I scribbled a note on my card: In re the widow’s mite and Isaiah Sommers. After a mere fifteen minutes’ wait, the secretary scooted me ahead of other supplicants, who gave me dirty looks for jumping the queue.
The alderman had a young man with him wearing the navy blazer with the Empower Youth Energy insignia on it: a gold eye with EYE on Youth embroidered around it. The alderman himself was dressed in Harris tweed, his shirt having the palest green stripe in it to match the green in the tweed.
He shook my hand genially and waved me to a seat. “So you have something to say about the widow’s mite, Ms. Warshawski?”
“Have you kept up with that story, alderman? You know Margaret Sommers took your advice and insisted on a meeting with the agent, Howard Fepple, only to walk in and find him dead?”
“I’m sorry to hear it: that must have been a shock for her.”
“She got a worse one this morning. Her husband has been brought in for questioning-the cops got a tip. They think he murdered Fepple-out of outrage over the guy robbing his aunt of her mite, so to speak.”
He nodded slowly. “I can understand their reasoning, but I’m sure Isaiah wouldn’t have killed a man. I’ve known him for years, you see, for years, because his aunt, bless her, had a son who was one of my boys before he passed. Isaiah is a fine man, a churchgoing man. I don’t see him as a murdering man.”
“Do you see who might have phoned in an anonymous tip to the police, alderman? Their technicians say they’re pretty sure it was an African-American male who made the call.”
He gave a great mirthless smile. “And you thought to yourself, Who do I know who’s an African-American male? Louis Durham. We’re all alike, after all, we black men: animals at heart, aren’t we.”
I looked at him steadily. “I thought to myself, Who has been having surreptitious meetings with the European chief of the insurance company that holds the paper on Aaron Sommers? I thought to myself, I don’t see what enticements those two men could offer each other-kill the Holocaust Asset Recovery Act in exchange for shutting down the demonstrations outside the Ajax building? But what if Mr. Rossy wanted something more-what if he wanted Isaiah Sommers to take the fall for the murder so that he could close the claim file and get the mess out of his hair? What if in exchange for shutting off your demonstration and getting someone to finger Isaiah Sommers, Rossy said he’d fly to Springfield to kill the IHARA bill for you?”
“You have a reputation as an investigator, Warshawski. This isn’t worthy of you.” Durham stood and moved to the door; the young man in the EYE blazer followed him.
I perforce got up to leave, as well. “Yes, but remember, Durham, I’m shameless-you wrote that on your placards yourself.”
I picked up my car from the West Loop garage where I’d parked, more puzzled than angered by the encounter. What had he hoped to learn from me that got me in to see him so readily? What were he and Rossy doing together? Had one of his people really made that phone call that led to Isaiah Sommers’s arrest? I couldn’t put the pieces together in any meaningful way.
I was negotiating the tricky intersection at Armitage, where three streets come together underneath the Kennedy Expressway, when Tim Streeter called. “Vic, not to alarm you, but there’s a bit of a situation.”
My heart skipped a beat. “Calia? What’s happened? Where are you? Oh, help, hang on.” I laid down rubber under the Kennedy, forced a semi turning onto the expressway to stand on his brakes with a loud blaring of his horn, and pulled into a gas station on the other side.
“Vic, calm down. The kid’s here with me; we’re at the Children’s Museum in Wilmette. Agnes is fine. It’s at the hospital. This guy Posner, you know, the one who’s been-”
“Yeah, yeah, I know who he is.”
“Okay, he’s shown up at the hospital with a group of pickets denouncing Mr. Loewenthal and Dr. Herschel for keeping Jewish families apart. The kid and I were supposed to drop in on Mr. Loewenthal for a brown-bag lunch-Mom’s working on her presentation for the gallery-but when we got to the hospital, Posner and his gang were out in force.”
“Oh, damn him and the horse he rode in on, too.” So much adrenaline was running through me that I was ready to bounce up to Bryn Mawr Avenue and take Posner apart with my own hands. “Radbuka there?”
“Yeah. That’s when we got a bit of a situation: I didn’t realize what it was at first, thought it might be a labor dispute or right-to-lifers. Wasn’t until we got close up that I made out the signs. And then Radbuka saw the kid and wanted to make a move on her. I hustled her out of there but the cameras were rolling; she may be on TV tonight. Hard to say. Called Mr. Loewenthal from the car and came on up here.”
He interrupted himself briefly to talk to Calia, who was whining in the background that she needed to see her Opa now. “I’d better go, but I told Mr. Loewenthal if he needs extra support to call my brother. I’ll stick with the little one.”
When we’d hung up I sat with my head in my hands, trying to order my mind. I couldn’t just fly north to the hospital without doing something for Isaiah Sommers. I forced myself to continue to my office, where Mary Louise greeted me with a severe reprimand over once again making myself so inaccessible overnight: it was no way to run this kind of business. If I wanted to unplug myself from the world to sleep, I should let her know so she could cover for me.
“You’re right. It won’t happen again-put it down to sleep deprivation clouding my judgment. Here’s what’s going on, though.” I sketched out the situations with Sommers, with Amy Blount, and now the demonstration outside Beth Israel. “I can understand why Radbuka wants to hook up with Posner, but what does Posner get out of attacking Max and Lotty? He went to see Rossy last night-I’m wondering if Rossy somehow set him on to Beth Israel.”
“Who knows why someone like Posner does anything?” Mary Louise said impatiently. “Look, I only have two more hours to give you today. I don’t think it’s very helpful for you if I spend it going over conspiracy theories. And really, Vic-it makes sense for me to deal with Sommers’s situation-I can call the Finch to get the details of the investigation and give Freeman’s assistant some support. But why did you agree to go all the way down to the South Side for this Amy Blount? The cops are right, you know-this kind of B &E is a dime a dozen. We just file reports-they do, I mean-and keep a lookout for stolen goods. If she didn’t lose anything valuable, why waste your time on it?”
I grinned. “Conspiracy theory, Mary Louise. She wrote a history for Ajax. Ralph Devereux and Rossy are all hot on who’s stealing Ajax files, or leaking Ajax files to Durham -at least, they were worrying about that last week. Maybe Rossy’s spiked Durham ’s guns for now. If Amy Blount’s papers and floppies have been rifled, I want to know what’s missing. Is it something the alderman wanted for his campaign on slave reparations? Or is there really some junkie out there who’s so addled that he thinks he can sell history papers for enough money to buy a fix?”
She scowled. “It’s your business. Just remember when you’re writing the rent and insurance checks in two weeks why you don’t have more cash flow this month.”
“But you will go down to Hyde Park to look over Ms. Blount’s place? After you’ve gotten Sommers’s situation squared away with the Finch?”
“Like I said, Vic, it’s your business, it’s your money to waste. But quite frankly, I can’t see what good I’ll do you by going to Hyde Park, or what benefit you’ll get from joining Joseph Posner up at the hospital.”
“I’ll have a chance to talk to Radbuka, which I’ve been desperate for. And maybe I’ll find out what Rossy and Posner had to say to each other.”
She sniffed and turned to the phone. While she called the Finch-Terry Finchley, her old commanding officer from her days in the Central District-I went to my own desk. I had a handful of messages, one from an important client, and a half dozen e-mails. I dealt with them as quickly as I could and took off.