Sara Paretsky - V.I. Warshawski 10 (57 page)

I could see all of this happening. But how could I
prove any of it? If I had world enough and time, I could probably find they’d
gone to Ameritech for old phone books. The cops hadn’t been able to trace the
SIG that killed Fepple. Perhaps Fillida’s friend in the Italian consulate had
brought it in with her under diplomatic cover. “Laura, darling, I want to bring
my guns with me. The Americans are so bizarre about guns—they all carry them
the way we do pocketbooks, but they will make my life a misery of forms if I
try to carry my own through customs with me.”

As I cruised down Lake Shore Drive for my meeting with
Durham, I thought uneasily about Paul Hoffman in his hospital bed. Where had
Fillida Rossy been going on a Friday afternoon with her gym bag? Did she work
out this late in the day, or did the bag hold a gun for finishing the job on
Paul?

At the lights on Chicago Avenue, I called the
hospital: there was a block on his room, so they wouldn’t connect me. That was
good. Could they give me a status report? His condition had been upgraded to
serious.

When I’d found a meter a few blocks south of the Glow,
I called Tim Streeter up at Max’s. Max hadn’t come home from work yet—Posner
had been back at the hospital today. The demonstrations had been more subdued,
but the board was meeting late to discuss the problem.

Tim was bored; they really didn’t need him any longer.
If I could get Calia Ninshubur’s collar they would all be happy.

“Oh, that wretched collar.” I told Tim if I couldn’t
get up to Evanston tonight, Calia would have to accept receiving it in the mail
when she returned home. More important was my dilemma about Paul’s safety,
which I explained to him.

Tim said he’d talk to his brother to see if one of the
women on their team would look after Paul for a few days. He himself needed a
break from bodyguarding: four days of Calia had turned him prematurely white.

When we finished, I leaned my head wearily against the
steering wheel. Too much was going on that I didn’t understand and couldn’t
control. Where had Lotty gone? She’d stalked angrily off into the night last
night, driven home—and disappeared. I dialed her apartment, where her clipped
voice came on again from the machine. “Lotty, please call me if you are picking
up your messages. I’m seriously worried.” I called back up to Evanston,
intending to leave a message for Max, but he’d just walked in the door.

“Victoria, have you had any word from Lotty? No? Mrs.
Coltrain called, wanting to know if you had been able to get into her
apartment.”

“Oh, nuts—calling Mrs. Coltrain back went out of my
head—I’m spinning in too many directions right now.” I told Max about my tour
through the apartment this morning and asked if he could tell Mrs. Coltrain
about it himself.

“If Lotty disappeared of her own free will, how could
she leave without letting us know?” I added. “Surely she must know how much
this would upset all her friends, not to say Mrs. Coltrain and her clinic
staff.”

“She’s seriously disturbed,” Max said. “Something has
knocked her off-balance, so that she’s thinking only of some small world, not
the bigger one with her friends in it. Her whole behavior is—it’s frightening
me, Victoria. I’m tempted to call it some kind of long-delayed post-traumatic
breakdown, as if she held so much in for so many decades that it’s hitting her
with the force of a tidal wave. If you get any kind of word from her, no matter
the hour, let me know at once. As I will you.”

It helped that Max was as troubled as I.
Post-traumatic stress—it’s a diagnosis bandied about so glibly these days that
one forgets how real and terrifying a condition it is. If Max was right, it
could explain Lotty’s unbearable edginess lately, as well as her sudden
evaporation. I wished I hadn’t gotten myself bogged down in the trailing
tentacles of the investigation: I wanted to find her now. I wanted to console
her if that lay within my power. I wanted to bring her back to life. But I was
frighteningly aware that I had few powers. I wasn’t an
indovina
. I was
barely making progress slogging through quicksand as an investigator.

I climbed stiffly out of the car. It was six-thirty; I
was late for my meeting with the alderman. I walked up the street to the Golden
Glow. It’s the closest thing I have to a private club, not that it’s private,
but I’ve been a regular for so many years that they let me run a tab that I pay
once a month.

Sal Barthele, who owns the place, flashed me a smile
but didn’t have time to come around to say hello—the horseshoe mahogany bar,
which her brothers and I had helped her retrieve from a Gold Coast mansion when
it went under the wrecking ball ten years ago, was three-deep with weary
traders. The half dozen little tables with their signature Tiffany lamps were
also crowded. I scanned the room but didn’t spot the alderman.

Durham came in just as Jacqueline, who was working the
floor, whizzed past me with a full tray. She handed me a glass of Black Label
without breaking stride and went on to a table where she served eight drinks
without checking the order. I took a deep swallow of scotch, steadying myself from
my worries about Lotty, bracing myself to talk to the alderman.

Jacqueline saw me edge my way to the door to greet
Durham: she flashed an arm at me, pointing to a table in the corner. Sure
enough, just as Durham had given me an easy greeting, the five women clustered
at the table hopped up to leave. By the time the alderman and I were sitting
down, half the bar had emptied as people ran to catch seven-o’clock trains. I’d
wondered if he would come with an escort; now that the room had cleared I could
see two youths in their EYE blazers standing just inside the door.

“So, Investigator Warshawski. You are still on your
quest to link African-American men with any crime that floats by your nose.” It
was a statement, not a question.

“I don’t have to go on a quest,” I said with a gentle
smile. “The news gets hand-delivered to me. Colby Sommers has not only been
flashing a roll but telling everyone and their dog Rover what he did to—well, I
hate to say earn, that demeans the hard work that most people do for a living.
Let’s call it scoring.”

“Call it what you want, Ms. Warshawski. Call it what
you want, it doesn’t change the ugly truth behind the insinuations.” When
Jacqueline hovered briefly in front of us, he ordered Maker’s Mark and a twist;
I shook my head—one whisky is my limit when I’m in a tricky conversation.

“People say you’re smart, alderman; people say you’re
the one man who can give the mayor a run for his money in the next election
cycle. I don’t see it myself. I know Colby Sommers was a lookout when a couple
of EYE youths broke into Amy Blount’s apartment earlier this week. When you and
I talked on Wednesday, I was wondering about an anonymous tip the cops got, one
to frame Isaiah Sommers. Now I know Colby Sommers made that phone call. I know
that Isaiah and Margaret Sommers went to Fepple’s agency the Saturday morning
his body was lying there, brains and blood all over everything, on your advice.
I guess what I don’t know is what Bertrand Rossy could possibly offer you to
make you get up to your neck in his problems.”

Durham smiled, a genial smile that didn’t reach his
eyes. “You don’t know much, Ms. Warshawski, because there’s no way you can know
folks in my ward. It’s no secret that Colby Sommers hates his cousin: everyone
along Eighty-seventh Street knows that. If he tried to frame Isaiah for murder
and if he got involved in the fringes of hard-core crime, it doesn’t shock me
the way it might you: I understand all the indignities, all the centuries of
injustice, that make black men turn on themselves, or turn on their own
community. I doubt you could ever understand such things. But if Colby has
tried to harm his cousin, I’ll make a call to the local police commander, see
if I can’t help sort that out so that Isaiah doesn’t suffer needlessly.”

“I hear things, too, alderman.” I twirled the last
small mouthful of whisky in my glass. “One of the most interesting is about you
and reparations for descendants of slaves. An important issue. A good one to
put the mayor in a bind over—he can’t afford to alienate the international
business community by pushing it; he can’t afford to look bad to his
constituents by ignoring it, especially since he backed the City Council’s
condemnation of slavery.”

“So you understand local politics, detective. Maybe
that means you’ll vote for me, if I ever run for an office that covers whatever
chardonnay district you live in.”

He was deliberately trying to goad me; I gave him a
quizzical smile to show I understood the effort even if I didn’t get the
reason. “Oh, yes, I understand local politics. I understand it might not look
so good if people found out that you only started on your campaign when
Bertrand Rossy came to town. When he—persuaded—you to take the spotlight off
Joseph Posner and the Holocaust asset issue by banging the drum over
reparations for slavery.”

“Those are mighty ugly words, detective, and as you
know, I am not a patient man when it comes to people like you slandering me.”

“Slander. Now, that assumes a baseless accusation. If
I wanted to take the trouble, or ask, say, Murray Ryerson at the
Herald-Star
to take the trouble, I’m betting we could find some substantial chunk of change
moving from Rossy to you. Either something from him personally, or something on
an Ajax corporate check. I’m betting from him personally. And maybe he was even
savvy enough to give you cash. But someone will know about it. It’s just a
question of digging deep enough.”

He didn’t flinch. “Bertrand Rossy is an important
businessman around town, even if he is from Switzerland. And like you say, one
of these days I might want to run for mayor of Chicago. It can’t hurt me to
have support in the business community. But most important to me is my own
community. Where I grew up. And where I know most people by their first names.
They’re the Chicagoans who need me, they’re the ones I work for, so I’d best be
getting to a meeting with them.”

He drained his glass and signaled for a check, but I
waved a hand to Jacqueline, meaning Sal should add it to my bar tab. I didn’t
want to be indebted to Alderman Durham for anything, not even one mouthful of
scotch whisky.

Bodies Building

A
t the end
of the trading day, the South Loop empties fast. The streets take on the
forlorn and tawdry look that human spaces acquire when they’ve been abandoned:
every piece of garbage, every abandoned can and bottle, stood out on the empty
streets. The L screeching overhead sounded as remote and wild as a coyote on
the prairie.

I walked the three blocks to my car very fast, looking
around every few steps into doorways and alleys, zigging back and forth across
the street. Who would come for me first—Fillida Rossy, or Durham’s EYE gang?

Durham had not only brushed me off, he’d done so with
a studied offensiveness that was designed to make me angry. As if he hoped that
focusing on racial injustice would keep me from thinking about the specifics of
the crimes Colby Sommers was involved in.

So what wasn’t I supposed to think about? It seemed to
me I was getting a tolerably clear picture of why Ulrich’s journals mattered.
And of how Howard Fepple had been killed. I was also starting to see the
connection between Durham and Rossy. They had a beautifully dovetailed set of
needs: Rossy handed Durham an attention-getting campaign issue, gave him the
cash to fund it, and manipulated the legislature into linking the Holocaust
with slave reparations, making it too big an issue for them to touch. Durham in
exchange took the spotlight away from Ajax, Edelweiss, and Holocaust asset
recovery. It was lovely, in a perverted way.

What I didn’t understand was what Howard Fepple had
seen in the Sommers file that made him think he had a big payday coming. I
supposed it could have been something to do with Ulrich’s European
life-insurance book—that Fepple, like me, like anyone in insurance, knew Edelweiss
couldn’t afford an exposure on Holocaust life-insurance policies.

But that didn’t explain how Ulrich had made his money.
Thirty years ago he wouldn’t have been blackmailing his Swiss employers,
because thirty years ago Holocaust bank accounts and Holocaust life-insurance
policies didn’t matter to state legislatures or the U.S. Congress. Ulrich must
have been doing something more local. He didn’t seem like a criminal
mastermind, just an ugly guy who horribly abused his son and found a quiet way
to turn a plug nickel into a silver dollar.

A man lurched out of the shadows in front of me. I
didn’t know I could get my hand inside my shoulder holster so fast. When the
man asked for the price of a meal, old Ezra filling the air around him, sweat
trickled down the back of my neck. I stuck the gun in my jacket pocket and
fished in my bag for a dollar, but he’d seen the gun and ran down a side street
on unsteady legs.

I drove back to my office, keeping an uneasy eye on
the rearview mirror, checking for tails. When I got to Tessa’s and my
warehouse, I parked away from the building. I had my gun in my hand when I let
myself in. Before settling at my desk, I searched Tessa’s studio, the hall, the
bathroom, and all the subdivisions of my office—it’s hard to break in to our
building but not impossible.