Sara Paretsky - V.I. Warshawski 10 (25 page)

When my father died this was a flourishing agency but
I am a failure as an agent. I have watched my sales and profits go in a
downward spiral for five years. I thought I could cheat my way out of debt but
now that the detective is watching me I’m afraid I would be a failure even at
that. I’ve never married, I’ve never known how to attract women, I can’t face
myself any longer. I don’t know how to pay my bills. If anyone cares, perhaps
my mother, I’m sorry. Howard

I printed it out and stuffed the paper in my pocket.
My hands inside their latex gloves were wet. Black spots swam around my eyes. I
was very aware of Fepple’s shattered head next to me, but I couldn’t look at
it. I wanted to leave the obscene mess, but I might not get another chance to
find the Sommers file.

The cabinets were open, which surprised me: when I was
here last week, Fepple had made quite a point of unlocking them when he wanted
to put the papers away, then promptly locking them again. The third drawer, the
one where he’d stuck the Sommers file, was labeled
Rick Hoffman’s clients
.

The files were jammed into the drawer, some upside
down, none in any kind of order. When I pulled out the first file,
Barney
Williams
, I thought I was at the end of the alphabet, but it was followed
by
Larry Jenks
. With an uneasy eye on the clock, I emptied the drawer
and replaced the folders one at a time. The Sommers file wasn’t there.

I flipped through the folders looking for anything
that related to Sommers. There wasn’t anything in them but copies of policies
and payment schedules. About three-quarters of them were closed cases, where
the policy was stamped
Paid
with the date or
Lapsed for nonpayment
with the date. I looked in the other drawers but found nothing. I took a half
dozen of the paid policies: I could get Mary Louise to check on whether they’d
been paid to the beneficiary.

I listened uneasily to voices coming from the hall,
but I couldn’t leave until I’d looked for the Sommers papers in the mess on the
desk. The papers were flecked with bits of blood and brain. I didn’t want to
disturb them—an experienced tech could tell in a flash that someone had been
searching—but I wanted that file.

Bracing myself, keeping my eyes shielded, willing
myself to believe there was nothing in the chair, I leaned over the desk,
pulling back the edges of the documents in front of Fepple. I worked my way
outward from the middle in a circle. When I found nothing, I moved around to
Fepple’s side of the desk, trying not to step in anything, and looked in the
desk drawers. Nothing but signs of his dismal life. Half-eaten bags of chips,
an unopened box of condoms covered in cracker crumbs, diaries dating back to
the 1980’s when his father was booking appointments, books on how to improve
your table-tennis game. Who would have thought he had enough
stick-to-it-iveness to pursue a sport?

It was nine now. The longer I stayed, the more likely
it was that someone would come in on me. I went to the door, standing to the
left of the frame so I couldn’t be seen through the glass, listening for sounds
from the hall. A group of women was passing, laughing about something, wishing each
other a good morning: how was the weekend, heavy workload this morning in Dr.
Zabar’s office, how was Melissa’s birthday party. Silence, then the elevator
bell and a pair of women with an infant. When they had gone, I slid the door
open a crack. The hall was empty.

As I went out, I saw Fepple’s briefcase in the corner
behind me. On an impulse, I picked it up. While I waited for the elevator, I
stuffed the latex gloves into the case along with the files I was borrowing.

I hoped I didn’t have anything on me to link me to the
crime scene, but when I got off the elevator at the bottom, I saw my shoe had
left a nasty brownish smear on the car floor. I somehow managed to walk out the
door with my head up, but as soon as I was out of the guard’s sight lines I skittered
around the corner, barely making it to the alley before throwing up my orange
juice and coffee.

Hunter in the Middle

B
ack home, I
scrubbed my shoes obsessively, but all the perfumes of Dow Chemical wouldn’t
wipe them clean. I couldn’t afford to throw them out, but I didn’t think I
could bear to wear them again, either.

I took off the suit, inspecting every inch under a
strong light. There didn’t seem to be anything of Fepple on the fabric, but I
bundled it up for the dry cleaner anyway.

I had stopped at a pay phone on Lake Shore Drive to
call in the news of a dead body in the Hyde Park Bank building. By now the
police machinery should be in motion. I walked restlessly to the kitchen door
and back. I could call one of my old friends on the force for an inside report
on the investigation, but then I’d have to reveal that I’d found the body.
Which would mean I’d spend the day answering questions. I tried calling
Morrell, hoping for comfort, but he’d already left for his meeting at the State
Department.

I wondered what Fepple had done with my business card.
I hadn’t seen it on his desk, but I wasn’t looking for anything that small. The
cops would come after me if they figured out I was the detective mentioned in
Fepple’s suicide note. If it was a suicide note.

Of course it was. The gun had fallen from his hand to
the floor underneath, after he shot himself. He felt like a failure and
couldn’t face himself any longer, so he shot away the lower half of his face. I
stopped at the kitchen window to stare at the dogs, which Mr. Contreras had let
into the garden. I should take them for a run.

As if catching my gaze, Mitch looked up at me and
grinned wolfishly. That nasty little smile of Fepple’s when he’d read the
Sommers file, when he said he was going to take over Rick Hoffman’s client
list. That was the smile of someone who thought he could capitalize on another
person’s weakness, not the smile of a man who hated himself so much he was
going to commit suicide.

This morning he’d been in the same suit and tie he’d
worn on Friday. Who had he dressed up for? A woman, as he had implied? Someone
he tried to romance, but who told him horrible things about himself, so
horrible that he came back to the office and committed suicide? Or had he
dressed for the person who’d called him when he was talking to me? The person
who told him how to ditch me: go to a pay phone, await further instructions.
Fepple cut through the little shopping center, where his mystery caller picked
him up. Fepple figured he could cash in on some secret he’d seen in the Sommers
file.

He tried to blackmail his mystery caller, who told
Fepple they needed to talk privately in his office—where he shot Fepple,
staging it to look like suicide. Very Edgar Wallace. In either case, the
mystery caller had taken the Sommers file. I moved restlessly back to the
living room. More likely Fepple had left the file on his bedside table, along
with old copies of
Table-Tennis Tips.

I wished I knew what the police were doing, whether
they were accepting the suicide, whether they were testing for gunpowder
residue on Fepple’s hands. Finally, for want of something better to do, I went
down to the yard to collect the dogs. Mr. Contreras had his back door open;
when I went up the half flight of stairs to tell him I was going to take the
dogs with me for a run and then to my office, I could hear the radio.

Our top local story: the body of insurance agent
Howard Fepple was found in his Hyde Park office this morning following an
anonymous tip to police. The forty-three-year-old Fepple apparently killed
himself because the Midway Insurance Agency, started by his grandfather in
1911, was on the brink of bankruptcy. His mother, Rhonda, with whom he lived,
was stunned by the news. “Howie didn’t even own a gun. How can the police go
around saying he shot himself with a gun he didn’t have? Hyde Park is real
dangerous. I kept telling him to move the agency out here to Palos, where
people actually want to buy insurance; I think someone broke in and murdered
him and dressed it up to look like he killed himself.”

Area Four police say they will not rule out the
possibility of murder, but until the autopsy report is complete they are
treating Fepple’s death as a suicide. This is Mark Santoros, Global News,
Chicago.

“Ain’t that something, cookie.” Mr. Contreras looked
up from the
Sun-Times,
where he was circling racing results. “Guy
shooting himself just because he come on hard times? No stamina, these young
fellas.”

I muttered a weak agreement—ultimately I would tell
him that I’d found Fepple, but that would be a long conversation which I didn’t
feel up to holding today. I drove the dogs over to the lake, where we ran up to
Montrose Harbor and back. Sleep deprivation made my sinuses ache, but the
three-mile run loosened my tight muscles. I took the dogs with me down to the
office, where they raced around, sniffing and barking as if they had never been
inside the place before. Tessa yelled out at me from her studio to get them
under control
at once
before she took a sculpting mallet to them.

When I had them corralled inside my own place, I sat
at my desk for a long while without actually moving. When I was little, my
granny Warshawski had a wooden toy she’d get out for me when we went to visit.
A hunter was in the middle, with a bear on one side and a wolf on the other.
When you pushed the button once, the hunter swung around to point his rifle at
the wolf while the bear jumped up to threaten him. If you pushed it again, he
turned to the bear while the wolf jumped up. Sommers. Lotty. Lotty. Sommers. It
was as if I were the hunter in the middle, who kept swerving between the two
images. I couldn’t keep track of either one’s problem long enough to focus on
it before the other popped up again.

Finally, wearily, I switched on my computer. Sofie Radbuka.
Paul had found her in a chat room on the Web. While I was searching, Rhea Wiell
called.

“Ms. Warshawski, what did you do to Paul last night?
He was waiting outside my office this morning when I got in, weeping, saying
you had ridiculed him and kept him from his family.”

“Maybe you could hypnotize him and get him to recover
a memory of the truth,” I said.

“If you imagine that is funny, you have such a
perverse sense of humor I would believe anything of you.” The vestal virgin had
turned so icy her voice could have put out the sacred fire.

“Ms. Wiell, didn’t we agree on as much privacy for Mr.
Loewenthal as you demanded for Paul Radbuka? But Paul tracked Max Loewenthal
down in his home. Did he think of that all by himself?”

She was human enough to be embarrassed and answered
more quietly, “I didn’t give him Max Loewenthal’s name. Paul unfortunately saw
it himself in my desk file. When I said you might know one of his relatives, he
put two and two together: he’s very quick. But that doesn’t mean he should have
been subjected to taunting,” she added, trying to regain the upper hand.

“Paul barged in on a private party, and unnerved
everyone by making up three different versions of his life story in as many
minutes.” I knew I shouldn’t lose my temper, but I couldn’t keep myself from
snapping, “He’s dangerously unstable; I’ve been wanting to ask why you found
him a good candidate for hypnotherapy.”

“You didn’t tell me you had special clinical skills
when we met on Friday,” Wiell said in a honeyed voice even more irritating than
her icy fury. “I didn’t know you could evaluate whether someone was a good
candidate for hypnosis. Do you think he was dangerously unstable because he
threatened the peace of mind of people who are embarrassed to claim a
relationship with him? This morning, Paul told me that they all know who Sofie
Radbuka was, but that they refused to tell him, and that you goaded them on. To
me this is heartless.”

I took a deep breath, trying to tamp down my
annoyance—I needed her help, which would never be forthcoming if I kept her
pissed off at me. “Fifty years ago, Mr. Loewenthal looked for a Radbuka family
who had lived in Vienna before the war. He didn’t know the family personally:
they were acquaintances of Dr. Herschel’s. Mr. Loewenthal undertook to search
for any trace of them when he went back to central Europe in 1947 or ’48 to
hunt for his own family.”

Mitch gave a short bark and ran to the door. Mary
Louise came in, calling out to me about Fepple. I waved to her but kept my
attention on the phone.

“When Paul said he was born in Berlin, Mr. Loewenthal
said that made it extremely unlikely that Paul was related to the Radbukas he’d
looked for all those years back. So Paul instantly offered two alternative
possibilities—that he’d been born in Vienna, or even in the Lodz ghetto, where
the Viennese Radbukas had been sent in 1941. We all—Mr. Loewenthal, me, and a
human-rights advocate named Morrell—thought that if we could see the documents
Paul found in his father’s—foster father’s—papers after his death, we could
work out whether there was any possibility of a relationship. We also suggested
DNA testing. Paul rejected both suggestions with equal vehemence.”

Wiell paused, then said, “Paul says you tried to keep
him out of the house, then you brought in a group of children to taunt him by
calling him names.”

I tried not to screech into the mouthpiece. “Four
little ones came pelting downstairs, caught sight of your patient, and began
yelling that he was the big bad wolf. Believe me, every adult within a twenty-foot
radius moved rapidly to break that up, but it upset Paul—it would unnerve
anyone to have a group of strange kids mock him, but I gather it awoke
unpleasant associations in Paul’s mind to his father—foster father. . . . Ms.
Wiell, could you persuade Paul to let me or Mr. Loewenthal look at these
documents he found in his father’s papers? How else can we trace the connection
Paul is making between himself and Mr. Loewenthal?”