Sara Paretsky - V.I. Warshawski 10 (9 page)

“A lesson I’m sure Gertrude Sommers and her nephew
learned at Aaron Sommers’s funeral,” I said, getting up to leave.

He bowed his head mournfully, as if unaware of the
bite behind my words. He hadn’t gotten to be one of the richest men in South
Shore by apologizing for his rigorous business methods.

Tales of Hoffman

T
he score so
far today seemed to be Warshawski zero, visitors three. I hadn’t gotten any
satisfaction from Ajax, or the Midway Agency, or the funeral director. While I
was south, I might as well complete my sweep of frustrating meetings by
visiting the widow.

She lived a few blocks from the Dan Ryan Expressway,
in a rickety twelve-flat with a burnt-out building on one side and a lot with
bits of masonry and rusted-out cars on the other. A couple of guys were leaning
over the engine of an elderly Chevy when I pulled up. The only other person on
the street was a fierce-looking woman muttering as she sucked from a brown
paper bag.

The Sommerses’ doorbell didn’t seem to work, but the
street door hung loosely on its hinges, so I went on into the building. The
stairwell smelled of urine and stale grease. Dogs barked from behind several
doors as I passed, briefly overwhelming the thin hopeless wail of a baby. I was
so depressed by the time I reached Gertrude Sommers’s door that I was hard put
to knock instead of beating a craven retreat.

A few minutes passed. Finally I heard a slow step and
a deep voice calling to know who it was. I told her my name, that I was the
detective her nephew had hired. She scraped back the three dead bolts holding
the door and stood in the entrance for a moment, looking me over somberly
before letting me in.

Gertrude Sommers was a tall woman. Even in old age she
was a good two inches taller than my five-eight, and even in grief she held
herself erect. She was wearing a dark dress that rustled when she walked. A
black lace handkerchief, tucked in the cuff of her left sleeve, underscored her
mourning. Looking at her made me feel grubby in my work-worn skirt and sweater.

I followed her into the apartment’s main room,
standing until she pointed regally at the sofa. The bright floral upholstery
was shielded in heavy plastic, which crackled loudly when I sat down.

The building’s squalor ended on her doorstep. Every
surface that wasn’t encased in plastic shone with polish, from the dining table
against the far wall to the clock with its fake chimes over the television. The
walls were hung with pictures, many of the same smiling child, and a formal
shot of my client and his wife on their wedding day. To my surprise, Alderman
Durham was on the wall—once in a solo shot, and again with his arms around two
young teens in his blue Empower Youth Energy sweatshirts. One of the boys was
leaning on metal crutches, but both were beaming proudly.

“I’m sorry for your loss, Ms. Sommers. And sorry for
the terrible mix-up over your husband’s life insurance.”

She folded her lips tightly. She wasn’t going to help.

I plowed ahead as best I could, laying the photocopies
of the fraudulent death certificate and canceled insurance check in front of
her. “I’m bewildered by this situation. I’m wondering if you have any
suggestions about how it could have occurred.”

She refused to look at the documents. “How much did
they pay you to come here and accuse me?”

“No one paid me to do that, and no one could pay me to
do that, Ms. Sommers.”

“Easy words, easy words for you to say, young woman.”

“True enough.” I paused, trying to feel my way into
her point of view. “My mother died when I was fifteen. If some stranger had
cashed in her burial policy and then accused my dad of doing it, well, I can
imagine what he would have done, and he was an easygoing guy. But if I can’t
ask you any questions about this, how am I ever going to find out who cashed
this policy all those years ago?”

She clamped her lips together, thinking it over, then
said, “Have you talked to the insurance man, that Mr. Hoffman who came around
every Friday afternoon before Mr. Sommers could spend his pay on drink, or
whatever he imagined a poor black man would do instead of putting food on his
family’s table?”

“Mr. Hoffman is dead. The agency is in the hands of
the previous owner’s son, who doesn’t seem to know too much about the business.
Did Mr. Hoffman treat your husband with disrespect?”

She sniffed. “We weren’t people to him. We were ticks
in that book he carried around with him. Driving up in that big Mercedes like
he did, we knew just where our hard-saved nickels went. And no way to question
whether he was honest or not.”

“You think now he cheated you?”

“How else do you explain this?” She slapped the papers
on the table, still without looking at them. “You think I am deaf, dumb, and
blind? I know what goes on in this country with black folk and insurance. I
read how that company in the south got caught charging black folk more than
their policies were worth.”

“Did that happen to you?”

“No. But we paid. We paid and we paid and we paid. All
to have it go up in smoke.”

“If you didn’t file the claim in 1991, and you don’t
think your husband did, who would have?” I asked.

She shook her head, but her gaze inadvertently went to
the wall of photographs.

I drew a breath. “This isn’t easy to ask, but your son
was listed on the policy.”

Her look scorched me. “My son, my son died. It was
because of him we went after a bigger policy, thinking to leave him a little
something besides our funerals, Mr. Sommers’s and mine. Muscular dystrophy, our
boy had. And in case you’re thinking, Oh, well, they cashed the policy to pay
his medical bills, let me tell you, miss, Mr. Sommers worked two shifts for
four years, paying those bills. I had to quit my job to take care of my son
when he got too sick to move anymore. After he passed, I worked two shifts,
too, to get rid of the bills. At the nursing home where I was an aide. If
you’re going to pry into all my private details you can have that one without
charging my nephew a nickel for it: the Grand Crossing Elder Care Home. But you
can go snooping through my life. Maybe I have a secret
drinking
vice—you’ll go ask them at the church where I became a Christian and where my
husband was a deacon for forty-five years. Maybe Mr. Sommers
gambled
and
used all my housekeeping money. That’s the way you plan on ruining my
reputation, isn’t it.”

I looked at her steadily. “So you won’t let me ask you
any questions about the policy. And you can’t think of anyone who might have
cashed it in. You don’t have other nephews or nieces besides Mr. Isaiah Sommers
who might have?”

Again her gaze turned to the wall. On an impulse, I
asked her who the other boy was in the picture of Alderman Durham with her son.

“That’s my nephew Colby. And no, you’re not getting a shot
along with the cops to pin something on him, nor yet on the alderman’s Empower
Youth Energy organization. Alderman Durham has been a good friend, to my family
and to this neighborhood. And his group gives boys something to do with their
time and energy.”

It didn’t seem like the right time or place to ask
about the rumors that EYE members hustled campaign contributions with a
judicious use of muscle. I turned back to the papers in front of us and asked
about Rick Hoffman.

“What was he like? Can you imagine him stealing the
policy from you?”

“Oh, what do I know about him? Except, like I said,
his leather book that he ticked off our names in. He could have been Adolf
Hitler for all I know.”

“Did he sell insurance to a lot of people in this
building?” I persisted.

“And why do you want to know that?”

“I’d like to find out if other people who bought from
him had the same experience you did.”

At that she finally looked at me, instead of through
me. “In this building, no. At where Aaron—Mr. Sommers—worked, yes. My husband
was at South Branch Scrap Metal. Mr. Hoffman knew people want to be buried
decent, so he came around to places like that on the South Side, must have had
ten or twenty businesses he’d hit on Friday afternoon. Sometimes he’d collect
at the shop yard, sometimes he’d come here, it all depended on his schedule.
And Aaron, Mr. Sommers, he paid his five dollars a week for fifteen years,
until he was paid up.”

“Would you have any way of knowing the names of some
of the other people who bought from Hoffman?”

She studied me again, trying to assess whether this
was a soft sell, and deciding finally to take a chance that I was being
genuine. “I could give you four names, the men my husband worked with. They all
bought from Hoffman because he made it easy, coming around like he did. Does
this mean you understand I’m telling the truth about this?” She swept a hand
toward my documents, still without looking at them.

I grimaced. “I have to consider all the possibilities,
Ms. Sommers.”

She eyed me bitterly. “I know my nephew meant it for
the best, hiring you, but if he’d known how little respect you’d have—”

“I’m not disrespecting you, Ms. Sommers. You told your
nephew you’d talk to me. You know the kinds of questions this must raise:
there’s a death certificate with your husband’s name on it, with your name on
it as the presenter, dated almost ten years ago, with a check made out to you
through the Midway Insurance Agency. Someone cashed it. If I’m going to find
out who, I have to start somewhere. It would help me believe you if I could
find other people this same thing happened to.”

Her face pinched up with anger, but after sitting in
silence while the clock ticked off thirty seconds, she pulled a lined notepad
from under the telephone. Wetting her index finger, she turned the pages of a
weather-beaten address book and finally wrote down a series of names. Still
without speaking, she handed the list to me.

The interview was over. I picked my way back along the
unlit hall and down the stairs. The baby was still wailing. Outside, the men
were still huddled over the Chevy.

When I unlocked the Mustang the men shouted over a
jovial offer to trade. I grinned and waved. Oh, the kindness of strangers. It
was only when people talked to me they got so hostile. There was a lesson in
there for me, but not one I particularly wished to pursue.

It was almost three: I hadn’t eaten since my yogurt at
eight this morning. Maybe the situation would seem less depressing if I had
some food. I passed a strip mall on my way to the expressway and bought a slice
of cheese pizza. The crust was gooey, the surface glistened with oil, but I ate
every bite with gusto. When I got out of my car at the office I realized I’d
dripped oil down the front of my rose silk sweater. Warshawski zero, visitors five,
at this point. At least I didn’t have any business meetings this afternoon.

My part-time assistant, Mary Louise Neely, was at her
desk. She handed me a packet with the video of the Radbuka interviews, which
Beth Blacksin had messengered over. I stuffed it in my briefcase and brought
Mary Louise up to date with the Sommers case, so she could check on the other
men who had bought insurance from Rick Hoffman, then told her about Don’s
interest in Paul Radbuka.

“I couldn’t find anyone named Radbuka in the system,”
I finished, “so either—”

“Vic—if he changed his name, he had to do so in front
of a judge. There will be a court order.” Mary Louise looked at me as though I
were the village idiot.

I gaped at her like a dying pike and meekly went to
turn on my computer. It was small comfort that if Radbuka or Ulrich or whatever
his name was had taken any legal action, it wasn’t in the system yet: I should
have thought of that myself.

Mary Louise, not wanting to go stomping far and wide
through the city, didn’t believe Radbuka wasn’t somewhere in the system. She
did her own search and then said she would stop at the courts in the morning to
double-check the paper record.

“Although maybe the therapist will tell you where to
find him. What’s her name?”

When I told her, her eyes opened wide. “Rhea Wiell?
The
Rhea Wiell?”

“You know her?” I spun around in my chair to face her.

“Not personally.” Mary Louise’s skin turned the same
orangy pink as her hair. “But because, you know, because of my own story, I
followed her career. I sat in on some of the trials where she testified.”

Mary Louise had run away from an abusive home when she
was a teenager. After a tumultuous ride through sex and drugs, she’d pulled
herself together and become a police officer. In fact, the three children she
was fostering had been rescued from an abusive home. So it wasn’t surprising
she paid special attention to a therapist who worked with molested children.

“Wiell used to be with the State Department of
Children and Family Services. She was one of the staff therapists, she worked
with kids, but she also was an expert witness in court cases that hinged on
abuse. Remember the MacLean trial?”

As Mary Louise described it, the details began coming
back to me. The guy was a law professor who’d started life as a Du Page County
criminal prosecutor. When his name was put forward for a federal judgeship, his
daughter, by then a grown woman, came forward to denounce him as having raped
her when she was a child. She was insistent enough that she forced the state to
bring charges.