“Damn you, Vic, you can’t prove any of this!” Ralph smacked his aluminum desktop so hard he winced in pain.
“No, because those wretched journals of Ulrich’s keep disappearing. But believe me, Rossy is hot on their trail. The head office in Zurich can’t afford for this to come to light. Edelweiss can’t afford for anyone to see those books of Ulrich’s. I’m betting Rossy and his wife engineered Howard Fepple’s death. I’m betting he killed poor little Connie. I’m betting he told her she was on a top-secret project, working just for him, that she couldn’t tell anyone, not Karen, not you, not her mother. He was handsome, rich, powerful; she was a plain little Cinderella toiling in the ranks. He probably was her Prince Charming fantasy come to life. She was loyal to Ajax, and he was Ajax—no conflict for her there, but a lot of excitement.”
Ralph was very white. He unconsciously massaged his right shoulder, where he’d taken a bullet from his old boss ten years ago.
“I presume the police are connecting Connie’s murder to Ajax, or you all wouldn’t be gathered here on a Saturday,” I said.
“The girls—women—she usually had a drink with on Friday nights say she canceled because she had to work late,” Ralph said leadenly. “She certainly left the building when everyone else did, according to her coworkers. When one of them teased her about having a date that she didn’t want to tell them about, she became very embarrassed, said it wasn’t like that, but she’d been asked to keep it confidential. The cops are looking at the company.”
“So will you let me take a look at Connie’s desk file?”
“No.” His voice was barely above a whisper now. “I want you to leave the building. And in case you’re imagining stopping on thirty-nine to hunt for it yourself, don’t: I’m sending Karen down to Connie’s desk right now to collect all her papers and bring them up here. I’m not going to have you riding through my department like a cowgirl herding mavericks.”
“Will you promise me one thing? Two things, actually. Will you look through Connie’s papers without telling Bertrand Rossy about it? And will you let me know what you find?”
“I’m not promising you anything, Warshawski. But you can rest assured that I’m not jeopardizing what’s left of my career by taking this story to Rossy.”
L
Jumped for Joy
Before I left Ralph’s office, I gave Denise another copy of my card. “He’s going to want to get in touch with me,” I said with more confidence than I felt. “Make sure he knows he can reach me on my cell phone anytime this weekend.”
I almost couldn’t bear not seeing Connie Ingram’s desk file myself, but Karen Bigelow rode with me as far as the thirty-ninth floor, assuring me that she would summon building security if I followed her to Connie’s workstation.
When I left the building, I turned into a whirlwind of useless activity. Don Strzepek had decided not to take my advice on leaving town; I got him to persuade Rhea to let me visit her in her town house on Clarendon, hoping a firsthand description of her attacker would tell me one way or another if it had been one of the Rossys.
That was my first wasted hour. Don let me into the house, past a waterfall with lotus flowers floating in it, to a solarium, where Rhea sat in a large armchair. Her luminous eyes peered at me from a cocoon of shawls. While she sipped herbal tea and Don held her hand, she stepped me through the events of the night before. When I tried to press her on anything—the height, the build, the accent, the strength, of her assailant, she leaned back in the chair, a hand over her forehead.
“Vic, I know you mean well, but I have been over this ground, not just with Donald and the police, but with myself. I put myself in a light trance and spoke the whole incident into a tape recorder, which you may listen to—if any detail had stuck out I would have recalled it then.”
I listened to the tape, but she refused to reinduce a trance so that I could question her myself. I suggested that she might have noticed the color of the eyes glittering through the ski mask, the color of the mask or of the bulky jacket the person wore—her trance recital didn’t cover any of those points. At that she became wearily belligerent: if she had thought such questions would produce useful answers, she would have asked them herself.
“Don, could you help Vic find her way out. I’m exhausted.”