Posner, you know, the one who’s been—”

“Yeah, yeah, I know who he is.”

“Okay, he’s shown up at the hospital with a group of
pickets denouncing Mr. Loewenthal and Dr. Herschel for keeping Jewish families
apart. The kid and I were supposed to drop in on Mr. Loewenthal for a brown-bag
lunch—Mom’s working on her presentation for the gallery—but when we got to the
hospital, Posner and his gang were out in force.”

“Oh,
damn
him and the horse he rode in on,
too.” So much adrenaline was running through me that I was ready to bounce up
to Bryn Mawr Avenue and take Posner apart with my own hands. “Radbuka there?”

“Yeah. That’s when we got a bit of a situation: I
didn’t realize what it was at first, thought it might be a labor dispute or
right-to-lifers. Wasn’t until we got close up that I made out the signs. And
then Radbuka saw the kid and wanted to make a move on her. I hustled her out of
there but the cameras were rolling; she may be on TV tonight. Hard to say.
Called Mr. Loewenthal from the car and came on up here.”

He interrupted himself briefly to talk to Calia, who
was whining in the background that she needed to see her Opa
now
. “I’d
better go, but I told Mr. Loewenthal if he needs extra support to call my
brother. I’ll stick with the little one.”

When we’d hung up I sat with my head in my hands,
trying to order my mind. I couldn’t just fly north to the hospital without
doing something for Isaiah Sommers. I forced myself to continue to my office,
where Mary Louise greeted me with a severe reprimand over once again making
myself so inaccessible overnight: it was no way to run this kind of business.
If I wanted to unplug myself from the world to sleep, I should let her know so
she could cover for me.

“You’re right. It won’t happen again—put it down to
sleep deprivation clouding my judgment. Here’s what’s going on, though.” I
sketched out the situations with Sommers, with Amy Blount, and now the
demonstration outside Beth Israel. “I can understand why Radbuka wants to hook
up with Posner, but what does Posner get out of attacking Max and Lotty? He
went to see Rossy last night—I’m wondering if Rossy somehow set him on to Beth
Israel.”

“Who knows why someone like Posner does anything?”
Mary Louise said impatiently. “Look, I only have two more hours to give you
today. I don’t think it’s very helpful for you if I spend it going over
conspiracy theories. And really, Vic—it makes sense for me to deal with
Sommers’s situation—I can call the Finch to get the details of the
investigation and give Freeman’s assistant some support. But why did you agree
to go all the way down to the South Side for this Amy Blount? The cops are
right, you know—this kind of B&E is a dime a dozen. We just file
reports—they do, I mean—and keep a lookout for stolen goods. If she didn’t lose
anything valuable, why waste your time on it?”

I grinned. “Conspiracy theory, Mary Louise. She wrote
a history for Ajax. Ralph Devereux and Rossy are all hot on who’s stealing Ajax
files, or leaking Ajax files to Durham—at least, they were worrying about that
last week. Maybe Rossy’s spiked Durham’s guns for now. If Amy Blount’s papers and
floppies have been rifled, I want to know what’s missing. Is it something the
alderman wanted for his campaign on slave reparations? Or is there really some
junkie out there who’s so addled that he thinks he can sell history papers for
enough money to buy a fix?”

She scowled. “It’s your business. Just remember when
you’re writing the rent and insurance checks in two weeks why you don’t have
more cash flow this month.”

“But you will go down to Hyde Park to look over Ms.
Blount’s place? After you’ve gotten Sommers’s situation squared away with the
Finch?”

“Like I said, Vic, it’s your business, it’s your money
to waste. But quite frankly, I can’t see what good I’ll do you by going to Hyde
Park, or what benefit you’ll get from joining Joseph Posner up at the hospital.”

“I’ll have a chance to talk to Radbuka, which I’ve
been desperate for. And maybe I’ll find out what Rossy and Posner had to say to
each other.”

She sniffed and turned to the phone. While she called
the Finch—Terry Finchley, her old commanding officer from her days in the
Central District—I went to my own desk. I had a handful of messages, one from
an important client, and a half dozen e-mails. I dealt with them as quickly as
I could and took off.

Road Rage, Hospital Rage, Any Old Rage

T
he hospital
was on the city’s northwest side, far enough from the trendy neighborhoods that
nearby traffic usually flowed fast. Today, though, when I was about a mile
away, the main road got so heavy I tried the side streets. Five blocks from
Beth Israel, I came to a total halt. I looked around frantically for an alley
so I could escape to an alternate route, but as I was about to make a U-turn,
it dawned on me that if the jam came from gapers rubbernecking at Posner’s
demonstrators, traffic would be blocked on all sides of Beth Israel. I pulled
over to an empty meter and sprinted the last half mile.

Sure enough, I found Posner and several dozen
protesters in the middle of the kind of crowd he seemed to adore. Chicago cops
were furiously directing traffic at the intersection; staff in green-and-gold
hospital security blazers were trying to guide patients to side entrances;
television crews were filming. The last had attracted a crowd of gawkers. It
was just on one—anyone coming back from lunch had probably stopped to enjoy the
show.

I was too far back to read the signs, but I could hear
a chant that chilled my heart:
Max and Lotty, have a heart! Don’t smash
survivors’ lives apart!

I ran around to the back, to the service entrance,
where I opened my wallet and flashed my PI license in the face of a security
guard so fast he couldn’t tell whether it was an FBI badge or a credit card. By
the time he’d figured that out, I had disappeared into the labyrinth of halls
and stairwells that make security at any hospital a nightmare.

I tried to keep my bearings but still ended up in
radiation oncology and file storage before finding the main lobby. I could hear
shouting from the group outside, but I couldn’t see anything: Beth Israel is an
old brick building, without a plate-glass front or even any windows low enough
to see outside. Hospital guards, who were completely unused to this kind of
chaos, were doing an ineffectual job of keeping gawkers from blocking the main
entrance. An older woman sobbed helplessly to one side that she’d just had
outpatient surgery, that she needed a taxi to get home, while a second woman
with a newborn looked around anxiously for her husband.