Even laying out these questions on a legal pad at my dining room table didn’t help, although it did make me able to look at the material more calmly. I finally put the journals to one side to see if there was anything else in the file. An envelope held Ulrich’s INS documents, starting with his landing permit on June 17, 1947, in Baltimore, with son Paul Hoffman, born March 29, 1941, Vienna. Paul had X’d this out, saying, Paul Radbuka, whom he stole from England. The documents included the name of the Dutch ship they had arrived on, a certification that Ulrich was not a Nazi, Ulrich’s resident-alien permits, renewed at regular intervals, his citizenship papers, granted in 1971. On these, Paul had smeared, Nazi War Criminal: revoke and deport for crimes against humanity. Paul had said on television that Ulrich wanted a Jewish child to help him get into the States, but there wasn’t any reference to Paul’s religion, or to Ulrich’s, in the landing documents.
My brain would work better if I got some rest. It had been a long day, what with finding Paul’s body and his unnerving refuge. I thought of him again as a small child, locked in the closet, terrified, his revenge now as puny as when he’d been a child.
XL Confession
I slept heavily, but unpleasantly, tormented by dreams of being locked in that little closet with swastikaed faces leering down at me, with Paul dancing dementedly outside the door like Rumpelstiltskin, crying, “You’ll never know my name.” It was a relief when my answering service brought me back to life at five: a woman named Amy Blount had called. She said she had offered to look at a document for me and could stop by my office in half an hour or so if that was convenient.
I really wanted to get up to Max’s. On the other hand, Mary Louise would have left a report on her day’s interviews with Isaiah Sommers’s friends and neighbors. Come to think of it, Ulrich Hoffman’s books might mean something to Amy Blount: after all, she was a historian. She understood odd documents.
I put Ninshubur in the dryer and called Ms. Blount to say I was on my way to my office. When I got there, I made copies of some of the pages in Ulrich’s books, including the one with Paul’s heavy marginalia.
While I waited for Ms. Blount, I looked over Mary Louise’s neatly typed report. She had drawn a succession of blanks on the South Side. None of Isaiah Sommers’s friends or coworkers could think of anyone with a big enough grudge against him to finger him to the cops.
His wife is an angry woman, but at the bottom I believe she is on his side-I don’t think she set him up. Terry Finchley tells me the police right now have two competing theories:
1. Connie Ingram did it because Fepple tried to assault her. They don’t like this because they believe what she says about not going to his office. They do like it because her only alibi is her mother, who sits in front of the tube most nights. They also can’t get around the forensic evidence showing that Fepple (or someone) entered his “hot” date in his computer on Thursday, when everyone agrees Fepple was still alive.
2. Isaiah Sommers did it because he thought Fepple was robbing his family of ten thousand dollars they all could use. They like this better, because they can actually put Sommers at the scene. They can’t prove he ever owned a 22-caliber SIG, but they can’t trace the gun anyway. Terry says they’d risk going to court if they could completely discount Connie as a suspect; he also says they know that with Freeman Carter and you acting for Sommers, they need to have cast-iron evidence. They know Mr. Carter would demolish them in court since they can’t put the SIG in Sommers’s hands any more than anyone else’s.
The only odd thing here is Sommers’s cousin Colby-this is his other uncle’s son, the one he told you might have stolen the policy to begin with; he hangs on the fringe of Durham’s Empower Youth Energy. He’s been flashing cash lately, and everyone is surprised, because he never has any.
This can’t be the original life-insurance money, I scribbled on the page, because that was cashed in almost a decade ago. I don’t know if it’s significant or not, but poke at it tomorrow morning, see if you can find anyone who knows where he got it.
As I dropped the report back on Mary Louise’s desk, Amy Blount came to the door. She had on her professional wardrobe, the prim tweed suit with a severe blue shirt. Her dreadlocks were once again tied back from her face. With the formal attire her manner had become more guarded again, but she took Ulrich’s two journals and looked at them carefully, comparing them with the photocopy of the fragment I’d found in Fepple’s office.
She looked up with a rueful smile that made her seem more approachable. “I hoped I was going to perform some kind of hocus-pocus on this, impress you beyond expression-but I can’t. If you hadn’t told me you’d found it in a German man’s home, I’d have guessed some Jewish organization-the names all look Jewish to me, at least the ones on the document you found in the Midway Insurance office. Someone was keeping track of these people, marking off when they died; only Th. Sommers is still alive.”
“You think Sommers is a Jewish name?” I was startled: I only associated it with my client.
“In this context, yes-it’s there with Brodsky and Herstein, after all.”
I looked at the paper again myself. Could this be a different Aaron Sommers altogether? Was that why the policy had been paid out? Because Fepple’s father, or the other agent, had confused my client’s uncle with someone else with the same name? But if it was just a case of simple confusion-why had someone cared enough to steal all the papers relating to the Sommers family?
“I’m sorry,” I said, realizing I’d missed what else she’d been saying. “The dates?”
“What are they? Attendance records? Payment records? It doesn’t take Sherlock Holmes to say they were written by a European person. And you know the man was German. Other than that, I can’t help you. I didn’t find anything like this in the files I looked at, but of course Ajax has company files, not client records.”
She didn’t seem quite ready to leave, so I asked her if she had heard any further accusations from Bertrand Rossy about feeding Ajax material to Alderman Durham. She played with a large turquoise ring on her index finger, twisting it and looking at it under the light.
“That was a strange event,” she said. “I suppose that’s really why I wanted to come by. To ask your opinion-or to trade professional opinions. I hoped I could tell you something about your document so that you could give me your opinion about a conversation.”
I was intrigued. “You did your best, I’ll do mine.”
“This-is not an easy thing for me to tell you, and you would oblige me by promising to keep it confidential. That is, not to act on it.”
I frowned. “Without knowing in advance-I can’t promise that if it makes me party to a crime, or if the information would help clear my client of a potential murder charge.”
“Oh! Your Mr. Sommers, you mean, your non-Jewish Mr. Sommers. It’s not that kind of information. It’s-it’s political. It could be damaging politically, and embarrassing. For me to be known as someone who gave out the information.”
“Then I can safely promise you that I will hold what you say in confidence,” I said gravely.
“It concerns Mr. Durham,” she said, her eyes on her ring. “As a matter of fact, he did ask me to give him documents from the Ajax files. He knew I was working on their history-everybody did. Mr. Janoff-you know, the chairman of Ajax-was quite gracious about introducing me to people at the gala they held for their hundred-fiftieth anniversary, even if he was a bit patronizing-you know how they do it, ‘Here’s the little gal who wrote up our history.’ If I’d been white, or a man, would he have introduced me as ‘the little guy’? But at any event, I met the mayor, I even met the governor, and some of the aldermen, including Mr. Durham. The day after the gala he-Mr. Durham, that is-called. He wanted me to give him anything I had found in the archives which would support his claim. I told him it wasn’t mine to give, and that even if it were, I didn’t believe in the politics of victimhood.”