Sara Paretsky - V.I. Warshawski 10 (50 page)

“But that doctor could not tell you any revelations
this man Paul might make,” Lotty protested. “You have no standing to get
someone to reveal patient confidences to you.”

Max looked absurdly guilty: he had clearly been
planning to send a friend from Beth Israel who might, as a favor to Max,
violate the standards of confidentiality.

“But what’s in these books that made him keep them
secret?” Carl said. “Do they show some reason to believe that’s why he was
shot?”

I pulled the accordion file out of my briefcase. I’d
forgotten the picture of the woman I’d taken along. I laid it on the coffee
table in front of the three.

“His
savior in England
, you can see he’s
labeled it,” I said. “I couldn’t help wondering—well, do you know her?”

Carl frowned at the dark, wistful face. “London,” he
said slowly. “I don’t remember who, except that it’s a long time ago, during
the war years maybe, or right after.”

“He had this on this wall, in the middle of his shrine
to the therapist he worships?” Lotty said in a high queer voice.

“You know who she is?” I asked.

Lotty looked grim. “I know who she is—I can even show
you the book where he found this picture, if Max has it on his shelves. But
why—”

She interrupted herself to dart from the room. We
heard her running up the stairs, her tread as always light, that of a young
woman.

Max looked at the picture. “I don’t recognize the
face. This isn’t the doctor in London Lotty worshiped as a child, is it?”

Carl shook his head. “Claire Tallmadge was very
fair—the perfect English rose. I always thought that was part of Lotty’s
infatuation with her. It used to make my blood boil, how Lotty would let that
family call her ‘the little monkey.’ Victoria, let’s see these books you
brought with you.”

I handed over the accordion file. Max and Carl recoiled
from the disfigured face on the front of it.

“Who is this?” Carl demanded.

“Paul’s father,” I said. “Paul had a ton of
photographs of him in that secret room, all marked up like this. Not the
blood—that got there when I took it away with me.”

Lotty returned with a book, which she held open at a
page of photographs. “Anna Freud.”

We all stared from Paul’s picture to the identical
shot on the page, dumbfounded, until Carl said, “Of course. You took me to hear
her speak, but she looked different—this is such an intimate picture.”

“She was a refugee from Vienna, like us,” Lotty
explained. “I admired her to an extraordinary degree. I even volunteered at the
nursery she ran in Hampstead during the war, you know, washing dishes, the kind
of thing an unskilled teenager could do. Minna used to lash out at me—well,
never mind that. For a time I imagined I would follow Anna Freud and become an
analyst myself, but—well, never mind that, either. Why is this man claiming her
as his savior? Does he imagine he was in the Hampstead nursery?”

The rest of us could only shake our heads, bewildered.

“What about these?” I handed over the ledgers.

“Ulrich,” Max breathed, looking at the peeling gold
leaf stamped on the front. “How stupid of me to forget it is more often a first
name than a last. No wonder you couldn’t find him. What are these?”

“I think they must have something to do with
insurance,” I said, “but you can see that Paul had put them in here with the
label
Einsatzgruppenführer Ulrich Hoffman
. Since they were locked in his
secret room, I’m assuming these documents convinced him his name was Radbuka,
but I frankly don’t get it. I showed them to a young historian who’s been
working in the Ajax archives; she said it looked like a Jewish organization’s
ledgers. Would that be possible?”

Max picked up the second volume and squinted at it.
“It’s been a long time since I tried reading this kind of old-fashioned German
handwriting. These are addresses, I think. It could be some kind of Jewish
welfare association, I suppose, a list of names and addresses—perhaps the group
all bought insurance together. I don’t understand the other numbers, though.
Unless your historian friend is right: maybe S. Radbuka brought sixty-five
people with her and K. Omschutz brought fifty-four.” He shook his head,
unsatisfied with that explanation, and looked back at the books. “
Schrei.
What city has a street called—oh, Johann Nestroy. The Austrian fairy-tale
writer. Is this Vienna, Lotty? I don’t remember either Nestroy or
Schreigassen.”

Lotty’s skin looked waxen. She took the book from Max,
her arms jerky, as if she were a marionette. She looked at the page where he
was pointing, her finger moving slowly along the lines, reading the names under
her breath.

“Vienna? Yes, it should be Vienna. Leopoldsgasse,
Untere Augarten Strasse. You don’t remember those streets? Where was your
family driven after the Anschluss?” Her voice was a harsh squawk.

“We lived on Bauernmarkt,” Max said. “We weren’t
relocated, although we had three other families, all strangers, pushed into our
flat. I can’t say I’ve wanted to keep these street names in my head all these
years. I’m surprised you remember them.”

His voice was pregnant with meaning. Lotty looked at
him grimly. I hastily intervened before they could start fighting.

“This looks like the same paper stock and the same
handwriting I found on a sheet of paper in the bag of a dead insurance agent on
the South Side, which is why I’m assuming these are insurance documents. The
old agent was named Rick Hoffman, and I’m betting he’s Paul’s father—stepfather
or whatever. Would Rick be a nickname for Ulrich?”

“It could be.” Max smiled wryly. “If he wanted to fit
into America, he would have picked a name everyone could pronounce instead of
something alien like Ulrich.”

“If he sold insurance, he would have felt a special
incentive to fit in,” I said.

“Ah, yes, I do believe this is an insurance journal.”
Carl turned to a page that was filled with names and dates with check marks,
like the fragment in Fepple’s office. “Didn’t your family buy insurance like
this, Loewenthal? The agent came into the ghetto every Friday on his bicycle;
my father and all the other men would pay their twenty or thirty korunas and
the agent marked them off in his book. You don’t remember such a thing? Oh, well,
you and Lotty came from the haute bourgeoisie. These weekly payments, they were
for people on small incomes. My father found the whole process humiliating,
that he couldn’t afford to go to an office, pay his money up front, like an
important man—he used to send me down with the coins tightly wrapped in a twist
of newspaper.” He started looking through the pages of tiny ornate writing.

“My father bought his policy through an Italian
company. In 1959 it occurred to me that I should claim that life insurance. Not
that it was so much money, but why should the company get to keep it? I went
through a long rigmarole. But they were adamant that without the death
certificate, and without the policy number, they would do nothing for me.” His
mouth twisted bitterly. “I hired someone—I was in a position to hire
someone—who went back through the company’s records and found the policy number
for me, but even so, they never would pay it because I couldn’t present the
death certificate. They are incredible thieves, in their glass skyscrapers with
their black ties and tails. I make it an absolute policy that the Cellini
accepts no money from any insurance companies. The management is livid over it,
but I think: it could be my father’s coins wrapped in a scrap of newspaper that
they’re using to buy their way onto artistic boards. They won’t sit on mine.”

Max nodded in sympathy; Lotty murmured, “All money has
someone’s blood on it, I suppose.”

“Do you think these numbers are insurance sales,
then?” I asked, after a respectful pause. “And the crosses, that means the
person died? He put a check against those he could confirm, perhaps.” In my bag
on the floor my cell phone started to ring. It was Rhonda Fepple, speaking in
the drugged, half-dead voice of the newly bereaved. Had there been an arrest?
The police didn’t tell her anything.

I took the phone out to the kitchen with me and told
her the progress of the investigation, if such it could be called, before
asking her if Rick Hoffman had been German.

“German?” she repeated, as if I had asked if he were
from Pluto. “I don’t remember. I guess he was foreign, now that you mention
it—I remember Mr. Fepple swearing out some legal forms for him when Mr. Hoffman
wanted to become a citizen.”

“And his son, was his name Paul?”

“Paul? I think so. That could be right, Paul Hoffman.
Yes, that’s right. What? Did Paul come around and kill my boy? Was he jealous
because Howie inherited the agency?”

Could Paul Hoffman-Radbuka be a murderer? He was such
a confused person, but—murderer? Still, maybe he had thought Howard Fepple was
part of some
Einsatzgruppen
conspiracy—if he knew Fepple had one of
Ulrich’s old ledger books, he might be crazy enough to think he had to destroy
Fepple. It seemed absurd, but everything involving Paul Radbuka-Hoffman defied
reason.

“Wouldn’t your son have mentioned it, if he’d seen
Paul Hoffman recently?”

“He might not have, if he had some secret plan in
mind,” Rhonda said listlessly. “He liked to keep secrets to himself; they made
him feel important.”

That seemed too sad an epitaph. More to brace myself
than her, I asked if she had anyone to talk to, to help her through this time—a
sister or a minister, perhaps.

“Everything seems so unreal since Howie died, I can’t
make myself feel anything. Even getting the house broken into didn’t upset me
like you’d think it would.”

“When did that happen?” Her tone was as apathetic as
if she were reciting a grocery list, but the information jolted me.

“I think it was the day after—after they found him.
Yes, because it wasn’t yesterday. What day would that be?”

“Tuesday. Did they take anything?”

“There’s nothing here to take, really, but they stole
my boy’s computer. I guess gangs from the city come out here looking for things
to steal to sell for drugs. The police didn’t do anything. Not that I care,
really. None of it matters now—I wasn’t ever going to use a home computer,
that’s for sure.”

Lotty’s Perfect Storm

I
stared out
the kitchen window at the dark garden. The same person who shot Paul must have
broken into Rhonda Fepple’s house. They—she? Ilse Wölfin?—had killed Fepple.
Not because of the Sommers file, but for some altogether different reason—to
get the fragment from Ulrich Hoffman’s ledgers I’d found in Fepple’s bag. And
then they’d careened around Chicago, looking for the rest of the books.

Howard Fepple, excited over the next big thing that
was going to make him rich, had put the bite on a lethal hand. I shook my head.
Fepple didn’t know about Hoffman’s journals: he’d gotten roused by something he
saw in the Sommers policy file. He’d been excited, he’d told his mother she’d
be driving a Mercedes of her own, he’d found out how Rick Hoffman made money
from his lousy client list. Not because of the ledgers.

Behind me I heard raised voices, the front door slam,
a car start.

Could it be simpler than that? Could Paul
Hoffman-Radbuka have murdered Fepple? Maybe he was deluded enough to imagine
that Fepple was part of his father’s
Einsatzgruppe
. But then—who had
shot Paul? I couldn’t make sense of any of it. Gerbil on treadmill, going round
and round. What had Fepple noticed that I wasn’t getting? Or what paper had he
seen that his murderer had taken away? These secret papers of Paul’s which I
thought would explain everything had only left me more confused.

I went back to an earlier issue. There had been an
Aaron Sommers on the fragment of Ulrich’s journals I’d found in Fepple’s bag.
Was that my client’s uncle? Or had there been two Aaron Sommerses—one Jewish,
one black?

Connie Ingram had talked to Fepple. That was a point
of certainty—even if she’d never gone to see him, she had spoken to him. He had
entered her name in his appointment software. Maybe she really had gone to
Fepple’s office—under Ralph’s orders? I recoiled from the thought. Under
Rossy’s orders? If I showed Connie Ingram a copy of Ulrich’s journals, would
she tell me whether she’d seen something like this in Fepple’s copy of the
Sommers file?

I went back to the living room. Lotty had left.

“She gets more bizarre every time I see her,” Carl
complained. “She looked at that page where your lunatic had written in red that
Sofie Radbuka was his mother in heaven, made a melodramatic speech, and took
off.”

“To do what?”

“She decided to go visit the therapist, Rhea Wiell,”
Max said. “Frankly, I think it’s high time someone talked to the woman. That
is, I know you’ve tried to do so, Victoria, but Lotty—she’s in a professional
position to confront her.”

“Is Lotty going to try to see Rhea tonight?” I asked.
“It’s a little late to pay an office visit, I’d think. Her home address is
unlisted.”

“Dr. Herschel was going to go to her own clinic,” Tim
said from the corner where he’d been silently watching the rest of us. “She
said she had some kind of directory in her office that ought to provide Ms.
Wiell’s home address.”