Hardball (22 page)

“That sounds like me, all right, gangbanger torching an old lady’s house.”

Conrad leaned forward. “You showed me the house once, the place where you grew up, your ma’s tree and everything.”

That was true. In the spring, before I left for Italy, I’d been coaching a basketball team in my old high school, and Conrad and I had occasionally had a drink together after the games. One evening, in a fit of nostalgia, I’d shown him my home, along with the place on the breakwater where Boom-Boom and I used to jump into Lake Calumet, and various other high points of my childhood.

I sat up. “I have a young cousin who’s spending the summer in Chicago. She wanted a tour of historic Warshawski family sites. If you go to Back of the Yards and Gage Park, you’ll find we’ve been there, too. If those two places have been torched, I’ll start to get seriously interested in your questions. Was anyone hurt at the Houston Street fire?”

“Nope. Old lady got herself, her daughter, her grandkids out. And, not only that, in a rare moment of civic cooperation the fire department came before things got out of hand. Anyway, there never really was a fire, so the structure is okay.”

“That’s a mercy.” I lay back down again.

“You going to ask me how it started?”

“Faulty wiring? Geraldo doing reefer in bed?”

“Smoke bomb. Someone broke a window and threw it into the living room while they were eating supper. Everyone ran out the back door, and a couple of lowlifes came in through the broken window and helped themselves while the family was waiting for the fire department.”

“Scum,” I agreed. “I’m very sorry to know this, of course, especially if they broke one of those windows with the prisms across the top. Those prisms were what made my mother feel she could tolerate living in South Chicago.”

“You don’t know anything about this, Ms. W.?”

I knew I was furious, but I was still so tired, and lethargic from the residue of morphine in my system, that I couldn’t feel the anger. “Conrad, I’m tired, I’m in pain, I held a burning woman in my arms a few nights ago and couldn’t save her life. Don’t make me play twenty questions. And don’t accuse me of things you know are simply beyond me. One more innuendo about this, about how I might be implicated in an attack on the people who live in my childhood home, and you will never speak to me again. Even if you want to buy me World Series tickets, you’ll funnel your invitation through my attorney.”

He sucked in a breath. “The lady says she saw you. She says she went around to the front of the house to wait for us and the fire department and saw you across the street watching it all.”

I made a face. “Oh, please. It was dark, right? And she’d seen me once through an inch-wide chain bolt. She saw someone else and is confused. Or she knows who really did it and is so frightened of that person that she wants to finger a stranger.”

Conrad stood up and looked down at me. “I believe in you, Vic. I really do. I’m the only person in the Fourth District who knows you grew up in that house, and I’m keeping it that way. For now. But I’d like to put you in a lineup for Señora Andarra . . . for my own peace of mind, if nothing else.”

29

ALL THOSE FRIENDLY GOVERNMENT AGENTS

THE NEXT FEW DAYS WERE A TIME OF FRUSTRATING INACTION while I let my eyes heal enough that I could get to work. Lotty took me home with her, and I continued to build up my strength, using the gym in her building’s basement, making phone calls during the day while she was at her clinic or the hospital.

My first day at Lotty’s, Mr. Contreras came over in the morning before Lotty left for work. He brought a small suitcase with clothes that Petra had packed; he would have been embarrassed to rummage in my underwear drawer himself. He also brought the dogs, which annoyed Lotty because her apartment is full of glass tables and museum-quality artwork, including a small statue of Andromache salvaged from the ruins of her grandparents’ art collection. Mitch’s exuberant energy made her so tense that she terminated the visit quickly, on grounds that I didn’t have the stamina for it.

“You mean
you
don’t,” I said. But I took the dogs out to the hall behind the kitchen, where we waited for the service elevator.

“Peewee wants to visit,” Mr. Contreras said. “I told her I was sure you’d want to see her.”

“Absolutely. The sooner, the better. Can you go up to my place and collect my phone charger so she can bring it with her?” I couldn’t tie up Lotty’s phone but I needed to start connecting myself to the land of the living. “And here are my car keys. Get her to drive you over to pick up my car on Kedzie before I get a hundred meter violations and twenty boots.”

I didn’t think I could stand to use my old handbag again. When I had stuck my hand in to fish out my keys, it came out covered in ash. Sister Carolyn had known I was a PI only because my license had been the plastic on top when she looked at my wallet. The credit cards underneath it had fused together with my driver’s license. I called my card companies for replacements, but I’d have to go in person to the Secretary of State’s Office for a new PI license.

After Mr. Contreras left, Lotty went to her clinic on Damen. I resisted the impulse to go back to bed and phoned Sister Carolyn instead. I wanted to know if she’d been able to find any more bottle fragments in Sister Frankie’s apartment.

“The police came almost as soon as you’d left. They wanted to know who broke the seal on Frankie’s door. I told them it must have been the intruder we chased down the stairs. They put a padlock on the door, so we can’t get in.”

“Bolt cutters,” I said absently, flexing my fingers inside their gauze wrappers, imagining working a pick into the padlock.

“We’ll think about that,” the nun said drily. “But I want to know who’s watching our building. When you were here, you said it was the federal government.”

“The feds came to see me in the hospital: someone from Homeland Security, someone from the FBI, and local guys from the Bomb and Arson squad. It was the day after the fire, so I don’t remember it clearly. They know who lives in your building, all the families. Come to think of it, they’re probably listening to this conversation, so forget the bolt cutters.”

“Eavesdropping!” Zabinska was almost speechless with fury.

I suggested she come see me at Lotty’s so we could talk about it privately. I wanted to speak to her anyway, now that I was more alert mentally, to learn anything Sister Frankie might have said to her about Steve Sawyer’s involvement in Harmony Newsome’s murder.

Before Lotty left, she had made me promise to stay inside. But I wanted to be in motion. After doing as much of a workout as I could handle, and having a phone meeting with Marilyn Klimpton at my office, I wandered restlessly around Lotty’s apartment. In the side room where she keeps her television (off-limits) and her library overflow (off-limits), I found a sewing basket with a pair of shears in it. I went into the bathroom and started chopping my hair.

When I was five, my father gave me a doll for Christmas that had a huge halo of dark hair. It was JFK’s first year in office, and dolls all had the Jackie do. Boom-Boom and I took a pair of scissors to that doll, and, by the time we’d finished, she looked much as I did now. Dentists shouldn’t drill their own teeth and detectives shouldn’t cut their own hair. At least, not when their hands were wrapped up in boxer’s tape.

A little after one, when I thought I might go mad from inaction, the cops showed up. They knew I’d been sprung; they probably knew Lotty wasn’t home. It was time to talk.

I put on my heavy dark glasses to underline my invalid status. Just to be prudent, I rode the elevator to the lobby to make sure they were really cops, not robbers. I hadn’t actually seen any of their faces in the hospital, but their voices told me these were essentially the same players who’d interrogated me last week.

The FBI had sent Lyle Torgeson again, but the feds had beefed up their presence with someone from Homeland Security. The city had sent only the woman from the Office of Emergency Management instead of the duo who’d come to my hospital room. The CPD sent the same two guys from the Bomb and Arson squad, a young white man with a crew cut who was already developing a paunch and a Latino about my own age who was balding and had big fatigue circles around his eyes.

“I don’t have Dr. Herschel’s permission to bring all these strangers into her home,” I told the doorman. “Is there a conference room we could use?”

“There’s a room in the building manager’s office,” the doorman said doubtfully. “It’s kind of small, though.”

“We can take you down to Thirty-fifth and Michigan,” the Latino Bomb and Arson guy suggested.

“You have a warrant? . . . Then we’ll meet here. There are only six of us, after all.”

The doorman called up to the building manager to see if the room was free and to send someone down to escort us so that he wouldn’t have to abandon his post at the entrance.

It was a small room, and getting six chairs around the round table meant we all had to be careful to keep our knees to ourselves. I was sorry in a way that I’d kept them out of Lotty’s place, but if they were uncomfortable inhaling one another’s bad breath, which the woman from OEM had to a remarkable degree, they wouldn’t stay long.

I kept my big plastic glasses on mostly to annoy them. They would want to try to read my facial tics, how I moved my eyes and so on, and now they couldn’t.

“You look like the bad end of a catfight,” Torgeson said. “You get your hair caught in a wringer over at the nun’s place when you went back there?”

“Everyone’s taping this, right? So the FBI and OEM and CPD are all going to get the same useful transcript. The real question here is”—I paused long enough to see that they were all leaning forward, hoping for some gem of self-revelation—“why is a woman always characterized as being in a catfight after an altercation? I’m sure with the research you’ve done on me, you know I have two dogs, so it’s a good bet I’d be more responsive to a dogfight metaphor. And yet your underlying sexism made you—”

“Enough,” Torgeson barked. “You know damned well what I was talking about.”

I shook my head. “Mind reading isn’t one of my skills. And I haven’t been tapping your phone, so I can’t rely on your conversations to tell me what you’re thinking or talking about.”

“Ms. Warshawski, we know you left Beth Israel to return to the nun’s apartment four nights ago.” It was the white guy from Bomb and Arson.

When I didn’t say anything, he said, “Well?”

“Is there a question?” I said.

“What were you doing at the nun’s building four nights ago?” he said, his voice tight from the effort not to lose his temper.

“I was in the hospital four nights ago,” I said.

When the HIV nun had escorted me back inside, she’d flashed her hospital ID at the security guard and stopped to chat briefly with one of the nurses. No one looked at me, a rookie nun, new to the HIV/ AIDS service, head lowered. No one on the fifth floor had commented on my absence, either, when I slipped back into my room or the next morning, so I didn’t think it had been noticed.

“You were seen entering the Freedom Center building,” the woman from OEM said. “What were you doing there?”

“I was seen?” I echoed. “That’s an old, old ploy. I need more than that to persuade me I was at Kedzie and Lawrence instead of in my hospital bed.”

The OEM woman pulled a set of stills from her briefcase and laid them on the small round table in the middle of the room. We all took turns looking at them. They were time-stamped, and they showed a woman whose dark hair held a few white streaks wearing jeans and a white shirt. They were shot from behind, so you couldn’t see where her hair had been shaved back from her temples. Nor could you see that she was using the edge of her plastic lenses to snap the tongue back in the front-door lock.

“I don’t know,” I said. “It’s not like this person is wearing a jacket marked ‘V. I. Warshawski.’ And I think I’d remember if I’d been there. You have some shots showing me leaving, some where I could see my face? I don’t recognize myself from behind.”

There was a momentary silence. I’d left wearing a nun’s veil, my face down, two other sisters and my cousin holding me close. They had the shots, but they probably didn’t know what to make of them.

“Look, Warshawski, this isn’t supposed to be an antagonistic meeting,” the Latino guy from Bomb and Arson said. “We assume you’re on the same team we are.”

“And what team would that be, Detective?’

“That you want to catch Sister Frances’s killer,” he said.

“Oh, I definitely want to do that,” I agreed.

“Then why don’t you tell us what you were doing at her apartment?” That was the FBI’s Lyle Torgeson.

I yawned. “I wasn’t at her apartment.”

“Let’s forget four nights ago,” Torgeson said. “The night of the fire . . . You agree you were there that night? . . . Tell us why.”

“Right. I went to talk to Sister Frances about Steve Sawyer.”

“We know about that,” the man from Homeland Security said.

“You have bugs planted in her room?” I asked. “They’re good quality, I guess, if they survived the fire and you retrieved them. Not like the crap weapons you buy from China and sell to Afghanistan.”

“You were bugging the room?” the white Bomb and Arson detective said, turning to the feds. “Why the fuck were you doing that?”

“National security,” the Homeland Security man said. “I can’t say any more.”

“Beautiful umbrella,” I murmured. “From now on, whenever I do anything particularly embarrassing, I’ll just cry ‘National security!’ and refuse to say anything else.”

“That’s enough,” Torgeson snapped. “What were you doing in Sister Frances’s apartment?”

“National security,” I said.

The two Bomb and Arson squad detectives swallowed smiles. Harmony did not reign supreme between the federal and local law enforcers. I let them bicker with one another for a few minutes.

“I have a question for you,” I said. “You know why I went to see Sister Frances, to discuss the case of the man who’d been convicted of killing Harmony Newsome in Marquette Park forty years ago. Sister Frances was marching with Ms. Newsome that hot summer day and said she didn’t think it was possible that Steve Sawyer killed Ms. Newsome. Are you reopening the case?”

“He was tried, convicted, did his time. We’re not interested.” That was the Latino cop.

“Then why was that the last question OEM asked me in the hospital, why did I care what Sister Frances had to say about that old murder?”

“I think you misheard. You were drugged, in a lot of pain,” Torgeson said.

“You’re the ones with the tape recorders.” I looked at my fingertips. “Go listen to the conversation. I don’t have anything else for you.”

The crowded room was momentarily quiet. Then the Bomb and Arson team started asking me questions that I could answer, to lead them step-by-step through my brief time with Sister Frances. It wasn’t meaningful or helpful, but I was the only witness.

The more times I recounted the Molotov cocktails sailing in on us, the less real they became. It was easy to describe them glibly, as if they were a plot detail in a thriller and not a death-dealing event.

When I finished, I asked what residue they’d found in the bottles: gasoline? rocket fuel? jellied bomb accelerant?

“We can’t answer questions like that,” the Homeland Security man said. “They’re in connection with an investigation linked to our national security.”

It was my turn to remember I needed to keep a leash on my temper. “What about the perps? You must have pictures of them, time-stamped and everything, right? Anything you can show on the street for an ID?”

“We can’t comment. It’s an investigation linked to our national security.”

“But these pictures aren’t?” I picked up the stills of me at the entrance to the Freedom Center building. “That’s good. I’ll show them to Sister Carolyn, see if she knows who this might be. Given that someone was in Sister Frances’s apartment that night, she might recognize who.”

“If you weren’t there, how do you know someone was in the dead nun’s apartment?” Torgeson pounced.

“You just told me.” I got to my feet, holding the stills. The woman from OEM leaned over, spraying me with her fetid breath, and grabbed the pictures.

“These are government property and are highly classified.”

“I know,” I said. “‘An investigation linked to our national security. ’ ”

She glared at me. “I’d strongly advise you not to suggest to a nun that she take a bolt cutter to a room that’s been secured by the police.”

I smiled at her. We were playing a game where the person who keeps her temper longest wins. “You know, we live in a county where patronage workers get paid a hundred thousand dollars a year not to work. So it cheers me no end to see that you really are earning the salary my tax dollars pay for. You’ve been hard at it, and I’ll see you get a note stuck in your personnel file.”