Total Recall

by Sara Paretsky

  I watched, fuming, as the circle of marchers brought Durham parallel to me. He was a big, broad-shouldered man in a black-and-tan houndstooth jacket which looked as though it had been made to measure, so carefully did the checks line up along the smooth-fitting seams. His face gleamed with excitement behind his muttonchop whiskers.

  Since I couldn’t punch him, I folded the broadsheet into my purse and ran down Adams toward my car. A cab would have been faster, but my rage needed a physical outlet. By the time I reached Canal Street, the soles of my feet throbbed from running in pumps on city pavement. I was lucky I hadn’t sprained an ankle. I stood outside my car gulping in air, my throat dry.

  As my pulse returned to normal, I wondered where Bull Durham had gotten the money for custom tailoring. Was someone paying him to harass Ajax and the Birnbaums-not to mention me? Of course, all aldercreatures have plenty of chances to stick their fingers in the till in perfectly legal ways-I was so furious with him I wanted to assume the worst.

  I needed a phone, and I needed water. As I looked for a convenience store where I could buy a bottle, I passed a wireless shop. I bought another in-car charger: my life would be easier this afternoon if I was plugged in.

  Before I got onto the expressway to track down my client-ex-client-I called Mary Louise on my private office line. She was understandably upset at my leaving her holding the bag. I explained how that had happened, then read her Bull Durham’s broadsheet.

  “Good grief, he’s got a nerve! What do you want to do about it?”

  “Start with a statement. Something like this:

  “In his zeal to make political hay out of Gertrude Sommers’s loss, Alderman Durham overlooked a few things, including the facts. When Gertrude Sommers’s husband died last week, the Delaney Funeral Parlor humiliated her by halting the funeral just as she took her seat in the chapel. They did so because her husband’s life-insurance policy had been cashed some years ago. The family briefly employed investigator V I Warshawski to get at the facts of what happened. Contrary to Alderman Durham’s claims, Ajax Insurance did not hire Warshawski. Warshawski was not at Aaron Sommers’s funeral and did not see or meet the unfortunate widow until the following week. It is inconceivable that Warshawski would ever interrupt a funeral in the fashion the alderman is claiming. If Alderman Durham was utterly mistaken about the facts of Warshawski’s involvement in the case, are his other statements open to the same questions?”

  Mary Louise read it back to me. We tweaked it a few times, then she agreed to phone or e-mail it to the reporters who had been calling. If Beth Blacksin or Murray wanted to talk to me in person, she should tell them to come to my office around six-thirty-although if they were like the rest of the Chicago media, they would probably be camped outside the doors of members of the Birnbaum family, hoping to accost them.

  A cop tapped my parking meter and made an ugly comment. I put the car in gear and started down Madison toward the expressway.

  “Do you know what the Birnbaum part of Durham ’s handout is about?” Mary Louise asked.

  “Apparently Ajax insured the Birnbaums back in the 1850’s. Part of the vast Birnbaum holdings came from something in the South. Ajax execs are steaming over how Durham got that information.”

  As I oozed onto the expressway I was glad I’d bought the water: traffic seems to run freely these days only between ten at night and six the next morning. At two-thirty, the trucks heading south on the Ryan formed a solid wall. I put Mary Louise on hold while I slid my Mustang in between an eighteen-wheel UPS truck and a long flatbed with what looked like a reactor coil strapped to it.

  Before hanging up, I asked her to dig up Amy Blount’s home phone number and address. “Phone them to me here in my car, but don’t call her yourself. I don’t know yet if I want to talk to her.”

  The flatbed behind me gave a loud hoot that made me jump: I had let three car lengths open up in front of me. I scooted forward.

  Mary Louise said, “Before you go, I tracked down those men Aaron Sommers worked with at South Branch Scrap Metal. The ones who bought life insurance from Rick Hoffman along with Mr. Sommers.”

  The Durham attack on me personally had driven the earlier business from my mind. I’d forgotten to tell Mary Louise the client had fired me, so she’d gone ahead with the investigation and had found three of the four men still alive. Claiming to be doing an independent quality check for the company, she’d persuaded the policyholders to call the Midway Agency. The men said their policies were still intact; she’d double-checked with the carrier. The third man had died eight years ago. His funeral had been duly paid for by Ajax. So whatever fraud had been committed, it wasn’t some wholesale looting by Midway or Hoffman of those particular burial policies. Not that it really mattered at this point, but I thanked her for the extra effort-she’d done a lot in a short morning-and turned my attention to the traffic.

  When I reached the Stevenson cutoff, my motion slowed to something more like a turtle on Valium than a pinball-construction, now in its third year, cut off half the lanes. The Stevenson Expressway is the key to the industrial zone along the city’s southwest corridor. Truck traffic along it is always heavy; with the construction and the afternoon rush building, we all bumped along at about ten miles an hour.

  At Kedzie I was glad to leave the expressway for the maze of plants and scrap yards alongside it. Even though the day was clear, down here among the factories the air turned blue-grey from smoke. I passed yards full of rusting cars, yards making outboard motors, a rebar mill, and a mountain of yellowish salt, ominous portent of the winter ahead. The roads were deeply rutted. I drove cautiously, my car slung too low to the ground for the axle to survive a major hole. Trucks jumped past me with a happy disregard of any traffic signs.

  Even with a good detail map I blundered a few times. It was a quarter past three, fifteen minutes after Isaiah Sommers’s shift ended, before I jolted into the yard of the Docherty Engineering Works. A roughly graveled area, it was as scarred by heavy trucks as the surrounding streets. A fourteen-wheeler was snorting at a loading dock when I got out of the Mustang.

  It was my lucky afternoon-it looked as though the seven-to-three shift was just leaving the shop. I leaned against my car, watching men straggle through a side door. Isaiah Sommers appeared about halfway through the exodus. He was talking to a couple of other men, laughing in an easy way that took me by surprise: when I’d met him he’d been hunched and surly. I waited until he’d clapped his coworkers on the shoulder and gone on to his own truck before straightening up to follow him.

  “Mr. Sommers?”

  The smile vanished, leaving his face in the guarded lines I’d seen the other night. “Oh. It’s you. What do you want?”

  I pulled the broadsheet from my purse and handed it to him. “I see the steps you took on your own led you straight to Alderman Durham. There are a few factual errors, but it’s having quite a galvanizing effect on the city: you should be pleased.”

  He read the sheet with the same slow concentration he’d given my contract. “Well?”

  “You know as well as I that I wasn’t present at your uncle’s funeral. Did you tell Mr. Durham that I was?”

  “Maybe he put the two pieces of the story together wrong, but, yes, I did talk to him. Told him about you accusing my aunt.” He stuck his jaw out pugnaciously.

  “I’m not here to play he-said, she-said with you but to find out why you went out of your way to pillory me in this public way, instead of trying to work things out in private.”

  “My aunt-she doesn’t have money or connections or a way to get even when someone like you comes along to accuse her unjustly.”

  Several men passed us, looking us over curiously. One of them called a greeting to Sommers. He flipped up a palm, but kept his angry gaze on me.

  “Your aunt feels bereft. She needs someone to blame, so she’s blaming me. Almost ten years ago, someone using your aunt’s name cashed a check for the policy, with a death certificate claiming your
uncle was dead to back up the claim. Either your aunt did it, or someone else. But her name was on the check. I had to ask her. You’ve fired me, so I won’t be asking any more questions, but don’t you wonder how it got there?”

  “The company did it. The company did it and hired you to frame me, like it says here.” He pointed at the broadsheet, but his voice lacked conviction.

  “It’s a possibility,” I conceded. “It’s a possibility the company did it. We’ll never know, of course.”

  “Why not?”

  I smiled. “I have no reason to look into it. You could hire someone else to do so, but it would cost you a fortune. Of course it’s much easier to toss accusations around than it is to look for facts. It’s the American way these days, isn’t it: find a scapegoat instead of a fact.”

  His face was bunched in confusion. I took the broadsheet from him and turned back to my car. The phone, which I’d left attached to the charger, was ringing-Mary Louise, with Amy Blount’s details. I scribbled them down and started the car.

  “Wait,” Isaiah Sommers yelled.

  He shook off someone who’d stopped to talk to him and ran over to my car. I put it in park and looked up at him, my brows raised, my expression bland.

  He fumbled for words, then blurted out, “What do you think?”

  “About-”

  “You said it’s a possibility that the company cashed in the policy. Is that what you think?”

  I turned off the engine. “To be honest, no. I won’t say it’s impossible: I uncovered claims fraud at that company once before, but it was under a different management team, which had to resign when the news got out. The thing is, it would mean collusion between someone in the company and the agent, since the agency deposited the check, but the claims manager made no demur about bringing the file up where I could see it.” It’s true Rossy had put me through a song and dance to keep me from examining the complete file-but Edelweiss had only been involved with Ajax for four months, so I didn’t see how he could possibly be part of an Ajax life-insurance fraud.

  “The agent is a more likely candidate. Although none of the other policies Hoffman sold at your uncle’s workplace was fraudulently cashed, the check was paid through Midway. It’s also possible your uncle did it, for reasons you might never know or you might find very painful to know. Or some other family member. And before you blow your stack and get on to Bull Durham from the nearest phone, I don’t seriously think it was your aunt, not after talking to her. But your family or the agency would be the two places I would look. If I was looking.”

  He slammed the roof of my car in frustration. He was strong enough that the car bounced slightly.

  “Look here, Ms. Warashki. I don’t know who to believe, or who to listen to. My wife-she thought I should go talk to Alderman Durham. Camilla Rawlings, the lady who gave me your name to begin with, she already chewed me out for firing you: she thinks I should make my peace with you. But what can I believe? Mr. Durham, he said he had proof the insurance company profited from slavery, and this is one more cover-up, and no offense, but you being white, how can you understand?”

  I got out of the car so he wouldn’t have to bend over and I wouldn’t get a crick in my neck looking up. “Mr. Sommers, I can’t ever, completely, but I do try to listen empathically-and impartially-to whatever I hear. The situation with your aunt, I realize it’s complicated by America ’s history. If I want to ask her how her name got to be on that check, then you and your wife and your aunt see me as a white woman, someone in league with the company to defraud you. But if I start screaming in chorus with you-company cover-up! fraud!-when I have no facts, then I’m useless as a detective. My only lodestar is sticking to the truth-as far as I can know it. It’s a costly decision-I lose clients like you, I lost a wonderful man in Camilla’s brother. I’m not always right, but I have to stick to the truth or be buffeted like a leaf by every wind that blows.”

  It took me a long time to get over my breakup with Conrad Rawlings. I love Morrell, he’s a great guy-but Conrad and I were attuned in a way that you only find once in a very blue moon.

  Sommers’s face contorted with strain. “Would you consider going back to work for me?”

  “I’d consider it. I’d be a little wary, though.”

  He nodded in a kind of rueful understanding, then blurted out, “I’m sorry about Durham getting the facts mixed up. I do have cousins, one anyway, that could have gone and done it. But you see, it’s painful, too painful, to expose my family like that. And if it was my cousin Colby, then, hell, I’ll never see the money again. I’d be out the price of the funeral and the price of your fee, besides making my family ashamed in public.”

  “It’s a serious problem. I can’t advise you on it.”

  He shut his eyes tightly for a moment. “Is there-do you still owe me any more time from my five hundred dollars?”

  He’d had an hour and a half coming to him before Mary Louise checked with the men at South Branch Scrap Metal. Any more work would be with the meter running again.

  “About an hour,” I said gruffly, cursing myself.

  “Could you-is there anything you could find out about the agent in just an hour?”

  “You going to call Mr. Durham and tell him he made a mistake? I have a press interview scheduled at six-thirty; I don’t want to mention your name if I’m working for you.”

  He took a breath. “I’ll call him. If you’ll ask a few questions of the insurance agency.”

  XIII Secret Agent

  Family spokesman Andy Birnbaum, great-grandson of the patriarch who parlayed a scrap-metal pushcart into one of America ’s great fortunes, said the family is bewildered by Durham ’s accusations. The Birnbaum Foundation has supported inner-city education, arts, and economic development for four decades. Birnbaum added that relations of the African-American community with both the Birnbaum Corporation and its foundation have been mutually supportive, and he is sure that if Alderman Durham sits down to talk, the alderman will realize there has been a misunderstanding.”

  I got that sound bite on the radio as I was riding back into the city. The inbound traffic was heavy but moving fast, so I didn’t pay close attention until my own name jumped out at me.

  “Investigator V I Warshawski said in a written statement that Durham ’s accusations that she had interrupted Aaron Sommers’s funeral with demands for money are a complete fabrication. Joseph Posner, who is lobbying hard for Illinois to pass the Holocaust Asset Recovery Act, said that Durham ’s charges against Ajax were a red herring to keep the legislature from considering the act. He said Durham ’s anti-Semitic comments were a disgrace to the memory of the dead, but that as the Sabbath started in a few hours he would not violate its peace by appearing in public to confront the alderman.”

  Thank heavens we were at least spared Joseph Posner joining the fray just now. I couldn’t absorb any more news; I turned to music. One of the classical stations was soothing the commuter’s savage breast with something very modern and spiky. The other was running a high-voltage ad for Internet access. I turned off the radio altogether and followed the lake south, back to Hyde Park.

  Given Howard Fepple’s lackadaisical attitude toward his business, there was only an outside chance that I’d find him still in his office at four-thirty on Friday. Still, when you’re a pinball, you bounce off all the levers in the hopes of landing in the money. And this time I had a bit of luck-or whatever you’d call the chance to talk to Fepple again. He was not only in but he’d installed fresh lightbulbs, so that the torn linoleum, the grime, and his eager expression when I opened the door all showed up clearly.

  “Mr. Fepple,” I said heartily. “Glad to see you haven’t given up on the business yet.”

  He turned away from me, his eager look replaced by a scowl. It obviously wasn’t the hope of seeing me that had led him to put on a suit and tie.

  “You know, an amazing thought occurred to me when I was driving back from seeing Isaiah Sommers this afternoon. Bul
l Durham knew about me. He knew about the Birnbaums. He knew about Ajax. But even though he went on for days about the injustice to the Sommers family, he didn’t seem to know about you.”

  “You don’t have an appointment,” he muttered, still not looking at me. “You can leave now.”

  “Walk-in business,” I chirped brightly. “You need to cultivate it. So let’s talk about that policy you sold Aaron Sommers.”

  “I told you, it wasn’t me, it was Rick Hoffman.”

  “Same difference. Your agency. Your legal liability for any wrongdoing. My client isn’t interested in dragging this out in court for years, although he could sue you for a bundle under ERISA-you had a fiduciary responsibility to his uncle, which you violated. He’d be happy if you’d cut him a check for the ten thousand that the policy was worth.”

  “He’s not your-” he blurted, then stopped.

  “My, my, Howard. Who has been talking to you? Was it Mr. Sommers himself? No, that can’t be right, or you’d know he’d brought me back in to finish the investigation. So it must have been Alderman Durham. If that’s the case, you are going to have so much publicity you’ll be turning business away. I have an interview with Channel Thirteen in a little bit, and they will be salivating when they hear that your agency has been tipping off Bull Durham about your own customers’ affairs.”

  “You’re all wet,” he said, curling his lip. “I couldn’t talk to Durham -he’s made it clear he doesn’t have any use for whites.”

  “Now I’m really curious.” I settled myself in the rickety chair in front of his desk. “I’m dying to see who you’re all dolled up for.”

  “I have a date. I do have a social life that has nothing to do with insurance. I want you to leave so I can close up my office.”