Hardball

by Sara Paretsky

  There’s a network of underground passages that connect the hotels and high-rises on the east side of the Loop. I took the lobby escalator down, slipped behind a pillar, and knelt down. I didn’t see anyone behind me, but I still took off my Scarlett O’Hara hat and left it behind a potted palm. It just made me too damned easy to track.

  I waited until a group of women all came down together, laughing and talking, and moved just in front of them so that we all seemed to be walking along the underground corridor together. They peeled off at one of the subterranean take-out joints.

  I darted into a neighboring gift shop, where I bought a Cubs cap. Going up and down escalators, buying a frozen yogurt, I didn’t see the same face twice. I bought a red CHICAGO sweatshirt at another gift shop and pulled it on over my linen jacket. Although the weight of the sweatshirt on a hot day made me feel as though I were encased in a burka, I wasn’t instantly recognizable.

  Still underground, I finally headed to my original destination: the Illinois Central station. There was a twenty-minute wait for the next train to South Chicago. I bought a ticket and stood near the door leading to the tracks. When they called my train, I waited until the last possible moment before sliding through the doors and down the stairs. I thought I was clean, but you never know.

  The slow ride to South Chicago was like a backward journey through my life, the ride I’d taken with my mother so many times as a child, past the University of Chicago, where my mother had wanted me to study. “The best, Victoria. You need to have the best,” she would say when the train stopped there to let off students.

  Ninety-first Street. End of the line. A certain desolation attached to the conductor’s announcement. Life ends here. I walked the four blocks from the station to my old home.

  At least Señora Andarra’s grandson and his friends weren’t visible this morning, but a couple of helpless-looking men were sitting on a curb with a bottle in a brown paper bag. Somewhere, a car stereo was pouring out a bass so loudly that the air was vibrating from it.

  At my old home, I saw the boarded-over window that had been broken to throw in the smoke bomb. The prisms across the top were splintered, too. I concentrated instead on the decorative-glass fanlight over the front door, which was still intact.

  I rang the bell. After a few minutes, when I wondered if she’d gone out, Señora Andarra opened it the length of its stubby chain. “Esta ventana,” I stumbled in my bad Spanish, pointing at the fan. “Mi madre amó esta ventana también.”

  The fact that my mother also loved that window didn’t make Señora Andarra smile, but it did keep her from slamming the door in my face. Using painful pidgin Spanish interlaced with English and Italian, I tried to explain that I was a detective, that I had photographs. Could she look at them, let me know if any of the people in them had been at her house when the bomb came through the window?

  The whole time I spoke, she stared at me through the crack in the door, her dark eyes frowning in her nut-colored face. When I finally stumbled to an end of my story, she took the folder from me. As I’d feared, she singled Petra out with no trouble.

  “¿Su hija?” she asked.

  I was tired of everyone thinking Petra was my daughter, so I dutifully explained she was my cousin. “Mi prima. ¿Y los hombres?”

  I thought she lingered on the shot of Alito with Strangwell, but I couldn’t be sure. She finally shook her head, and said she didn’t know any of them, hadn’t seen any of them. I walked back to the station and waited for the northbound train to whisk me back to civilization, or whatever it was.

  34

  THE BOYS IN THE BACK ROOM

  ON THE TRAIN NORTH, I CALLED CONRAD RAWLINGS AT the Fourth District. Of course, I should have gone to see him before visiting Señora Andarra, but I didn’t feel I had spare time for getting police permission to talk to people in my cousin’s orbit.

  Conrad was predictably annoyed, but he’d seen the news about Petra; he was more interested in finding out why she’d been at a crime scene in his bailiwick than yainching at me for not calling him first.

  “Is there anyone else you can place at the crime scene that you might care to mention? Not that we cops can compel testimony. The laws keep us from getting answers to questions that might help solve crimes. But if you’re in the mood…”

  I ignored the savagery in his tone. “I showed Ms. Andarra a shot of Larry Alito with Les Strangwell, but they didn’t look familiar to her.”

  “Spell the names.”

  I could hear him tapping at his computer.

  “Any special reason you think a cop and a politico-a big Gorgon zola politico, from what Google is telling me-would be involved in a two-bit home invasion?”

  “Alito’s an ex-cop, and he’s sniffing around this story somewhere, somehow. Strangwell is my cousin’s boss at the Krumas campaign.”

  “And that’s reason enough to suspect he’s a villain, because anyone who tries to boss the Warshawski women around must be a criminal?”

  “I can’t talk about this now. Not with you hostile and me out of my head with worry.” I pressed the OFF button.

  A detective who’s out of her head with worry is useless. I slipped off my shoes and pulled my feet up to sit cross-legged on the seat. Took deep, low breaths, tried to empty my mind of fear, to fill it with a useful to-do list.

  The police and FBI had both canvassed the street where I have my office, to see if anyone could describe the men who’d been with Petra, or at least the car they’d driven-if they’d come by car. Naturally, they wouldn’t share the results with me. I didn’t want to retrace all those steps, not on my own: there must be several hundred people in that section of Milwaukee, between the businesses and the apartments. But I could talk to Elton Grainger. I couldn’t remember whether I’d seen him yesterday or not. He was usually at the coffee bar across the street during the day. If he hadn’t been too drunk, he might remember seeing Petra with her entourage.

  Petra’s college roommate, Kelsey Ingalls. My aunt wouldn’t give me her phone number, but Kelsey was the person Petra might have confided in. I could surely find her in one of my subscription databases.

  Those two tasks meant I should go to my office, but when the train pulled into the Randolph Street station I realized I was underneath the building where the Krumas campaign had its headquarters. Maybe Petra had confided in one of her coworkers. Maybe Les Strangwell would tell me what she’d been working on. What was it Johnny’s daughter had said? Enough “maybes” make a hive.

  I went through the maze of underground corridors and found my hat where I’d left it, stuffed behind the potted palm: not a good mark for the cleaning staff but easier for me. I put the Cubs hat and CHICAGO sweatshirt in my briefcase. I kept forgetting the Nellie Fox baseball. It was in there, too. My case now bulged so much with discarded clothes that I couldn’t zip it shut.

  I checked in with the lobby guard, who phoned up to the campaign. She did a creditable job with my name, Petra having probably accustomed her to it. The guard looked at my passport, printed out a pass, and directed me to the elevators that would carry me to 41.

  When I got off the elevator, I barely had time to admire the giant red-white-and-blue posters with Brian’s bright smile and keen eyes. A thirty-something woman, with a mass of reddish curls, hurried through the double glass doors to greet me. She was carelessly dressed in a yellow shirt whose tails partly hung out over a floral-print skirt, and she started speaking almost before she was through the doors.

  “Where have… Oh! Who are you?” Her hands, which she’d been brandishing in annoyance, fell loosely at her sides.

  “V. I. Warshawski… Who are you?”

  “Oh! Petra’s cousin, the detective. Petra forgets her ID about once a week, and the front desk has to call for permission to let her in. I was hoping this meant she’d shown up. Where is she?”

  “I wish I knew. I want to find out what she’s been working on to see if it’ll give me any hint about where she might have gone.”


  The woman glanced uncertainly at the double glass doors. “Maybe I’d better ask Mr. Strangwell. She’s been doing more for him lately than for me.”

  “You’re…” I squeezed my eyes shut, trying to remember if Petra had ever called her boss by name.

  “Tania Crandon. I run the NetSquad, which is where Petra started. Before she got so important that she only takes orders from Mr. Strangwell.” When she realized how resentful she sounded, the skin at her throat and chest flushed in the blotchy way that afflicts very fair people.

  She was wearing an ID around her neck, which she swiped against a pad on the doors. When they clicked open, I followed her into the campaign hive. Her cellphone tweeted to let her know she had messages coming in. She glanced at these and thumbed responses as we walked past campaign workers. They were gathered in knots over computer screens, arguing in corners, answering cellphones and landlines, shrieking news at each other across the tops of cubicles.

  Ms. Crandon looked like a senior citizen in here. Most of the staff was Petra’s age. Regardless of race or sex, they all seemed to share my cousin’s exuberant energy. Maybe Krumas really did signal a change in politics as usual in Illinois.

  Various youths scurried up to Tania with questions. One asked for Petra. They couldn’t respond to some rumor on drilling for oil in the Shawnee National Forest without her input, she’d been doing the research.

  “See me after lunch,” Tania said. “I’ll have something for you by then.”

  Our destination was the southwest corner of the floor. This part of the operation was quieter, with a row of offices banked along the south wall. The corner suite included a secretary, who was handling a phone console with the panache of Solti on the podium. Tania bent to murmur in the secretary’s ear. The woman looked at me in surprise, made a call of her own, hit a key on the computer on the desk, and unlocked the inner-office door.

  Tania followed close behind her. They shut the door too fast for me to see inside, but not too fast for me to hear my uncle’s voice raised in a hoarse shout. So Peter, too, wanted to know what Strangwell had his daughter doing. That was a help. The politico might share more with her father than with her PI cousin.

  A few armchairs were arranged to give visitors a view of the Bean, the big sculpture in Millennium Park in which you can see sky, city, and self reflected in its stainless steel curves. I stood for a few moments at the window, watching tourists photograph themselves, but the light was so bright that I had to put my dark glasses on, and then I couldn’t see much.

  As the minutes stretched on, I left the window. I tried the office door, but it was locked. I scowled at it, then left the area looking for the NetSquad. I had a feeling that if I didn’t find Petra’s coworkers now, I’d be hustled off the floor before I could talk to them.

  The campaigners were deep in conferences or text messages and cellphones. A youth who finally responded to me told me the NetSquad was in Sector 8.

  “Sector 8 is which way?”

  “We’re in pods. Communications is Pod 1, nearest the elevators. Pod 2 is R and D. Sector 8, the NetSquad, straddles the two.” He went back to his computer, finished with me.

  Pods, sectors: they’d clearly grown up playing too many sci-fi games on their handhelds. The energy and self-absorption of the campaigners, which had seemed entertaining at first, began to grate on me.

  When I finally found Sector 8, I saw the young woman who’d wanted Petra’s input on oil drilling in the Shawnee Forest. About five kids were at their computers. It was hard to get a real count because they never sat still for long. Someone would type furiously for a bit, yell, “I’m sending you this, read it before it goes live,” and then take off, while another two or three staffers would emerge from other pods, look at what was on-screen, sit down to type a comment, then drift away again.

  I finally managed to get a young man with a shock of black hair falling into his eyes to pay attention to me. “Petra Warshawski.”

  “Petra? She’s not here. She disappeared. They think she’s been kidnapped.”

  The magic words brought the whole pod to his desk, where they started arguing about whether Petra had been kidnapped or had disappeared on a secret assignment for Strangwell.

  “Petra could be doing an undercover assignment for the Chicago Strangler,” a young woman with a number of piercings said. “She never says what the Strangler has her doing.”

  “Running a hit squad,” the sole African-American youth on the team suggested.

  “The Strangler feels free to machine-gun the whole opposition in broad daylight,” the pierced woman said. “You wouldn’t have to be undercover for that.”

  “Who would Petra talk to if she had a tough problem to unknot?” I asked.

  That quieted the group for a minute, but a young woman in jeans and layered tank tops said, “We don’t work like that. It’s more, like, how do I do this, and we all, like, brainstorm and come up with different ideas. Brian’s campaign, it’s about change. It’s not about personal glory. So we, like, all work together.”

  “What if Petra had a personal problem?” I asked.

  The African-American kid said, “She didn’t have personal problems that I could see… I mean, before the Strangler pulled her off the team. Then, I don’t know if working for him went to her head or he had her doing something she didn’t like, but she stopped eating with us after work. We don’t know what she’s doing or who she’s talking to.”

  “Guy’s a fucking organizing genius,” the first kid I’d spoken to said.

  “Granted,” the African-American youth said. “But would you want to go to El Gato Loco with him?”

  The pierced woman laughed. Another young woman came along and asked who was going where for lunch. Before they all took off, I handed cards around.

  “I’m her cousin. She disappeared in a way that’s got me seriously worried. And the Chicago police and the FBI are on it, too, so I’m surprised they haven’t been around to talk to you. If you can think of anyone she might confide in, or anything she’s said that would tell me why she took off, call me please.”

  They were e-mailing with excitement before I even left the pod. Police, FBI: way too cool to keep to yourself. I walked slowly back to Strangwell-the Strangler’s-corner of the floor. The kids admired him, but he frightened them. And, at the same time, they had been jealous of Petra for being singled out to work for him.

  Strangwell’s door stood open now. Tania Crandon was next to it, working her cellphone. The secretary was standing next to her desk, talking on the landline. Strangwell, frowning, watched from the doorway.

  “We didn’t know what happened to you!” Tania pocketed her phone.

  “I know. It’s a big operation, easy to get lost in.” I smiled amiably. “I wanted to talk to Petra’s coworkers, to see if she’d been in touch with any of them.”

  “And had she?” Strangwell asked.

  “I don’t think so. They say that she turned standoffish when she started working for you. Was that one of your conditions?”

  His cold eyes turned fractionally chillier. “I expect everyone who works for me to protect the confidentiality of our clients. The fact that NetSquad talked to you without permission makes me think I haven’t been clear in communicating that rule.”

  Tania Crandon flushed again. It was clearly supposed to be her fault that her team had chatted with me. She started to apologize, but I cut her short.

  “You have a young and energetic team. And I’m guessing that if you tamp down their exuberance, you’ll lose the best qualities of their work. I’m V. I. War-”

  “I know who you are. Your uncle is here. We’d all like to talk to you, to make sure you don’t do something that might jeopardize our ability to find Petra.”

  I didn’t know if he was being an SOB because I’d spoken to the NetSquad, or because I was Petra’s cousin and she’d disappeared on him-or because it was his nature-but I followed him into his office. I knew Peter was there, of co
urse, and it wasn’t surprising to see George Dornick, since he was advising the campaign on security, but I was startled to see Harvey Krumas as well.

  Of the four men, only Strangwell looked at ease, his cold, shrewd eyes surveying me to see how I was reacting to the group. Harvey and Peter were both flushed-whether from anger, fear, or some other emotion-I couldn’t decipher their expressions. Even Dornick, a vision in pearl-gray shantung and pink shirting, looked ill at ease.

  I moved forward before Strangwell could take complete control of the encounter. “Mr. Krumas, we met at your son’s fundraiser on Navy Pier. George, have you come in to augment police efforts to find Petra? Mr. Strangwell, can you tell us what Petra’s been working on the last ten days or so? She’s been seen in some odd places, and it would help if I knew whether you’d sent her to them or she’d been going on her own.”

  “Odd places?” Dornick said. “Like what?”

  “Like the Mighty Waters Freedom Center a few nights after it was fire-bombed.” I touched my face inadvertently. “Like my childhood home the night someone threw a smoke bomb through the window.”

  “Petra wouldn’t go to South Chicago, not unless you took her there. Damn it, Vic, if you put her in front of a crew of gangbangers-” My uncle’s outburst lacked conviction, apparently even to himself, since he let Dornick cut him off midsentence.

  “Les says Petra was playing at detective for you, Vicki.”

  “Vic,” I corrected.

  Strangwell ignored me. “I had to read Petra the riot act when I found she was looking up information for Vicki here on campaign time. I’m sorry, Peter. Now I can’t help wondering if I wounded her pride, and she ran away.”

  “It’s not like Petra to be hypersensitive,” my uncle said, “but you’re such a ruthless SOB, Strangwell, maybe you were crueler than you realized at the moment.”

  “This is a very strange chorus.” I was trying not to lose my temper because that would cost me judgment. “Is that what you did while I was waiting? Agree on the song and the harmony? Petra ran away because big, mean Les was too tough for her? I chewed her out good and hard for rummaging through my private possessions, and she bounced back like the proverbial Pillsbury Doughboy. But now you want me to think she might have run off because Les hurt her feelings?”