Sara Paretsky - V.I. Warshawski 10 (54 page)

“Does someone in the building have keys? Could I get
in to see if she’s all right?”

He consulted a list. Lotty had left Max and my names
as people to call in any emergency; he guessed the super could let me in if I
didn’t have keys. When was I coming? In twenty minutes? He’d get Gerry up from
the basement, where he was supervising a boiler-repair crew.

Mary Louise called as I was leaving. She was on the
South Side with Gertrude Sommers—yes, the client’s aunt—who wanted to tell me
something in person. I’d forgotten about sending Mary Louise down to check on
the client’s dubious cousin—I’d left the note for her yesterday afternoon, but
so much was going on it seemed like a month ago.

I tried not to sigh audibly. I was tired, and tired of
running from one end of Chicago to the other. I told Mary Louise that unless
some crisis developed at Lotty’s place, I’d be at Gertrude Sommers’s apartment
in about ninety minutes.

Heard on the Street

T
he doorman
at Lotty’s building had seen me a number of times, but he and Gerry, the
building super, still insisted on proof of my identity before Gerry took me up
to the eighteenth floor. The precaution, which would normally have made me
impatient, gave me some reassurance about Lotty’s safety.

When we got to her apartment, Gerry rang the bell
several times before undoing her locks. He went with me through the rooms, but
there was no sign of Lotty, and no sign that any violent struggle had taken
place.

While Gerry watched in mounting disapproval, I looked
through the drawers in the side room that Lotty uses as a home office, and then
in Lotty’s bedroom, for Ulrich’s journals. Gerry followed me from room to room
while I imagined the places that people conceal things—behind clothes, under
rugs and mattresses, inside kitchen cabinets, behind pictures on the wall,
slipped in among the books on her own shelves.

“You don’t have a right to be doing that, miss,” he
said when I was poking through Lotty’s underwear drawer.

“You married, Gerry? Kids? You know if your wife or
one of your daughters was having a dangerous pregnancy who everyone would tell
you she should see? Dr. Herschel. Who takes her duties so seriously she never
even calls in sick unless she’s running a fever that she thinks would affect
her judgment. Now she’s suddenly vanished. I’m hoping for any sign that would
tell me whether she left voluntarily or not, whether she packed a bag,
anything.”

He wasn’t sure he believed me, but he didn’t make
further efforts to stop me. Of Ulrich’s journals there wasn’t a sign, so she
must have taken them with her. She had left under her own steam. She must have.

“Is her car in the garage?” I asked.

He called down to the doorman on his walkie-talkie;
Jason said he’d go out to look. That’s how an intruder could infiltrate: wait
until the doorman goes to the garage, then follow another tenant inside.

When we got downstairs, Jason was back at his station.
Dr. Herschel’s car was here—he once again abandoned his station to take me out
to look. It was locked, and I didn’t want to show off my parlor tricks by
opening it in front of him, so I peered through the tinted windshield. Unlike
me, Lotty doesn’t leave her car strewn with papers, old towels, and stinking
T-shirts. There wasn’t anything on the seats.

I gave each of them my card and asked Jason to
question people as they came home about whether anyone had seen her leave.
“That way we can keep it casual,” I said when he started to object. “Otherwise
I’ll have to bring the police in, which I’m very reluctant to do.”

The two men exchanged glances: the building management
would be annoyed if the cops came around to question the tenants. They pocketed
their tens with suitable dignity and agreed not to let anyone up to Dr.
Herschel’s apartment unless Max or I was here.

“And you do keep an eye on the lobby, even when you’re
running another errand?” I persisted.

“We don’t leave the lobby unattended, ma’am.” Jason
was annoyed. “I can always see it on the TV monitor in the garage. And when I
go on break, Gerry stays here to cover for me.”

I knew it wasn’t a foolproof system, but I’d lose
their cooperation if I criticized it any further. I sat in the Mustang for a
bit, massaging the back of my neck. What had happened to her? That Lotty had a
life of which I knew nothing had become abundantly clear in the last ten days.
Just because she’d hugged her secrets to herself, did that mean I had to
respect this secrecy? But conversely, did my friendship, my love, my concern,
any of those give me the right to invade a privacy she’d gone to such lengths to
protect? I thought it over. Probably not. As long as those damned books of
Ulrich’s weren’t going to put her at risk. But they might. If only I could find
someone who could interpret them for me. Maybe they would mean something to
Bertrand Rossy.

I slowly put the car into gear and made the difficult
drive to the South Side. Every week it gets harder to cross the heart of
Chicago. Too many people like me, sitting one to a car. At the entrance to the
expressway at North Avenue, I stopped for gas. Price was still going up. I know
we pay less than half what they do in Europe, but when you’re used to cheap
fuel a thirty-dollar fill-up is a jolt. I crawled down the Ryan to
Eighty-seventh, the exit nearest Gertrude Sommers’s.

At her building, nothing seemed to have changed from
two weeks ago, from the derelict Chevy out front to the despairing wail of the
baby within. Mrs. Sommers herself was still rigidly erect in a dark, heavily
ironed dress, her expression as forbidding as before.

“I told that other girl she might as well go,” she
said when I asked if Mary Louise was still there. “I don’t like to talk to the
police about my family. Even though she says she’s private, not with the police
anymore, she looks and talks like police.”

She gave the word a heavy first-syllable stress. I
made an effort to put Lotty out of my mind, to concentrate on what Gertrude
Sommers had decided to tell me.

She waved me to a chair at the pressed-wood table
along the far wall, then seated herself, with the sighing sound of stiff fabric
against stocking. Her back was rigidly upright, her hands folded in her lap,
her expression so forbidding that it was hard for me to meet her gaze.

“At Bible study on Wednesday night the reverend spoke
to me. About my nephew. Not my nephew Isaiah, the other one. Colby. Do you
think if his father had named him for a prophet, like Mr. Sommers’s other
brother named Isaiah, Colby would be an upright man, as well? Or would other
temptations have always proved too strong for him?”

Whether this was a rhetorical question or not, I knew
better than to try to answer. She was going to need time to come to the point.
I would have to let her get there on her own. I slipped a hand into my pocket
to turn off my cell phone: I didn’t want its ringing to interrupt her.

“I’ve been worried about Isaiah since Mr. Sommers
passed. He found money for the funeral out of his own pocket. He took it on
himself to hire you, with money out of his own pocket, to find out what
happened to Mr. Sommers’s life-insurance money. Now, for acting like that good
Samaritan, the police are hounding him, with that wife of his gnawing on him
from behind. That’s a good job he has at the engineering works, a fine job.
She’s lucky to have a man who’s a hardworking churchgoer, like Mr. Sommers was
before him. But she’s like a baby, wanting what she can’t have.”

She looked at me sternly. “In my heart I’ve been
blaming you for Isaiah’s troubles. Even though Isaiah kept saying you were
trying to end them, not foment them. So when the reverend spoke to me about my
nephew Colby, I didn’t want to hear, but the reverend reminded me, ‘Ears they
have and hear not, eyes they have and see not.’ So I knew the time had come for
me to listen. Um-hmm.”

She nodded, as if she were lecturing herself in that
little grunt. “So I listened to the reverend telling me that Colby was flashing
money around the neighborhood, and I thought, What are you trying to tell
me—that Colby has my husband’s insurance money? But the reverend said, nothing
like that. Colby got paid for helping do a job.

“‘A job,’ I said. ‘If my nephew Colby is getting money
for working, then I’m on my knees to praise Jesus.’ But the reverend told me,
not that kind of job. The reverend said, ‘He’s been hanging out with some of
those Empower Youth men.’ And I said, ‘The alderman does a lot of good in this
neighborhood, I won’t believe any ill of him.’ And the reverend said, ‘I hear
you, Sister Sommers, and I don’t believe ill of him, either. I know what he did
for your son when he was a boy, what he did for you and Mr. Sommers when your
boy was afflicted with the scourge of muscular dystrophy. But a man doesn’t
always know what the left hand of his left hand is doing. And some of the
alderman’s left hands are finding their way into people’s pocketbooks and cash
registers.’”

She gave another little grunt, “un-hnnh,” her lips
folded over in bitterness at having to repeat ill of her family to me, a
stranger, a white woman. “So the reverend says, ‘I’ve been hearing that your
nephew Colby got paid good money to make a telephone call to the police. To
tell them his cousin Isaiah had been in the office of that insurance agent who
defrauded you of your husband’s money and then got murdered. And if ever Cain
hated Abel for being righteous in the eyes of the Lord, your nephew Colby has
always hated his cousin Isaiah with that same hatred. I hear,’ the reverend
said, ‘I hear he gladly made that phone call. And I hear that when these same
left hands of the alderman’s left hand wanted a gun, that Colby knew where to
find it. And when they went breaking into an apartment in Hyde Park with a
blowtorch, Colby was glad to stand lookout for them.’

“‘I won’t go to the police against my own family,’ I
told the reverend. ‘But it’s not right for Isaiah to lie in jail, as he will if
the worst comes about from these police questions, because of the hatred of his
cousin.’ So when the other girl came around this morning, wanting to ask me
about Colby—because someone had been telling her stories about him as well—I
remembered you. And I saw the time had come to talk to you.”

The news was so startling that I hardly knew what to
say. Alderman Durham’s EYE team deployed to kill Howard Fepple? That hardly
seemed possible. In fact, I didn’t think it could be possible, because the
guard at the Hyde Park Bank would have noticed them—you wouldn’t mistake
Durham’s EYE troops for expectant parents going up to a Lamaze class. But it
must have been some EYE hangers-on who broke into Amy Blount’s apartment.

I pressed my palms against my eyes, as if that would
bring any clarity to my vision. Finally I decided to tell Gertrude Sommers a
good deal of the events of the last week and a half, including the old journals
that Ulrich Hoffman entered his payments in.

“I don’t understand any of this,” I finished. “But I
will have to talk to Alderman Durham. And then—I may have to talk to the
police, as well. One man is dead, another critically wounded. I don’t
understand what possible connection there is here between these old books of
Hoffman’s and the alderman—”

I halted. Except that Rossy had singled out Durham on
the street on Tuesday. He was just back from Springfield, where they’d killed
the Holocaust Asset Recovery Act, where Ajax had thrown its weight behind
Durham’s slave-reparations rider. And the demonstrations had stopped.

Rossy was from a European insurance company. Carl had
thought Ulrich’s records looked similar to the ones a European insurance agent
had kept on his father many years ago. Was that what connected Rossy to the
Midway Insurance Agency?

I picked up my briefcase and pulled out the
photocopies of Ulrich’s journal. Mrs. Sommers watched me, affronted at first by
my inattention, then interested in the papers.

“What is that? It looks like Mr. Hoffman’s
handwriting. Is this his record of Mr. Sommers’s insurance?”

“No. But I’m wondering if it’s a record of someone
else’s insurance that he sold in Europe sixty-five years ago. Look at this.”

“But it isn’t an
E,
it’s an
N
. So it
can’t be an Edelweiss policy number. Or it is, but they have their own company
code.”

“I suppose you know what you’re talking about, young
lady. But it doesn’t mean a thing to me. Not one thing.”