Sara Paretsky - V.I. Warshawski 10 (6 page)

“You look horribly healthy. It makes me want to smoke
more in self-defense.” He sucked in a final mouthful of smoke, then ground the
butt tidily on a broken piece of pottery Morrell had given him. “Morrell said
you’d operate the coffee thingy for me; I suppose you know he’s gone into town
to see someone or other at the State Department.”

I knew: Morrell had gotten up when I did, at
six-thirty. As his departure date loomed, he’d stopped sleeping well—several
times in the night I’d woken to find him staring rigidly at the ceiling. In the
morning, I slid out of bed as quietly as possible, going to the guest bathroom
in the hall to wash, then using his study to leave a message for Ralph
Devereux, head of claims at Ajax Insurance, asking for a meeting at his
earliest convenience. By the time I finished that, Morrell was up. While I did
my stretches and drank a glass of juice, he answered his mail. When I left for
my run, he was deep in an on-line chat with Humane Medicine in Rome.

My return route took me past Max’s lakefront home. His
Buick was still in the driveway, as were two other cars, presumably Carl’s and
Michael’s rentals. There didn’t seem to be any signs of life: musicians go to
bed late and get up late. Max, who usually is at work by eight, must be
following his son’s and Carl’s rhythms.

I stared at the house, as if the windows would lead me
to the secret thoughts of the men inside. What had the man on television last
night meant to Max and Carl? They had at least recognized the name, I was pretty
sure of that. Had one of their London friends been part of the Radbuka family?
But Max had made it clear last night that he wasn’t ready to talk about that. I
shouldn’t try to trespass. I shook out my legs and finished my run.

Morrell had a semi-commercial espresso machine. Back
in his apartment, I made cappuccinos for Don and myself before showering. While
I dressed, I checked my own messages. Ralph had called from Ajax and would be
delighted to squeeze me in at a quarter of twelve. I put on the rose silk
sweater and sage skirt I’d worn yesterday. It gets complicated spending part of
my life at Morrell’s—the clothes I want are always in my own apartment when I’m
with him, or in his place when I’m home.

Don had moved to the kitchen eating island with the
Herald-Star
when I came in. “If they took you for a ride on a Russian mountain in Paris,
where would you be?”

“Russian mountain?” I mixed yogurt and granola with
orange slices. “Is this helping you get ready to ask searching comments of
Posner and Durham?”

He grinned. “I’m sharpening my wits. If you were going
to do some fast checking on the therapist who was on television last night,
where would you start?”

I leaned against the counter while I ate. “I’d search
the accreditation databases for therapists to see if she was licensed and what
her training was. I’d go to ProQuest—she and the guy from the memory foundation
have been mixing it up—there might be some articles about her.”

Don scribbled a note on the corner of the
crossword-puzzle clues. “How long would it take you to do it for me? And how
much would you charge?”

“Depends on how deep you wanted to go. The basics I
could do pretty fast, but I charge a hundred dollars an hour with a five-hour
initial minimum. How generous is Gargette’s expenses policy?”

He tossed the pencil aside. “They have four hundred
cost accountants in their head office at Rheims just to make sure editors like
me don’t eat more than a Big Mac on the road, so they’re not too likely to
spring for a private investigator. Still, this could be a really big book. If
she is who she says she is—if the guy is who he says he is. Could you do some
checking for me on spec?”

I was about to agree when I thought of Isaiah Sommers,
carefully counting out his twenties. I shook my head unhappily. “I can’t make
exceptions for friends. It makes it hard for me to charge strangers.”

He pulled out a cigarette and tapped it on the paper.
“Okay. Can you do some checking and trust me for the money?”

I grimaced. “Yeah. I guess. I’ll bring a contract back
with me tonight.”

He returned to the porch. I finished my breakfast and
ran water over the bowl—Morrell would have a fit if he came home to find
case-hardened yogurt on it—then followed Don out the back door: my car was
parked in the alley behind the building. Don was reading the news but looked up
to say good-bye. On my way down the back stairs the word came to me from
nowhere. “Roller coaster. If it’s the same in French as Italian, a Russian
mountain is a roller coaster.”

“You’ve already earned your fee.” He picked up his
pencil and turned back to the crossword page.

Before going to my office, I swung by Global
Entertainment’s studios on Huron Street. When the company moved into town a
year ago, they bought a skyscraper in the hot corridor just northwest of the
river. Their Midwest regional offices, where they control everything from a
hundred seventy newspapers to a big chunk of the broadband DSL business, are on
the upper levels, with their studios on the ground floor.

Global executives are not my biggest fans in Chicago,
but I’ve worked with Beth Blacksin since before the company took over Channel
13. She was on the premises, editing a segment for the evening news. She ran
out to the lobby in the sloppy jeans she can’t wear on-air, greeting me like a
long-lost friend—or, anyway, a valuable source.

“I was riveted by your interview yesterday with that
guy Radbuka,” I said. “How’d you find him?”

“Warshawski!” Her expressive face came alive with
excitement. “Don’t tell me he’s been murdered. I’m getting to a live mike.”

“Calm down, my little newshound. As far as I know he’s
still on the planet. What can you tell me about him?”

“You’ve found out who the mysterious Miriam is, then.”

I took her by the shoulders. “Blacksin, calm down—if
you’re able. I’m purely on a fishing expedition right now. Do you have an
address you’d be willing to give out? For him, or for the therapist?”

She took me with her past the security station to a
warren of cubicles where the news staff had desks. She went through a stack of
papers next to her computer and found the standard waiver sheet people sign
when they give interviews. Radbuka had listed a suite number at an address on
North Michigan, which I copied down. His signature was large and untidy, kind
of the way he’d looked in his too-big suit. Rhea Wiell, by contrast, wrote in a
square, almost printlike hand. I copied out the spelling of her name. And then
noticed that Radbuka’s address was the same as hers. Her office at Water Tower.

“Could you get me a copy of the tape? Your interview, and
the discussion between the therapist and the guy from the antihypnosis place?
That was good work, pulling them together at the last minute.”

She grinned. “My agent’s happy—my contract’s coming up
in six weeks. Praeger has a real bee in his bonnet about Wiell. They’ve been
adversaries on a bunch of cases, not just in Chicago but all around the
country. He thinks she’s the devil incarnate and she thinks he’s the next thing
to a child molester himself. They’ve both had media training—they looked
civilized on camera, but you should have heard them when the camera wasn’t
rolling.”

“What did you think of Radbuka?” I asked. “Up close
and personal, did you believe his story?”

“Do you have proof he’s a fraud? Is that what this is
really about?”

I groaned. “I don’t know anything about him. Zippo.
Niente. Nada. I can’t say it in any more languages. What was your take on him?”

Her eyes opened wide. “Oh, Vic, I believed him
completely. It was one of the most harrowing interviews I’ve ever done—and I
talked to people after Lockerbie. Can you imagine growing up the way he did and
then finding the man who claimed to be your father was like your worst enemy?”

“What was his father—foster father’s name?”

She scrolled through the text on her screen. “Ulrich.
Whenever Paul referred to him, he always used the man’s German name, instead of
‘Daddy’ or ‘Father’ or something.”

“Do you know what he found in Ulrich’s papers that
made him realize his lost identity? In the interview he said they were in
code.”

She shook her head, still looking at the screen. “He
talked about working it through with Rhea and getting the correct
interpretation. He said they proved to him that Ulrich had really been a Nazi
collaborator. He talked a lot about how brutal Ulrich had been to him, beating
him for acting like a sissy, locking him in a closet when he was away at work,
sending him to bed without food.”

“There wasn’t a woman on the scene? Or was she a
participant in the abuse?” I asked.

“Paul says Ulrich told him that his mother—or Mrs.
Ulrich, anyway—had died in the bombing of Vienna as the war was ending. I don’t
think Mr. Ulrich ever married here, or even had women to the house. Ulrich and
Paul seemed to have been a real pair of loners. Papa went to work, came home,
beat Paul. Paul was supposed to be a doctor, but he couldn’t handle pressure,
so he ended up as an X-ray technician, which earned more ridicule. He never
moved out of his father’s house. Isn’t that creepy? Staying with him even when
he was big enough to earn his own living?”

That was all she could, or at least all she would,
tell me. She promised to messenger over a tape of the various segments with
Radbuka, as well as the meeting between the therapists, to my office later in
the day.

I still had time before my appointment at Ajax to do some
work in my office. It was only a few miles north and west of Global—but a
light-year away in ambience. No glass towers for me. Three years ago a sculptor
friend had invited me to share a seven-year lease with her for a converted
warehouse on Leavitt. Since the building was a fifteen-minute drive from the
financial district where most of my business lies and the rent was half what
you pay in those gleaming high-rises, I’d signed on eagerly.

When we moved in, the area was still a grimy
no-man’s-land between the Latino neighborhood farther west and a slick Yuppie
area nearer the lake. At that time, bodegas and palm readers vied with music
stores for the few retail spaces in what had been an industrial zone. Parking
abounded. Even though the Yuppies are starting to move in, building espresso
bars and boutiques, we still have plenty of collapsing buildings and drunks. I
was against further gentrification—I didn’t want to see my rent skyrocket when
the current lease expired.

Tessa’s truck was already in our little lot when I
pulled in. She’d received a major commission last month and was putting in long
hours to build a model of both the piece and the plaza it would occupy. When I
passed her studio door she was perched at her outsize drafting table,
sketching. She’s testy if interrupted, so I went down the hall to my own office
without speaking.

I made a couple of copies of Isaiah Sommers’s uncle’s
policy and locked the original in my office safe, where I keep all client
documents during an active investigation. It’s really a strongroom, with
fireproof walls and a good sturdy door.

Midway Insurance’s address was listed on the policy:
they had sold the policy to Aaron Sommers all those years back. If I couldn’t
get satisfaction from the company, I’d have to go back to the agent—and hope he
remembered what he’d done thirty years ago. I checked the phone book. The
agency was still on Fifty-third Street, down in Hyde Park.

I had two queries to complete for bread-and-butter
clients. While I sat on hold with the Board of Health, I logged on to Lexis and
ProQuest and submitted a search on Rhea Wiell, as well as Paul Radbuka.

My Board of Health connection came on the phone and
for once answered all my questions without a lot of hedging. When I’d wrapped
up my report I checked back with Lexis. There was nothing on the Radbuka name.
I checked my disks of phone numbers and addresses for the U.S.—more up-to-date
than Web search engines—and found nothing. When I looked up his father’s name,
Ulrich, I got forty-seven matches in the Chicago area. Maybe Paul hadn’t
changed his name legally when he became Radbuka.

Rhea Wiell, on the other hand, gave me a lot of hits.
She had apparently appeared as an expert witness in a number of trials, but
tracking them down so I could get transcripts would be a tedious business.
However, I did find she was a clinical social worker, fully accredited by the
State of Illinois: at least she had started from an authentic position. I
logged off and swept my papers together into my case so I could be on time for
my meeting with the head of the Ajax claims department.

Staking a Claim

I
originally
met Ralph Devereux early in my life as an investigator. It hasn’t been so many
years, but at the time I was the first woman in Chicago, maybe even the
country, with a PI license. It was a struggle to get clients or witnesses to
treat me seriously. When Ralph took a bullet in his shoulder because he
couldn’t believe his boss was a crook, our relationship fractured as abruptly
as his scapula.

I hadn’t seen him since; I admit I felt a little
nervous anticipation as I rode the L down to Ajax’s headquarters on Adams
Street. When I got off the elevator at the sixty-third floor, I even stopped in
the ladies’ room to make sure my hair was combed and my lipstick tidily confined
to my mouth.