Hardball

by Sara Paretsky

  Rivers studied me up and down with somber eyes, then handed the bag to me. “I’m going to take a chance on you, Ms. Detective. You’ve extended yourself here today. And if you don’t come through with the money, heck, I can leave your body in George Dornick’s office, claim he was responsible.”

  It was a feeble joke, but we had all been so tense that we burst out laughing. All but Kimathi, who jerked away when he saw me laugh. “They say I the song-and-dance man… They laugh.” That sobered me up in a hurry.

  I asked Rivers to let me out through the back, into the alley, just to give myself a little comfort zone. On my way out, I again urged the chess players to follow with Kimathi as fast as possible.

  Once I reached Morrell’s car, I moved quickly, pushed by a nervous energy so frantic that I found myself flooring the accelerator and taking terrible risks in the traffic on the Ryan. At least I wasn’t texting, or playing the tuba, at the same time.

  I pulled off the expressway, got out of the car, and tried to take some deep breaths, tried to regain some kind of center, but all I could see was my dad, the face I loved and trusted, looking through a one-way window into an interrogation room.

  “You all right, there?” A police car had pulled up behind me without my noticing.

  I felt the blood drain into my legs, but I clutched the car door and managed a smile. “Thanks. I had a cramp in my foot and thought I’d better get off to work it out.”

  The officer tipped a wave but waited until I got into the car and slowly merged onto the Ryan. He followed me, as I studied traffic in my side mirrors, kept to the speed limit, signaled my lane changes. A bubble of hysteria kept threatening to overwhelm me. We serve and protect: the Chicago police motto. Was he protecting me? Was he making sure I hadn’t pulled over for a drug deal? Was he bored? What did he do in the station when he brought in a suspect?

  I left the Ryan again at the main downtown exit and put the car in the underground garage near Millennium Park. I locked the red bag in the trunk. If I got to a point where I had to run, a bag like that would slow me down. It would also be easy for some tracker to follow.

  Out on the street, the late August sun was blistering, and all that I had in the way of protection was my Cubs cap. No jacket, no lotions to protect my skin. I felt such a surge of self-loathing, anyway, that it seemed to me it would be good if the sun peeled the skin off my arms.

  I was in too much of a hurry for public transportation and hailed a cab to take me to the top of Michigan Avenue. There’s a vertical shopping mall across the street from the Drake Hotel, where my uncle was staying. I went into the mall and found a stationer, where I picked up a pad of paper, an envelope, and a pen.

  The Four Seasons Hotel was attached to the mall at the sixth floor. I walked through the connecting door into the subdued colors and calm of wealth, smiled at a concierge, and found an alcove where I could do some writing. I chewed on the capped end of the pen, trying to figure out what I wanted to say.

  Dear Peter

  Your big brother Tony covered your ass all those years ago, but I know now that you killed Harmony Newsome. There is no statute of limitations on murder, and I don’t feel Tony’s protective attachment to you, I won’t try to save you. What I’m wondering, though, is why you would sacrifice Petra. I thought at least you had a father’s normal love for his children.

  If you want to talk to me, I will be in the gazebo across from the Drake for ten minutes. If you don’t show, I’ll be on my way. Will Bobby Mallory sit on the truth for you?

  V.I.

  I sealed up my note in the envelope and addressed it to my uncle. Across the street, I entered the lower lobby of the Drake, where there’s an arcade of shops. A bellman was standing near the stairs leading to the Drake’s main lobby. I gave him a five and asked him to deliver the envelope at once. Then I walked quickly through the arcade to the hotel’s north entrance.

  It was 1:23 when I handed the letter to the bellman. Assume Peter was in his room. Assume the bellman delivered the envelope right away. Peter would call Dornick… or Alito… or Les Strangwell. Something should happen within twenty minutes.

  Just across the street from the Drake is a little park, a triangle made by the hotel, Michigan Avenue on the left, and Lake Shore Drive as the hypotenuse. Beyond the drive lie some of the city’s most beautiful sand beaches. This time of year, the Oak Street Beach was packed with tourists, tanners, swimmers, and volleyballers, but the triangular park was essentially empty. A homeless man was asleep on a patch of grass outside its gazebo.

  I walked along the row of cars parked on the south side of the triangle. Only one had someone sitting inside. There was a service van in front of one of the condos, and it could have held a surveillance team, but I didn’t think Dornick or Strangwell would feel the need to keep that sophisticated of a watch on Peter.

  I walked back to Michigan Avenue, which was filled with shoppers and tourists. A trio of black youths banged homemade drums on the corner.

  A tunnel goes under the avenue, but I crossed at street level. I was in the company of a woman who had a leash with a dog at the end of it in one hand and a cellphone in the other that was glued to her ear. A nanny with a baby buggy, also on a cellphone, was behind me. I felt reassuringly anonymous, just one more person in a ball cap enjoying the end of summer.

  I sat on a bench in a bus stop on the far corner and watched the park. An elderly man with a toy poodle shuffled over from one of the condos near the hotel. The dog sniffed at late-blooming orange flowers while the man stared vacantly into the distance. A hard-muscled young woman jogged past the gazebo, down a ramp leading under Lake Shore Drive and to the beach. A few bicyclists emerged on the return route.

  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 Par
k, 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 s
kin 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.