Sara Paretsky - V.I. Warshawski 10 (58 page)

I put in a call to Terry Finchley at the police
department. He’d been Mary Louise’s commanding officer her last three years on
the force and was the person she still turned to for inside information on
police investigations. I knew he wasn’t involved in the Sommers murder
directly, but he knew about the investigation because he’d been getting
information about it to Mary Louise. He wasn’t in, either. I hesitated, then
left a message for him with the desk sergeant:
Colby Sommers is a hanger-on
with the EYE team. He knows something about Howard Fepple’s murder; he also was
involved in the break-in in Hyde Park where you sent the forensics unit on
Wednesday
. The sergeant promised to pass it on.

When I switched on my computer, I felt unreasonably
let down that Morrell hadn’t responded to my e-mail. Of course, it was the
middle of the night in Kabul. And who knew where he was—if he’d gone into the
backcountry already, he wouldn’t be anywhere near a phone hookup. Lotty off in some
desolate place that I couldn’t penetrate, Morrell at the ends of the earth. I
felt horribly alone and sorry for myself.

The fax of Anna Freud’s article on the six toddlers
from Terezin had come in. I turned to it resolutely, determined not to wallow
in self-pity.

The article was long, but I read it through with total
attention. Despite the clinical tone of the piece, the heartbreaking
destruction of the children came through clearly—deprived of everything, from
parental love to language, fending for themselves as toddlers in a
concentration camp, somehow coming together to support one another.

After the war, when the British admitted a number of
children from the camps to help them learn to live in a terror-free world,
Freud took over the care of these six: they were far too young for any of the
other programs. And they were such a tight little group that the social workers
were afraid of separating them, afraid of the added trauma that separation
would create in their young lives. They were all close, but two had formed a
special bond with each other: Paul and Miriam.

Paul and Miriam. Anna Freud, whom Paul Hoffman called
his savior in England, cutting her photograph from her biography to hang in his
chamber of secrets. Freud’s Paul, born in Berlin in 1942, sent to Terezin at
twelve months, just as Paul Hoffman had claimed for himself in the interview on
television. The only one of the six about whose family nothing was known. So if
your name was Paul, and your father was a German who brutalized you, locked you
in a closet, beat you for any signs of feminine character, maybe you would
start to think, This is my story, the children in the camps.

But Paul and Miriam weren’t Anna Freud’s children’s
real names. In a study of real people, Freud had used code names to protect
their privacy. Paul Hoffman hadn’t understood that. He’d read the article,
absorbed the story, imagined his little playmate Miriam for whom he cried so
piteously on television last week.

The hairs stood up on the back of my neck. I felt an
overwhelming desire for my own home and bed, for privacy away from other
people’s soul-sickening traumas. I wasn’t up to driving north to Evanston. I
put Ninshubur’s little collar in a padded mailer, addressed it to Michael
Loewenthal’s London home with a note for customs,
used goods, no declared
value,
and dropped it in a mailbox with some airmail postage. I kept an eye
out on the street all the way home, but neither Fillida nor the EYE team seemed
to be stalking me.

I was happy when Mr. Contreras waylaid me as I came
into the lobby. When he learned I hadn’t eaten all day, except for my apple, he
exclaimed, “No wonder you’re discouraged, doll. I got spaghetti on the stove.
It ain’t homemade, like you’re used to, but it’s plenty good enough for an
empty stomach.”

It was, indeed—I ate two bowls of it. We drove the
dogs to a park and let them romp in the dark.

I fell early to sleep. In the night, I had my most
dreaded nightmare, the one where I was trying to find my mother and only came
on her as she was lowered into her grave, wrapped in so many bandages, with
tubes coming from every arm, that she couldn’t see me. I knew she was alive, I
knew she could hear me, but she gave no sign. I woke from it weeping, saying
Lotty’s name aloud to myself. I lay awake for an hour, listening to sounds from
the world outside, wondering what the Rossys were doing, before falling back at
last into a fitful sleep.

At seven, I got up to run to the lake with the dogs
while Mr. Contreras followed us in my Mustang. The idea that I might be in
danger worried him powerfully; I could see he was going to stick close at hand
until the Edelweiss business was resolved.

The lake was still warm, even though the September
days were drawing short; I went into the water with the dogs. While Mr. Contreras
threw sticks for them I swam to the next rock outcropping and back. When I
rejoined the three of them I was tired but refreshed, the misery of the
previous night eased from my mind.

As we drove home I turned on the radio to catch the
news at the top of the hour.
Presidential election blah-blah, violence on
the West Bank and Gaza blah-blah
.

In our top local story, police have released the
identity of a woman whose body was found early this morning in the Sundown
Meadow Forest Preserve. A Countryside couple came on the body when they were
running their dogs in the woods a little before six this morning. Countryside
police now tell us that her name was Connie Ingram, thirty-three, of LaGrange.
She lived with her mother, who became worried when her daughter did not return
from work last night.

“She doesn’t have a boyfriend,” Mrs. Ingram said. “She
often stayed late on Fridays to go for a drink with her girlfriends at work,
but she always caught the 7:03.”

When her daughter failed to come home by the last train,
Mrs. Ingram called local police, who told her they didn’t take a missing
person’s report until someone had been gone for seventy-two hours. Still, by
the time Mrs. Ingram talked to LaGrange police, her daughter was already dead:
the Cook County Medical Examiner estimates that she was strangled around eight
P.M.

Ingram had worked at Ajax Insurance in the Loop since
graduating from high school. Coworkers say she had recently been troubled by
accusations from Chicago police that she was involved in the murder of longtime
Ajax insurance agent Howard Fepple earlier this week. Countryside and LaGrange
authorities are cooperating fully with the Chicago police in the investigation.

In other local news, a South Side man was shot and
killed in an apparent drive-by shooting as he was walking home from the L last
night. Colby Sommers had been involved in Alderman Louis Durham’s Empower Youth
Energy program as a boy; the alderman said he is sending condolences to the
family.

Is the end of summer getting you down? Turn to—

I turned off the radio and pulled over to the curb.

Mr. Contreras looked at me in alarm. “What’s up, doll?
She a friend of yours? You’re white as my hair right now.”

“Not a friend—the young woman in the claims department
I’ve been telling you about. Yesterday morning when I went down to Ajax, Ralph
Devereux taxed her with knowing something about these wretched old journals
that Lotty’s wandered off with.”

Connie Ingram disappeared for a few minutes on her way
to the elevator. I thought she was hiding from me, but maybe she was in
Bertrand Rossy’s office, seeking advice.

Fepple must have sent a sample of his goods to the
company: how else had they known he really could blackmail them? He’d sent them
to poor little Connie Ingram, because she was in touch with him. She went
directly to Bertrand Rossy because Rossy was taking a personal interest in the
work she was doing on the Sommers file. It must have been almost unbearably
exciting for a claims handler to be pulled out of the pit by the glamorous young
executive from the new owners in Zurich. He swore her to secrecy; he knew she
wouldn’t betray his interest in the case to Ralph, to her boss Karen Bigelow,
to anyone, because he could gauge her excitement pretty clearly.

But she was a company woman; she was worried when she
left Ralph’s office. She wanted to be loyal to the claims department, but she
needed to consult Rossy first. So what did Rossy do? Arranged a secret meeting
with her at the end of the day. (“We can’t talk now, my schedule is full; I’ll
pick you up at the bar across the street after work. But don’t tell anyone. We
don’t know who in this company we can trust.”) Something like that. Taken her
to the forest preserve, where she might have imagined sex with the boss, and
strangled her when she turned to smile at him.

The scenario made me shudder in disgust. If I was
right. Peppy leaned her head across the backseat and nuzzled me, whimpering. My
neighbor wrapped a towel around me.

“You get into the passenger seat, doll, I’m driving
you home. Tea, honey, milk, you need that and a hot bath right now.”

I didn’t fight him, even though I knew I couldn’t
afford to sit around for very long. While he boiled water for tea and fussed
around with bread and eggs I went upstairs to shower.

Standing under the hot water, drifting, my mind turned
up what Ralph had said yesterday to Connie. Something like,
I didn’t think
we ever deep-sixed papers in an insurance company
. If Fepple had sent her
samples of his wares, so to speak, she’d have kept them.

I turned off the water abruptly and dried myself
quickly. Say Rossy took care of the claims master file, cleaning out anything
in Ulrich’s handwriting. He’d found the microfiche copy—nothing simpler than
for him to roam the floors of the building after hours: just checking on local
operations. Hunt for the right drawer, abstract the fiche, and destroy it.

But I’d guess Connie had a desk file—the documents she
needed to consult every day on a case while she was actively working on it. It
probably hadn’t occurred to Rossy—he’d never done a day’s clerical work in his
life. And I bet Fepple’s stuff was in it.

I scrambled into my clothes: jeans, running shoes, and
the softly cut blazer to conceal my gun. I ran down the stairs to Mr.
Contreras’s place, where I took the time to drink the hot, sweet tea he’d made
and eat scrambled eggs. I was impatient to be going—but I owed him the courtesy
to sit at the table for fifteen minutes.

While I ate I explained what I wanted to do, muting
his protest at my taking off again. The clinching argument in his eyes was that
the sooner I got going on Rossy and Ajax, the sooner I’d be able to start
looking for Lotty.

Clerical Work

I
ran back
up to my apartment to collect my bag—and to call Ralph, so I’d know where he
was instead of bouncing around town hunting for him. My phone was ringing when
I got upstairs. It stopped before I got my door opened but started again as I
rummaged in my briefcase for my Palm Pilot.

“Vic!” It was Don Strzepek. “Don’t you ever check your
messages? I’ve left four in the last hour.”

“Don, knock it off. Two people connected with my
investigation were murdered last night, which is way bigger in my mind than
returning your phone calls.”

“Well, Rhea was lucky she wasn’t murdered last night.
A masked gunman broke into her place, looking for those damned books of Ulrich
Hoffman’s. So if you can clean the snot off your nose and be responsive, go get
them back from Dr. Herschel before someone else is hurt.”

“Broke into her home?” I was horrified. “How do you
know they were after Ulrich’s books?”

“The attacker demanded them. Rhea was terrified: the
bastard tied her up, held a gun on her, started tossing stuff out of her
bookshelves, going through her personal things. She had to say that Lotty had
them.”

I felt the air drain from me, as if I’d been kicked in
the solar plexus. “Yes, I can see that.”

My voice was as dry as the dust under my dresser, but
Don was full of his own alarms and didn’t notice. At four this morning, Rhea
woke to find someone standing over her with a gun. The person was completely
covered in a ski mask, gloves, a bulky jacket. Rhea couldn’t tell if it was a
man or a woman, a black person or a white, but the attacker’s size and ferocity
made her think it was a man. He pulled a gun on her, forced her downstairs,
taped her hands and feet to a dining-room chair.

The intruder had said, “You know what we want. Tell us
where you’ve hidden them.” She protested that she didn’t know, so the man had
growled out: the books of her patient Paul Hoffman.

Don’s voice shook. “Prick said he’d already searched
her office. She says it was the worst part, in a way, that she had to keep
asking him to repeat what he was saying—he apparently spoke in a kind of growl
that was hard to understand. Something deep in the throat; that’s why she
couldn’t even tell the sex of the speaker. Also, well, you know how it is when
you’re terrified, especially if you’re not used to physical attacks—your brain
doesn’t process stuff normally. And this—people look so horrible in ski masks
and everything. It’s paralyzing to see someone in that getup. They don’t look
human.”

It flitted through my mind that Rhea could test her
own theories by getting herself hypnotized, to see what she could recall of her
assailant, but the episode had been too traumatic for me to make sport of her.
“So she said, Don’t shoot me, Dr. Herschel took the books?”