Sara Paretsky - V.I. Warshawski 10 (8 page)

I put his hand down. “My powers are limited. But you
seem to have a long lifeline. Now, with your permission may I copy the canceled
check and the death certificate?”

“Forgive my Swiss habits of being unwilling to part
with official documents. By all means, make copies of these two papers. But the
file as a whole I think I’ll keep with me. Just in case your charm makes you
more persuasive with this young lady than her normal loyalties would allow you
to be.”

He gestured at Connie Ingram, who blushed. “Sir, I’m
really sorry, sir, but can you fill out a slip for me? I can’t let a claim file
stay out of our area without a notice of the number and of who has it.”

“Ah, so you have respect for documents as well.
Excellent. You write down what you need, and I will sign it. Will that fulfill
the requirements?”

Her color spreading to her collarbone, Connie Ingram
went out to Ralph’s secretary to type up what she needed. I followed with the
documents I was allowed to have; Ralph’s secretary copied them for me.

Ralph walked partway down the hall with me. “Stay in
touch, Vic, okay? I would be grateful to hear from you if you learn anything
about this business.”

“You’ll be the second to know,” I promised. “You going
to be equally forthcoming?”

“Naturally.” He grinned, briefly showing a trace of
the old Ralph. “And if I remember right, I’m likely to be much more forthcoming
than you.”

I laughed, but I still felt sad as I waited for the
elevator. When the doors finally opened with a subdued
ding,
a young
woman in a prim tweed suit stepped off, clutching a tan briefcase to her side.
The dreadlocks tidily pulled away from her face made me blink in recognition.

“Ms. Blount—I’m V I Warshawski—we met at the Ajax gala
a month ago.”

She nodded and briefly touched my fingertips. “I need
to be in a meeting.”

“Ah, yes: with Bertrand Rossy.” I thought of putting
her on her guard against Rossy’s accusation that she was siphoning off company
documents for Bull Durham, but she whisked herself down the hall toward Ralph’s
office before I could make up my mind.

The elevator that brought her had left. Before another
arrived, Connie Ingram joined me, her paperwork apparently finished.

“Mr. Rossy seems very protective of his documents,” I
commented.

“We can’t afford to misplace any paper around here,”
she said primly. “People can sue us if we don’t have our records in tiptop
shape.”

“Are you worried about a suit from the Sommers
family?”

“Mr. Devereux said the agent was responsible for the
claim. So it’s not our problem here at the company, but of course he and Mr.
Rossy—”

She stopped, red-faced, as if remembering Rossy’s
comment about my persuasive charms. The elevator arrived and she scurried into
it. It was twelve-forty, heart of the lunch hour. The elevator stopped every
two or three floors to take in people before making its express descent from
forty to the ground. I wondered what indiscretion she had bitten back, but
there wasn’t any way I could pump her.

Cold Call

S
omething
there is that doesn’t love a fence,” I muttered as I boarded the northbound L.
Lots of people on the train were muttering to themselves: I fit right in. “When
someone is guarding documents, is it because his corporate culture is
obsessive, as Rossy said? Or because there’s something in them he doesn’t want
me to see?”

“Because he’s in the pay of the U-nited Nations,” the
man next to me said. “They’re bringing in tanks. Those U-nited Nations
helie-copters landing in Dee-troit, I seen them on TV.”

“You’re right,” I said to his beery face. “It’s
definitely a UN plot. So you think I should go down to Midway Insurance, talk
to the agent, see if my charms are persuasive enough to wangle a look at the
sales file?”

“Your charms plenty persuasive enough for me,” he
leered.

That was esteem-enhancing. When I got off the train at
Western, I picked up my car and immediately headed south again. Down in Hyde
Park, I found a meter with forty minutes on it on one of the side streets near
the bank where Midway Insurance had their offices. The bank building itself was
the neighborhood’s venerable dowager, its ten stories towering over Hyde Park’s
main shopping street. The facade had recently been cleaned up, but once I got
off the elevator onto the sixth floor, the dim lights and dingy walls betrayed
a management indifference to tenant comfort.

Midway Insurance was wedged between a dentist and a
gynecologist. The black letters on the door, telling me they insured life,
home, and auto, had been there a long time: part of the
H
in
Home
had peeled away, so that it looked as though Midway insured
nome
.

The door was locked, but when I rang the bell someone
buzzed me in. The office beyond was even drearier than the hall. The flickering
fluorescent light was so dim that I didn’t notice a peeling corner of linoleum
until I’d tripped on it. I grabbed at a filing cabinet to keep from falling.

“Sorry—I keep meaning to fix that.” I hadn’t noticed
the man until he spoke—he was sitting at a desk that took up most of the room,
but the light was bad enough I hadn’t seen him when I opened the door.

“I hope you buy premises insurance, because you’re
inviting a nasty suit if you don’t glue that down,” I snapped, coming all the
way into the room.

He turned on a desk lamp, revealing a face with
freckles so thick that they formed an orange carpet across his face. At my
words the carpet turned a deeper red.

“I don’t get much walk-in business,” he explained.
“Most of the time we’re in the field.”

I looked around, but there wasn’t a desk for a second
person. I moved a phone book from the only other chair and sat down. “You have
partners? Subordinates?”

“I inherited the business from my dad. He died three
years ago, but I keep forgetting that. I think the business is going to die,
too. I never have been much good with cold calls, and now the Internet is
killing independent agents.”

Mentioning the Internet reminded him that his computer
was on. He flicked a key to start the screensaver, but before the fish began
cascading I saw he’d been playing some kind of solitaire.

The computer was the only newish item in the room. His
desk was a heavy yellow wooden one, the kind popular fifty years ago, with two
rows of drawers framing a kneehole for the user’s legs. Black stains from
decades of grime, coffee, ink, and who knows what scarred the yellow in the
places I could see it—most of the surface was covered in a depressing mass of
paper. My own office looked monastic by comparison.

Four large filing cabinets took up most of the
remaining space. A curling poster of the Chinese national table-tennis team
provided the only decoration. A large pot hung from a chain above the window,
but the plant within had withered down to a few drying leaves.

He sat up and tried to put a semblance of energy into
his tone. “What can I do for you?”

“I’m V I Warshawski.” I handed him one of my cards.
“And you are?”

“Fepple. Howard Fepple.” He looked at my card. “Oh.
The detective. They told me you’d be calling.”

I looked at my watch. It had been just over an hour
since I left Ajax. Someone in the company had moved fast.

“Who told you that? Bertrand Rossy?”

“I don’t know the name. It was one of the girls in
claims.”

“Women,” I corrected irritably.

“Whatever. Anyway, she told me you’d be asking about
one of our old policies. Which I can’t tell you anything about, because I was
in high school when it was sold.”

“So you looked it up? What did it tell you about who
cashed it in?”

He leaned back in his chair, the man at ease. “I can’t
see why that’s any of your business.”

I grinned evilly, all ideas about charm and persuasion
totally forgotten. “The Sommers family, whom I represent, have an interest in
this matter that could be satisfied by a federal lawsuit. Involving subpoenas
for the files and suing the agency for fraud. Maybe your father sold the policy
to Aaron Sommers back in 1971, but you own the agency now. It wouldn’t be the
Internet that would finish you off.”

His fleshy lips pursed together in a pout. “For your
information it wasn’t my father who sold the policy but Rick Hoffman, who
worked for him here.”

“So where can I find Mr. Hoffman?”

He smirked. “Wherever you look for the dead. But I
don’t imagine old Rick ended up in heaven. He was a mean SOB. How he did as
well as he did . . .” He shrugged eloquently.

“You mean unlike you he wasn’t afraid of the cold
call?”

“He was a Friday man. You know, going into the poor
neighborhoods on Friday afternoons collecting after people got paid. A lot of
our business is life insurance like that, small face value, enough to get
someone buried right and leave a little for the family. It’s all someone like
this Sommers could probably afford, ten thousand, although that was big by our
standards, usually they’re only three or four thousand.”

“So Hoffman collected from Aaron Sommers. Had he paid
up the policy?”

Fepple tapped a file on top of the mess of papers.
“Oh, yes. Yes, it took him fifteen years, but it was paid in full. The
beneficiaries were his wife, Gertrude, and his son, Marcus.”

“So who cashed it in? And if they did, how come the
family still had the policy?”

Looking at me resentfully, Fepple started through the
file, page by page. He stopped at one point, staring at a document, his lips
moving soundlessly. A little smile flickered at the corners of his mouth, an
unpleasant, secretive smile, but after a moment he continued the search.
Finally he pulled out the same documents I’d already seen at the company: a
copy of the death certificate and a copy of the countersigned check.

“What else was in the file?” I asked.

“Nothing,” he said quickly. “There was nothing unusual
about it at all. Rick did a zillion of these little weekend sales. There’s no
surprise to them.”

I didn’t believe him, but I didn’t have a way to call
his bluff. “Not much of a way to make a living, three- and four-thousand-dollar
sales.”

“Rick did real well for himself. He knew how to work
the angles, I’ll tell you that much.”

“And what you’re not telling me?”

“I’m not telling you my private business. You’ve
barged in here without an appointment, fishing around for dirt, but you don’t
have any grounds to ask questions. And don’t go waving federal lawsuits at me.
If there was any funny business about this, it was the company’s
responsibility, not mine.”

“Did Hoffman have any family?”

“A son. I don’t know what happened to him—he was a
whole lot older than me, and he and old Rick didn’t hit it off too great. I had
to go to the funeral, with my old man, and we were the only damned people in
the church. The son was long gone by then.”

“So who inherited Hoffman’s share of the business?”

Fepple shook his head. “He wasn’t a partner. He worked
for my old man. Strictly commission, but—he did well.”

“So why don’t you pick up his client list and carry on
for him?”

The nasty little smile reappeared. “I might just do
that very thing. I didn’t realize until the company called me what a little
gold mine Rick’s way of doing business represented.”

I wanted to see that file badly, but short of grabbing
it from the desk and running off down the stairs into the arms of the guard in
the lobby, I couldn’t think of any way to look at it. At least, not at the
moment. As I left, I tripped again on the corner of the linoleum. If Fepple
didn’t fix it soon I’d be suing him myself.

Since I was already south, I went on another two miles
to Sixty-seventh Street, where the Delaney Funeral Parlor stood. It was in an
imposing white building, easily the grandest on the block, with four hearses
parked in the lot behind it. I left my Mustang next to them and went in to see
what I could learn.

Old Mr. Delaney talked to me himself, about how sorry
they were to have had to inflict such grief on a sweet decent woman like Sister
Sommers but that he couldn’t afford to bury people for charity: if you did it
once, every freeloader on the South Side would be coming around with some story
or other about their insurance falling through. As to how he’d learned that
Sommers’s policy had already been cashed in, they had a simple procedure with
the life-insurance companies. They had called, given the policy number, and
been told that the policy had already been paid. I asked who he’d spoken to.

“I don’t give anything away free, young lady,” Mr.
Delaney said austerely. “If you want to pursue your own inquiries at the
company, I urge you to do so, but don’t expect me to give you for nothing information
I spent my hard-earned money finding out. All I will tell you is that it isn’t
the first time this has happened, that a bereaved family has discovered that
their loved one had disposed of his resources without privileging them with the
information. It isn’t a regular occurrence, but families are often sadly
surprised at the behavior of their loved ones. Human nature can be all too
human.”