“Ajax?” Bostwick said. “They’re having a lot of trouble these days—Durham and Posner are out front right now, aren’t they?”
“Yes, indeed, the building is surrounded by demonstrators, but the claims vice president thinks this agent’s death merits more of his attention than a few protesters.”
“Doesn’t sound like a few to me, miss, the way they were asking for backup out there on Adams. But give me the details about this computer—I’ll make sure a forensics unit gets down to it. Commander Purling, well, with the Robert Taylor Homes in his district, he doesn’t have time to do a lot of finesse work.”
A discreet way of saying the guy was a lazy jerk. I gave Bostwick the details about Fepple and the importance of the date, adding that I had seen the victim shortly before he left for an appointment on Friday evening. Bostwick repeated back what I said, double-checked the spelling of my name, and asked where Captain Mallory could reach me if he wanted to discuss the situation.
I hung up and glared at Ralph. “I’m respecting the privacy of your company and your authority over it, but you had damned well better make a call like that yourself if you want to find out who really was in your microfiche cabinet. Especially if you’re going to keep accusing me of theft. We should know by the end of the day tomorrow, or Thursday at the latest, when that date with Connie Ingram was entered in Fepple’s computer. If it was before I last saw him on Friday, then Ms. Ingram’s going to be crying for a bigger audience than us. By the way, what happened to your paper file? The one Rossy hung on to last week?”
Ralph and Karen Bigelow exchanged startled glances. “I guess he still has it,” the supervisor said. “It hasn’t been checked back into our unit.”
“Is his office up here? Let’s go ask him about it—unless you think I wandered in and stole it after we spoke at noon, Ralph.”
He flushed. “No, I don’t imagine you did. But why did you go down to the thirty-ninth floor at noon without telling me? You’d been with me seconds earlier.”
“It was an impulse; it only occurred to me when I got to the elevators. You had pretty much stiffed me on the file, and I was hoping Ms. Ingram would let me see it. Can we at least go see Rossy, get the paper file back from him?”
“The chairman went down to Springfield today. The Holocaust Recovery Act is coming up in front of the banking and insurance committee—he wanted to testify against it. Rossy went with him.”
“Really.” My brows went up. “He’d invited me to dinner tonight.”
“What’d he do that for?” Ralph’s flush deepened into resentment.
“When he called yesterday to invite me, he said it was because his wife was homesick and wanted someone she could speak Italian with.”
“Are you making that up?”
“No, Ralph. I’m not making up anything I said this afternoon. But maybe he forgot about the invitation. When did he decide to go to Springfield?”
Resentment was still uppermost in Ralph’s mind. “Hey, I just run the claims department. Apparently not too well if people make off with our files. No one talks to me about deep subjects like legislative hearings. Rossy’s got an office on the other side of the floor. His secretary’s probably here: you can ask her if he’s coming back tonight. I’ll walk you over to see if he’s still got the file.”
“I should find Connie, Mr. Devereux,” Karen Bigelow said. “But what should I do about the microfiche? Should I report the theft to security?”
Ralph hesitated, then told her she should lock the cabinet and declare it off-limits. “Conduct a desk-by-desk search of your unit tomorrow. Someone may have inadvertently kept the fiche after looking up some other file. If you don’t find it by the end of the day, let me know: I’ll call security.”
“Look, you two,” I said, impatient with this futile proposal, “Connie’s name in Fepple’s calendar is serious. If she didn’t set up the date, someone did it using her name. Which means it was someone who knows her as a claims handler. And that means a very limited universe, especially since it wasn’t me.”
Ralph knotted his tie and unrolled his cuffs. “According to you, anyway.”
XXIX
Strange Bedfellows
We found Rossy’s secretary in the chairman’s conference room, watching the early-evening news with the chairman’s secretary, the head of the marketing department—whom I’d met at Ajax’s hundred-fiftieth-birthday celebration—and five other people who were never introduced.
“We are demanding a boycott of all Ajax insurance by America’s Jewish community,” Posner was proclaiming to the camera. “Preston Janoff insulted the whole Jewish community, he insulted the sacred memories of the dead, by his remarks in Springfield today.”