From the river’s edge, I looked back and finally saw the shack, almost invisible against the underbrush and discarded tires. It had a faded logo from the C &NW railroad on it; I suppose they’d once used it for storage. As I got closer, I saw Elton had put a rain barrel on the roof and fixed up a showerhead. There weren’t any windows in the shack, and the boards it was built with were gray-black with damp, but he had covered any holes with a variety of metal, Styrofoam, and plastic sheeting.
I clambered up the embankment and made my way around to the side where the door was. “Elton? You home? It’s V. I. Warshawski. We need to talk.”
I rapped smartly on the panel and heard a movement from inside the shack, an intake of a sob. I pulled open the ramshackle door. My cousin Petra blinked at me from a nest of sleeping bags.
“Vic! How did you know? Who told you? Who’s with you?”
I couldn’t speak. I was so overcome with relief at the sight of Petra that I just stood there, shaking my head in wonder.
47
A RIVER RUNS THROUGH IT
I WAS ON THE FLOOR, HOLDING PETRA, WHILE SHE SOBBED against my shoulder. “Vic, I’m so scared, it’s so awful, don’t yell at me. I didn’t mean… I didn’t want-”
“I’m not going to yell at you, little cousin,” I said softly, stroking her dirty hair, “when it’s my hot temper that made you too scared to trust me.”
“They told me if I talked to anyone, they’d shoot Mom and the girls and Daddy would go to prison, I didn’t know what to do. They said you wanted Daddy to go to prison, you were just using me, and if I didn’t help them, if I talked to you about what I was doing, you’d punish me and him and Mom and everyone.”
“Who are they? Les Strangwell? Dornick?”
She swallowed a sob and nodded.
Mosquitoes were swarming into the shack, biting us through our clothes. I had to close the door, although there wasn’t much air in the small space. With the door shut, it smelled of damp river mud and stale sweat. The only light came from a couple of makeshift skylights Elton had created by cutting squares in the roof and filling them with discarded windowpanes. Outside, the sun was starting to set. I could just make out my cousin’s bleached, frightened face.
“It started with the Nellie Fox baseball, didn’t it?” I said. “The day you found it in my trunk, you talked about it in the office.”
“Me and my ultra-big mouth! It was only partly the ball. Everything started at the fundraiser when I talked about Johnny Merton in front of that creepy Judge Coleman. I heard him tell Uncle Harvey that you’d better not be screwing around in the Harmony case, which at first I thought was funny. I thought he was saying something about you and music, or your mom, or something. And Uncle Harvey said they’d nailed the Anacondas for that, and he didn’t want this to be some snake coming back to life after its head got chopped off. And then, the day after the fundraiser, when Mr. Strangwell brought me in to work for him, he told me it was top secret because you wanted to sabotage Brian’s campaign.”
“I see. So he told you I had some kind of evidence that would destroy the campaign and you had to find it?”
A train thundered overhead, shaking the shack. We had to wait for it to pass before we could talk. When the noise finally died away, we could hear the ordinary sweet sounds of a summer’s evening, the birds’ last songs, the little insects chirruping.
“The evidence?” I prodded my cousin when she remained silent.
“At first, it seemed like a game, going around to all those places where Daddy and his folks used to live, and then it turned scary. When that nun got killed and you were in the hospital, they told me there would be something in her apartment, and they sent this horrible, horrible man to take me there. That was when I started to get really afraid and I almost told you, but then I thought of what they said about you being, like, an old lover of Johnny Merton’s and-”
“What!” I was jolted into sitting up. “Petra! Jesus, no! I represented him when I was a public defender, but he was one of the scariest people I ever met, at least until I got to know Les Strangwell. And you don’t sleep with your clients even if you want to. Please, tell me you believe me on this!”
“Don’t get mad at me, Vic, I can’t take it!” Her voice held an undercurrent of hysteria. She’d been alone with her fears too long.
“No, baby, I’m not mad at you. But it upsets me that they would tell such a big lie about me. I like you enough that I don’t want you to believe it, that’s all.”
“Okay,” she muttered.
I waited a tick, hoping for more, something like “Of course I don’t believe it,” but when she said nothing I pushed her to finish her story. “So you came along to Sister Frankie’s apartment with the horrible man… Was that Larry Alito?… And when you found me there, you signaled to him to leave. And then you texted him and told him to come get the bag of evidence.”
“It sounds awful,” she whispered, “hearing you say it out loud, but it got worse. They told me you had these old pictures, that was what they wanted to find, but they wanted the baseball, too. See, every morning Mr. Strangwell would ask for a report from me on what you were doing and what you were looking for, and when I told him you wanted me to do a little work for you, then he was really excited and said to do everything you asked and report back to him. But when I looked up those contractors, I saw their address was the same as Uncle Harvey’s Chicago apartment, and that was weird. So I asked Mr. Strangwell, and then he said… he said…” For a moment, she couldn’t go on, but then she managed to pull herself together. “That was when the Strangler said if I didn’t do exactly what he said, Mom and the girls would die and Daddy would go to prison.”
I kept petting her and crooning to her, trying to assure her that we could fix it all so that no one got killed or sent to prison, although I wasn’t sure about either of those things. Finally, when she seemed a bit calmer, I asked how she’d ended up here in Elton’s shack.
“That was after they made me open your office for them.”
“Yeah, babe, I know that much. I saw you on my video camera.”
“They said you had a picture that might send Daddy to jail,” she whispered. “When I told them you and I hadn’t been able to get into your old South Chicago house, they made me go down there with them to show them which house it was. Then when Uncle Sal gave me your apartment keys so I could make up your bed and bring you some yogurt-you know, while you were staying at Dr. Herschel’s-Mr. Strangwell made me give him the keys to make copies.
“I guess then they tore your house apart. I wasn’t there. This one man, the one they called Larry, he found an old picture of Uncle Tony and all of them playing ball together, and the Strangler was just totally pissed, because he said only a drunk idiot would think that proved anything about anyone. So they decided they had to go through your office.
“I had to go with them. They wouldn’t let me just tell them your keypad code because the Strangler said if you were there-like, maybe you didn’t get in to see the snake man-you’d let me in. Then they went just totally crazy inside your office, and I was terrified they would kill me because I’d seen too much. And Mr. Dornick kept phoning the Strangler and saying how could he be so sure a big-mouth like me wouldn’t end up babbling it all to you. So I pretended I was having my period, that I was bleeding and needed the bathroom, and went down the hall.
“This horrible man, the one they called Larry, he was standing there, holding his gun, and I saw the back door and just bolted outside and ran like fury. And Elton was there, out on the street, so I remembered how he talked about his crib. And I begged him to save my life. So the bus was just coming, and we jumped on. And he brought me here. And I’ve been too scared to leave.”
While I cradled her, I tried to think of a safe house, someplace where Petra at least could sleep while I tried to get the police to listen to my side of the story. I was imagining and discarding ideas when Petra suddenly asked about the pictures.
“Wh
at are they?”
“It’s an old story and an ugly one. Your father was at a riot in Marquette Park in 1966-”
“A race riot, you mean. When blacks were tearing down the neighborhood.”
“Those came later. This was a white riot, your father and your uncle Harvey and about eight thousand other people screaming and yelling at Martin Luther King. The pictures show your father and your uncle Harvey in the vicinity of the murder of a black woman. They show a police officer-I’m guessing it was either George Dornick or Larry Alito-pocketing the murder weapon. Later, Dornick and Alito tortured a black man into confessing to the murder.”
“No, you’re lying! Daddy couldn’t… Uncle Harvey wouldn’t-”
I cut her off. “I know how you feel, because my father was involved, too. He watched the torture, and when he tried to stop it they threatened to send Peter to prison. So my father-my father, the best man I’ve ever known-he turned his back on the torturers to save Peter. And later he took the baseball-that Nellie Fox baseball, the murder weapon-to save your father from prison.”
“That’s not true!” Petra screamed, getting to her feet. “You’re making this up!”
“I wish I was.” I got to my feet, too, and reached under my shirt for the photo album. The light was too dim for her to make out much, but she pretended to study the pages.
“Sister Frankie was at the march with the murdered woman. She was killed to keep her from talking to me. Why do you think they sent you to her apartment to collect evidence? It was to keep someone like me from turning it over to the cops. That building is under Homeland Security surveillance because the nuns provide assistance to immigrants, but they didn’t take your picture, or Larry Alito’s, the night you two showed up, because George Dornick has good connections to Homeland Security.”
“I can’t let you publish these,” she whispered. “You mustn’t, you mustn’t.”
“Petra, forty years of wrong are sitting on us. On you and me, I mean. Forty years of wrong our own fathers did. I can’t even guess how many other men Dornick and Alito tortured. I can’t keep quiet, not to save Peter, not even to save Tony.”
“Oh, damn you,” she choked. “It’s like Uncle Sal says, you’re the only who gets to be right. The rest of us don’t count in your uni verse.”
“Damn you, too, Petra Warshawski. You’ve put my life in danger along with your own. If you’d told me all this a month ago, Sister Frankie might still be alive. How many people have to die to protect Peter?”
We were glaring at each other, our noses almost touching in the cramped space, both panting with fury and fear, when we heard footfalls crashing down the side of the embankment. The noise of many people, not Elton. Flashlights played around the embankment. The summer evening was ending, and the pale light coming in through Elton’s skylights had turned purple while we quarreled. I squeezed Petra’s arm and put my hand over her mouth.
The envelope of pictures… They had to survive, whatever happened to me. I looked wildly around and grabbed a black garbage bag from the pile of bags and blankets on the floor. I rolled the envelope up in it. I didn’t have time to get the bag or Petra out of the shack. I stuffed it into a crack and pushed my cousin against the sliver of wall next to the door. I stood in front of her. When the door opened, we wouldn’t be instantly visible.
I pulled the Smith & Wesson from the tuck holster, flipped off the safety, and spoke directly into my cousin’s ear. “When I say go, you stoop down, run out of there, and jump in that water. Swim across, get to Uncle Sal.”
It wasn’t a great plan, but it was all I had. Even in the purple light, I could see her eyes large and terrified in her pale face. The muscles in her throat moved, but she only nodded.
“This is the place?” The voice was George Dornick’s.
“Yes, yessir, it is.” Elton, quavering, barely audible.
“What a dump. You are a worthless piece of shit, you know that?” Dornick, amused, contemptuous. “Open the door. I want to see the girl myself.”
“You said you wasn’t going to hurt her none,” Elton was anxious. “You told me you just wanted to talk to her.”
“That’s right, dirtbag, no one’s going to get hurt. The girl needs to go home, that’s all.” That was a third man, a stranger, and when he laughed a couple of other men joined in: Dornick and two, perhaps three, subordinates.
Petra’s heart was jumping against my shoulder blades. I reached behind me and squeezed her hand. The shack door swung open. A flashlight played around the tiny space, found my feet. I dropped, rolled, and crashed into the figure behind the light, knocking him to the ground.
“Go!” I yelled, and kept rolling, away from the shack so that the second flashlight followed me. I heard Petra behind me. I fired at random to cover her dash out the door, down to the river, the moment’s hesitation, the splash as she dropped into the water. Good girl! I started down the slope after her, but the lights followed me, and someone fired. I dropped into the brush, landing on something large and sharp, rolled away again, and fired blindly toward the light.
“That’s Warshawski. Goddamn it, where’s the girl?”
“Someone jumped in the water.”
The person I’d knocked over had recovered, and I saw the flashlight beam going down to the water. A shot sang out over the river, and ducks began honking and squawking. Wings flapped, and the man shot again. Shouts sounded from the far side.
I tried working my way to the bank. An old tire and a shrub tripped me. I moved backward on my knees and one hand, keeping my gun in front of me. More shots, and then Dornick was spreading his troops in a triangle around me. Dornick shouted a command, and two guns fired in succession, one on either side.
I edged backward while he issued his orders, but the men in the triangle around me were all shining their lights into the brush where I’d landed. I was a fox in the hunt. They had light-finding, heat-seeking missiles, or some crap, that would take care of me.
“Where are the negatives, Vic?” Dornick called.
“My lawyer has them, George.”
“You never made it to your lawyer. We were there ahead of you.”
“I messengered them into town… The same time I sent Bobby Mallory his copies.”
Bobby’s name stopped him briefly, but Dornick only said, “We know you were on your way to Carter’s office. We were listening to that girl’s cellphone.”
“Girl’s cellphone? You mean the Reverend Karen Lennon? I bet you were fun as a little boy, Georgie. Bet you were the one who crawled under the jungle gym to look at your classmates’ panties. Did you start with that and then move on to torturing mice and cats? Captain Mallory isn’t going to watch your back anymore, Georgie. Not when he reads my report.”
“Without the negatives, your report doesn’t mean shit,” Dornick said. “You tell me where they are, and I’ll let the drunk go.”
“It’s okay, Vic,” Elton quavered. “You don’t have to do nothing on my account.”
“What happened, Elton?” I called. “How’d they know you had Petra here?”
“Someone in the coffee place across from your office,” Dornick said. “They told us a homeless guy had gone off with the girl, and we started shaking all the winos and weirdos in Bucktown. And a guy like Elton doesn’t take a lot of shaking before he falls off the tree, isn’t that right, dirtbag?”
“I’m sorry, Vic. I know you saved my life and all and I wish you hadn’t, that’s the God’s truth. If you’da let me die, my little girl wouldn’t be in so much trouble. Your little girl, I mean. She’s a real nice gal, Vic. You can be proud of her. So don’t worry about me no more now, you hear? You don’t need to look after me no more, okay?”
Dornick ignored Elton’s quavery apology. “I want those negatives, Vic.”
He ordered his crew to come into the brambles after me. “Alive: I want to search her. I don’t want her dead… yet.”
The men crashed down the bank and into the thicket. I fired and hit one of the
m but missed the other two. And then they had me by the arms, and I was kicking, shooting, but the end was ordained at the beginning. They held me while Dornick ran his hands inside my clothes, squeezed my nipples.
I stomped hard on his instep and kicked back at the kneecap of the man behind me. Both men cried out. They weren’t used to pain. I broke free, but Dornick grabbed me before I could start running. He wrenched my gun away and tossed it into the underbrush. An underling held me while Dornick slapped my face. Left side, right side, left side.
“You watch too many old Nazi flicks, George.” I said. “That’s always what Erich von Stroheim does.”
He hit me again. “You’re not as smart as Tony always claimed you were. Where are the pictures?”
“Freeman has them.”
“No, he doesn’t.” Slap.
“I put them in a FedEx box on Armitage,” I said.
“Take the shack apart,” Dornick ordered. “She wouldn’t even leave them with a messenger from Cheviot. She sure didn’t put them in a box.”
I had shot one man; the second man was holding me. Dornick held a gun on Elton while the fourth man dismantled his home. Elton gave little cries of misery as the walls were peeled apart, plastic bags torn open, his nest of sleeping bags ripped apart. It took a good twenty minutes, but the black garbage bag was gone. Petra must have grabbed it on her way out, determined to save Peter’s hide.
Dornick was angry now. He held his gun on me, and I could see the red triangle of the laser sight in the dark toying with my chest, my head, figuring where best to shoot so as not to hit his lackey.
I went limp in the man’s arms, took a breath-the kind Gabriella always wanted, down, down to my tailbone, shutting my eyes: “Breathe, don’t think. Breathe, don’t think”-and began my mother’s signature aria, “Non mi dir, bell’idol mio” (Say not, my beloved).
Dornick’s gun sounded, and I flinched. I couldn’t help it, ruining Mozart’s fluid line, thinking instead of breathing. He’d missed.
“You goddammed asshole, you-”
Hardball Page 37