Total Recall

by Sara Paretsky

  Agnes gave Calia a quick hug. “ Victoria, thank you a million times. Please, though, no television. She only gets an hour a week and I don’t think American shows are suitable for her.” She darted back into the drawing room, where we could hear her furiously tossing cushions from the couch. Calia grimaced and clutched my hand.

  It was Max who actually got Calia into her jacket and saw that her dog, her doll, and her “favoritest story” were in her day pack. “So much chaos,” he grunted. “You’d think they were trying to launch the space shuttle, wouldn’t you. Lotty tells me you have an evening appointment on the South Side. Perhaps you could meet me in the Pleiades lobby at four-thirty. I should be able to finish up by then so I can collect this whirling dervish from you. If you have a crisis, my secretary will be able to reach me. Victoria, we are grateful.” He walked outside with us, kissing Calia lightly on the head and me on the hand.

  “I hope your panel isn’t too painful an outing,” I said.

  He smiled. “Lotty’s fears? She’s allergic to the past. I don’t like wallowing in it, but I think it can be healthy for people to understand it.”

  I strapped Calia into the backseat of the Mustang. The Birnbaum Foundation, which often underwrites communications issues, had decided to hold a conference on “Christians and Jews: a New Millennium, a New Dialogue.” They came up with the program after Southern Baptists announced plans to send a hundred thousand missionaries to Chicago this past summer to convert the Jews. The Baptist drive fizzled out; only about a thousand stalwart evangelizers showed up. It cost the Baptists something in cancelation fees at the hotels, too, but by then the planning for the Birnbaum conference was well under way.

  Max was taking part in the bank-account panel, which infuriated Lotty: he was going to describe his postwar experiences in trying to track down his relatives and their assets. Lotty said he was going to expose his misery for the world at large to stare at. She said it only reinforced a stereotype of Jews as victims. Besides, she would add, dwelling on missing assets only gave people fuel for the second popular stereotype, that all Jews cared about was money. To which Max invariably replied, Who cares about money here, really? The Jews? Or the Swiss who refuse to return it to the people who earned it and deposited it? And the fight went on from there. It had been an exhausting summer, being around them.

  In the seat behind me, Calia was chattering happily. The private eye as baby-sitter: it wasn’t the first image you got from pulp fiction. I don’t think Race Williams or Philip Marlowe ever did baby-sitting, but by the end of the morning I decided that was because they were too weak to take on a five-year-old.

  I started at the zoo, thinking trudging around for an hour would make Calia eager to rest while I did some work in my office, but that proved to be an optimism born of ignorance. She colored for ten minutes, needed to go to the bathroom, wanted to call Grandpapa, thought we should play tag in the hall that runs the length of the warehouse where I lease space, was “terrifically” hungry despite the sandwiches we’d eaten at the zoo, and finally jammed one of my picklocks into the back of the photocopier.

  At that point I gave up and took her to my apartment, where the dogs and my downstairs neighbor gave me a merciful respite. Mr. Contreras, a retired machinist, was delighted to let her ride horseback on him in the garden. The dogs joined in. I left them to it while I went up to the third floor to make some calls. I sat at the kitchen table with the back door open so I could keep an ear cocked for when Mr. Contreras’s patience waned, but I did manage to get an hour of work in. After that Calia consented to sit in my living room with Peppy and Mitch while I read her “favoritest” story, The Faithful Dog and the Princess.

  “I have a dog, too, Aunt Vicory,” she announced, pulling a blue stuffed one from her day pack. “His name is Ninshubur, like in the book. See, it says, Ninshubur means ‘faithful friend’ in the language of the princess’s people.”

  “Vicory” was the closest Calia could get to Victoria when we met almost three years ago. We’d both been stuck with it ever since.

  Calia couldn’t read yet, but she knew the story by heart, chanting “For far rather would I die than lose my liberty” when the princess flung herself into a waterfall to escape an evil enchantress. “Then Ninshubur, the faithful hound, leapt from rock to rock, heedless of any danger.” He jumped into the river and carried the princess to safety.

  Calia pushed her blue plush dog deep into the book, then threw him on the floor to demonstrate his leap into the waterfall. Peppy, well-bred golden retriever that she was, sat on the alert, waiting for a command to fetch, but her son immediately bounded after the toy. Calia screamed, running after Mitch. Both dogs began to bark. By the time I rescued Ninshubur, all of us were on the brink of tears. “I hate Mitch, he is a bad dog, I am most annoyed at his behavior,” Calia announced.

  I was thankful to see that it was three-thirty. Despite Agnes’s prohibition, I plunked Calia in front of the television while I went down the hall to shower and change. Even in the era of casual dress, new clients respond better to professionalism: I put on a sage rayon suit with a rose silk sweater.

  When I got back to the living room, Calia was lying with her head on Mitch’s back, blue Ninshubur between his paws. She bitterly resisted restoring Mitch and Peppy to Mr. Contreras.

  “Mitch will miss me, he will cry,” she wailed, so tired herself that nothing made sense to her.

  “Tell you what, baby: we’ll get Mitch to give Ninshubur one of his dog tags. That way Ninshubur will remember Mitch when he can’t see him.” I went into my storage closet, where I found one of the small collars we’d used when Mitch had been a puppy. Calia stopped crying long enough to help buckle it in place around Ninshubur. I attached a set of Peppy’s old tags, which looked absurdly big on the small blue neck but brought Calia enormous satisfaction.

  I stuffed her day pack and Ninshubur into my own briefcase and scooped her up to carry her to my car. “I’m not a baby, I don’t get carried,” she sobbed, clinging to me. In the car she fell asleep almost at once.

  My plan had been to leave my car with the Pleiades Hotel valet for fifteen minutes while I took Calia in to find Max, but when I pulled off Lake Shore Drive at Wacker, I saw this wasn’t going to be possible. A major crowd was blocking the entrance to the Pleiades driveway. I craned my head, trying to see. A demonstration, apparently, with pickets and bullhorns. Television crews added to the chaos. Cops were furiously whistling cars away, but the traffic was so snarled I had to sit for some minutes in mounting frustration, wondering where I would find Max and what to do with Calia, heavily asleep behind me.

  I pulled my cell phone out of my briefcase, but the battery was dead. And I couldn’t find the in-car charger. Of course not: I’d left it in Morrell’s car when he and I went to the country for a day last week. I pounded the steering wheel in useless frustration.

  As I sat fuming, I watched the picketers, who belonged to conflicting causes. One group, all white, was carrying signs demanding passage of the Illinois Holocaust Asset Recovery Act. “No deals with thieves,” they were chanting, and “Banks, insurers, where is our money?”

  The man with the bullhorn was Joseph Posner. He’d been on the news so many times lately I could have picked him out in a bigger crowd than this. He was dressed in the long coat and bowler hat of the ultra-Orthodox. The son of a Holocaust survivor, he had become ostentatiously religious in a way that made Lotty grind her teeth. He could be seen picketing everything from X-rated movies, with the support of Christian fundamentalists, to Jewish-owned stores like Neiman Marcus that were open on Saturday. His followers, who seemed to be a cross between a yeshiva and the Jewish Defense League, accompanied him everywhere. They called themselves the Maccabees and seemed to think their protests should be modeled on the original Maccabees’ military prowess. Like a growing number of fanatics in America, they were proud of their arrest records.

  Posner’s most recent cause was an effort to get Illinois to pass the Illinois Hol
ocaust Asset Recovery Act. The IHARA, suggested by legislation in Florida and California, would bar insurance companies from doing business in the state unless they proved that they weren’t sitting on any life or property claims from Holocaust victims. It also had clauses dealing with banks and with firms that benefited from use of forced labor during the Second World War. Posner had been able to generate enough publicity that the bill was being debated in committee.

  The second group outside the Pleiades, mostly black, was carrying signs with a large red slash through Pass the IHARA. NO DEALS WITH SLAVE OWNERS and ECONOMIC JUSTICE FOR ALL, their signs proclaimed. The guy leading this group was also easy to recognize: Alderman Louis “Bull” Durham. Durham had been looking for a long time for a cause that would turn him into a high-profile opponent to the mayor, but opposition to the IHARA didn’t strike me as a citywide issue.

  If Posner had his Maccabees, Durham had his own militant followers. He’d set up Empower Youth Energy teams, first in his own ward and then around town, as a way of getting young men off the streets and into job-training programs. But some of the EYE teams, as they were called, had a shadier side. There were whispers on the street of extortion and beatings for store owners who didn’t contribute to the alderman’s political campaigns. And Durham himself always had his own group of EYE-team bodyguards, who surrounded him in their signature navy blazers whenever he appeared in public. If the Maccabees and the EYE team were going head to head, I was glad I was a private detective trying to make my way through traffic, not one of the policemen hoping to keep them apart.

  The traffic finally inched me past the hotel entrance. I turned east onto Randolph Street, where it perches over Grant Park. All the meters there were taken, but I figured the cops were too busy at the Pleiades to spare time for ticketing.

  I locked my briefcase in the trunk and pulled Calia from the backseat. She woke briefly, then slumped against my shoulder. She wasn’t going to manage the walk to the hotel. I gritted my teeth. Making the best load I could of her forty-pound deadweight, I staggered down the stairs leading to the lower level of Columbus Drive, where the hotel’s service entrance lay. It was already almost five: I hoped I’d find Max without too much trouble.

  As I’d hoped, no one was blocking the lower entrance. I walked past the attendants with Calia and rode the elevator up to the lobby level. The crowd here was as thick as the mob outside, if quieter. Hotel guests and Birnbaum conference participants were wedged around the doors, anxiously wondering what was going on and what to do about it.

  I was despairing of finding Max in this mob when I spotted a face I knew: Al Judson, the Pleiades security chief, was near the revolving doors, talking on a two-way radio.

  I elbowed my way to him. “What’s up, Al?”

  Judson was a small black man, unobtrusive in crowds, an ex-cop who’d learned how to keep an eye on volatile groups from patrolling Grant Park with my dad forty years ago. When he saw me he gave a smile of genuine pleasure. “Vic! Which side of the door are you here for?”

  I laughed, but with some embarrassment: my dad and I had argued about my joining antiwar protesters in Grant Park when he was assigned to riot control duty. I’d been a teenager with a dying mother and emotions so tangled I hadn’t known what I wanted. So I’d run wild with the Yippies for a night.

  “I need to find this small person’s grandfather. Should I take to the streets instead?”

  “Then you’d have to choose between Durham and Posner.”

  “I know about Posner’s crusade on the life-insurance payments, but what’s Durham ’s?”

  Judson hunched a shoulder. “He wants the state to make it illegal for a company to do business here if they profited from slavery in the U.S. Unless they pay restitution to the descendants of slaves, that is. So he says, Don’t pass the IHARA unless you add that clause to it.”

  I gave a little whistle of respect: the Chicago City Council had passed a resolution demanding reparations for descendants of slaves. Resolutions are a nice gesture-nods to constituencies without costing businesses anything. The mayor might be in an awkward spot if he fought Durham publicly over turning the resolution into a law with teeth in it.

  It was an interesting political problem, but not as immediate a one for me as Calia, who was making my arms feel as though they were on fire. One of Judson’s subordinates was hovering, ready to snatch his attention. I quickly explained my need to find Max. Judson spoke into his lapel radio. Within a few minutes, a young woman from hotel security appeared with Max, who took Calia from me. She stirred and began to cry. He and I had time for a few flustered words, about his panel, the melee outside, Calia’s day, before I left him the unenviable task of soothing Calia and getting her to his car.

  As I sat in the thicket of traffic waiting to move back past the protest site toward Lake Shore Drive, I nodded off several times. By the time I reached Isaiah Sommers’s house in Avalon Park, I was thick with sleepiness. I was almost twenty minutes late, though. He swallowed his annoyance as best he could, but it wouldn’t do for me to fall asleep in front of him.

  II Cash on the Coffin

  When did your aunt give the policy to the funeral home?” I shifted on the couch, the heavy plastic covering the upholstery crinkling as I moved.

  “On the Wednesday. My uncle passed on the Tuesday. They came for the body in the morning, but before they would collect it, they wanted proof that she could pay for the funeral. Which was scheduled for the Saturday. My mother had gone over to be with my aunt, and she found the policy in Uncle Aaron’s papers just like we knew it would be. He was methodical in everything he did, great and small, and he was methodical in his documents, as well.”

  Sommers massaged his neck with his square hands. He was a lathe operator for the Docherty Engineering Works; his neck and shoulder muscles were bunched from leaning over a machine every day. “Then, like I said, when my aunt got to the church on Saturday they told her they weren’t starting the funeral until she came up with the money.”

  “So after they took your uncle’s body on Wednesday, the funeral parlor must have called the policy number in to the company, who told them that the policy had already been cashed. What a horrible experience for all of you. Did the funeral director know who the money had been paid to?”

  “That’s just my point.” Sommers pounded his fist on his knee. “They said it was to my aunt. And that they wouldn’t do the funeral-well, I told you all that.”

  “So how did you manage to get your uncle buried? Or did you?” I had an uneasy vision of Aaron Sommers lying in cold storage until the family shelled out three thousand dollars.

  “I came up with the money.” Isaiah Sommers looked reflexively toward the hall: his wife, who had let me in, had made clear her disapproval of his exerting himself for his uncle’s widow. “And believe me, it wasn’t so easy. If you’re worried about your fee, don’t be: I can take care of that. And if you can find out who took the money, maybe we can get it back. We’d even give you a finder’s fee. The policy was worth ten thousand dollars.”

  “I don’t need a finder’s fee, but I will need to see the policy.”

  He lifted a presentation copy of Roots from the coffee table. The policy was folded carefully underneath.

  “Do you have a photocopy of it?” I asked. “No? I’ll mail you one tomorrow. You know that my fee is a hundred dollars an hour, with a minimum of five hours’ work, right? I charge for all non-overhead expenses, as well.”

  When he nodded that he understood, I pulled two copies of my standard contract from my case. His wife, who had obviously been lurking outside the door, came in to read it with him. While they slowly went through each clause, I looked at the life-insurance policy. It had been sold to Aaron Sommers by the Midway Agency, and it dated back, as Isaiah said, some thirty years. It was drawn on the Ajax Life Insurance company. That was a help: I had once dated the guy who now headed claims operations at Ajax. I hadn’t seen him for a number of years, but I thought he would pr
obably talk to me.

  “This clause here,” Margaret Sommers said, “it says you don’t refund money if we don’t get the results we’re looking for. Is that right?”

  “Yes. But you can halt the investigation at any point. Also, I will report to you after my initial inquiries, and if it doesn’t seem as though they’re going anywhere, I’ll tell you that frankly. But that’s why I ask for a five-hundred-dollar earnest payment up front: if I start to look and don’t find anything, people are tempted not to pay.”

  “Hmmph,” she said. “It doesn’t seem right to me, you taking money and not delivering.”

  “I’m successful most of the time.” I tried not to let fatigue make me cranky-she wasn’t the first person to raise this point. “But it wouldn’t be fair to say I always am able to find out what someone wants to know. After my first inquiry, I can estimate the amount of time it will take to complete the investigation: sometimes people see that as more than they’re willing to invest. You may decide that, too.”

  “And you’d still keep Isaiah’s five hundred dollars.”

  “Yes. He’s hiring my professional expertise. I get paid for providing that. Just as a doctor does, even when she can’t cure you.” It’s taken years in the business to become hard-hearted-or maybe headed-about asking for money without embarrassment.

  I told them if they wanted to talk it over some more they could call me when they’d made a decision, but that I wouldn’t take the uncle’s policy or make any phone calls until they’d signed a contract. Isaiah Sommers said he didn’t need more time, that his cousin’s neighbor Camilla Rawlings had vouched for me and that was good enough for him.

  Margaret Sommers folded her arms across her chest and announced that as long as Isaiah understood he was paying for it, he was free to do as he pleased; she wasn’t keeping books for that mean old Jew Rubloff to throw her money away on Isaiah’s useless family.

  Isaiah gave her a hard look, but he signed both contracts and pulled a roll from his trousers. He counted out five hundred dollars in twenties, watching me closely while I wrote out a receipt. I signed the contracts in turn, giving one back to Isaiah, putting the other with the policy in my case. I jotted down his aunt’s address and phone number, took the details for the funeral parlor, and got up to leave.