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.
XXXIV
Road Rage, Hospital Rage, Any Old Rage
The hospital was on the city’s northwest side, far enough from the trendy neighborhoods that nearby traffic usually flowed fast. Today, though, when I was about a mile away, the main road got so heavy I tried the side streets. Five blocks from Beth Israel, I came to a total halt. I looked around frantically for an alley so I could escape to an alternate route, but as I was about to make a U-turn, it dawned on me that if the jam came from gapers rubbernecking at Posner’s demonstrators, traffic would be blocked on all sides of Beth Israel. I pulled over to an empty meter and sprinted the last half mile.
Sure enough, I found Posner and several dozen protesters in the middle of the kind of crowd he seemed to adore. Chicago cops were furiously directing traffic at the intersection; staff in green-and-gold hospital security blazers were trying to guide patients to side entrances; television crews were filming. The last had attracted a crowd of gawkers. It was just on one—anyone coming back from lunch had probably stopped to enjoy the show.
I was too far back to read the signs, but I could hear a chant that chilled my heart: Max and Lotty, have a heart! Don’t smash survivors’ lives apart!