“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?”
“That we dropped the ball on Sommers, and on Fepple,” Ralph said coldly. “Preston Janoff’s been over this with the head of agency management, wanting to know why we kept a relationship with a guy who produced a policy a month for us in his good years. Janoff’s agreed to make the Sommers family whole: we’ll send out a check tomorrow. On a total exception basis, as I said. But other than that—Vic, the Rossys’ guests know you’re a detective, they’re avid about American crime, it’s natural they should pump you. And tell me this: what earthly reason could Bertrand Rossy have for getting involved with a loser like Fepple, whom he never even heard of before last week?”
He was right. That was the crux of the problem. I couldn’t think of a reason.
“Ralph, I was hearing last night that it’s Fillida’s money that runs Edelweiss, that Bertrand married the boss’s daughter.”
“That’s not news. Her mother’s family founded the company in the 1890’s. They were Swiss, and they’re still the majority shareholders.”
“She’s a funny woman. Very chic, very soft-spoken, but definitely in charge of what’s said and done in the Rossy home. I gather she keeps close watch on what happens on Adams Street as well.”
“Rossy’s a substantial guy. Just because he married up doesn’t mean he doesn’t do the job well. Anyway, I don’t have time for gossip about my managing director’s wife. I have work to do.”
“Oh, kiss my mistletoe,” I said, but the line was dead.
I dialed back into Ajax and asked for Rossy’s office. His secretary, the cool, well-groomed Suzanne, put me on hold. Rossy came on in a surprisingly short time.
When I thanked him for last night’s dinner, he said, “My wife so enjoyed meeting you last night. She says you are refreshing and original.”
“I’ll add that to my resumé,” I said politely, which earned me one of his hearty laughs. “You must be pleased that Joseph Posner’s stopped haunting the Ajax premises.”
“Of course we are. Any day without a disturbance in a big company is a good one,” he agreed.
“Yep. It may not surprise you to learn he’s moved his protesters up to Beth Israel Hospital. He spun me some rigmarole, which he says you gave him, about you promising a private search of the Edelweiss and Ajax policies if he’d leave Ajax alone and haunt Beth Israel instead.”
“I’m sorry? This word is new to me, rigmarole.”
“Farrago—a bunch of nonsense. What could the hospital possibly have to do with missing Holocaust assets?”
“That I don’t know, Ms. Warshawski, or Vic—I feel I can call you Vic after our friendly evening last night. About the hospital and Holocaust assets you would have to talk to Max Loewenthal. Is that all? Did you discover any new or unusual information about that unusual piece of paper from Mr. Fepple’s office?”
I sat up very straight: I could not afford to be inattentive. “The paper is at a lab, but they tell me it was made at a plant outside Basel sometime in the thirties. Does that ring a bell with you?”
“My mother was only just born in 1931, Ms. Warshawski, so paper from that era means very little to me. Does it mean anything to you?”