Midway Insurance was wedged between a dentist and a gynecologist. The black letters on the door, telling me they insured life, home, and auto, had been there a long time: part of the H in Home had peeled away, so that it looked as though Midway insured nome.
The door was locked, but when I rang the bell someone buzzed me in. The office beyond was even drearier than the hall. The flickering fluorescent light was so dim that I didn’t notice a peeling corner of linoleum until I’d tripped on it. I grabbed at a filing cabinet to keep from falling.
“Sorry—I keep meaning to fix that.” I hadn’t noticed the man until he spoke—he was sitting at a desk that took up most of the room, but the light was bad enough I hadn’t seen him when I opened the door.
“I hope you buy premises insurance, because you’re inviting a nasty suit if you don’t glue that down,” I snapped, coming all the way into the room.
He turned on a desk lamp, revealing a face with freckles so thick that they formed an orange carpet across his face. At my words the carpet turned a deeper red.
“I don’t get much walk-in business,” he explained. “Most of the time we’re in the field.”
I looked around, but there wasn’t a desk for a second person. I moved a phone book from the only other chair and sat down. “You have partners? Subordinates?”
“I inherited the business from my dad. He died three years ago, but I keep forgetting that. I think the business is going to die, too. I never have been much good with cold calls, and now the Internet is killing independent agents.”
Mentioning the Internet reminded him that his computer was on. He flicked a key to start the screensaver, but before the fish began cascading I saw he’d been playing some kind of solitaire.
The computer was the only newish item in the room. His desk was a heavy yellow wooden one, the kind popular fifty years ago, with two rows of drawers framing a kneehole for the user’s legs. Black stains from decades of grime, coffee, ink, and who knows what scarred the yellow in the places I could see it—most of the surface was covered in a depressing mass of paper. My own office looked monastic by comparison.
Four large filing cabinets took up most of the remaining space. A curling poster of the Chinese national table-tennis team provided the only decoration. A large pot hung from a chain above the window, but the plant within had withered down to a few drying leaves.
He sat up and tried to put a semblance of energy into his tone. “What can I do for you?”
“I’m V I Warshawski.” I handed him one of my cards. “And you are?”
“Fepple. Howard Fepple.” He looked at my card. “Oh. The detective. They told me you’d be calling.”
I looked at my watch. It had been just over an hour since I left Ajax. Someone in the company had moved fast.
“Who told you that? Bertrand Rossy?”
“I don’t know the name. It was one of the girls in claims.”
“Women,” I corrected irritably.
“Whatever. Anyway, she told me you’d be asking about one of our old policies. Which I can’t tell you anything about, because I was in high school when it was sold.”
“So you looked it up? What did it tell you about who cashed it in?”
He leaned back in his chair, the man at ease. “I can’t see why that’s any of your business.”
I grinned evilly, all ideas about charm and persuasion totally forgotten. “The Sommers family, whom I represent, have an interest in this matter that could be satisfied by a federal lawsuit. Involving subpoenas for the files and suing the agency for fraud. Maybe your father sold the policy to Aaron Sommers back in 1971, but you own the agency now. It wouldn’t be the Internet that would finish you off.”
His fleshy lips pursed together in a pout. “For your information it wasn’t my father who sold the policy but Rick Hoffman, who worked for him here.”
“So where can I find Mr. Hoffman?”
He smirked. “Wherever you look for the dead. But I don’t imagine old Rick ended up in heaven. He was a mean SOB. How he did as well as he did . . .” He shrugged eloquently.
“You mean unlike you he wasn’t afraid of the cold call?”
“He was a Friday man. You know, going into the poor neighborhoods on Friday afternoons collecting after people got paid. A lot of our business is life insurance like that, small face value, enough to get someone buried right and leave a little for the family. It’s all someone like this Sommers could probably afford, ten thousand, although that was big by our standards, usually they’re only three or four thousand.”
“So Hoffman collected from Aaron Sommers. Had he paid up the policy?”
Fepple tapped a file on top of the mess of papers. “Oh, yes. Yes, it took him fifteen years, but it was paid in full. The beneficiaries were his wife, Gertrude, and his son, Marcus.”