Our top local story: the body of insurance agent Howard Fepple was found in his Hyde Park office this morning following an anonymous tip to police. The forty-three-year-old Fepple apparently killed himself because the Midway Insurance Agency, started by his grandfather in 1911, was on the brink of bankruptcy. His mother, Rhonda, with whom he lived, was stunned by the news. “Howie didn’t even own a gun. How can the police go around saying he shot himself with a gun he didn’t have? Hyde Park is real dangerous. I kept telling him to move the agency out here to Palos, where people actually want to buy insurance; I think someone broke in and murdered him and dressed it up to look like he killed himself.”
Area Four police say they will not rule out the possibility of murder, but until the autopsy report is complete they are treating Fepple’s death as a suicide. This is Mark Santoros, Global News, Chicago.
“Ain’t that something, cookie.” Mr. Contreras looked up from the Sun-Times, where he was circling racing results. “Guy shooting himself just because he come on hard times? No stamina, these young fellas.”
I muttered a weak agreement—ultimately I would tell him that I’d found Fepple, but that would be a long conversation which I didn’t feel up to holding today. I drove the dogs over to the lake, where we ran up to Montrose Harbor and back. Sleep deprivation made my sinuses ache, but the three-mile run loosened my tight muscles. I took the dogs with me down to the office, where they raced around, sniffing and barking as if they had never been inside the place before. Tessa yelled out at me from her studio to get them under control at once before she took a sculpting mallet to them.
When I had them corralled inside my own place, I sat at my desk for a long while without actually moving. When I was little, my granny Warshawski had a wooden toy she’d get out for me when we went to visit. A hunter was in the middle, with a bear on one side and a wolf on the other. When you pushed the button once, the hunter swung around to point his rifle at the wolf while the bear jumped up to threaten him. If you pushed it again, he turned to the bear while the wolf jumped up. Sommers. Lotty. Lotty. Sommers. It was as if I were the hunter in the middle, who kept swerving between the two images. I couldn’t keep track of either one’s problem long enough to focus on it before the other popped up again.
Finally, wearily, I switched on my computer. Sofie Radbuka. Paul had found her in a chat room on the Web. While I was searching, Rhea Wiell called.
“Ms. Warshawski, what did you do to Paul last night? He was waiting outside my office this morning when I got in, weeping, saying you had ridiculed him and kept him from his family.”
“Maybe you could hypnotize him and get him to recover a memory of the truth,” I said.
“If you imagine that is funny, you have such a perverse sense of humor I would believe anything of you.” The vestal virgin had turned so icy her voice could have put out the sacred fire.
“Ms. Wiell, didn’t we agree on as much privacy for Mr. Loewenthal as you demanded for Paul Radbuka? But Paul tracked Max Loewenthal down in his home. Did he think of that all by himself?”
She was human enough to be embarrassed and answered more quietly, “I didn’t give him Max Loewenthal’s name. Paul unfortunately saw it himself in my desk file. When I said you might know one of his relatives, he put two and two together: he’s very quick. But that doesn’t mean he should have been subjected to taunting,” she added, trying to regain the upper hand.
“Paul barged in on a private party, and unnerved everyone by making up three different versions of his life story in as many minutes.” I knew I shouldn’t lose my temper, but I couldn’t keep myself from snapping, “He’s dangerously unstable; I’ve been wanting to ask why you found him a good candidate for hypnotherapy.”
“You didn’t tell me you had special clinical skills when we met on Friday,” Wiell said in a honeyed voice even more irritating than her icy fury. “I didn’t know you could evaluate whether someone was a good candidate for hypnosis. Do you think he was dangerously unstable because he threatened the peace of mind of people who are embarrassed to claim a relationship with him? This morning, Paul told me that they all know who Sofie Radbuka was, but that they refused to tell him, and that you goaded them on. To me this is heartless.”