Sara Paretsky - V.I. Warshawski 10 (45 page)

Don paused to make a hissing noise—presumably inhaling
smoke. “I did meet him briefly this morning—I guess before he joined Posner at
the hospital. He’s pretty agitated these days. Rhea wouldn’t let me ask him too
many questions for fear of getting him more upset. He won’t let me see the
papers—he seems to think I might be a rival for Rhea’s affection, so he’s
clamming up on me.”

I couldn’t suppress a snort of laughter. “I’ve got to
hand it to Rhea for sticking with the guy. He’d have me in the locked ward at
Elgin within a week if I tried to follow his gyrations around the dance floor.
Although of course you are a rival, I can see his point of view. What does Rhea
say?”

“She says she can’t betray a patient confidence, which
of course I respect her for. Although my old reporter’s instincts make that
hard to do.” He gave a little laugh that managed to sound both rueful and
admiring. “She encouraged his involvement with Posner because Posner’s giving
him a sense of real family. But of course we didn’t know when we saw him they
were going to go picket Max at the hospital. I’m seeing her for dinner tonight,
so I’ll talk to her about it then.”

I made a little structure out of paper clips while I
chose my words. “Don, I asked Radbuka today who Ulrich was, and he had kind of
a fit on the street, saying it was his foster father’s name and that I was
accusing Rhea of being a liar. But you know, yesterday she made quite a point
that Ulrich
wasn’t
the guy’s name. She even seemed to be laughing at me
a little over that.”

He sucked in another lungful of smoke. “I’d forgotten
that. I can try to ask her again tonight, but—Vic, I’m not going to play man in
the middle between you and Rhea.”

“No, Don, I don’t expect you to.” All I wanted him to
do was be on my side, pump her for information, and feed it to me. That wasn’t
really asking him to be in the middle. “But if you can persuade her that Max
isn’t related to the Radbuka family, maybe she in turn can persuade Paul to
stop making a scene up at Beth Israel. Only, Don, for God’s sake, please don’t
feed Lotty to Rhea as a substitute for Max. I don’t know if the Radbukas were
cousins or patients or enemy aliens in London whom Lotty was close to, but she
won’t survive the kind of harassment Paul’s been giving Max.”

I waited for his response, but he wouldn’t promise me
anything. I ended up slamming the phone down in disgust.

Before giving up detecting for the day, I also phoned
Amy Blount. Mary Louise’s report had said that the break-in at her place had
been the work of a pro, not a random smash-and-grab.
The padlock on the gate
was intact,
Mary Louise had written.

Someone had run a torch around it, taking the gate
apart: the scorch marks on the kitchen door were obvious. Because you were
interested in her connection to Ajax, I asked her specifically about any Ajax
documents. She didn’t have originals; she had scanned various 19th-century
files to a floppy, which was missing. In fact, all her dissertation notes were
missing. The perps damaged her computer as well. Nothing else was gone, not
even her sound system. I talked Terry into sending down a proper forensics
crew, but we’re still not likely to find the perps.

I commiserated with Ms. Blount over her misery, then
asked if her paper files had been tampered with.

“Oh, yes, those are gone, too, all my research notes.
Who could want them? If I’d known I was sitting on such hot material I’d have
published my dissertation by now; I’d have a real job, instead of hanging on in
this rathole writing diddly corporate histories.”

“Ms. Blount, what papers had you copied from the Ajax
files?”

“I did not take classified internal documents. I did
not hand confidential company information to Alderman Durham—”

“Ms. Blount, please, I know this has been a tough
twenty-four hours, but don’t jump on me. I’m asking for quite a different
reason. I’m trying to figure out what is going on at Ajax Insurance these
days.”

I explained what had been happening since I’d visited
her on Friday—primarily Fepple’s death, Sommers’s problems, Connie Ingram’s
name appearing on Fepple’s appointment register. “The real oddity was the
fragment of a document I found.”

She listened carefully to everything I said, but my
description of the handwritten document didn’t sound like anything she’d seen.
“I’ll be glad to look at it—I could come by your office tomorrow sometime.
Offhand it sounds like something out of an old ledger, but I can’t interpret
all those marks unless I see them. If it has your client’s name on it, it would
be recent, at least by my standards. The papers I copied dated from the 1850’s,
because my research is on the economics of slavery.”

She was suddenly depressed again. “All that material
is missing. I suppose I can go back to the archives and recopy it. It’s the
sense of violation that gets me down. And the pointlessness of it all.”

My Kingdom for an Address

M
elancholy
gave me a restless night’s sleep. I got up at six to run the dogs. I was in my
office by eight-thirty, even though I stopped for breakfast again at the diner,
even though I made a detour to Lotty’s clinic on my way down. I didn’t see
her—she was still at the hospital making rounds.

As soon as Mary Louise came in, I sent her to the
South Side to see if any of Sommers’s friends could help figure out who had
fingered him. I called Don Strzepek back, to see if he’d had any luck—or I’d
had any luck—in getting Rhea to take Paul’s harassment of Max seriously.

He gave an embarrassed cough. “She said she thought it
was a sign of strength in him that he was making new friends, but she could see
that he might need a greater sense of proportion.”

“So she’ll talk to him?” I couldn’t keep the
impatience out of my voice.

“She says she’ll bring it up at his next regular
appointment, but she can’t take on the role of managing her patients’ lives:
they need to function in the real world, fall, pick themselves up, like
everyone else. If they can’t do that, then they need more help than she can
give them. She’s so amazing,” he crooned, “I’ve never known anyone like her.”

I cut him short halfway through his love song, asking
him if that high-six-figure book advance was clouding his objectivity on Paul
Radbuka. He hung up, hurt: I wasn’t willing to discover Rhea’s good points.

I was still snarling to myself over that conversation
when Murray Ryerson called from the
Herald-Star
. Beth Blacksin had told
him about my private conversation with Posner yesterday at the demonstration.

“For old times’ sake, V I,” he wheedled me. “Far off
the record. What was that about?”

“Far off the record, Murray? May Horace Greeley rise
from the dead and wither your testicles if you talk even to your mother about
this, let alone Blacksin?”

“Scout’s honor, Warshawski.”

He had never betrayed such a confidence in the past.
“Off the record, I don’t know what it means, but Posner and Durham both had
private audiences with Bertrand Rossy, the managing director of Edelweiss Re,
who’s in Chicago overseeing their takeover of Ajax. I was wondering if Rossy
had offered Posner something to get him to stop protesting at Ajax and move on
to Beth Israel, but I didn’t get anywhere with asking Posner. He might talk to
you—women scare him.”

“Maybe it’s just you, V I—you scare me and I’m twice
Posner’s size. Durham, though—no one’s ever pinned anything on him, even though
the mayor has the cops sticking to him like his underwear. Guy’s one smooth
operator. But if I learn something splendid about either of them I promise I’ll
share.”

I felt a little better when I’d hung up: it was good
to have some kind of ally. I took the L downtown to meet with clients who
actually were paying me to do sophisticated work on their behalf and got back
to my office a little before two. The phone was ringing as I unlocked the door.
I got to it just as the answering service did. It was Tim Streeter; in the
background I could hear Calia howling.

“Tim—what’s going on?”

“We have a small situation here, Vic. I’ve been trying
to call you for the last few hours, but you didn’t have your phone on. Our pal
was back this morning. I have to admit, my guard was down; I assumed he was
concentrating on Posner these days. Anyway, you know he goes everywhere by
bicycle? Calia and I were in the park on the swings, when he came roaring
across the grass on his bike. He grabbed at Calia. Of course I had her in my
arms before he touched her, but he got that Nibusher, you know, that little
blue dog she takes everywhere.”

Behind him I could hear Calia scream, “Not Nibusher,
he’s Ninshubur the faithful hound. He misses me, he needs me right now, I want
him now, Tim!”

“Oh, hell,” I said. “Max needs to get a restraining
order on this guy—he’s like a disintegrating Roman candle these days. And that
damned therapist is zero help—not to mention Strzepek. I should have been
following Paul, made sure I got his home address. Will you call your brother
and tell him I want him ready to tail Radbuka home from Posner’s office or Rhea
Wiell’s, or wherever he next pops up?”

“Will do. I couldn’t follow him out of the park, of
course, because I needed to stay with the kid. This is not a good situation.”

“Max and Agnes know? Okay, let me talk to Calia for a
minute.”

At first Calia refused to talk to “Aunt Vicory.” She
was tired, she was scared, and she was reacting the way kids do, digging her
heels in, but when Tim said I had a message about Nebbisher she reluctantly
came to the phone.

“Tim is very naughty. He let the bad man take
Ninshubur and now he says his name wrong.”

“Tim feels bad that he didn’t look after Ninshubur for
you, sugar. But before you go to bed tonight, I’ll try to have your doggy back
to you. I’m leaving my office right now to start looking, okay?”

“Okay, Aunt Vicory,” she said in a resigned voice.

When Tim came back on the line, he thanked me for
drying up the tears—he’d been starting to feel desperate. He’d reached Agnes at
her gallery appointment; she was on her way home, but he’d rather protect the
Israeli prime minister in Syria than look after another five-year-old.

I drummed my fingers on the desktop. I called Rhea
Wiell, who was fortunately between appointments. When I explained the situation
and said it would be really helpful if we could get the dog back today, she
said she would bring it up with Paul when she saw him Friday morning.

“Of course, Vic, all he wants it for is as a talisman
of the family that he sees as denying his ties to them. In the early days of
his treatment with me, he would take little things from my office, thinking I
didn’t see him doing it: cups from the waiting room, or one of my scarves. As
he became stronger, he stopped doing that.”

“You know him better than I do, Rhea, but poor Calia
is only five. I think her needs come first here. Could you call him now and
urge him to return it? Or let me have his phone number so I can call him?”

“I hope you’re not making up this whole episode in an
effort to try to get his home number from me, Vic. Under the circumstances, I
doubt you, of all people, could persuade him to see you. He has an appointment
with me in the morning; I’ll talk to him about it then. I know Don is convinced
that Max Loewenthal is not related to Paul, but Max certainly holds the key to
Paul’s door to his European relatives. If you could get Max to agree to see
him—”

“Max offered to see him when Paul crashed the party on
Sunday. He doesn’t want to see Max—he wants Max to embrace him as a family
member. If you could get Paul to let us look at his family papers—”

“No,” she said sharply. “I thought as soon as you
called that you’d come up with some other way of trying to wheedle me into
letting you see those, and I was right. I will not violate Paul’s privacy. He
endured too many violations as a child for me to do that to him.”

She hung up on me. Why couldn’t she see her prize
exhibit belonged in the locked ward at Menard? Or on heavy doses of
antipsychotics.

That irritated thought gave me an idea. I looked up
the number for Posner’s Holocaust Asset Recovery Committee on Touhy. When a man
answered, I pushed my nose down to make my voice sound nasal.

“This is Casco Pharmacy in River Forest,” I said. “I
need to reach Mr. Paul Radbuka.”

“He doesn’t work here,” the man said.

“Oh, dear. We’re filling his prescription for Haldol,
but we don’t have his address. He left this phone number. You don’t know where
we can reach him, do you? We can’t fill a prescription for this kind of drug
without an address.”

“Well, you can’t use our address; he’s not on staff
here.”

“Very good, sir, but if you do have some way for me to
reach him? This is the only phone number he gave us.”

The man put the receiver down with a bang. “Leon, did
that guy Radbuka fill out a form when he came in on Tuesday? We’re starting to
get his phone calls, and I, for one, have no wish to act as his answering
service.”

I heard talk back and forth on the floor, most of it
complaining about Radbuka and why did Reb Joseph want to burden them with such
a difficult person. I heard Leon, the trusted henchman Posner brought with him
to our talk outside the hospital yesterday, rebuke them for questioning Reb
Joseph’s judgment, before picking up the phone himself.