“You could go in, and welcome,” I said. “Once is enough for me.”
“Neither of you has a right to violate Paul’s privacy by going into his house,” Rhea said coldly. “All patients idealize their therapists to some extent. Ulrich was such a monstrous father that Paul juxtaposes me against him as an idealized form of the mother he never knew. As for your going into the house, Vic—you called me this morning wanting his address. Why do that if you knew where he lived? If he’d been shot, how did you get inside? Are you sure you weren’t the woman down there shooting him, because of your rage over his wanting to prove a close relationship with your friends?”
“I didn’t shoot the little goober, even though he was acting like a great pain in the neck,” I said softly, my eyes hot. “But I do have a sample of his blood now, on my clothes. I can send it out for a DNA profile. That will prove once and for all whether he’s related to Max—or Carl or Lotty.”
She stared at me in dismay. I pushed brusquely past her before she or Don could speak.
XLIV
The Lady Vanishes
I wondered if Paul was safe in his hospital room. If Ilse the She-Wolf learned he had survived her shot, would she come back to finish the job? I couldn’t ask for a police posting without explaining about Ulrich’s journals. And my mind boggled at the task of trying to make the cops understand that story, especially when I didn’t fully understand it myself. I finally compromised by going back to the fifth floor to tell the charge nurse that my brother was scared of his attacker coming back to kill him.
“We worry about Paul,” I said. “I don’t know if you’ve noticed, but he lives in a world of his own. He thinks the Nazis are after him. Did Dr. Herschel tell you when she was talking to you that it would be best if no one goes in to see him unless I, or his doctor, or the therapist Rhea Wiell is here, as well? He’ll get so agitated that he could get into serious respiratory difficulties right now.”
She told me to write up something for the nursing station. She let me use her computer in the back room, then taped my message up at the station and said she would make sure the central switchboard routed any calls or visitors to them.
Before going home, I went to my own office to send Morrell an e-mail, recounting the events of the day. So far no one has beaten me up and left me to die on the Kennedy, I wrote, but I’ve been having a strenuous time. I finished with an account of the conversation in Paul’s hospital room. You’ve done so much work with torture victims—could this be a dissociative protection, identifying with victims of the Holocaust? The whole situation is really spooky.
I ended with the messages of love and longing one sends to distant lovers. What had sustained Lotty over the years against such feelings? Had her sense of torment made her think she deserved loneliness and longing? When I got home, I sat on the back porch with Mr. Contreras and the dogs for a long time, not talking much, just drawing comfort from their presence.
In the morning, I decided it was time to visit Ajax Insurance again. I phoned Ralph from my own office and talked to his secretary, Denise. As usual, his calendar was full; once again I pleaded my case forcefully but with charm and goodwill; once again, Denise arranged to fit me in, twenty minutes from now if I could get to Ajax by nine-thirty. I grabbed my briefcase with the photocopies from Ulrich’s journals and ran down to the corner of North for a cab.
When I reached Ralph’s office, Denise told me he would be back from the chairman’s office in two minutes. She settled me in his conference room with a cup of coffee, but Ralph came in almost immediately, pressing his fingers along the corners of his eyes. He looked too tired for this early in the day.
“Hi, Vic. We have a big exposure in the Carolina flood zone. I can give you five minutes, and then I have to move on.”
I laid my photocopies on his conference table. “These are from the journals of Ulrich—Rick—Hoffman, the agent who sold Aaron Sommers his life-insurance policy all those years ago. Ulrich kept what seems to be a list of names and addresses, followed by a set of cryptic initials and check marks. Do they mean anything to you?”
Ralph bent over the papers. “This handwriting is just about impossible to read. Is there any way to get it clearer?”
“Blowing up the image seems to help. Unfortunately I don’t have the originals to work with right now, but I can read some of this—I’ve been looking at it a couple of days.”
“Denise,” he shouted to his secretary. “Can you come here a minute?”
Denise obediently trotted in, not showing any annoyance at the peremptory summons, and took a couple of sheets to her copier. She came back with various sizes of blowups. Ralph looked at them and shook his head.