He wrote back at once with love, commiseration—and a précis of the articles on Edelweiss I’d sent him yesterday. Not that it mattered now, just another little part of Fillida’s family’s wealth, Nesthorn had insured a lot of Nazi bigwigs during the war and had even forced people in occupied Holland and France to buy life insurance from them. In the sixties, they thought it would be prudent to change their name to Edelweiss because local resentment against the Nesthorn name still ran high in western Europe.
Standing in the parking lot, I gave a bark of mirthless laughter and shook my shoulders out again. A giant figure loomed out of the shadows and moved toward me.
“Murray!” I gasped, my gun in my hand before I knew I’d drawn it. “Don’t freak me after a day like this one.”
He put an arm around me. “You’re getting too old for these tall buildings, Warshawski.”
“You’re right about that,” I agreed, putting my gun away. “Without Ralph and Mrs. Coltrain, I’d be on a slab about now.”
“Not to mention Durham,” he said.
“Durham?” I snapped. “I know he’s painting himself as Mr. Clean, but that lying piece of politician knows he got away with murder!”
“Maybe. Maybe. But I had a few words with the aldercreature this afternoon. Off the record, unfortunately. But he said that last night he looked at you, looked at Rossy, figured he’d better bet on the local talent. Said he’d read some of your file, saw that you often got your butt whipped good but usually landed on top. Who knows, Warshawski—he gets to be mayor, maybe you’ll be police superintendent.”
“And you can run his press office,” I said dryly. “Guy did a lot of mean nasty stuff. Including cheerfully helping frame Isaiah Sommers for Howard Fepple’s murder.”
“He didn’t know it was Isaiah Sommers, not from what my gofers in the police department tell me. I mean, he didn’t know Isaiah was a relative of the Sommers family who he’d helped out back in the ’90’s.” Murray kept his arm around my shoulders. “When he found that out he forced Rossy to settle Gertrude Sommers’s claim. And he tried to get the cops to keep an open mind on the murder investigation. It’s why they didn’t charge Isaiah Sommers. Now it’s your turn. I want to see these mystery journals or ledgers or whatever that the Rossys were stampeding through town trying to find.”
“I want them, too.” I pulled away from his arm and turned to face him. “Lotty’s vanished with them.”
When I told Murray about Lotty’s disappearance after the fracas with Rhea at Paul Hoffman-Radbuka’s bedside, he looked at me somberly. “You’re going to find her, right? Why did she take the books away?”
I shook my head. “I don’t know. They told her . . . something that they didn’t tell anyone else.”
I leaned into my car for my briefcase and found a set of the photocopies I’d made of the journal pages. “You can have this. You can run it if you want.”
He squinted at the sheet in the dim light. “But what does it mean?”
I leaned wearily against my car and pointed at the line that read “Omschutz, K 30 Nestroy (2h.f) N–13426–?–L.” “As I understand it, we’re looking at a record for K. Omschutz, who lived at 30 Nestroy Street in Vienna. The 2h.f means he was in apartment 2f at the rear of the building. The numbers are the policy numbers, with a tag meaning it was an Austrian life-insurance policy—? for ?sterreich—the Austrian for Austria. Okay?”
After a minute’s squinting scrutiny he nodded.
“This other sheet just gives the face value of the policy in thousands of Austrian schillings, and the weekly payment schedule. It wasn’t a code. It meant something quite clear to Ulrich Hoffman: he knew he’d sold K. Omschutz a policy with a face value of fifty-four thousand schillings and a weekly payment of twenty schillings a week. As soon as Ralph Devereux at Ajax realized that it applied to prewar life-insurance claims, he put it together with the material that he found on his dead claims handler’s desk. That was what made him blow caution to the winds and storm into Bertrand Rossy’s office this morning.”
Ralph had gone over this with me when I got to the hospital tonight, his mouth twisted in bitter mockery over his recklessness. I was utterly weary of the entire business, but Murray was so excited at getting even a few pages of the Hoffman journals as a scoop that he could hardly contain himself.
“Thanks for letting me scoop the town, Warshawski: I knew you couldn’t stay mad at me forever. What about Rhea Wiell and Paul Hoffman or Radbuka? Beth Blacksin was feeling mighty peeved after she got to the clinic this afternoon and found out that whole business could turn out to be a fraud.”