It seemed to me it was time to visit Ralph again. His secretary remembered me from last week, but I couldn’t see Ralph: his schedule was packed until six-thirty tonight. However, when I said I might be able to defuse Alderman Durham’s protest, she put me on hold—as it turned out, long enough for me to read the entire sports section of the Herald-Star. When she came back, she said Ralph could squeeze me in for five minutes at noon if I got there on the dot.
“On the dot it is.” I hung up and turned to the dogs. “That means we go back home, where you can lounge around the garden and I can put on panty hose. I know you will feel bereft, but ask yourselves—who really will be having more fun?”
It was ten-thirty now. I’d had a wistful hope of climbing into Morrell’s bed for a nap, but I still had to drop photos of Radbuka off at Max’s for Tim Streeter. And I wanted to get back to my own place to change into something more appropriate than jeans for a Loop meeting. “Life’s just a wheel and I’m caught in the spokes,” I sang as I shepherded the dogs once more back to the car. All was still quiet at Max’s when I stopped to drop off Radbuka’s photographs. I zipped down the drive to Belmont, dumped the dogs with Mr. Contreras, and ran up the stairs to my own apartment.
Tonight was my dinner with the Rossys, my chance to chatter Italian to cheer up Bertrand’s homesick wife. I put on a soft black trouser suit that could take me from meetings to dinner. A turtleneck that I could remove when I got to the Rossys’ so that the rose silk camisole underneath dressed up the outfit. My mother’s diamond-drop earrings I buttoned into a pocket. Pumps in my briefcase, the crepe-soled shoes I’d worn yesterday morning to step in Fepple’s—I broke off the thought without completing it and ran back down the stairs. The pinball back in action.
I drove down to my office, then took the L into the Loop. At the Ajax building on Adams, a small band of protesters was still circling the sidewalk near the entrance. Without Alderman Durham there to lead the charge, the troops looked bedraggled. Every now and then they’d rouse themselves to chant something at the herd of people on their way from office to lunch, but for the most part they merely talked among themselves, posters drooping against their shoulders. These seemed to be the same signs they had carried on Friday—no reparations for slaveowners, no high-rises on the bones of slaves, and so on, but the flyer a dogged young man handed me on my way in had cut out the attacks on me. Literally cut out—the middle header asking me if I had no shame was gone, leaving a gap between the merciless Ajax and the compassionless Birnbaums. The text looked strange:
Ajax Insurance cashed her husband’s life-insurance policy ten years ago. When he died last week, they sent their tame detective to accuse Sister Sommers of stealing it.
I guess this way they could just type my name back in if I reverted to chief villain. I tucked the flyer into my briefcase.
At noon on the dot, the executive-floor attendant brought me to Ralph’s antechamber. Ralph himself was still in a meeting in his conference room, but his secretary buzzed him and after the briefest wait he emerged. This time I got a grim nod, not a grin and a hug.
“Does trouble always follow you, Vic?” he said when we were in his office with the door shut. “Or does it just jump up to bite me anytime you’re in the vicinity?”
“If you really only have five minutes, don’t spend it blaming me for Alderman Durham’s pickets.” I sat on one of the hard tubular chairs, while Ralph leaned against the edge of his desk. “I came to suggest that you make the Sommers family whole. Then you can issue a big PR statement about how your respect for the widow’s grief—”
He cut me short. “We paid them ten thousand dollars in 1991. I won’t double-pay a life-insurance policy.”
“The question is, who got that money back in 1991? Personally, I don’t think anyone in the Sommers family ever saw it. That check started and stopped at the agency door.”
He folded his arms in an uncompromising line. “Do you have proof of this?”
“You know, don’t you, that Howard Fepple is dead? There’s no one—”
“He committed suicide because his agency was going down the toilet. It was in our executive briefing this morning.”
I shook my head. “Old news. He was murdered. The Sommers family file has disappeared. There’s no one from the agency left to explain what really happened.”
Ralph stared at me in angry disbelief. “What do you mean, he was murdered? The cops found his body, they found the suicide note. It was in the papers.”
“Ralph, listen to me: barely an hour ago, the medical examiner called to tell me the autopsy proves murder. Don’t you think it was funny that the Sommers family file disappeared at the same time Fepple was killed?”
“What are you trying to do to me? Am I supposed to believe this on your say-so?”
I shrugged. “Call the medical examiner. Call the watch commander at the Twenty-first District. I’m not trying to do anything but help my client—and give you a way of defusing the protest down there on Adams.”