“But Rhea says that Ulrich wasn’t his name.”
His face turned from pink to red. “Don’t try to call Rhea a liar. You’re the liar. Ulrich left behind documents in code. They prove that my name is really Radbuka. If you believed in Rhea you’d understand the code, but you don’t, you’re trying to destroy her, you want to destroy me, I won’t let you, I won’t, I won’t, I won’t!”
I watched in alarm as he began shaking, wondering if he was having a seizure of some kind. When I moved to try to help him, Posner barked at me to keep my distance: he was not going to allow a woman to touch one of his followers, even if Radbuka himself was not aware of the danger a woman’s touch posed. He and Leon supported Radbuka over to a bench at the bus stop. I watched for a moment, but Radbuka seemed to be calming down. I left the men to it and walked slowly up the street back to the hospital, hoping for a word with Max before returning to my office.
“Posner made a certain kind of sense,” I told Max, when his weary secretary got him to give me five minutes, “with his ideas about Ajax bribing Durham to start demonstrating, but really, he must be as crazy as Paul Radbuka to stage a demonstration here. How are things going with your donors?”
Max doesn’t often look his age, but this afternoon his skin was drawn tight and grey across his cheekbones. “I don’t understand any of this, Victoria. Morrell’s friend Don Strzepek came over last night. In good faith I let him look at my old notes; I thought he believed them. Surely a friend of Morrell’s wouldn’t have been abusing my trust?”
“But those notes-they don’t have enough detail about the Radbukas for anyone to know if this guy Paul is a relative or not-unless there’s something in your file I didn’t see?”
He made a tired gesture. “Just that letter of Lotty’s, which you read. Surely Don wouldn’t have used that to encourage Paul to believe he was a relative, would he?”
“I don’t think so, Max,” I said, but not with total confidence: I was remembering the glow in Don’s eyes when he looked at Rhea Wiell. “I can try to talk to him tonight, though, if you’d like.”
“Yes, why don’t you do that.” He sat heavily at his desk, his face an effigy. “I never thought I would be happy to see the last of my family, but I will be glad when Calia and Agnes get on that plane.”
XXXVI Rigmarole: New Word for the Same Old Story
I slowly walked back to my car and drove down to my office, obeying every speed limit, every traffic sign. The morning’s adrenaline-fueled fury was long gone. I stared at the stack of messages Mary Louise had left for me, then caught up with Morrell at his hotel in Rome, where it was nine at night. The conversation both cheered and further depressed me. He said the kinds of things one wants to hear from a lover, especially when the lover is about to go into the land of the Taliban for eight weeks. But when we hung up I felt more forlorn than ever.
I tried to take a nap on the cot in my back room, but my mind wouldn’t shut down. I finally got up again and determinedly went through the messages, returning phone calls. Halfway through the pile was a note to call Ralph at Ajax: the company had decided to make the Sommers family whole. I got back to him at once.
“Mind you, Vic, this is a one-time-only event,” Ralph Devereux warned when I called him. “Don’t expect to make it a habit.”
“Ralph, this is wonderful news-but whose idea was it? Yours? Rossy’s? Did Alderman Durham call and urge you on to do this?”
He ignored me. “And another thing: I would greatly appreciate it if you let me know the next time you sic the cops on my employees.”
“You’re right, Ralph. I got caught up in an emergency at a hospital, but I should have called you. Did they arrest Connie Ingram?”
Mary Louise had left a typed report about Sommers and about Amy Blount which I was trying to scan while I talked: between Mary Louise’s police contacts and Freeman Carter’s skill, the state had let Isaiah Sommers go home, but they’d made it clear he was their front-runner. The trouble was not his prints on the door per se: the Finch said the 911 techs had confirmed what the Twenty-first District cops had told Margaret Sommers: they’d received an anonymous phone tip-probably from a black male-which was what made them print the room.
“No. But they came right here to the building to question her.”
“Right to the sacred halls of Ajax itself?”
When he sputtered a request to can the sarcasm, that it disrupted everyone’s workday to have cops in the building, I added, “Connie Ingram was lucky, lucky to be a white female. Maybe it’s embarrassing to have the cops question you in your office, but they took my client away from his workstation in cuffs. They hauled him over to Twenty-ninth and Prairie for a chat in a windowless room with a bunch of guys watching through the one-way glass. He’s only eating at home tonight because I hired him the best criminal lawyer in town.”
Ralph brushed that aside. “Karen Bigelow-Connie’s supervisor, remember?-Karen sat in on the interrogation along with one of our lawyers. Connie was extremely upset, but the police seemed to believe her, or at least they didn’t arrest her. The trouble is, Vic, they pulled phone records for Fepple’s office and found several calls from her extension, including one the day before he was killed. She says she did call him, several times, to get him to fax his copies of the Sommers documents to her. But Janoff is pissed at having cops in the place, Rossy is pissed, and frankly, Vic, I’m not very happy myself.”
I put down the notes to give him my full attention. “Poor Connie: it’s a hard reward for doing your duty, to be grilled by the cops. I hope the company doesn’t abandon her.
“Ralph, what deal did Rossy do with Durham and Posner to get them to call off their protests?”
“What the hell are you talking about?” He suddenly was really angry, not just blustering.
“I mean that Rossy swung down Adams Street yesterday while I was upstairs with you. He called Durham over to his car, met with him an hour later at his home, and finished up by talking privately to Joseph Posner. Today Posner was picketing Beth Israel Hospital, while Durham ’s left the arena. I called City Hall just now- Durham was in his office listening to pleas for exceptions to zoning ordinances in Stewart Ridge.”
Ralph blew frosty air across the line to me. “Is it so strange that the managing director tries for a one-on-one with the guys who want to shut down his company? He’s stuck in traffic like every other stiff in the Loop last night and sees his chance. Don’t try to spin that into a conspiracy for me.”
“Ralph, remember when we met? Remember how you got that bullet in your shoulder?”
The memory still rankled, how his boss had betrayed both him and the company. “What could Rossy possibly be doing that would involve a worthless agent on Chicago ’s South Side? Edelweiss couldn’t have anything to do with Howard Fepple. Use your head, Vic.”
“I’m trying, but it isn’t telling me anything very intelligible. Listen, Ralph, I know you have mixed feelings about me, but you’re a savvy insurance guy. Put these things together for me: all the Sommers documents disappear, except for the paper file-about which you think there’s something amiss, although you can’t put your finger on it-and that file spent a week in Rossy’s office.
“Throw this in: either Connie Ingram or someone pretending to be her set up a date with Fepple for last Friday night. Who besides Ajax personnel knew she’d been talking to him? Next, Fepple’s dead, and his copy of the file disappears, and Rossy invites me to dinner, very much on the spur of the moment. Whereupon Fillida and her Italian friends pump me in concert about Fepple, his death, and his files. And finally, there’s that odd document I found in Fepple’s papers, the one I showed you with Sommers’s name on it. What does all this add up to in your mind?”