“I’d think you could find finesse without lying,” she grumbled, taking the files from me. “Oh, gross, V I. Did you have to spill your breakfast on them?”
One of the folders had a smear of jelly on it, which was now on my hands as well. When I looked deeper into the bag, I saw the remains of a jelly donut mushed up with the papers and other detritus. It was gross. I washed my hands, put on latex gloves, and emptied the case onto a piece of newspaper. Mitch and Peppy were extremely interested, especially in the donut, so I lifted the newspaper onto a credenza.
Mary Louise’s interest was caught; she put on her own pair of gloves to help me sort through the rubble. It wasn’t a very appetizing—or informative—haul. An athletic supporter, so grey and misshapen it was hard to recognize, jumbled in with company reports and Ping-Pong balls. The jelly donut. Another open box of crackers. Mouthwash.
“You know, it’s interesting that there’s no diary, either in here or on his desk,” I said when we’d been through everything.
“Maybe he had so few appointments he didn’t bother with a diary.”
“Or maybe the guy he was seeing Friday night took the diary so no one would see Fepple had an appointment with him. He took that when he grabbed the Sommers file.”
I wondered if wiping the jelly out of the interior of the case would destroy vital clues, but I couldn’t bring myself to dump the contents back into the mess.
Mary Louise pretended to be excited when I went to the bathroom for a sponge. “Gosh, Vic, if you can clean out a briefcase, maybe you can learn to put papers into file jackets.”
“Let’s see: first you get a bucket of water, right?—oh, my, what’s this?” The jelly had glued a thin piece of paper to one side of the case. I had almost pulped it running the sponge over the interior. Now I took the case over to a desk lamp so I could see what I was doing. I turned the case inside out and carefully peeled the page off the side.
It was a ledger sheet, with what looked like a list of names and numbers in a thin, archaic script—which had bloomed like little flowers in the places it was wet. Jelly mixed with water had made the top left part of the page unreadable, but what we could make out looked like this:
“This is why it’s such a mistake to be a housecleaning freak,” I said severely. “We’ve lost part of the document.”
“What is it?” Mary Louise leaned over the desk to see it. “That isn’t Howard Fepple’s handwriting, is it?”
“This script? It’s so beautiful, it’s like engraving—I don’t see him doing it. Anyway, the paper looks old.” It had gilt edging; around the lower right, which had escaped damage, the paper had turned brown with age. The ink itself was fading from black to green.
“I can’t make out the names,” Mary Louise said. “They are names, don’t you think? Followed by a bunch of numbers. What are the numbers? They can’t be dates—they’re too weird. But it can’t be money, either.”
“They could be dates, if they were written European style—that’s how my mother did it—day first, followed by month. If that’s the case, this is a sequence of six weeks, from June 29 to August 3 in an unknown year. I wonder if we could read the names if we enlarged them. Let’s lay this on the copier, where the heat will dry it faster.”
While Mary Louise took care of that, I looked through every page of the company reports in Fepple’s bag, hoping to find another sheet from the ledger, but this was the only one.
XXI
Stalker in the Park
Mary Louise started work on the files I’d pulled out of Rick Hoffman’s drawer. I turned back to my computer. I’d forgotten the search I’d entered for Sofie or Sophie Radbuka, but the computer was patiently waiting with two hits: an invitation from an on-line vendor to buy books about Radbuka, and a bulletin board for messages at a family-search site.
Fifteen months earlier, someone using the label Questing Scorpio had posted a query: I am looking for information about Sofie Radbuka, who lived in the United Kingdom in the 1940’s.
Underneath it was Paul Radbuka’s answer, entered about two months ago and filling pages of screen. Dear Questing Scorpio, words can hardly express the excitement I felt when I discovered your message. It was as if someone had turned on a light in a blacked-out cellar, telling me that I am here, I exist. I am not a fool, or a madman, but a person whose name and identity were kept from him for fifty years. At the end of the Second World War, I was brought from England to America by a man claiming to be my father, but in reality he was a committer of the most vile atrocities during the war. He hid my Jewish identity from me, and from the world, yet made use of it to smuggle himself past the American immigration authorities.