“Someone is,” I agreed. “I was with him Friday afternoon, and some very sophisticated person gave him a simple but slick method for ditching me. This person came back in with him under cover of a group of Lamaze parents and left with them. Probably after killing him. Connie Ingram is the only appointment he showed for Friday. And next to it he’d written, says she wants to discuss Sommers, but she sounds hot for me.” I pulled the diary printout from my bag and waved it at her.
“He wrote that down about me? I only ever talked to him on the phone, to ask him to double-check about the payment. And that was last week right after you first came here. Mr. Rossy asked me to. I live at home. I live with my mother. I would never—I never made that kind of phone call.” She buried her face in her hands, crimson with shame.
Ralph snatched the printout from me. He looked at it, then tossed it contemptuously aside. “I have a Palm. You can enter events after the date—anyone could have typed that in. Including you, Vic. To deflect criticism away from your helping yourself to our microfiche.”
“Another thing for technicians to look at,” I snapped. “You can back-enter dates, but you can’t fool the machine: it will tell you what day those keystrokes were typed. It seems to me we’ve just about covered anything useful here: I need to get these technical problems to the cops before little Miss Innocence here goes down and wipes out the hard drive.”
Tears were streaming down Connie’s face. “Karen, Mr. Devereux, honest, I was never down in that agent’s office. I never said I’d go out with him, even though he asked me to, why would I? He didn’t sound like a nice person on the phone.”
“He asked you out on a date?” I interrupted her wailing. “When was that?”
“When I called down there. After you were here last week I called him, like I said, like Mr. Rossy and Mr. Devereux asked me to. To find out what he had in his files, and he said, he talked in this kind of nasty way, he said, ‘Lots of juicy stuff. Wouldn’t you like to see it? We could share a bottle of wine and go over the file together.’ And I said, ‘No, sir, I just want you to send me copies of all your relevant documents so I can find out how this policy got a check issued on it when the policyholder was still alive.’ And then he said more stuff, really, I can’t repeat it, and he seemed to think it would be fun to have a date, but honestly, I know I still live with my mother and I’m thirty-three, but I’m not a desperate virgin like—anyway, I never said I would see him. If he put it in his calendar, he was a liar and I’m not sorry he’s dead, so there!” She ran sobbing from the room.
“Does that satisfy you, Miss Detective?” Karen Bigelow said coldly. “Seems to me you could find something better to do than bully an honest, hardworking girl like Connie Ingram. Excuse me, Mr. Devereux, I’d better make sure she’s all right.”
She started to sail majestically from the room, but I moved to block her path. “Ms. Claims Supervisor, it’s great that you support your staff, but you came up here to accuse me of theft. Before you go off to mop up Connie Ingram’s tears, I want that accusation cleared up.”
She breathed heavily at me. “I heard from the girl who took you over to Connie’s workstation that you were wandering around the floor. You could have been in those files.”
“Then we’ll call the cops. I won’t have this kind of accusation made lightly about me. Besides which, someone is trying to make sure no copies of that file remain. I may be advising my client to sue Ajax. In which case, if you can’t find the documents you’re going to look mighty stupid in court.”
“If that’s your goal, you’d have all the more motive for stealing the fiche,” Ralph said.
Red lights of anger were starting to dance in front of me. “And I’ll bring an action for slander.”
I moved to his desk and started pressing keys on the phone. It had been a long time since I’d dialed the work number for my dad’s oldest friend on the force, but I still knew it by heart. Bobby Mallory has made a reluctant adjustment to my career as a detective, but he still prefers that when we meet it be for family events.
“What do you think you’re doing?” Ralph demanded, as an officer answered the phone.
“I’m doing what you should have done, calling the cops.” I turned to the phone. “Officer Bostwick, it’s V I Warshawski: is Captain Mallory in?”
Ralph’s eyes glittered. “You have no authority to bring the cops into this building. I will speak to this officer and tell him so.”
It was a sign of the change in Bobby’s attitude toward me that although I’d never met Officer Bostwick he recognized my name. He told me that Bobby was unavailable; was there a message?
“A murder in the Twenty-first District, officer—there’s evidence in the computer, which was left running and left in the vic’s office.” I gave him Fepple’s address and date of death. “Commander Purling may not have realized the importance of the computer. But I’m at the Ajax Insurance company, where the vic did a lot of business, and there may be a question of checking the time when data was entered.”