Hardball

by Sara Paretsky

  He snapped his cellphone shut and stormed through the revolving door. “Les” had told him, had he? That man with the sandy hair and cold eyes: that was Les Strangwell.

  I took my coffee out onto the plaza and sat in the shade. What line connected Strangwell to Alito? Of course, ex-cops do freelance work all the time, but what kind of security work did the Krumas campaign… George Dornick. Dornick was advising Brian on terrorism and Homeland Security issues. He was Alito’s ex-partner. Maybe Dornick was throwing some crumbs his way.

  But what crumbs? I thought of my apartment. Someone who knew how to pick locks in a sophisticated way had gotten in there. A cop would have access to all kinds of tools. And George Dornick, with his special security services, had access to even more. But what could I have that Dornick, let alone Les Strangwell, might want? The picture of my dad’s softball team? Larry Alito had been in it, as had Dornick, Bobby Mallory, and a lot of other guys.

  Alito was proud of his police service. It defined him. I couldn’t imagine any reason why he would want the picture unless it was pure spite against me. But there wasn’t any reason for that, either.

  I didn’t have enough data to make up a believable story. I gave up trying, and took the El back to my office. Elton Grainger was out front, hawking Streetwise. He didn’t recognize me at first. But when he realized I’d been in a fire, he was all sympathy.

  “And a nun got killed, you say? Oh, Vic, I don’t have a TV, I don’t see the news. That’s terrible. No wonder you haven’t been around. How’s that cute cousin of yours?”

  “Cute as ever.” I tried not to grind my teeth. “Anyone been coming around looking for me while I’ve been away?”

  “I haven’t been looking. But I’ll put out a guest book. Anyone comes up to the door, they got to sign in with me.”

  He parodied a hotel doorman, and I had to laugh. Of course it was idiotic to think Elton would pay attention to anyone scouting out my office. I typed in the code on the door lock and went inside, keeping a hand on the handle of my gun in its tuck holster.

  When I was inside, I searched the office, from the cot to the bathroom I shared with my sculpting lease-mate, but no one was there. I answered a few e-mails. But I had reached the end of my stamina, and set out for home.

  When I got there, I found Petra out in the backyard with the dogs. Mr. Contreras had his barbecue going. She was sitting on the grass with her arms around Mitch, who acknowledged my arrival by lifting his head to look at me. Peppy, at least, came over to meet me.

  “Poor Peewee is beat.They got her working too hard,” Mr. Contreras announced. “We’re doing burgers and corn. You want some?”

  I accepted gratefully, and went upstairs for wine and a salad, leaving my hat and gloves. I brought some cushions down with me and stretched out on the grass, where I could see my cousin’s face. She looked pinched and anxious. But when she saw me studying her, she tried to grin in her usual enthusiastic fashion.

  “I’m pretty beat myself, first day back on the job. I had to go to the Prudential Plaza this afternoon, and I finally got a look at Les Strangwell.”

  “You didn’t talk to him, did you?” Petra asked, a little breathless.

  “Not about you, not about anything. Guy has freaky eyes, don’t you think?”

  She shivered but didn’t say anything.

  “Petra, are you in trouble at work?”

  Mr. Contreras frowned and started to protest, but he caught my little headshake and was silent.

  “No, no! Why should I be in trouble? I do whatever they tell me to, and faster than a speeding bullet.”

  “You just seemed jumpy on the phone today. And you’re definitely not your usual high-voltage self tonight.”

  She played with her stack of rubber bracelets. “It’s like Uncle Sal said: they’re working me too hard. I even have to go back in tonight, as soon as I scarf down some of Uncle Sal’s home cooking. What took you downtown? Are you still looking for that missing gangbanger? Did you think you’d find him in the Prudential building?”

  “Yep. Selling bonds out of the fiftieth-floor office. Actually, I’m going back out to Joliet tomorrow afternoon. Johnny Merton, the head snake charmer, has agreed to see me again, and I’m hoping the murder of Sister Frances may jolt him into telling me something.”

  “You’re going out to the prison tomorrow?” she repeated, looking at me anxiously.

  “Why not?”

  She bit her lips. “Just… uh… I don’t know… you’re still hurting, I mean.”

  “I’m a renewable resource.” I took a hamburger from Mr. Contreras and sat up to keep it out of Peppy’s mouth. “I’m like Hercules, except I regenerate my spleen, my skin, and my brain every morning.”

  She laughed in a distracted, forced way and changed the subject, also in a distracted, forced way. She fed most of her hamburger to Mitch, then got up to leave.

  I followed her to the side gate. “Petra! What is wrong here?”

  Her large eyes filled with tears, and she stared at me for a long pause, then said, “Leave me alone, can’t you? Do you have to pry into everybody’s business?”

  “No,” I said slowly. “No, of course not. But you’re acting-”

  “I know what I’m doing. Leave me alone!” She slammed the gate.

  “You haven’t been riding her over your place being torn apart, have you?” Mr. Contreras and the dogs had bustled over to join us.

  I shook my head. “I wish now I had gone to her office today. Maybe I will after I get done with Johnny tomorrow.”

  But the next day was when I came back from Stateville to find that intruders had been in my office and wrecked it with the force of an F5 tornado. That was when I found Petra’s white rubber ONE bracelet on the cement apron outside my back door. That was the night I spent with Bobby Mallory and the FBI trying to find any trace of my cousin.

  After that sleepless night, my uncle Peter and aunt Rachel arrived. My uncle unleashed his own F5 on me, blaming me, at high volume, for anything that might have gone wrong with Petra. I tried to ride out the storm without fighting back because I knew raw rage was the only way he was able to express his fear. I was afraid, too, and so was my aunt. Finally, after several hours of his useless screaming, Rachel took Peter downtown to meet with the FBI’s Special Agent in Charge.

  33

  LOSING A FOLLOWER

  AFTER PETER AND RACHEL LEFT, I HAD A LONG TALK WITH Mr. Contreras, which included a promise to involve him in any action necessary to rescue Petra. I even shared with him the list I’d made of all the odd questions I had about my cousin during the past few weeks: the Nellie Fox baseball, her relentless interest in the contents of my trunk, her wish to see any storage places in the old family home in Back of the Yards, her effort to tour my own childhood home in South Chicago, her arrival at Sister Frankie’s gutted apartment last week, the smoke bomb that forced the Andarra family to vacate the house the night before Sister Frankie’s murder.

  At first he put up a spirited defense of her youth and impulsiveness, but by the time I got to her late-night trip to the Freedom Center even Mr. Contreras was uneasy. “But, doll, if she was doing something she shouldn’ta been, it was because she was pushed into it. You listen to me. She’s as good as gold, little Peewee, and don’t you go thinking otherwise. When you get to the end of this story, you’re going to find Johnny Merton was behind it. Mark my words.”

  “Let’s find her first and argue over who got her in over her head later, right?”

  He agreed gruffly, and watched while I printed out a couple of shots I’d taken of Petra on my cellphone. I also printed random pictures off the Web of young blond women: some celebrities, some pictures that people had posted on their blogs, finishing with a few shots of myself.

  I uploaded the photo I’d snapped of Alito and Strangwell at the Prudential Plaza the other day. It wasn’t a very clear shot, but it was the only one I could find of Alito. Strangwell was highly visible. His website showed him with various Il
linois politicos, with U.S. presidents and a Supreme Court justice, and with entertainers like Michael Jordan. I guess if you were coming to Strangwell for help, the portraits showed you what kind of access a thousand dollars an hour bought you. I printed a couple of those images, and pulled one of Dornick from the Mountain Hawk Security website as well.

  The old man finally left when I went into the bathroom to get ready for my day outside. As I covered my face and arms with protective creams, it seemed somehow wrong to be tending to my body when my cousin’s life might be in danger. I put on my hat, my gloves, checked the clip in my gun and put it in its tuck holster, and went out the back door.

  Jake Thibaut was on his little porch with a cup of coffee. “That’s a fetching costume. You going undercover on a Civil War plantation?”

  I tried to smile but found my voice cracking instead. “It’s because of the fire. Because of… Sorry, my cousin has vanished in a way that has me pretty freaked. I’ve got to go, see what I can find out.”

  He walked down the five steps to our common landing. “You need any kind of help from me? You know, anything that doesn’t involve a handgun or some kind of physical heroism?”

  I started to say no, then remembered that Thibaut had seen the people who broke into my apartment as they left early Tuesday morning. I pulled my folder of photographs from my briefcase and showed them to him.

  “I know it was dark, and these aren’t great shots, but could any of these guys be the ones you saw?”

  “It’s impossible to say.” He tapped the picture of Alito and Strangwell. “They’re sitting, so I can’t tell how tall they are. This one”-he was touching Alito-“he’s broad enough, but… I’d have to see them walking. I measure people’s height against Bessie. My bass,” he added when he saw my puzzled look.

  I put the pictures back in the folder. As I started down the stairs, Thibaut said, “They looked menacing. Remember that.”

  I nodded soberly. Menacing didn’t even begin to cover the way these people had acted.

  I went out the back gate and picked up my car in the alley. In the frenzy we’d all been in since last night, no one had talked about seeing if Petra were at home, doped or… or not dead. I was going to make her apartment my first port of call, then head to South Chicago.

  I hadn’t had time to replace the lump of melted plastic in my wallet with a new driver’s license, and I didn’t want to waste an hour explaining that to a traffic cop, so for the few miles that lay between me and Petra’s loft I stayed within the thirty-mile-per-hour limit, stopped at all stop signs, and even braked when the light turned yellow.

  My picklocks were still in my glove compartment. I rang Petra’s bell, but there was no answer, even though I leaned on it for a good thirty seconds. I didn’t want to be seen using my picks in broad daylight, so I got inside on the tried-and-true method of ringing every bell in the building. There is usually someone careless enough to buzz you in, and I was lucky with the third bell I pushed.

  I took the stairs up to the fourth floor two at a time. By the time I reached Petra’s door, I had a stitch in my side where my gun was poking me. The woman who’d buzzed me in was shouting up the stairwell. I tried to steady my voice when I called down an apology, I’d rung the wrong door. The voice of an educated white woman was reassuring to her, and she called back an acknowledgment. I heard her door close, and I knelt to work Petra’s lock.

  My hands were shaking. I was slow, exhaustingly slow, and my cotton gloves kept slipping on the picks. I took off the stupid gloves but still felt like I was stirring molasses with my fingers.

  When I finally got inside, the apartment had a churchlike quiet. A tap was dripping somewhere. That ping of water on enamel was all I could hear. I found myself tiptoeing through the big room that made up the bulk of the loft, looking for any signs of my cousin or anything that would give me a hint about where she’d gone.

  Petra hadn’t bothered much with furnishing the place. She had an overstuffed sofa, one of those big, sacklike things, covered in a kind of taupe denim. An outsize teddy bear was sitting in the middle of it, staring at the windows, with a sad smile on its face. Its wide plastic eyes unnerved me. I finally turned it facedown.

  She had a television on a rolling stand, a rolling computer table, and an armchair that matched the sofa. She had no curtains for the long row of windows, just the blinds that came with the apartment.

  I hadn’t been here, except the night I unlocked the door for her, so I had no idea what might be missing if she’d left under her own steam. No drugs in the bathroom, but her electric toothbrush and Waterpik were still in their stands. Her tube of Tom’s Toothpaste was carefully rolled from the bottom up.

  In the area where she slept, she had a futon and a dresser. A change of clothes was tossed carelessly across the futon, trailing onto the floor, and more clothes were half on hangers or had been allowed to fall to the closet floor.

  A stack of wicker baskets by the bed held books, magazines, and a box of condoms. I wished I knew who she was dating or whether the box was simply there for insurance. I flipped through The Lost Diary of Don Juan, hoping that the lost diary of Petra Warshawski might fall out, but I didn’t see anything in her handwriting, not even a checkbook. With someone in the Millennium Gen, you couldn’t tell if that meant she had run away, taking her checkbook with her, or that she did all her banking online.

  The one thing I had hoped to find was her laptop, so I could see who she’d been e-mailing what to. Although she seemed to do most of her communicating by texting, a computer might have longer documents, more of a key to what she was doing. At a minimum, I could have seen what websites she’d been visiting lately.

  The big room flowed into a kitchen with a tiled work island and a big cooktop, with a grill and a restaurant-sized exhaust fan. The fancy appliances seemed wasted on my cousin. Her refrigerator held wine and blueberry yogurt and not much else. In the morning, she’d grab a carton and eat it on the bus. At lunch, she’d pick up a sandwich and eat it at her desk. And at night, the group of friends she’d made would all go out for Thai or Mexican. Or so I pictured it.

  A door by the refrigerator led to a small deck and back stairs. When I pulled the door open, it swung crazily on its hinges and then fell off. I jumped out of the way just in time to avoid a smash on the head.

  The noise, the shock of the door collapsing under my hand… I leaned against the work island, shaking. When my heart was more or less normal, I saw my gun was in my right hand. I hadn’t noticed drawing it.

  Whoever had come in through the back hadn’t bothered with the finesse of picklocks; they’d simply crowbarred the hinges out of the doorjamb and then propped the door up when they left.

  What had they taken? The computer? My cousin at gunpoint? I moved the door and went down the back stairs. There were cigarette butts on one landing, but they looked old, the residue of a smoker sent outside to indulge, not a recent watcher. The stairs ended in an asphalt areaway that was separated from the alley by a high fence and a gate. I opened the gate. Its lock was still in place. But a row of parking spaces lay behind the gate, and the intruder could have waited out there for someone to park and simply followed that person in.

  I propped the gate open and walked the length of the alley. My cousin’s shiny Pathfinder was sitting there, all locked up. I opened it and looked through the receipts and empty drink containers. I got down on my knees and looked under the seats, in the glove compartment, in the spare-tire compartment, under the hood, under the fenders. I detected that Petra drank a lot of smoothies and bottled water, didn’t go in for soft drinks, ate at El Gato Loco, and wasn’t careful with her credit-card chits. After searching the alley, the only other clue I found was that a lot of people drink at night and can’t be bothered to find a trash can for their empties.

  I returned to Petra’s place through the back. I needed to do something about the broken kitchen door. On my way out through the front, I saw the building-management company name on
a plaque. I called them to report the broken door. And called Bobby Mallory to tell him that someone had broken into Petra’s apartment.

  “That ‘someone’ wasn’t you, was it, Vicki?”

  “They broke the back door getting in. I was there just now, trying to see what was missing, and I’m wondering if they stole her computer. Or maybe forced her at gunpoint to go into my office.”

  Bobby catechized me on what my aunt and uncle were up to. When I told them they were meeting with the FBI this morning, he was skep tical. The Bureau was stretched too thin with terror watching, he claimed. He didn’t think they could find Petra even if she’d been kidnapped.

  Bobby’s comments only increased my own high level of terror. I wished I knew whether my next step was a waste of time or not. Fear paralyzes you, makes it hard to act creatively.

  It wasn’t until I’d driven three blocks that I realized I had company. After the fire bombs, after the trashing of my home and office, after Petra’s disappearance, I should be taking triple precautions, making sure no one had planted bugs or bombs in my car before climbing into it, riding around the block two or three times to make sure I was clean before I went anywhere. It was only this sixth sense I’d gotten from all my years in the business that made me note that the bike messenger, the same one who’d been riding behind me on my way over to Petra’s, was in my side mirror again.

  A bike was a great way to do a tail within the city. Any maneuver I made, he could react faster to than a car. Of course, he couldn’t follow me onto Lake Shore Drive. But anyone smart enough to use a messenger as a tail had a car or two as backup.

  I pretended I hadn’t noticed him and got onto the drive. I didn’t bother to check for tails. If they wanted me to know, they’d reveal themselves. If they didn’t, my best strategy was not to try to flush them out now.

  I pulled off at the first downtown exit, and stopped at the second hotel I came to. I turned my car over to the valet, explained I was going to a meeting and that I wasn’t a guest, and went inside.