The door suddenly opened behind me. “Detective? I’m Frankie Kerrigan. Sorry to keep you waiting. We were having a short meeting on our Iowa refugees.”
Frankie Kerrigan was a thin, wiry woman, around seventy, with curly gray hair that had once been red. Her face and arms were freckled and sunburned. She wore a T-shirt and jeans. Her only badge of office was a plain wooden cross on a thin chain.
She seemed to realize I was searching her for signs of nun-ness, because she flashed a smile, and said, “When I have to talk to a judge, I put on a veil and a skirt, but, here at home, I get to wear jeans. Come on up, Detective.”
I followed her into the hall. “You know I’m a private investigator, right, not a cop?”
“Yes, I remember that. I didn’t know how you like to be addressed.”
“Most people call me Vic.”
The hallway was a jumble of strollers and bicycles, like any urban building. Unlike most, the halls and stairwell were scrubbed clean; I could smell the disinfectant as I trotted up the stairs after her. The Virgin of Guadalupe sat in a niche at the turn in the landing. At the top of the first flight, a weeping Jesus looked at me from a foot-high cross.
“How was Iowa?” I asked while she unlocked her own front door.
“Depressing. Five hundred families broken up by these ridiculous raids, women and children left homeless, the business that employed them shut down for loss of workers. We’re doing our best. But the judicial atmosphere these days is so punitive, our best is pretty futile.”
She ushered me into a front room that was furnished simply but with warmth: bright throws on the daybed and two chairs, bookcases built of a light wood and filled floor to ceiling. A small fan sat in one open window. In the other window, she’d built a shelf to hold a plant erful of red and orange flowers.
She brought tea-“Hot tea is the best thing to drink in hot weather, I’ve always believed”-but didn’t waste time with other preliminaries.
“I can’t tell you how happy I am that someone is revisiting Harmony’s murder. She was an amazing young woman. I met her when I went to Atlanta to work with Ella Baker, and Harmony was one of the SNCC volunteers there. She was a student at Spelman. But she was from Chicago and came back here at the end of the spring semester to do organizing. She’d already been arrested three times in the South, during sit-ins and trying to register voters. That gave her a kind of glamour and credibility with young people in her neighborhood.”
She picked up a photograph from a small desk. “I found this after you called last week. Harmony’s mother gave it to me after the funeral. And when we started the Freedom Center, we named it in Harmony’s honor, after her favorite Bible verse.”
The old eight-by-ten showed the young woman whose face I’d seen in the Herald-Star story, but more alert, more attractive, than in the old file photo. She was standing next to SNCC founder Ella Baker. Both women were smiling, but with a kind of fundamental seriousness that made you feel the importance of their mission. The picture had been inscribed, “Let justice pour down like waters.”
I handed back the picture. “I hope you realize that I’m not revisiting her death but trying to find Steve Sawyer, the man who was convicted of killing her. You said on the phone you hadn’t been happy with the verdict.”
“No, I wasn’t, and I did try to go to the police when I learned about the arrest.” Sister Frankie frowned over her teacup. “You see, Harmony and I were marching next to each other when she suddenly collapsed. I thought at first it was the heat. You have to understand, the noise was so intense, and the heat, and the hate… We couldn’t hear each other, let alone any individual voices from the mob. But all the young men from the neighborhood, all those gangbangers, they were clustered around the leadership-Dr. King, Al Raby, and so on-near the front of the march.”
She flashed a wry smile. “We women were at the back… Women and children last, you know, when it comes to public action or recognition… Harmony got hit from the side. At the moment, it was so shocking, I couldn’t think at all, let alone analyze what happened or even think about looking for a killer.
“Later, though, after the funeral, after the horror of the march and Harmony’s death subsided a little, I started thinking it over. The missile had to have come out of the mob, out of the crowd surging around us. All the gang members were up front, you see, around Dr. King and Al Raby. The person who killed her was at the side, and that meant it couldn’t have been a black person. The mob would have murdered any black man if he’d been in their midst.”
I felt let down. I’d been pinning my hopes on something substantial, an explicit identification. “So you didn’t see who hit her?”
She shook her head. “I offered to testify at the trial, but Steve Sawyer’s attorney wouldn’t put me on the witness list. I tried to insist, but my bishop called me and told me I was out of line. The cardinal was trying to calm passions in the city, and, there I was, stirring them up.” She smiled sadly. “Nowadays, that wouldn’t stop me. But then, I was only twenty-six, and I didn’t know how far I could go before the hierarchy would stop me.”
“What was it you thought you could add, your opinion about where the gang members were standing relative to you and Harmony?”
“No. It was something else. One of the boys had a camera. He was taking pictures of us, and I hoped-”
A loud bang cut her off midsentence. A rifle report… an M-80? Glass splintered and jangled, a large starfish-shaped break now in the window over the flowers. Sister Frankie sprang to her feet as a bottle filled with liquid sailed through the break, the telltale rag in its mouth.
“Get down! Get down!” I screamed.
She was bending down to pick up the bottle when a second bottle flew in. It hit her in the head and burst into flames. I grabbed the throw from the daybed and flung it and myself on her, wrapping her up, rolling her along the floor. I heard a third bottle land, and then screams from the street, car tires screeching, and, above it all, the hissing of fire, the snapping of flames, as fire grabbed books, bookcases, my own jacket. Choking on smoke and gasoline fumes, I rolled myself on top of Sister Frankie, trying to put out the fire licking at the arms of my jacket. Nun, throw, detective-an ungainly bundle-rolling to the door. I stuck up a quickly blistering arm, fumbled for the knob, tumbled into the hall.
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 warrior in a rickshaw 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.
Hardball Page 19