She grinned. “My agent’s happy—my contract’s coming up in six weeks. Praeger has a real bee in his bonnet about Wiell. They’ve been adversaries on a bunch of cases, not just in Chicago but all around the country. He thinks she’s the devil incarnate and she thinks he’s the next thing to a child molester himself. They’ve both had media training—they looked civilized on camera, but you should have heard them when the camera wasn’t rolling.”
“What did you think of Radbuka?” I asked. “Up close and personal, did you believe his story?”
“Do you have proof he’s a fraud? Is that what this is really about?”
I groaned. “I don’t know anything about him. Zippo. Niente. Nada. I can’t say it in any more languages. What was your take on him?”
Her eyes opened wide. “Oh, Vic, I believed him completely. It was one of the most harrowing interviews I’ve ever done—and I talked to people after Lockerbie. Can you imagine growing up the way he did and then finding the man who claimed to be your father was like your worst enemy?”
“What was his father—foster father’s name?”
She scrolled through the text on her screen. “Ulrich. Whenever Paul referred to him, he always used the man’s German name, instead of ‘Daddy’ or ‘Father’ or something.”
“Do you know what he found in Ulrich’s papers that made him realize his lost identity? In the interview he said they were in code.”
She shook her head, still looking at the screen. “He talked about working it through with Rhea and getting the correct interpretation. He said they proved to him that Ulrich had really been a Nazi collaborator. He talked a lot about how brutal Ulrich had been to him, beating him for acting like a sissy, locking him in a closet when he was away at work, sending him to bed without food.”
“There wasn’t a woman on the scene? Or was she a participant in the abuse?” I asked.
“Paul says Ulrich told him that his mother—or Mrs. Ulrich, anyway—had died in the bombing of Vienna as the war was ending. I don’t think Mr. Ulrich ever married here, or even had women to the house. Ulrich and Paul seemed to have been a real pair of loners. Papa went to work, came home, beat Paul. Paul was supposed to be a doctor, but he couldn’t handle pressure, so he ended up as an X-ray technician, which earned more ridicule. He never moved out of his father’s house. Isn’t that creepy? Staying with him even when he was big enough to earn his own living?”
That was all she could, or at least all she would, tell me. She promised to messenger over a tape of the various segments with Radbuka, as well as the meeting between the therapists, to my office later in the day.
I still had time before my appointment at Ajax to do some work in my office. It was only a few miles north and west of Global—but a light-year away in ambience. No glass towers for me. Three years ago a sculptor friend had invited me to share a seven-year lease with her for a converted warehouse on Leavitt. Since the building was a fifteen-minute drive from the financial district where most of my business lies and the rent was half what you pay in those gleaming high-rises, I’d signed on eagerly.
When we moved in, the area was still a grimy no-man’s-land between the Latino neighborhood farther west and a slick Yuppie area nearer the lake. At that time, bodegas and palm readers vied with music stores for the few retail spaces in what had been an industrial zone. Parking abounded. Even though the Yuppies are starting to move in, building espresso bars and boutiques, we still have plenty of collapsing buildings and drunks. I was against further gentrification—I didn’t want to see my rent skyrocket when the current lease expired.
Tessa’s truck was already in our little lot when I pulled in. She’d received a major commission last month and was putting in long hours to build a model of both the piece and the plaza it would occupy. When I passed her studio door she was perched at her outsize drafting table, sketching. She’s testy if interrupted, so I went down the hall to my own office without speaking.
I made a couple of copies of Isaiah Sommers’s uncle’s policy and locked the original in my office safe, where I keep all client documents during an active investigation. It’s really a strongroom, with fireproof walls and a good sturdy door.
Midway Insurance’s address was listed on the policy: they had sold the policy to Aaron Sommers all those years back. If I couldn’t get satisfaction from the company, I’d have to go back to the agent—and hope he remembered what he’d done thirty years ago. I checked the phone book. The agency was still on Fifty-third Street, down in Hyde Park.
I had two queries to complete for bread-and-butter clients. While I sat on hold with the Board of Health, I logged on to Lexis and ProQuest and submitted a search on Rhea Wiell, as well as Paul Radbuka.