Total Recall

by Sara Paretsky

  He grinned. “I’m sharpening my wits. If you were going to do some fast checking on the therapist who was on television last night, where would you start?”

  I leaned against the counter while I ate. “I’d search the accreditation databases for therapists to see if she was licensed and what her training was. I’d go to ProQuest-she and the guy from the memory foundation have been mixing it up-there might be some articles about her.”

  Don scribbled a note on the corner of the crossword-puzzle clues. “How long would it take you to do it for me? And how much would you charge?”

  “Depends on how deep you wanted to go. The basics I could do pretty fast, but I charge a hundred dollars an hour with a five-hour initial minimum. How generous is Gargette’s expenses policy?”

  He tossed the pencil aside. “They have four hundred cost accountants in their head office at Rheims just to make sure editors like me don’t eat more than a Big Mac on the road, so they’re not too likely to spring for a private investigator. Still, this could be a really big book. If she is who she says she is-if the guy is who he says he is. Could you do some checking for me on spec?”

  I was about to agree when I thought of Isaiah Sommers, carefully counting out his twenties. I shook my head unhappily. “I can’t make exceptions for friends. It makes it hard for me to charge strangers.”

  He pulled out a cigarette and tapped it on the paper. “Okay. Can you do some checking and trust me for the money?”

  I grimaced. “Yeah. I guess. I’ll bring a contract back with me tonight.”

  He returned to the porch. I finished my breakfast and ran water over the bowl-Morrell would have a fit if he came home to find case-hardened yogurt on it-then followed Don out the back door: my car was parked in the alley behind the building. Don was reading the news but looked up to say good-bye. On my way down the back stairs the word came to me from nowhere. “Roller coaster. If it’s the same in French as Italian, a Russian mountain is a roller coaster.”

  “You’ve already earned your fee.” He picked up his pencil and turned back to the crossword page.

  Before going to my office, I swung by Global Entertainment’s studios on Huron Street. When the company moved into town a year ago, they bought a skyscraper in the hot corridor just northwest of the river. Their Midwest regional offices, where they control everything from a hundred seventy newspapers to a big chunk of the broadband DSL business, are on the upper levels, with their studios on the ground floor.

  Global executives are not my biggest fans in Chicago, but I’ve worked with Beth Blacksin since before the company took over Channel 13. She was on the premises, editing a segment for the evening news. She ran out to the lobby in the sloppy jeans she can’t wear on-air, greeting me like a long-lost friend-or, anyway, a valuable source.

  “I was riveted by your interview yesterday with that guy Radbuka,” I said. “How’d you find him?”

  “Warshawski!” Her expressive face came alive with excitement. “Don’t tell me he’s been murdered. I’m getting to a live mike.”

  “Calm down, my little newshound. As far as I know he’s still on the planet. What can you tell me about him?”

  “You’ve found out who the mysterious Miriam is, then.”

  I took her by the shoulders. “Blacksin, calm down-if you’re able. I’m purely on a fishing expedition right now. Do you have an address you’d be willing to give out? For him, or for the therapist?”

  She took me with her past the security station to a warren of cubicles where the news staff had desks. She went through a stack of papers next to her computer and found the standard waiver sheet people sign when they give interviews. Radbuka had listed a suite number at an address on North Michigan, which I copied down. His signature was large and untidy, kind of the way he’d looked in his too-big suit. Rhea Wiell, by contrast, wrote in a square, almost printlike hand. I copied out the spelling of her name. And then noticed that Radbuka’s address was the same as hers. Her office at Water Tower.

  “Could you get me a copy of the tape? Your interview, and the discussion between the therapist and the guy from the antihypnosis place? That was good work, pulling them together at the last minute.”

  She grinned. “My agent’s happy-my contract’s coming up in six weeks. Praeger has a real bee in his bonnet about Wiell. They’ve been adversaries on a bunch of cases, not just in Chicago but all around the country. He thinks she’s the devil incarnate and she thinks he’s the next thing to a child molester himself. They’ve both had media training-they looked civilized on camera, but you should have heard them when the camera wasn’t rolling.”

  “What did you think of Radbuka?” I asked. “Up close and personal, did you believe his story?”

  “Do you have proof he’s a fraud? Is that what this is really about?”

  I groaned. “I don’t know anything about him. Zippo. Niente. Nada. I can’t say it in any more languages. What was your take on him?”

  Her eyes opened wide. “Oh, Vic, I believed him completely. It was one of the most harrowing interviews I’ve ever done-and I talked to people after Lockerbie. Can you imagine growing up the way he did and then finding the man who claimed to be your father was like your worst enemy?”

  “What was his father-foster father’s name?”

  She scrolled through the text on her screen. “Ulrich. Whenever Paul referred to him, he always used the man’s German name, instead of ‘Daddy’ or ‘Father’ or something.”

  “Do you know what he found in Ulrich’s papers that made him realize his lost identity? In the interview he said they were in code.”

  She shook her head, still looking at the screen. “He talked about working it through with Rhea and getting the correct interpretation. He said they proved to him that Ulrich had really been a Nazi collaborator. He talked a lot about how brutal Ulrich had been to him, beating him for acting like a sissy, locking him in a closet when he was away at work, sending him to bed without food.”

  “There wasn’t a woman on the scene? Or was she a participant in the abuse?” I asked.

  “Paul says Ulrich told him that his mother-or Mrs. Ulrich, anyway-had died in the bombing of Vienna as the war was ending. I don’t think Mr. Ulrich ever married here, or even had women to the house. Ulrich and Paul seemed to have been a real pair of loners. Papa went to work, came home, beat Paul. Paul was supposed to be a doctor, but he couldn’t handle pressure, so he ended up as an X-ray technician, which earned more ridicule. He never moved out of his father’s house. Isn’t that creepy? Staying with him even when he was big enough to earn his own living?”

  That was all she could, or at least all she would, tell me. She promised to messenger over a tape of the various segments with Radbuka, as well as the meeting between the therapists, to my office later in the day.

  I still had time before my appointment at Ajax to do some work in my office. It was only a few miles north and west of Global-but a light-year away in ambience. No glass towers for me. Three years ago a sculptor friend had invited me to share a seven-year lease with her for a converted warehouse on Leavitt. Since the building was a fifteen-minute drive from the financial district where most of my business lies and the rent was half what you pay in those gleaming high-rises, I’d signed on eagerly.

  When we moved in, the area was still a grimy no-man’s-land between the Latino neighborhood farther west and a slick Yuppie area nearer the lake. At that time, bodegas and palm readers vied with music stores for the few retail spaces in what had been an industrial zone. Parking abounded. Even though the Yuppies are starting to move in, building espresso bars and boutiques, we still have plenty of collapsing buildings and drunks. I was against further gentrification-I didn’t want to see my rent skyrocket when the current lease expired.

  Tessa’s truck was already in our little lot when I pulled in. She’d received a major commission last month and was putting in long hours to build a model of both the piece and the plaza it would occupy. When I passed her studio door
she was perched at her outsize drafting table, sketching. She’s testy if interrupted, so I went down the hall to my own office without speaking.

  I made a couple of copies of Isaiah Sommers’s uncle’s policy and locked the original in my office safe, where I keep all client documents during an active investigation. It’s really a strongroom, with fireproof walls and a good sturdy door.

  Midway Insurance’s address was listed on the policy: they had sold the policy to Aaron Sommers all those years back. If I couldn’t get satisfaction from the company, I’d have to go back to the agent-and hope he remembered what he’d done thirty years ago. I checked the phone book. The agency was still on Fifty-third Street, down in Hyde Park.

  I had two queries to complete for bread-and-butter clients. While I sat on hold with the Board of Health, I logged on to Lexis and ProQuest and submitted a search on Rhea Wiell, as well as Paul Radbuka.

  My Board of Health connection came on the phone and for once answered all my questions without a lot of hedging. When I’d wrapped up my report I checked back with Lexis. There was nothing on the Radbuka name. I checked my disks of phone numbers and addresses for the U.S. -more up-to-date than Web search engines-and found nothing. When I looked up his father’s name, Ulrich, I got forty-seven matches in the Chicago area. Maybe Paul hadn’t changed his name legally when he became Radbuka.

  Rhea Wiell, on the other hand, gave me a lot of hits. She had apparently appeared as an expert witness in a number of trials, but tracking them down so I could get transcripts would be a tedious business. However, I did find she was a clinical social worker, fully accredited by the State of Illinois: at least she had started from an authentic position. I logged off and swept my papers together into my case so I could be on time for my meeting with the head of the Ajax claims department.

  VI Staking a Claim

  I originally met Ralph Devereux early in my life as an investigator. It hasn’t been so many years, but at the time I was the first woman in Chicago, maybe even the country, with a PI license. It was a struggle to get clients or witnesses to treat me seriously. When Ralph took a bullet in his shoulder because he couldn’t believe his boss was a crook, our relationship fractured as abruptly as his scapula.

  I hadn’t seen him since; I admit I felt a little nervous anticipation as I rode the L down to Ajax ’s headquarters on Adams Street. When I got off the elevator at the sixty-third floor, I even stopped in the ladies’ room to make sure my hair was combed and my lipstick tidily confined to my mouth.

  The executive-floor attendant escorted me down a mile of parquet to Ralph’s corner; his secretary pronounced my name perfectly and buzzed the inner sanctum. Ralph emerged smiling, both arms held out in greeting.

  I took his hands in my own, smiling back, trying to hide a twinge of sadness. When I’d met him, Ralph had been a slim-hipped, ardent young man with a shock of black hair falling in his eyes and an engaging grin. His hair was still thick, although liberally tinged with grey, but he had jowls now, and while he wasn’t exactly fat, those slim hips had disappeared into the same past as our brief affair.

  I exchanged conventional greetings, congratulating him on his promotion to head of the claims department. “It looks as though you recovered full use of your arm,” I added.

  “Just about. It still bothers me when the weather’s damp. I got so depressed after that injury-waiting for it to heal, feeling like a moron for letting it happen at all-that I took to cheeseburgers. The big shake-ups here the last few years haven’t helped any, either. You look great, though. You still running five miles every morning? Maybe I should hire you to coach me.”

  I laughed. “You’re already in your first meeting before I get out of bed. You’d have to take a lower-pressure job. The shake-ups you mentioned-those from Edelweiss acquiring Ajax?”

  “That came at the end, really. We took a lot of hits in the market at the same time that Hurricane Andrew overwhelmed us. While we were dealing with that, and laying off a fifth of our workforce worldwide, Edelweiss snapped up a chunk of our depressed stock. They were a hostile suitor-I’m sure you followed that in the financial pages-but they certainly haven’t been a hostile master. They seem quite eager to learn how we do things here, rather than wanting to interfere. In fact, the managing director from Zurich who’s looking after Ajax wanted to sit in on my meeting with you.”

  His hand in the small of my back, he ushered me into his office, where a man with tortoiseshell glasses, dressed in a pale wool suit and a bold tie, stood when I entered. He was around forty, with a round merry face that seemed to match the tie more than the suit.

  “Vic Warshawski, Bertrand Rossy from Edelweiss Re in Zurich. You two should get along well-Vic speaks Italian.”

  “Oh, really?” Rossy shook hands. “With the name Warshawski I would have assumed Polish.”

  “My mother was from Pitigliano-vicino Orvieto,” I said. “I can only stumble through a few stock phrases of Polish.”

  Rossy and I sat in chrome tube chairs next to a glass-topped table. Ralph himself, who had always had an incongruous-seeming taste for modernism, leaned against the edge of the aluminum tabletop he used as a desk.

  I asked Rossy the usual things, about where he had acquired his perfect English (he had gone to school in England) and how he liked Chicago (very much). His wife, who was Italian, had found the summer weather oppressive and had taken their two children to her family’s estate in the hills above Bologna.

  “She just returned this week with Paolo and Marguerita for the start of the school year here and already I’m better dressed than I was all summer, isn’t that right, Devereux? I could barely persuade her to let me out the front door in this tie this morning.” He laughed loudly, showing dimples at the corners of his mouth. “Now I make a campaign to persuade her to try the Chicago opera: her family have been in the same box at La Scala since it opened in 1778 and she can’t believe a raw young city like this can really produce opera.”

  I told him I went to a production once a year in tribute to my mother, who had taken me every fall, but of course I couldn’t compare it to a European opera company. “Nor do I have a family box: it’s the upper gallery for me, what we call the nosebleed section.”

  He laughed again. “Nosebleed section. My colloquial American is going to improve for talking to you. We shall all go together one evening, if you can condescend to climb down from the nosebleed section. But I see Devereux looking at his watch-oh, very discreetly, don’t be embarrassed, Devereux. A beautiful woman is an inducement to waste precious business minutes, but Miss Warshawski must have come here for some other purpose than to discuss opera.”

  I pulled out the photocopy of the Aaron Sommers policy and explained the events around his aborted funeral. “I thought if I came straight to you with the situation, you could get me an answer fast.”

  When Ralph took the photocopy out to his secretary, I asked Rossy if he’d attended yesterday’s Birnbaum conference. “Friends of mine were involved. I’m wondering if Edelweiss is concerned about the proposed Holocaust Asset Recovery Act.”

  Rossy put his fingertips together. “Our position is in line with the industry, that however legitimate the grief and the grievances-of both the Jewish and the African-American communities-the expense of a policy search shall be most costly for all policyholders. For our own company, we don’t worry about the exposure. Edelweiss was only a small regional insurer during the war, so the likelihood of involvement with large numbers of Jewish claimants is small.

  “Of course, now I’m learning that we do have this fifteen-year history of slavery still taking place in America while Ajax was in its early days. And I am just now suggesting to Ralph that we get Ms. Blount, the woman who wrote our little history, to look in the archives so we know who our customers were in those very old days. Assuming she has not already decided to send our archives to this Alderman Durham. But how expensive it is to go back to the past. How very costly, indeed.”

  “Your history? Oh, th
at booklet on ‘One Hundred Fifty Years of Life.’ I have a copy-which I confess I’ve yet to read. Does it cover Ajax ’s pre-Emancipation years? Do you really think Ms. Blount would hand your documents to an outsider?”

  “Is this the true reason for your visit here? Ralph says you are a detective. Are you doing something very subtle, very Humphrey Bogart, pretending to care about the Sommers claim and trying to trick me with questions about the Holocaust and slavery claims? I did think this little policy was small, small potatoes for you to bring to the director of claims.” He smiled widely, inviting me to treat this as a joke if I wanted to.

  “I’m sure in Switzerland as well as here people call on those they know,” I said. “Ralph and I worked together a number of years ago, before he became so exalted, so I’m taking advantage of our relationship in the hopes of a fast answer for my client.”

  “Exalted’s the word for me,” Ralph came back in. “And Vic has such a depressing habit of being right about financial crime that it’s easier to go along with her from the start than fight her.”

  “What crime surrounds this claim, then-what are you correct about today?” Rossy asked.

  “So far, nothing, but I haven’t had time to consult a psychic yet.”

  “Psychic?” he repeated doubtfully.

  “Indovina,” I grinned. “They abound in the area where I have my office.”

  “Ah, psychic,” Rossy exclaimed. “I have been pronouncing it wrong all these years. I must remember to tell my wife about this. She is keenly interested in unusual events in my business day. Psychics and nosebleeds. She will enjoy them so much.”

  I was saved from trying to respond by Ralph’s secretary, who ushered in a young woman clutching a thick file. She was wearing khaki jeans and a sweater that had shrunk from too many washings.

  “This is Connie Ingram, Mr. Devereux,” the secretary said. “She has the information you wanted.”

  Ralph didn’t introduce Rossy or me to Ms. Ingram. She blinked at us unhappily but showed her packet to Ralph.