Hardball (19 page)

25

ALPHABET VISITORS FBI, OEM, HS, CPD

IT WAS THE DEAD OF NIGHT, AND MY FATHER WAS STILL out on patrol, still facing rioters someplace in the midnight city. People were throwing Molotov cocktails at him. I could see the bottles flying at his head, and I cried out, trying to warn him, which was stupid because he was miles away and couldn’t hear me. My mother mustn’t know I was frightened. It only made her worries harder when she had to comfort me as well as herself.

Our house was never truly dark. Flares from the mills created a ghostly light even at two in the morning, and the sky, always yellow from the sulfur vapors, gleamed dully all night long. Light seeped through the curtains and made my eyes hurt. My arms ached and my throat was sore. I had the flu. And, somewhere in the background, my mother was talking. A doctor had come to the house and was asking me how I felt.

“I’m fine.” I couldn’t complain about being sick, not with Papà out fighting a riot.

“What’s your name?” the doctor wanted to know.

“Victoria,” I croaked obediently.

“Who is the president?” the doctor asked.

I couldn’t remember who the president was and I started to panic. “Is this school? Is this a test?”

“You’re in the hospital, Victoria. Do you remember coming to the hospital?”

It was a woman’s voice, not my mother, but someone I knew. I struggled to come up with her name. “Lotty?”

“Yes,
Liebchen.
” Relief flooded her voice. “Lotty. You’re in my hospital.”

“Beth Israel,” I whispered. “I can’t see.”

“We’ve bandaged your eyes to protect them from light for a few days. You got a bit scorched.”

Fire. The Molotov cocktails hadn’t been flung at my dad but at Sister Frankie.

“The nun . . . Is she . . . How is she?”

“She’s in intensive care right now. You saved her life.” Lotty’s voice quavered.

“My arms hurt.”

“They were burned. But you got medical help fast, and there are only a few patches where the underlayer of skin was compromised. You’ll be fine in a few days. Now I want you to rest.”

A man was speaking in the background, loud, demanding that I answer questions. Lotty answered in the voice that made Max bow and call her
Eure Hoheit,
“Your Highness” in German. The surgeon, as Princess of Austria, telling the man that I would answer no official questions until she was sure I wasn’t still in shock.

Lotty was protecting me, I could rest, I could relax and be safe. I drifted off to sleep, riding on a field of violets. A saber-toothed tiger prowled through the violets. I crouched low, but it smelled me. My flesh was burned. I smelled like steak on Mr. Contreras’s grill. I tried to scream, but my throat was swollen, and no sound came out.

I struggled back to consciousness and lay panting in the dark. I felt my hands. They were wrapped in gauze, and the pressure was painful because they were still swollen. I tentatively felt my blistered eyelids. They, too, were padded in gauze.

A nurse came in and asked me to rate my pain on a scale of one to ten. “I’ve hurt worse, I think,” I whispered. “Maybe a nine. Is it day or night?”

“It’s afternoon. You’ve slept for five hours, and I can give you some more pain medication now.”

“How is the nun? How is Sister Frankie?”

I could feel her moving near me. “I don’t know. I just came on shift. The doctor will tell be able to tell you.”

“Dr. Herschel?” I asked. But I was already drifting back to the fractured lines and colors of morphic sleep.

A baseball sat on the kitchen table, rocking back and forth from a passing freight train that shook the house. It was Christmas, and Papà had gone to the ballpark without telling me. He and Mama and a strange man had been arguing in the middle of the night, their loud voices waking me up.

“I can’t do it!” Papà shouted.

And then Mama heard me on the stairs and called to me in Italian to go back to bed. The men’s voices dropped to whispers, until the man shouted, “I’m tired of you preaching to me, Warshawski! You’re not the cardinal, let alone a saint, so get off your plastic crucifix.”

The front door slammed, and the baseball started to roll off the table. It was a cannonball now and rolling toward my head, its fuse blowing sparks, and I woke again to darkness, drenched in sweat. I fumbled on the nightstand for water. There was a pitcher and a cup, and as I poured I spilled water on myself, but that felt good.

Someone came in with a cup of broth. It was strangely hard to find my mouth with my eyes bandaged, as if loss of sight meant loss of balance, loss of feeling. A nurse arrived to take my temperature and ask me my pain level.

“I’m crappy,” I rasped, “but no more morphine. I can’t take the dreams.”

I wanted to wash my hair, but that was out of the question until the bandages came off. The nurse sent in someone to sponge me off, and I dozed fitfully until Lotty arrived.

“The police want to question you, Victoria. I see you’ve discontinued your morphine. How much pain are you in?”

“Enough to make me know I was in a fire, but not so much I want to scream about it. How is Sister Frankie?”

Lotty put a hand on my shoulder. “That’s why they want to talk you, Vic. She didn’t make it.”

“No!” I whispered. “No!”

Sister Frankie had marched with Ella Baker at Selma. She stood with King in Marquette Park. She sat with men on death row. She housed Guatemalan asylum seekers and testified for immigrants. No harm came to her until she talked to me.

Lotty offered me Vicodin or Percocet to help me through the interview, but I welcomed the pain in my arms and the burning in my eyes where my useless tears leaked out. By some fluke, I was alive when I should also be dead. V. I. Warshawski, death dealer. The least that should happen was that I feel a little pain.

I could sense bodies filling the room. Two men from Bomb and Arson identified themselves, but I could tell there were others, and I demanded to know who was with them. There was a shuffling of feet and muttering, and then they went around the room, giving their names.

I didn’t recognize any of them: a man and a woman from the Office of Emergency Management, our local branch of Homeland Security, tagged along; a field agent from the FBI.

Lotty had cranked up the bed so that I was more or less sitting. I had my arms in front of me on the sheet. The IV tube going up to the bag that was giving me antibiotics and fluids swung against my shoulder. My little plastic friend and Lotty: my team against the police, the Bureau, and Homeland Security.

The Bomb and Arson men announced that they were taping the session. One of them asked if I was ready to make a statement.

“I’m ready to answer questions but not to make a formal statement, not until I can see well enough to read any document you ask me to sign.”

One of the group, I think the man from OEM, was wearing a kind of musky aftershave that made me feel sick to my stomach. The CPD’s Bomb and Arson team was leading the inquiry. It was one of them who had me state my name for the record.

“V. I. Warshawski.” As I spelled Warshawski, I remembered Petra’s a
war
rior in a rick
shaw
on a
ski
and had that horrible impulse to laugh that seizes us at moments of grief and fear.

“What were you doing at Sister Frances’s apartment?” a member of the Bomb team asked.

“We were meeting to discuss a forty-year-old murder.”

A murmur went through the room, and the woman from OEM asked whose murder.

“Harmony Newsome. Sister Frankie—Sister Frances—had been with Ms. Newsome when she died.”

“Why are you interested in this old murder . . . Vicki, is it?”

“Vicki, it isn’t,” I said. “You may call me Ms. Warshawski.”

There was a shifting and more muttering, and the temperature in the room went up a few degrees. Good. Why should I be the only one feeling burned?

“Why are you interested in this old murder?” the FBI’s Lyle Torgeson asked.

“I’m not . . . very.” I started to explain my search for Lamont Gadsden and suddenly felt so tired that I thought I might go to sleep midsentence. It seemed to me that I had been looking for Lamont Gadsden and Steve Sawyer my whole life.

“Why did you go to Sister Frances’s apartment?” Torgeson again.

“That was where she asked to meet me,” I said. “She wanted to talk to me. She said she’d been troubled for forty years by the verdict against Steve Sawyer.”

“And why was that?” said one of the detectives, truculent:
We in the Chicago Police Department do not bring innocent people into court.

“I don’t know. We got three sentences out before the bombs fell.”

“What did she say?” Torgeson asked.

“She said Iowa was depressing.”

“We were warned that you think you’re funny,” the man from OEM said, “but this isn’t the time or place.”

“Do I look to you like someone in the throes of merriment?” I said. “I’m in pain, I’m in shock, and I would love to think you’ve got a really active crime scene unit going over every square inch of the Freedom Center and the sisters’ building. I’m also mildly curious about why the OEM and the FBI are here. Do you think a terrorist was after Sister Frankie?”

A sucking in of breath and another buzz around the interrogation circle. “Anytime someone starts throwing bombs around, we’re curious,” Torgeson finally said. “As a citizen, you have an obligation to help us in our investigation.”

“As a human being, I am deeply grieved that Sister Frankie died and that I couldn’t do anything to keep that from happening.”

“So tell us, as a human being, what Sister Frankie said.” Torgeson’s voice was heavy with sarcasm.

“Sister Frankie said Iowa was depressing. She’d just come back from trying to help the families of the people your buddies in INS scooped up and arrested for the crime of working in a meat-packing plant. She said it was . . . Oh, I get it.” I leaned back against the egg-carton hospital mattress. “Sister Frankie was helping people who were in this country illegally. That’s why you’re all here, panting like badly trained bloodhounds.”

Lotty’s fingers gripped my shoulder:
Steady there, Vic. Keep your temper under control.

“Do you think her death is connected to her work in Iowa?” I said.

“We’re asking the questions this afternoon, Warshawski.” That was the woman from OEM, determined to be as tough as the men around her.

I smiled tightly. “So you do think her death is connected to her work in Iowa.”

“We don’t know,” Torgeson said. “We don’t know if Sister Frances was the target or another member of the Freedom Center. It might even have been you. You’ve made yourself plenty unpopular with some people in this town.”

The accusation was so ruthless, so unsettling, that I almost missed the woman from OEM saying, “We thought the target could also be one of the families who live in the building. Some are illegals. Some are dealing drugs.”

“You know a lot about them,” I said. “Fast work.”

It’s an amazing thing about lack of sight: you feel people’s emotions more than when you can see them. I could feel Torgeson withdraw into himself, as if a glass wall had slipped between him and the room.

“You know about them because you’ve had the Freedom Center women under surveillance,” I said. “You’ve been watching them, tapping their phones. America is facing international terror threats, and you’re following a bunch of nuns.”

“We are not at liberty to discuss our actions, nor are we required to do so,” the OEM woman snapped.

I ignored her. “You’re dogging the sisters and you couldn’t stop a fire bombing.”

“We moved as fast as we could,” Torgeson protested. “We were undercover. It didn’t look like a serious attack at first, not until we saw the flames in the windows.”

“What in the name of sweet Fanny Adams did you think it was?” I cried.

The room became completely quiet. I could hear the hospital noises, the pages, the squeaking of rubber soles on worn linoleum.

One of the Bomb men cleared his throat. “Tell us what happened inside the apartment.”

I shook my head, exhausted. “We heard the window break. For five seconds, I thought it was street noise. Kids had been setting off firecrackers in the alley. I thought it was an M-80 that had misfired.”

Behind my bandages, I shut my eyes, trying to remember the few minutes I’d spent with Sister Frankie. “Then I saw a bottle come in through the window. I saw the rag, I knew it was a fire bomb. I screamed at Sister Frances to get down, but she went to pick it up. And then another one came through and . . . and . . .”

She was on fire. With my eyes shut, I could see the flames engulf her wiry hair, her skin turn white beneath the yellow flames. I was shaking and heaving, and Lotty was telling everyone they had to leave.

“We need to know what Sister Frances told Warshawski here about Harmony Newsome.”

“You are in my hospital by my sufferance only,” Lotty said coldly. “I have told you the time has come for you to leave and you will leave.”

“Doctor, you may mean well,” the woman from OEM said, “but we have powers here from the Department of Homeland Security. That means we talk to Warshawski until we’re ready to leave.”

I could smell Lotty’s fury. I felt my plastic tube move, and suddenly I had slid out of the room, down the waterslide at Wolf Lake, with Boom-Boom yelling my name. He was trying to dunk me in the lake, but Gabriella pulled him away from me, and I started to breathe again.

26

AND NOW MURRAY

THANKS TO WHATEVER LOTTY INJECTED INTO MY IV, I slept the clock around. When I woke, the pain in my arms and eyes had subsided to a manageable throb. When a volunteer came in to help me with some kind of liquid goop that I’d been cleared to consume, I asked if she’d also help me with the phone.

I called Mr. Contreras first. He had seen the story on the news, but the hospital was blocking my calls, he said. He had called Lotty, who reassured him, but it was still a relief to him to hear from me in person.

“Don’t worry about the dogs none, doll, on account of I got that service you used when you was in Italy to come around. And Peewee”—his nickname for my cousin—“she’s been rallying around. She took Mitch into work with her this morning, and, last night, she went up to your place to get the sheets changed and everything, and even bought you yogurt, so you’ll be comfy when they let you out.”

That was reassuring, sort of. After the business with my trunk, it made me tense to think of my cousin wandering around my apartment. Maybe she’d collected the Nellie Fox ball and hoped, with her usual optimism, that I wouldn’t notice it was gone.

“Then there’s that nice fella who just moved in, the musician: he’s been helping with the dogs, too,” Mr. Contreras added. “But Murray Ryerson, he’s been around, him and some other reporters. I told him he should be ashamed, acting like a hyena following after the lions, picking up the food they did all the work finding.”

Mr. Contreras has never been crazy about any of the men in my life, but for some reason he actively dislikes Murray. I deflected the complaint as best I could and patiently answered his questions. I even took his rough words of comfort in stride: I wasn’t to blame myself. Nuns who went around working for terrorists knew they were taking risks. It wasn’t my fault someone had fire-bombed her the night I chose to visit.

After he and I finished, I got the volunteer to dial my office so that I could speak with Marilyn, the temp. She was overwhelmed by phone calls. It hadn’t occurred to me, but of course I was a media sensation.

“If it bleeds, it leads” is the old news bromide. And, if a nun bleeds, it leads for days. Julian Bond had called, as had Willie Barrow and other prominent civil rights veterans. Immigrant rights activists had held a vigil outside the hospital, and two men Sister Frankie had helped free from death row were staging a hunger strike outside police headquarters, demanding action in finding her killers. Since I’d been with her when she was murdered, I was understandably a person of interest to the TV crews.

“They keep calling, and some have been here, thinking you were hiding out. What should I tell them?”

“That it will be a week before I’m well enough to talk to anyone, and they should go away and find blood someplace else.”

We went through the more manageable part of my incoming calls. The subcontractor doing surveillance for me in Mokena. Some outstanding reports to clients, which I managed to dictate to her. And messages to various other clients, to tell them I’d be back in my office within the week and would talk to them then.

In the afternoon, I was wheeled to the ophthalmology department, and my eyes were unbandaged. Although the doctor had the blinds pulled and the overhead lights turned off, even the murky gray light made me wince. At first, I could see nothing but spark-filled spirals. After a few minutes, though, shapes swam into focus.

The doctor examined me closely. “You are very lucky, Ms. Warshawski. The burns on the lids were not severe and are already healing. For the next few weeks, you’ll need to wear dark glasses with photochromic lenses whenever you are outside, whether the sun is shining or not, and anytime you’re in a brightly lit room. If you wear glasses, you need to get prescription sunglasses to use in front of a computer for the next month or two. And stay away from TV and computers altogether for two more days. That’s a serious order, okay?”

He gave me an antibiotic salve to put on and under the lids twice a day, and told me it was safe to wash my hair.

When they brought me back to my room, with a pair of those outsize plastic sunglasses they give people after cataract surgery, the resident came around to inspect the rest of my body. My arms were rough and red. I’d been wearing a linen jacket, since I’d dressed professionally for my meeting, and while the fabric had charred it had spared my skin from more severe burns.

My hands had suffered the worst damage. When the dressings came off next week, I’d need to wear cotton gloves anytime I went outside.

When I finally crept into the bathroom and looked in the mirror, I looked sunburned, but my face only had a few blisters along the hairline. I’d apparently buried my face in the throw while I tumbled Sister Frances out of her room, which also had saved me from serious burns. What made me look bizarre wasn’t my shiny red cheeks but the clumps of hair missing from my head. I looked like a dog with mange.

Even so, I had been staggeringly lucky to escape the full force of the fire. If only I’d pulled Sister Frankie down instead of screaming at her . . . I could see the bottle hitting her head over and over again every time I closed my eyes.

The resident had said they would discharge me tomorrow if I continued to hold my own. In the meantime, they were removing my IVs. I could switch to oral antibiotics and actual food.

“You know you’ve created a kind of media circus at the hospital?” The resident was a young man, and a media circus was clearly a welcome change of pace for him.

Apparently, the hospital security staff had found one reporter trying to get into my room while I was asleep that morning. They had gotten the city to arrest another man they’d discovered at one of the nursing-station computers calling up Sister Frankie’s and my charts.

“We put a block on incoming calls to your room. The switchboard says they’ve clocked a hundred seventeen calls.”

I hadn’t thought there could be a plus to a hospital stay, but missing a hundred seventeen media calls proved me wrong.

When the doctor finally remembered he had other beds to visit, I put on plastic mitts to protect my hands and took a shower in the little bathroom. I felt better physically, but exhaustion, medication, and depression made me go back to the bed in a sort of numb lethargy.

I put on my heavy glasses and lay half dozing. Someone brought a species of lunch. I begged for coffee, thinking caffeine might lift some of the fog in my brain. The attendant said it wasn’t on my diet, and I lay back down, nauseated by the wobbly red Jell-O on the tray.

By and by, I thought of my clothes. My wallet had been in my handbag and that was probably melted into the remains of Sister Frances’s home, but I often stuff loose bills into my pockets. I found eleven dollars and thirteen cents in my smoky clothes. My cellphone was there, too, but the battery was dead.

I pulled my Lario boots onto my bare feet and put on my torn and charred linen jacket. I looked in the little mirror in the bathroom. Between the costume, my clumpy hair, and the outsize glasses, I looked like I belonged on the Uptown streets outside the hospital, collecting cigarette butts. I made it down the hall on wobbly legs; two days in bed, with no food and a lot of shock, had atrophied my muscles. A hospital security guard at the nursing station looked at me curiously but didn’t try to stop me. I rode down to the first-floor lobby.

Hospitals have realized that the cash register chings louder if they install an espresso machine. They don’t study how to make it good, figuring a clientele under stress will drink anything. I wasn’t in a position to be picky, either. I ordered a triple espresso from an attendant who, taking in my costume and my mangy head, asked to be paid first.

While he pulled my shots, I looked across the lobby to the front of the building. The media circus had shut down most of its rings, with only one camera truck still there. As I squinted through my glasses, I could just make out a couple of people with picket signs—the immigrant rights activists, perhaps, or maybe a striking local or even abortion protestors. The lenses were too opaque for me to be able to read the signs themselves.

My hands were so thickly wrapped that I had to hold the cup with my fingertips, and I had trouble opening the sugar packets. I finally tore them with my teeth, spraying sugar over myself and the floor before managing to get some in my coffee. I was heading for the elevators when I spotted my old pal Murray Ryerson from the
Herald-Star
at the reception desk
.
He was collecting a visitor’s pass and grinning with satisfaction at the clerk. So much for the lockdown on reporters.

I felt vulnerable and exposed, with no underwear under a shabby hospital gown, only my smoky jacket keeping my breasts and buttocks from public view. I retreated into a chair behind a potted plant and watched until Murray was inside an elevator.

As I waited, Beth Blacksin from Global Entertainment went up to the reception desk and started gesticulating in indignation, pointing at the elevator. So Murray had scammed his way in. A hospital security guard joined Beth.

Hospitals have a million exits and stairwells. I left the coffee shop by the far end and went into the first stairwell I came to. One flight, and I felt as though I’d been sandbagged, my legs wobbling, my head dizzy. I leaned against the wall and drank some of my coffee. It was bitter—they hadn’t cleaned the machine heads anytime recently—but the caffeine steadied me.

A doctor came running down the stairs but paused when he saw me. “Do you belong here?”

I held out my wrist with my plastic patient tag looped above my gauze hands. “I got turned around when I went downstairs for coffee.”

He read my tag. “Your room is on the fifth floor. You’d better take an elevator. I’m not sure you should be up and about at all . . . Definitely not climbing five flights of stairs.”

He opened the door to the first floor and held it while I walked past him. “I can call for a wheelchair.”

“No, the nurses told me I needed to start walking. I’ll be okay.”

He was in a hurry and didn’t stay to argue with me. I looked at my tag. Sure enough, it had my room number on it. That was a mercy: I hadn’t bothered to check it when I left.

I found a secondary elevator bank and saw a sign for the hospital library. Carrying my coffee in my fingertips, I walked past the Orthopedic Outpatient Clinic and Respiratory Diseases and came to the library. To my relief, this was merely a room filled with donated books, mostly unread review copies with publicists’ letters still inside the front covers. No staff were present to question whether a person in heavy dark glasses and no underwear ought to be there.

I turned out the overhead lights and curled up in an armchair. Time to stop feeling sorry for myself and guilty about Sister Frankie. Time to think, to work.

The feds had been watching Sister Frances’s apartment and hadn’t intervened in the attack on her. Did that mean they wanted her dead or had they been out getting pizza and not noticed whoever threw the Molotov cocktails?

The coffee helped, but not enough to get my muzzy brain fully functioning. I uncoiled myself from the armchair and took some of the publicity letters out of the books. Scrabbling in the drawers of a little desk, I found an old pencil stub. It would have to do. I couldn’t see well enough to write, and the pencil stub was too blunt for cursive, so I used block letters.

1. FEDS WATCHING FRANKIE: WHY?

2. LAMONT GADSDEN = SNITCH: TRUE?

3. WHAT IN BOTTLES—PRO OR STREET-GRADE ACCELERANT?

Who would tell me any of these things? There was something else, too, another important question, nagging the back of my mind. I took off my boots, tucked my legs under me, and let my mind drift. I dozed and woke and dozed, but it was Lotty’s anger that kept coming to the surface. It couldn’t be about Lotty. It must be the law enforcement people she sent about their business yesterday. They had asked something odd.

I stuffed the paper into my jacket pocket and bent to pull my boots on. When I stood, I had to clutch the chair to keep from falling over. It was infuriating to be so weak. I needed to be out on the streets, talking to people, not so shaky that a walk down a hospital corridor did me in. I made my unsteady way back to my room.

I had just sunk down on my egg-carton mattress when a nurse looked in. “Where have you been? We’ve been looking all over the hospital for you! Didn’t you hear us page you?”

“Sorry. I was testing my legs and got so tired I fell asleep in a chair. I didn’t hear anything.”

She took my temperature and felt my pulse and disappeared to spread the good news that I was back. As soon as she was gone, the bathroom door opened, and Murray came out.

“Well, well, Warshawski. They were telling the truth. You’re not dead yet.”

“Ryerson, get the
fuck
out of my hospital room.” I was startled into fury.

“Oh, those sweet words.” He grinned and peered at me. “You know, you do look pretty strange, if you don’t mind my saying so.”

“I do mind. I survived a fire. It was extremely unpleasant. Now leave.”

“After you talk to me, my fire-eating private eye.”

“I’ll talk to you if you do something for me.”

He bowed low over his tape recorder. “As you command, O Queen, so shall it be done.”

“I need some clothes. I can’t wear these. And my wallet and credit cards and whatnot are all at the sister’s apartment.”

Murray sat up. “I’m not going to your place. You know the old guy hates me. He’d sic that hellhound of yours on me, and I’d be fish food before I could explain why I was rummaging in your closet.”

“Buy me something, then. Jeans, a long-sleeved white shirt, and a bra. That’s all I need.”

“A bra? You mean, like brassiere? Ix-nay.”

“Murray, you were wearing a twenty-something blonde at Krumas’s fundraiser. You can’t tell me you blush and get prickly heat in a lingerie department. Size 36-C. And size 12 shirt, 31 long jeans. You record all that for posterity?”

“Okay,” Murray scowled. “I got it. Now, what were you doing at Sister Frances Kerrigan’s home to get her killed?”