Sara Paretsky - V.I. Warshawski 10 (35 page)

Ralph’s angry, anxious voice jolted me back to the
present. He was in shirtsleeves, his tie loosened, his eyes worried underneath
his angry facade. It was the worry that made me keep my own voice level when I
answered him.

“Admiring the view: it would be wonderful to leave all
this turmoil and follow the horizon, wouldn’t it? I know why I’m peeved about
Connie Ingram, but I don’t have any idea what’s got you so upset.”

“What did you do with the microfiche?”

“Oo-lu-lah vishti banko.”

His mouth set in a thin line. “What the hell is that
supposed to mean?”

“Your question made just as little sense to me. I
don’t know any microfiche, personally or by reputation, so you’d better start
at the beginning—” I broke off. “Don’t tell me your microfiche for the Sommers
file is damaged?”

“Very nice, Vic: surprised innocence. I’m almost
convinced.”

At that my calm disappeared. I pushed past him to the
elevator and hit the call button.

“Where are you going?”

“Home.” I bit off my words. “I wanted to ask you why
Connie Ingram was the last person to see Howard Fepple alive, and why she made
him think she’d be a hot date, and why after that really hot date, Fepple was
dead and the agency copy of Sommers’s file had vanished. But I don’t need the
garbage you’re flinging at me. I can take my questions directly to the cops.
Believe me, they’ll talk to little Miss Company Loyalty in a way that will get
her to respond.”

The elevator dinged to a stop behind me. Before I
could get on, Ralph grabbed my arm.

“Since you’re already here, give me two more minutes.
I want you to talk to someone in my office.”

“If I lose my chance to tail a guy who’s in your
demonstration, I am going to be one very cross detective, Ralph, so make it
succinct for me, okay? Which raises another question in my mind: why are you
focusing on your wretched microfiche when the building is under siege?”

He ignored my question, moving fast along the rosy
carpets to his office. His secretary, Denise, was still at her post. Connie
Ingram and a strange black woman were sitting stiffly on the tubular chairs.
They looked nervously at Ralph when we came in.

Ralph introduced the strange woman—Karen Bigelow, who
was Connie’s supervisor in claims. “Just tell Vic here what you told me,
Karen.”

She nodded, turning to face me. “I know about the
whole Sommers situation. I was on vacation last week, but Connie explained how
she’d had to leave the file up here with Mr. Rossy. And how this private
detective might try to get her to reveal confidential company information. So
when she—when you—came around asking to see the fiche, Connie came straight to
me. Neither of us was too surprised. As you know, of course, Connie here stood
her ground, but she got kind of worried and went to check the microfiche. The
card that included the Sommers file has gone missing. Not checked out or
anything. Disappeared. And I understand you were alone on the floor for some
time, miss.”

I smiled pleasantly. “I see. I have to confess I don’t
know where the fiche are stored, or you might have legitimate grounds for
suspicion. To you, who knows that rabbit warren on thirty-nine, it’s all
familiar, but to a stranger it’s impenetrable. But there’s one easy thing to
do: check for fingerprints. Mine are on file with the secretary of state,
because I’m a licensed investigator as well as an officer of the court. Get the
cops in, treat it like a real theft.”

The room was silent for a minute, then Ralph said, “If
you were in that cabinet, Vic, you’d have wiped it clean.”

“All the more reason to dust it. If it’s covered with
prints—besides Connie’s, which belong there since she just checked the
drawer—or claims she did—you’ll know I wasn’t in there.”

“What do you mean,
claims
she did, Miss
Detective?” Karen Bigelow gave me a hard look.

“It’s like this, Ms. Supervisor: I don’t know what
kind of game Ajax is playing with the Sommers family claim, but it’s a game
whose stakes are mighty high, now that a man’s been killed. Fepple’s mother
gave me a key to the agency office. I went down there today to see if I could
find any trace of his appointment calendar.”

I paused to stare hard at Connie Ingram, but her round
face didn’t show any special anxiety. “Now, whoever killed Howard Fepple swiped
the Sommers file. They swiped his handheld electronic diary. But they didn’t
think to wipe out the appointment from his computer. Or—they were even more
squeamish than I was about getting near the machine since it had his brains and
blood all over it.”

Both Bigelow and Connie flinched at that, which only
proved they didn’t like the idea of brains and blood and computers all mixed
together. “Well, guess who had an appointment with Howard Fepple last Friday
night? Young Connie Ingram here.”

Her mouth widened in a giant O of protest. “I never. I
never made an appointment to see him. If he put that in his diary, he’s lying!”

“Someone is,” I agreed. “I was with him Friday
afternoon, and some very sophisticated person gave him a simple but slick
method for ditching me. This person came back in with him under cover of a
group of Lamaze parents and left with them. Probably after killing him. Connie
Ingram is the only appointment he showed for Friday. And next to it he’d
written,
says she wants to discuss Sommers, but she sounds hot for me
.”
I pulled the diary printout from my bag and waved it at her.

“He wrote that down about me? I only ever talked to
him on the phone, to ask him to double-check about the payment. And that was
last week right after you first came here. Mr. Rossy asked me to. I live at
home. I live with my mother. I would never—I never made that kind of phone
call.” She buried her face in her hands, crimson with shame.

Ralph snatched the printout from me. He looked at it,
then tossed it contemptuously aside. “I have a Palm. You can enter events after
the date—anyone could have typed that in. Including you, Vic. To deflect
criticism away from your helping yourself to our microfiche.”

“Another thing for technicians to look at,” I snapped.
“You can back-enter dates, but you can’t fool the machine: it will tell you
what day those keystrokes were typed. It seems to me we’ve just about covered
anything useful here: I need to get these technical problems to the cops before
little Miss Innocence here goes down and wipes out the hard drive.”

Tears were streaming down Connie’s face. “Karen, Mr.
Devereux, honest, I was never down in that agent’s office. I never said I’d go
out with him, even though he asked me to, why would I? He didn’t sound like a
nice person on the phone.”

“He asked you out on a date?” I interrupted her
wailing. “When was that?”

“When I called down there. After you were here last
week I called him, like I said, like Mr. Rossy and Mr. Devereux asked me to. To
find out what he had in his files, and he said, he talked in this kind of nasty
way, he said, ‘Lots of juicy stuff. Wouldn’t you like to see it? We could share
a bottle of wine and go over the file together.’ And I said, ‘No, sir, I just
want you to send me copies of all your relevant documents so I can find out how
this policy got a check issued on it when the policyholder was still alive.’
And then he said more stuff, really, I can’t repeat it, and he seemed to think
it would be fun to have a date, but honestly, I know I still live with my
mother and I’m thirty-three, but I’m not a desperate virgin like—anyway, I
never said I would see him. If he put it in his calendar, he was a liar and I’m
not sorry he’s dead, so there!” She ran sobbing from the room.

“Does that satisfy you, Miss Detective?” Karen Bigelow
said coldly. “Seems to me you could find something better to do than bully an
honest, hardworking girl like Connie Ingram. Excuse me, Mr. Devereux, I’d
better make sure she’s all right.”

She started to sail majestically from the room, but I
moved to block her path. “Ms. Claims Supervisor, it’s great that you support
your staff, but you came up here to accuse me of theft. Before you go off to
mop up Connie Ingram’s tears, I want that accusation cleared up.”

She breathed heavily at me. “I heard from the girl who
took you over to Connie’s workstation that you were wandering around the floor.
You could have been in those files.”

“Then we’ll call the cops. I won’t have this kind of
accusation made lightly about me. Besides which, someone is trying to make sure
no copies of that file remain. I may be advising my client to sue Ajax. In
which case, if you can’t find the documents you’re going to look mighty stupid
in court.”

“If that’s your goal, you’d have all the more motive
for stealing the fiche,” Ralph said.

Red lights of anger were starting to dance in front of
me. “And I’ll bring an action for slander.”

I moved to his desk and started pressing keys on the
phone. It had been a long time since I’d dialed the work number for my dad’s
oldest friend on the force, but I still knew it by heart. Bobby Mallory has
made a reluctant adjustment to my career as a detective, but he still prefers
that when we meet it be for family events.

“What do you think you’re doing?” Ralph demanded, as
an officer answered the phone.

“I’m doing what you should have done, calling the
cops.” I turned to the phone. “Officer Bostwick, it’s V I Warshawski: is
Captain Mallory in?”

Ralph’s eyes glittered. “You have no authority to
bring the cops into this building. I will speak to this officer and tell him
so.”

It was a sign of the change in Bobby’s attitude toward
me that although I’d never met Officer Bostwick he recognized my name. He told
me that Bobby was unavailable; was there a message?

“A murder in the Twenty-first District,
officer—there’s evidence in the computer, which was left running and left in
the vic’s office.” I gave him Fepple’s address and date of death. “Commander
Purling may not have realized the importance of the computer. But I’m at the
Ajax Insurance company, where the vic did a lot of business, and there may be a
question of checking the time when data was entered.”

“Ajax?” Bostwick said. “They’re having a lot of
trouble these days—Durham and Posner are out front right now, aren’t they?”

“Yes, indeed, the building is surrounded by
demonstrators, but the claims vice president thinks this agent’s death merits
more of his attention than a few protesters.”

“Doesn’t sound like a few to me, miss, the way they
were asking for backup out there on Adams. But give me the details about this
computer—I’ll make sure a forensics unit gets down to it. Commander Purling,
well, with the Robert Taylor Homes in his district, he doesn’t have time to do
a lot of finesse work.”

A discreet way of saying the guy was a lazy jerk. I
gave Bostwick the details about Fepple and the importance of the date, adding
that I had seen the victim shortly before he left for an appointment on Friday
evening. Bostwick repeated back what I said, double-checked the spelling of my
name, and asked where Captain Mallory could reach me if he wanted to discuss
the situation.

I hung up and glared at Ralph. “I’m respecting the
privacy of your company and your authority over it, but you had damned well
better make a call like that yourself if you want to find out who really was in
your microfiche cabinet. Especially if you’re going to keep accusing me of
theft. We should know by the end of the day tomorrow, or Thursday at the
latest, when that date with Connie Ingram was entered in Fepple’s computer. If
it was before I last saw him on Friday, then Ms. Ingram’s going to be crying
for a bigger audience than us. By the way, what happened to your paper file?
The one Rossy hung on to last week?”

Ralph and Karen Bigelow exchanged startled glances. “I
guess he still has it,” the supervisor said. “It hasn’t been checked back into
our unit.”

“Is his office up here? Let’s go ask him about
it—unless you think I wandered in and stole it after we spoke at noon, Ralph.”

He flushed. “No, I don’t imagine you did. But why did
you go down to the thirty-ninth floor at noon without telling me? You’d been
with me seconds earlier.”

“It was an impulse; it only occurred to me when I got
to the elevators. You had pretty much stiffed me on the file, and I was hoping
Ms. Ingram would let me see it. Can we at least go see Rossy, get the paper
file back from him?”

“The chairman went down to Springfield today. The
Holocaust Recovery Act is coming up in front of the banking and insurance
committee—he wanted to testify against it. Rossy went with him.”

“Really.” My brows went up. “He’d invited me to dinner
tonight.”

“What’d he do that for?” Ralph’s flush deepened into
resentment.

“When he called yesterday to invite me, he said it was
because his wife was homesick and wanted someone she could speak Italian with.”

“Are you making that up?”

“No, Ralph. I’m not making up anything I said this
afternoon. But maybe he forgot about the invitation. When did he decide to go
to Springfield?”

Resentment was still uppermost in Ralph’s mind. “Hey,
I just run the claims department. Apparently not too well if people make off
with our files. No one talks to me about deep subjects like legislative
hearings. Rossy’s got an office on the other side of the floor. His secretary’s
probably here: you can ask her if he’s coming back tonight. I’ll walk you over
to see if he’s still got the file.”