Someone had run a torch around it, taking the gate apart: the scorch marks on the kitchen door were obvious. Because you were interested in her connection to Ajax, I asked her specifically about any Ajax documents. She didn’t have originals; she had scanned various 19th-century files to a floppy, which was missing. In fact, all her dissertation notes were missing. The perps damaged her computer as well. Nothing else was gone, not even her sound system. I talked Terry into sending down a proper forensics crew, but we’re still not likely to find the perps.
I commiserated with Ms. Blount over her misery, then asked if her paper files had been tampered with.
“Oh, yes, those are gone, too, all my research notes. Who could want them? If I’d known I was sitting on such hot material I’d have published my dissertation by now; I’d have a real job, instead of hanging on in this rathole writing diddly corporate histories.”
“Ms. Blount, what papers had you copied from the Ajax files?”
“I did not take classified internal documents. I did not hand confidential company information to Alderman Durham—”
“Ms. Blount, please, I know this has been a tough twenty-four hours, but don’t jump on me. I’m asking for quite a different reason. I’m trying to figure out what is going on at Ajax Insurance these days.”
I explained what had been happening since I’d visited her on Friday—primarily Fepple’s death, Sommers’s problems, Connie Ingram’s name appearing on Fepple’s appointment register. “The real oddity was the fragment of a document I found.”
She listened carefully to everything I said, but my description of the handwritten document didn’t sound like anything she’d seen. “I’ll be glad to look at it—I could come by your office tomorrow sometime. Offhand it sounds like something out of an old ledger, but I can’t interpret all those marks unless I see them. If it has your client’s name on it, it would be recent, at least by my standards. The papers I copied dated from the 1850’s, because my research is on the economics of slavery.”
She was suddenly depressed again. “All that material is missing. I suppose I can go back to the archives and recopy it. It’s the sense of violation that gets me down. And the pointlessness of it all.”
XXXVII
My Kingdom for an Address
Melancholy gave me a restless night’s sleep. I got up at six to run the dogs. I was in my office by eight-thirty, even though I stopped for breakfast again at the diner, even though I made a detour to Lotty’s clinic on my way down. I didn’t see her—she was still at the hospital making rounds.
As soon as Mary Louise came in, I sent her to the South Side to see if any of Sommers’s friends could help figure out who had fingered him. I called Don Strzepek back, to see if he’d had any luck—or I’d had any luck—in getting Rhea to take Paul’s harassment of Max seriously.
He gave an embarrassed cough. “She said she thought it was a sign of strength in him that he was making new friends, but she could see that he might need a greater sense of proportion.”
“So she’ll talk to him?” I couldn’t keep the impatience out of my voice.
“She says she’ll bring it up at his next regular appointment, but she can’t take on the role of managing her patients’ lives: they need to function in the real world, fall, pick themselves up, like everyone else. If they can’t do that, then they need more help than she can give them. She’s so amazing,” he crooned, “I’ve never known anyone like her.”
I cut him short halfway through his love song, asking him if that high-six-figure book advance was clouding his objectivity on Paul Radbuka. He hung up, hurt: I wasn’t willing to discover Rhea’s good points.
I was still snarling to myself over that conversation when Murray Ryerson called from the Herald-Star. Beth Blacksin had told him about my private conversation with Posner yesterday at the demonstration.
“For old times’ sake, V I,” he wheedled me. “Far off the record. What was that about?”
“Far off the record, Murray? May Horace Greeley rise from the dead and wither your testicles if you talk even to your mother about this, let alone Blacksin?”
“Scout’s honor, Warshawski.”