“I don’t think she was being disloyal to you or to the company, but I imagine Rossy turned her head. There was the big boss in from the new owners in Switzerland, telling her to report directly to him, that she shouldn’t tell anyone what he said to her because someone in the company was embezzling, and it might be anyone, you, her immediate supervisor Karen. I imagine that was how he worked it. Anyone who had spent fourteen years toiling as a claims clerk would have been thrilled, but she had that extra quality of loyalty and reliability. He said not to talk, she kept quiet. And then, he was sophisticated, he was glamorous.”
“It’s a warning to me to cut out cheeseburgers,” Ralph said with a gleam of humor. “Guy’s only two years younger than me. I need to look more glamorous to my young claims handlers. So he romanced her and strangled her. What a horrible ending for her. Can they make it stick?”
“Terry Finchley, the detective in charge, he got a search warrant. They’re looking at Rossy’s clothes, fingerprints—they may get a match with the marks on her neck. He and Fillida were so single-mindedly arrogant, they probably didn’t try too hard to conceal evidence.
“Fillida, that’s another story. She could face a lot of charges—Fepple’s murder, attacking Paul Hoffman, attacking Rhea Wiell, but she’s attractive, rich. They’re searching for her prints or clothes fibers or anything at Paul’s house, but she’s going to be hard for the state’s attorney to nail down. At least those cheeseburgers of yours did some good: when you came down on her you cracked her pelvis. She won’t ski anywhere anytime soon.”
He smiled briefly, the twisted smile that reminded me of the old Ralph, and shut his eyes. I thought he had drifted off to sleep, but as I started to get up he looked up at me again.
“What was Alderman Durham doing at the clinic? I saw him as they were carrying me off on a stretcher.”
“Oh, Fillida and Bertrand had gone berserk,” I said. “They thought they’d get a bomb, blow the three of us up, make it look as though anti-abortion terrorists had been responsible. They told Durham to get one for them—they assumed that they’d bought him, that he was just another one of their servants who’d do what they wanted.
“See, Rossy had been doing favors for Durham in exchange for some muscle: Rossy got the legislature to block the Holocaust Asset Recovery Act unless it included slavery reparations, he gave Durham money so Durham could build a war chest to run for mayor—along with this high-profile issue, slavery reparations, to build a citywide platform on. In return for all this help, Durham directed Rossy to some South Side muscle when Rossy wanted to break in to Amy Blount’s apartment to see if she had the Hoffman notebooks. But he’s a wily coyote, the alderman—he never put anything in writing. He never directly told Rossy he could find muscle for him.
“Rossy thought he’d bought Durham. But the alderman wants to be mayor more than he wants to be Al Capone. He called the cops, told them the Rossys were trying to get a bomb at the clinic. So the cops were on their way, even though they got there kind of late.”
The alderman now looked like Mr. Virtue. He’d given me a bit of a smirk in passing, the smirk of the man who’d gotten clean away with having Colby Sommers killed and who had a nice stash to launch his citywide campaign besides. He’d confessed to Terry Finchley, more in sorrow than in outrage, that some of the young men on his EYE team weren’t as rehabilitated as he would have wished. And the Finch, normally one of the city’s straightest, levelest cops, had read me a lecture on my prejudice in flinging accusations at the alderman. If I had to win every match in order to be happy, I’d be a mighty sad detective—but this was one round where the loss stuck in my craw.
The charge nurse came into the room. “He’s recovering from trauma. You’ve had your five minutes twice over, out you go, now.”
Ralph was asleep. I bent to kiss his forehead where the shock of greying hair still flopped over.
Down in the Beth Israel parking lot, I dug my fingers into my shoulders before climbing into my car. They were still sore from being tied behind my back. I’d gone home to rest when I finally finished talking to the cops, but I was still beat.
At home I’d felt honor bound to tell Mr. Contreras what had happened, before stumbling up to bed. I slept a few hours, but I woke up still tired clear to the bone. All that death, all the energy I’d spent trying to figure it out, had turned on such sordidness. Fillida Rossy, protecting her great-grandfather’s company. Protecting her wealth and position. Not that she was the Lady Macbeth behind Bertrand—he didn’t need his wife to screw his courage to the sticking point. He’d had his own arrogance, his own sense of entitlement.
When I got up, before driving to the hospital to see Ralph, I’d gone to my office to e-mail Morrell: How I wish you were here. How I need your arms around me tonight.