Sara Paretsky - V.I. Warshawski 10 by Total Recall

technician, which earned more ridicule. He never
moved out of his father’s house. Isn’t that creepy? Staying with him even when
he was big enough to earn his own living?”
    That was all she could, or at least all she would,
tell me. She promised to messenger over a tape of the various segments with
Radbuka, as well as the meeting between the therapists, to my office later in
the day.
    I still had time before my appointment at Ajax to do some
work in my office. It was only a few miles north and west of Global—but a
light-year away in ambience. No glass towers for me. Three years ago a sculptor
friend had invited me to share a seven-year lease with her for a converted
warehouse on Leavitt. Since the building was a fifteen-minute drive from the
financial district where most of my business lies and the rent was half what
you pay in those gleaming high-rises, I’d signed on eagerly.
    When we moved in, the area was still a grimy
no-man’s-land between the Latino neighborhood farther west and a slick Yuppie
area nearer the lake. At that time, bodegas and palm readers vied with music
stores for the few retail spaces in what had been an industrial zone. Parking
abounded. Even though the Yuppies are starting to move in, building espresso
bars and boutiques, we still have plenty of collapsing buildings and drunks. I
was against further gentrification—I didn’t want to see my rent skyrocket when
the current lease expired.
    Tessa’s truck was already in our little lot when I
pulled in. She’d received a major commission last month and was putting in long
hours to build a model of both the piece and the plaza it would occupy. When I
passed her studio door she was perched at her outsize drafting table,
sketching. She’s testy if interrupted, so I went down the hall to my own office
without speaking.
    I made a couple of copies of Isaiah Sommers’s uncle’s
policy and locked the original in my office safe, where I keep all client
documents during an active investigation. It’s really a strongroom, with
fireproof walls and a good sturdy door.
    Midway Insurance’s address was listed on the policy:
they had sold the policy to Aaron Sommers all those years back. If I couldn’t
get satisfaction from the company, I’d have to go back to the agent—and hope he
remembered what he’d done thirty years ago. I checked the phone book. The
agency was still on Fifty-third Street, down in Hyde Park.
    I had two queries to complete for bread-and-butter
clients. While I sat on hold with the Board of Health, I logged on to Lexis and
ProQuest and submitted a search on Rhea Wiell, as well as Paul Radbuka.
    My Board of Health connection came on the phone and
for once answered all my questions without a lot of hedging. When I’d wrapped
up my report I checked back with Lexis. There was nothing on the Radbuka name.
I checked my disks of phone numbers and addresses for the U.S.—more up-to-date
than Web search engines—and found nothing. When I looked up his father’s name,
Ulrich, I got forty-seven matches in the Chicago area. Maybe Paul hadn’t
changed his name legally when he became Radbuka.
    Rhea Wiell, on the other hand, gave me a lot of hits.
She had apparently appeared as an expert witness in a number of trials, but
tracking them down so I could get transcripts would be a tedious business.
However, I did find she was a clinical social worker, fully accredited by the
State of Illinois: at least she had started from an authentic position. I
logged off and swept my papers together into my case so I could be on time for
my meeting with the head of the Ajax claims department.

VI
    Staking a Claim
    I originally
met Ralph Devereux early in my life as an investigator. It hasn’t been so many
years, but at the time I was the first woman in Chicago, maybe even the
country, with a PI license. It was a struggle to get clients or witnesses to
treat me seriously. When Ralph took a bullet in his shoulder because he
couldn’t believe his boss was