Hardball (33 page)

Seventeen minutes after I’d handed the envelope to the bellman, my uncle appeared. His hair was uncombed, his shirttails hung half out of his trousers. He certainly wasn’t resting easily these days. While he looked in and around the gazebo, I checked the opposite side of the street. No one was lingering on the sidewalks. No new cars hovered in the area. I climbed down the stairs to the tunnel under Michigan Avenue and emerged on the path to the beach.

“Peter!” I called sharply. “Over here!”

42

ROUGHING UP THE UNCLE

“WHAT THE HELL ARE YOU UP TO?” CLOSE UP, MY UNCLE looked worse than I’d thought. His eyes were bloodshot, he was unshaven, and he smelled of stale alcohol.

“What the hell are you up to, Peter, letting Petra take the fall so that you don’t have to face the—”

“Goddamn you, you ignorant bitch, I am protecting my daughter.” For a moment, we both thought he was going to hit me.

My mouth creased in a sour smile. “Sending her out to find police evidence that Tony squirreled away for you? Involving her in arson and criminal trespass at my old South Chicago house and at my current house and office?”

“You don’t know anything!” His roar brought the cyclists and joggers around us to a brief halt:
Did I need help?

I smiled and waved at the concerned citizens, who were happy to leave us to our quarrel. I kept the smile on my lips and my voice light, conversational. We didn’t need to draw a crowd.

“I know that in 1967 Steve Sawyer was brutally tortured into confessing to a murder he never committed. I know he served forty years, doing
very
hard time, in your stead. And I know he thought there were some photographs proving who really killed Harmony Newsome in Marquette Park during that 1966 riot. I know that Larry Alito brought evidence of the murder over to our South Chicago house back around Christmas 1967 and that Tony took it to keep your sorry ass out of prison.”

“I didn’t kill Harmony Newsome,” Peter hissed.

“Then who did?”

Peter looked around, wondering who was listening. “I don’t know.”

“Brilliant,” I said. “ It wasn’t me, I wasn’t there, I didn’t do it. Every cop and every criminal lawyer hears that line a hundred times their first week on the job. You weren’t in Marquette Park, Tony didn’t take evidence, Larry Alito—”

“Shut up! I was in Marquette Park, okay? Is that a crime? It was my neighborhood park, my friends were all there.”

“What, you guys went there to play ball, and then suddenly, in the third inning, this huge riot broke out? And then what? You got lost in the crowd and started throwing bricks and rocks and stuff in the hopes they’d point you to your way home?”

“You’re just like your tight-assed bitch of a mother, acting like she was the Madonna and all the saints poured into one—”

“Call me any name you like, you two-bit bully, but do not insult Gabriella.” My hands on my hips, my face close to his. He backed away.

The silence lingered between us. Peter was fidgeting, worried about what I knew, what I might say. But I was weary, of him, of fighting, of myself. And when I finally spoke again, it took an effort to go through the motions.

“You went to Marquette Park in 1966, but you didn’t kill Harmony Newsome and you don’t know who did. But you sent Petra out looking for the evidence just in case it came back to bite you. Only it’s bitten Petra instead. Take it from there . . . Tell me how you’re protecting her.”

His face was white underneath the stubble. “Don’t preach at me. You’re the one who got Petey in trouble in the first place, introducing her to gangbangers and taking her to slums.”

“No, no, no.” My hands were over my ears, trying to stop the barrage of lies. “She wheedled me until I took her to see all the different houses you and Grandma Warshawski and Tony had lived in. I thought at the time Petra was behaving strangely, especially her wanting to see where everyone stored their stuff. I tried to get her to tell me why, and she wouldn’t. But of course she wanted to see if, by any chance, Tony had left behind that photograph!”

“You’re making this shit up to cover your own butt,” my uncle said.

“Peter, someone ID’d Petra, ID’d her standing on Houston Avenue while thugs threw a smoke bomb into the house and ransacked it. What did you have her doing?”

“People make mistakes all the time when they’re asked to ID someone. Petra wasn’t there. You might have bought off a witness—”

“To get my own cousin in trouble? Or for any reason whatsoever?” I wanted to pick him up and bang his head against the concrete barricade above us.

“Do you understand, I am crazy with worry. I will say or do anything to see Petra doesn’t get hurt. And if that means accusing you—of
anything
—I’ll do it.”

“You know they’ll never let Petra walk away from this,” I said. “When they find her, they’ll dump her body someplace where they can implicate one of Johnny Merton’s boys. They’d like it to be Steve Sawyer, of course, as Dornick suggested in Strangwell’s office yesterday. Dude’s already gone down once instead of you, why not twice?”

“Dornick told me back then that Sawyer was a killer, he and Merton both,” Peter burst out. “Sawyer was just going to prison for a different murder than the one he actually did.”

“Have you ever watched someone put electrodes on a man’s balls and run a current through them?” I asked.

He squirmed, and his hand went reflexively to his crotch.

“After a time—and not a very long time—he’ll say anything to get it to stop. Tony watched Larry Alito and George Dornick do this to Steve Sawyer. He tried to get them to stop, and they told him they were doing it for you.”

“I didn’t kill the girl, damn it!” Sweat poured from Peter’s face, although it could have been the hot sun of course. My own face was aching from the sun hitting my burns through the Cubs cap.

“Why did you send Petra out to look for the photos?”

“I didn’t.” He was hoarse. “I didn’t know what she was up to. Rachel was worried about Petey, said she sounded strange, subdued, not like herself, and she stopped calling every day the way she usually did. I thought it was the work on the campaign. Strangwell’s a hard boss. Petey isn’t used to that much discipline or responsibility.”

“Was Strangwell at Marquette Park with you in 1966?”

He shook his head. “Les is a friend of Harvey’s, helped him on the PR side, taught him how to handle congressional hearings, that kind of thing. Harvey was Les’s most important client before the Strangler became a political op, so of course Les moved in to run the kid’s campaign.”

“Dornick?” I prodded. “Was he at Marquette Park with you?”

“Dornick was a cop. He was in the park, but he was holding the line around King. We razzed him about it at—” He stopped, realizing how bad that sounded in today’s context.

“We?”
I prodded.

“All of us from the neighborhood,” he muttered.

“Harvey Krumas was there, too?”

“I said all of us from the neighborhood, and that’s all I’m saying.”

“If you didn’t kill Ms. Newsome, why did Tony cave and take evidence when Dornick and Alito threatened to send you to prison?”

“They could manipulate the evidence, Tony knew that.”

“And that Nellie Fox baseball ...What was it evidence of?”

“I don’t know what you’re talking about,” he muttered unconvincingly.

“That’s what Alito dropped off at my dad’s, isn’t it? The night he said you’d go to prison if Tony didn’t hide it?”

“That baseball didn’t prove one damned thing. George thought he was being so cute—” He cut himself short when he realized how much he was revealing, then continued. “Tony believed me when I swore to him that I never hurt that black girl. Why can’t you cut me the same slack?”

“Because, my dear uncle, you are willing to let George Dornick put a bullet through my head to protect yourself all over again. And despite your protestations that you’d do anything for Petra, I don’t see you going to Bobby Mallory, spilling your guts, so that your kid can come out of wherever she’s hiding and stop fearing for her own life! I’d love to know what they’re giving you that’s wonderful enough for you to let everyone around you—your brother, me, but, most of all, your daughter—take the fall for you.”

I waited a moment, hoping he’d say something, anything, to give me a handle to turn. When he remained silent, I started down the stairs that led to the tunnel under Michigan Avenue. Peter called after me; I waited for him at the bottom.

“Leave town, Vic.” He pulled out his wallet and tried to shove a fistful of twenties at me. “Leave town until all this blows over.”

“Peter, it’s not going to blow over. Bobby Mallory is already pulling a thread out of this ball of yarn. Don’t tell me your friends can force him to drop the investigation.”

He looked around again. “If Homeland Security tells Mallory to stop, he’ll stop.”

The interrogation I’d undergone after Sister Frankie’s death—Homeland Security had been there and wanted to know what the nun had told me before she died—had that been at Dornick’s behest? Did he, or Strangwell, have so much clout they could shut down a Chicago Police investigation?

“So they’re waiting for me to produce the photographs before they kill me,” I said slowly. “Once they have the pictures and I’m dead, they’ll feel safe.”

My uncle shifted uneasily. Maybe no one had said it out loud to him, but they’d made it clear that he’d get Petra in exchange for me and whatever evidence was still floating around from Marquette Park all those years ago. “Where are you going? What are you doing now? If you talk to Bobby—”

“I’m not telling you what I’m doing because I don’t want to be an easier target for your pal George than I already am. If you have anything to say to me, put it out on the Web. I’ll try to find a safe place to check my e-mails now and then.”

He grabbed my arm, trying to hector me into making a public declaration that I would drop the investigation, but I was angry, scared, and short of time. I shoved him away and sprinted through the tunnel and up the other side. I jumped into the first cab that came along and rode south to Millennium Park.

The skin on my arms and scalp was throbbing from where the sun had burned the raw patches. There are a couple of big fountains in the park, slabs of glass where water falls from the top and children dance and slide in it as it hits the ground. I held my burning arms and head under the water, not minding that my clothes were getting wet, keeping myself just turned away enough that the water didn’t hit my back hip and my gun sitting in its tuck holster.

I don’t know how long I stood, soothed by the water, oblivious to the exuberant children around me. I finally trudged on leaden feet to the garage entrance. A man was selling
Streetwise.

“Come on, beautiful, let’s have a smile on that gorgeous face of yours. Nothing is this bad. Not if you have a roof over your head and a family that loves you.”

“I don’t.” I walked past him into the garage.

In Morrell’s Honda, I leaned back in the seat, my wet clothes squelching against the vinyl upholstery. I could picture Morrell’s expression—annoyance quickly suppressed—at my dripping in his car. Suppressed, because he’d see how distraught I was, my confidence in my father’s essential rightness undermined. Morrell was so kind—and, well, moral—he would always put his need for order behind another person’s need for compassion.

“This for your brother.”
That’s what Steve Sawyer-Kimathi said Dornick and Alito had told Tony.
We’re torturing Kimathi for your brother’s sake.
And Tony had turned around and left them to it.

“Nothing is this bad. Not if you have a roof over your head and a family that loves you.”
What kind of love had Tony given me—all that wise, patient advice—what had it been grounded in? And my mother: how much had she known about Steve Sawyer and her husband’s brother and her husband?

I thought of some of the men I’d known over the years: my ex-husband, Murray, Conrad. My ex-husband and Murray Ryerson were ordinary, ambitious men, but Morrell at least was decent, even heroic. Maybe I carried some taint I’d never been aware of, something I’d been unwilling to face. Melodrama. The trouble was, I’d never imagined any taint could be attached to my father.

I was unexpectedly wracked again by sobs, so violent that they banged me against the steering wheel. I tried not to howl out loud, the last vestige of reason warning me not to attract attention.

43

DEATH OF NOT SUCH A GOOD GUY

I FINALLY RETURNED TO MORRELL’S PLACE, TOO WORN BY my emotional storm to do anything but sleep. When I woke again, it was after six. I went into the kitchen to make a cup of tea and found that Max had slid a note through the back door on his way home.

Karen Lennon was looking for you this afternoon. She says your client, Miss Claudia, is slipping out of this life but has asked for you off and on all day. Captain Mallory called on Lotty at her clinic this afternoon. He needs to see you urgently but wouldn’t tell Lotty why. I got the news that you’re safe to Mr. Contreras and Lotty, but felt I shouldn’t let them know where you are.

Max

I drank tea, slowly. I felt like someone convalescing from a devastating illness, that if I moved too quickly the fever would return and carry me away for good.

Bobby wanted to see me. He had gone to the clinic in person, hadn’t sent a minion. He knows Lotty, knows that the sight of a police badge stirs such terrible memories in her that even the best cop in the world receives a hostile reception, but, even so, for a routine inquiry he would have sent Terry Finchley. So he needed me badly and he needed me privately.

But Miss Claudia was slipping out of this life. She might have died while I was weeping in Millennium Park. I finished the tea and carefully washed the mug. Morrell would be quite cross if he came home from Afghanistan to find it dirty in his sink.

I looked wistfully at the phone. The trouble with the Age of Fear is that you don’t know who is listening in on your conversations. You don’t know if you can talk safely or not. Probably I could talk to Karen Lennon without anyone else catching the call, but the possibility that I’d jeopardize my safe house meant I couldn’t work on probabilities.

It was too late in the day to expect to find Karen at Lionsgate Manor. I drove down to Howard Street, the honky-tonk dividing line between Chicago’s Mexican-Pakistani-Russian north border and the very much more staid Evanston, and found a pay phone at the El stop there. Even more amazing, the phone’s cord and handset were both attached, and the phone asked me to deposit a dollar when I listened to it. I put my battery in my cellphone just long enough to look up Karen Lennon’s contact information, then called her cell from the pay phone.

“Vic, thank goodness! I’ve been trying to reach you since last night. I finally called Max this morning, and he told me you’re having to stay underground, so thank you for coming up for air and getting back to me. I’m sorry about your cousin, but Miss Claudia’s been asking for you. I’ve been afraid she’d pass while you were hiding.”

“If I go to Lionsgate Manor now, will I be able to see her?”

“If I’m with you, it should be okay. I’m home, but I can be there in twenty-five minutes. I’ll meet you at the main entrance, okay?”

“
Not
okay. I don’t know how long I can stay undercover, but I can’t have anyone know where I am. I’ll meet you outside Miss Claudia’s room.”

Karen wanted to know how I’d get into the building; you had to go past the guard station at night. I told her not to worry about that, just to give me the room number. She started to object, but I cut her off.

“Please, I don’t have enough time to do the things I have to do. Let’s not waste the last hours of Miss Claudia’s life arguing about this.”

I drove along Howard until I came to a shop that sold uniforms and business apparel. There are several ways to be invisible in a large institution. The best, in a nursing home, is to be a janitor. If you show up in a nurse’s uniform, all the other nurses think they know you and study your face too closely. A janitor, however, at the low end of the food chain, gets only a cursory look. I found a jumpsuit in gray, which I put on over my jeans, and a square-cut cap. I bought a big mop to complete the outfit. I stuck my gun into a side pocket—not the safest way to carry a firearm, but I wanted it close to hand.

When I reached Lionsgate, I parked on a side street so I could get away fast if I had to. Mop in hand, cap low on my forehead, I walked down the ramp at the manor’s parking garage and entered the building using one of those elevators. On the ground floor, I had to pass the guard station to get to the main elevators. The massive woman behind the counter, wearing a Lionsgate pale blue security blazer, was watching television. But she looked up as I passed and called out to me: Who was I? Where was my security ID?

My Polish is limited to a few stilted phrases garnered unwillingly as a child from Boom-Boom’s mother. Tonight, I didn’t stop walking but shouted over my shoulder in Polish instead that dinner was ready, it was getting cold, come to the table at once, something I’d heard Aunt Marie say four or five hundred times. The guard shook her head with the kind of annoyed incredulity accorded ignorant immigrants, but she returned to the small TV on the counter in front of her.

I rode up in an elevator with a real member of the cleaning crew. She was collecting dirty laundry and rolled her cart off at the eighth floor. When I reached Miss Claudia’s room, Miss Ella was sitting with her sister on the room’s one chair. Karen was on the lookout for me. She hurried over and greeted me in a low voice, taking my arm and escorting me to Miss Claudia’s bed.

Another woman lay in an adjacent bed, her breath coming in short, puffy bursts, a machine next to her beeping every now and then. I pulled a curtain between the two women to create the illusion of privacy.

My client frowned at me. “Our affairs haven’t been very important to you, have they? You took our money, but you didn’t find Lamont. And it seems you’ve stopped looking for him the last month.”

“I think your sister wants to see me,” I said as gently as I could. “How is she?”

“Maybe a little stronger,” Karen said. “She ate some ice cream, Miss Ella says.”

Miss Claudia was sleeping, too, her breath sounding much the same as her neighbor’s, shallow, ragged. I sat on the bed, ignoring the client’s outraged snort, and massaged Miss Claudia’s left hand, her good hand.

“It’s V. I. Warshawski, Miss Claudia,” I said in a deep, clear voice. “I’m the detective. I’m looking for Lamont. You told Pastor Karen you wanted to see me.”

She stirred but didn’t wake. I repeated the information several times, and, after a bit, her eyes fluttered open.

“ ’ Ti ve,” she asked.

“I found Steve,” I said.

“She’s asking, are you the detec
tive,
” Miss Ella corrected me.

“I’m the detective, Miss Claudia. I found Steve Sawyer. He’s very ill. He was in prison for forty years.”

“Sad. Hard. ’Mont?”

I clasped her hand more tightly. “Curtis . . . You remember Curtis Rivers? Curtis says Lamont is dead. But he doesn’t know where he’s resting. He says Johnny knows.”

Her fingers gave mine a weak response. Miss Ella said, “The Anacondas! I knew it was their doing.”

“I don’t think Johnny killed Lamont, but he knows what happened to him. I’ll try my best to get him to tell me.” I was speaking slowly to Miss Claudia, wondering how much sense she could make of my words.

Miss Ella huffed. “You’ll try and you’ll get the same results you’ve come up with all summer. Nothing.”

I didn’t try to answer or even look at her but kept my attention on her sister. Miss Claudia lay silent for a moment, taking conscious, deeper breaths, preparing herself for a major effort. “Bible.” She pronounced both consonants clearly. “Lamont Bible . . . You take.”

She turned her head on the pillow so I could see what she intended. The red leather Bible was on the nightstand by her head. “Find ’Mont. He dead, bury with him. He ’live, give him.” Another deep breath, another effort. “Promise?”

“I promise, Miss Claudia.”

“Lamont’s Bible?” Miss Ella was outraged. “That’s a family Bible, Claudia. You can’t—”

“Quiet yourself, Ellie.” But the effort in making clear speech was too hard for Miss Claudia, and she sank back into half-intelligible syllables: “ ’ Hite girl, ’hite ’tive, I want give.”

Miss Claudia watched me until she was sure I had the Bible, sure I was tucking it into the big side pocket of my overalls, not handing it to her sister. She closed her eyes and gasped for air. Miss Ella favored her sister and me both with bitter words. Especially her sister, who had always traded on her looks, never cared how much Ella worked and did, and spoiled Lamont when Ella told her time and again that she had ruined him by sparing the rod. If Miss Claudia heard, she didn’t respond. She had worn herself out speaking to me. I knew she wasn’t asleep because, as she lay there, her eyes fluttered open from time to time, looking from my face to my pocket where the end of the big red Bible was sticking out.

Holding her hand, I sang to her the song of the butterfly, the favorite of the lullabies of my childhood.
“Gira qua e gira là, poi si resta supra un fiore;
/
Gira qua e gira là, poi si resta supra spalla di Papà”
(Turning here, turning there, until she rests upon a flower; / Turning here, turning there, until she rests on Papà’s shoulder).

Miss Ella sniffed loudly, but I sang it through several times, calming myself along with Miss Claudia, until she was deeply asleep. When I got up to go, Miss Ella stayed in the chair, I suppose not wanting to dignify her sister’s bequest to me by acknowledging me, but Pastor Karen followed me into the hall.

“I know you’re under a lot of stress right now, and I’m sure your cousin is your biggest worry, so it was a really good thing you did, coming over here to see Miss Claudia.” She put a hand on my arm. “This man you mentioned, Curtis . . . Do you think he’s telling the truth about Lamont?”

“Oh, I think so. He doesn’t know what happened to Lamont, but it involved Johnny Merton, and it was so terrible that it shocked Merton into silence. And Merton . . . You’d have to know him to understand that a death he’d find shocking might turn you or me as mad as . . . as poor Steve Sawyer.”

I gently dislodged Lennon’s hand. “Something about Lamont, or Johnny and Steve Sawyer and the Anacondas, is connected to my cousin. The man who’s running security for the Krumas campaign, where my cousin worked, he was the cop who interrogated Sawyer forty years ago and tortured him into confessing.”

Karen gasped. “Torture? Are you sure?”

Sawyer-Kimathi’s mangled, burned body flashed in my head:
“They say I the song-and-dance man . . . They laugh.”
Would I ever be able to forget that? “Yes, oh yes. I wish I wasn’t, but . . . I know it happened. I don’t understand it, not all of it, but my uncle, and Harvey Krumas, the candidate’s father, they grew up together, and they still watch each other’s backs. The murder that happened in Marquette Park all those years ago, they’re both implicated in it, and that means—”

I couldn’t bear to go on, couldn’t bear to add that that meant my own uncle was implicated in Sister Frankie’s murder because his old buddy Harvey rushed a contracting crew over to her place to bury any evidence I might be able to dig up. I pressed my hands against my temples as if that would push all that knowledge out of my head.

“This is terrible, Vic. Why aren’t you going to the police?”

My smile was twisted. “Because Dornick is an ex-cop with lots of pals on the force, and I don’t know who there I can trust anymore.”

Karen started to ask me how Lamont was tied to Dornick, but my own words reminded me that Bobby Mallory had been trying to reach me. I interrupted her to ask if I could use her office phone to make a few calls.

We rode down to the second floor in silence, Karen shaking her head as if mourning all the sorry souls I’d told her about. While she unlocked her office door, I once again connected my cellphone long enough to look up Bobby’s unlisted home number.

Eileen Mallory answered. “Oh, Vicki, I’m so sorry about Petra. This is a terrible week. We never knew Peter at all well, but please tell him and Rachel that if there’s anything we can do, anything at all—a place to stay, extra help from Bobby’s team—they must let us know.”

I thanked her awkwardly and said Bobby had been trying to reach me. He hadn’t come home yet. She gave me his cellphone number. And another message, a personal one for me, so warm and loving it made my eyelids prick.

Bobby’s response wasn’t nearly so tender. “Where are you?” he demanded as soon as I answered.

“Wandering around the city like a demented ghost,” I said. “I understand you wanted to talk to me.”

“I want to see you at once.”

I looked at Karen Lennon’s scarred desktop. “You know, Bobby, that is not going to happen. I am hiding from George Dornick, hoping I find Petra before he does.”

“If Dornick’s on your ass, I’ll give him a medal for bringing you in.”

“That would be one you would hand him at my funeral, then, and you could congratulate each other on laying me and a lot of ugly department history to rest.”

I wasn’t sure how much time I would have before Bobby’s tech team figured out where I was calling from. I decided I could stay on the phone for three more minutes.

“Victoria, you have crossed an acceptable line. You’ve always imagined that you could do my job and that of thirteen thousand other good, decent cops better than we can. You’ve always imagined when we chew you out, it’s because we’re stupider or more corrupt than you. But now you have gone further than I will allow.”

“By criticizing George Dornick?” I asked.

“By fingering, if not murdering, Larry Alito.”

I had been watching the second hand go round on the institutional clock on Karen Lennon’s wall, but that news jolted me.

“Alito is dead?” I repeated stupidly.

“Get your head out of your butt.” Bobby was truly furious to use such coarse language talking to me. Even though he disapproves of me, he usually sticks to his no-swearing-at-women-and-children code when we’re speaking. “His body was found down by the river near Cortlandt this afternoon. And Hazel says you’d called up there this morning, threatening him.”