“Families named Ulrich? Why would you want-” She broke off, her dark soft eyes widening, first in bewilderment, then amusement. “If that’s your best investigative effort, Vic, then Paul Radbuka is definitely safe from you.”
I studied her for a moment, chin on hand, trying to decipher what lay behind her amusement. “So Ulrich wasn’t his father’s name after all? I’ll keep that in mind. Don, where should I leave a message for you about whether Max is free to talk to you tonight? At Morrell’s?”
“I’ll ride down with you, Vic, give Rhea a chance to center herself. I have a cell-phone number I can give you.”
He got up with me but lingered inside her consulting room for a private leave-taking. As I left, I noticed another young woman in the waiting room looking eagerly toward the inner door. It was a pity Rhea and I had gotten off to such a bad start: I would have liked to experience her hypnotic techniques to see whether they gave me the same rush they did her patients.
Don caught up with me outside the elevators. When I asked if he knew what the inside joke was about the name Ulrich, he shifted uncomfortably. “Not exactly.”
“Not exactly? You mean you know sort of?”
“Only that it wasn’t his father’s-foster father’s-last name. Not what the name really was. And don’t ask me to find out: Rhea won’t tell me because she knows you’ll try to wheedle it out of me.”
“I guess I should feel flattered that she thinks I’d be able to. Give me your cell-phone number. I’ll call Max and get back to you, but I have to run: like Rhea, I need to center myself before my next appointment.”
In the L going back to my car, I called Mary Louise to tell her she didn’t have to go door-to-door with Radbuka’s picture after all. I couldn’t recap the whole conversation over the noise of the train but told her that it apparently wasn’t his childhood name. She had started south, working her way west and north, and had only reached her third address, so she was happy to call it a day.
As I picked up my car at the Western L stop, I wondered idly what would happen if Rhea Wiell hypnotized Lotty. Where would an elevator to the past take Lotty? From her behavior on Sunday, the monsters on those lower floors were pretty ferocious. It seemed to me, though, that Lotty’s problem wasn’t that she couldn’t remember her monsters but that she couldn’t forget them.
I stopped in the office to check on mail and messages and whether I had any appointments for tomorrow that I’d forgotten. A couple of new things had come up. I entered them into my computer and pulled out my Palm Pilot to download them to the handheld device. As I did so I suddenly thought of Fepple’s mother telling me her gadget-happy son used a device like mine for a diary. If he’d kept his appointments up to date, they should still be sitting in that machine in his office. And I had a key: I could go in happy and legal, with the implicit consent of Rhonda Fepple.
I quickly returned a few phone calls, looked at my e-mail, pulled up the missing persons bulletin board to see that Questing Scorpio hadn’t answered my message, and went south again, to Hyde Park.
Collins, the four-to-midnight guard, recognized me. “Got some other tenants here we could do without if you want a hit list,” he said with heavy humor as I passed.
I smiled weakly and rode up to the sixth floor. I had a hard time getting myself to open the door, not because of the yellow crime-scene tape sealing it, but because I didn’t want to face the remains of Fepple’s life again. I took a breath and tried the handle. A woman in a nurse’s uniform heading to the elevator stopped to watch me. The police or the building management had locked the office. I took out my key and unlocked the door, breaking the yellow tape as I pushed it open.
“I thought that meant you can’t go in,” the woman said.
“You thought right, but I’m a detective.”
She walked over to peer around me into the room, then backed away, her face turning grey. “Oh, my God. Is that what happened in there? Oh, my God, if this is what can go on in this building, I’m getting a job at the hospital, hours or no hours. This is terrible.”
I was just as appalled as she was, even though I more or less knew what to expect. Fepple’s body was gone, but no one had bothered to clean up after him. Pieces of brain and bone had hardened on the chair and desk. Those weren’t visible from the door, but what you could see was the mess of papers, and on top of it, grey fingerprint powder showing up nests of footprints on the floor. The powder had drifted like dirty snow onto the desk, the computer, the strewn papers. I thought briefly of poor Rhonda Fepple, trying to sort through the wreckage. I hoped she had the sense to hire help.
The police hadn’t bothered to shut down the computer. Using a Kleenex to protect my fingers, I hit the ENTER key and brought the system back up. I couldn’t bring myself to sit on Fepple’s chair, or even touch it, so I leaned across the desk to operate the keyboard. Even in my awkward posture, it only took a few minutes to retrieve his computer datebook. On Friday, he’d had a dinner date with Connie Ingram. He’d even added a note: says she wants to discuss Sommers, but she sounds hot for me.
I printed out the entry and scuttled out of the office as fast as I could move. The foul scene, the fetid air, the horrible image of Connie Ingram sounding hot for Fepple, all made me feel like throwing up again. I found a women’s bathroom, which was locked. I stuck Fepple’s door key in, which didn’t turn the lock but did get someone on the inside to open it for me. I swayed over one of the sinks, washing my face in cold water, rinsing my mouth, pushing the worst of the images out of my mind-away from my stomach.
Connie Ingram, the earnest round-faced claims clerk whose company loyalty wouldn’t let me look at her files? Or who was so loyal that she would date a recalcitrant agent and set him up for a hit?
A sudden rage, the culmination of the week’s frustrations, swept over me. Rhea Wiell, Fepple himself, my vacillating client, even Lotty-I was fed up with all of them. And most of all with Ralph and Ajax. Chewing me out for the Durham protest, stiffing me over my request to see the company copy of Aaron Sommers’s file-and staging this charade. Which they’d botched by stealing the guy’s handheld but not wiping the entry out of the computer.
I shoved open the bathroom door and stalked to the elevator, the blood roaring in my head. I zoomed to Lake Shore Drive, honking impatiently at any car daring to turn in front of me, swooping through lights as they turned red-behaving like a mad idiot. On the Drive I covered the five miles to the Grant Park traffic lights in five minutes. The evening rush hour had built in the park, stalling me. I earned the irate whistle of a traffic cop by cutting recklessly around the stack of cars onto one of the side roads, flooring the car up to the Inner Drive.
As I got to the corner of Michigan and Adams, I had to stand on the brakes: the street was a mass of honking, unmoving cars. Now what? I wasn’t going to get near the Ajax building in my car with this kind of blockage. I made an illegal and highly dangerous U-turn and roared back to the Inner Drive. By now I’d had so many near-misses I was coming to my senses. I could hear my father lecturing me on the dangers of driving under the influence of rage. In fact, once when he’d caught me in the act, he’d made me come with him when he had to untangle a crumpled teenager from the steering wheel through his chest. The memory of that made me take the next few blocks sedately. I left the car in an underground garage and walked north to the Ajax building.
As I got to Adams Street, the congestion built. This wasn’t the normal throng of homebound workers but a penned-up crowd. I threaded my way into it with difficulty, moving along the edges of the buildings. Through the jam of people I could hear the megaphones. The protestors had come back to life.