Hardball

17

GOING HOME, I DROVE EAST ALL THE WAY TO THE BIG LAKE before starting south. I stayed on the local roads. It made for a longer trip, with all the stoplights in the little towns, but the breeze off Lake Michigan was cool, and it was easier to think without the congestion and impatience that clogged the tollway.

Partway down the coastal road, I stopped to walk over to the lake. The water was a purply gray in the summer twilight; I could see running lights away from the shore, but I was alone on the beach. Crickets and frogs chirped around me.

Alito hadn’t been surprised to see me. Who had warned him? I didn’t want to think it was Bobby. That opened the door on a kind of ugly possibility that I couldn’t bear to examine: my father’s best friend in league with a drunk, abusive cop.

Maybe Arnie Coleman had called after seeing me at the Krumas fundraiser. I tried to remember what I’d said when we were sparring at the Krumas table. It was Petra who blurted out that I was working on a case going back to Gage Park in the sixties. And I had mentioned Johnny Merton. If the Sawyer trial lay heavy on Coleman’s conscience, he could have connected the dots, although I had a hard time imagining anything lying heavy on my old boss’s conscience.

The other thing that this afternoon’s interview showed was that Alito knew Lamont Gadsden’s name. Had Lamont been his snitch, then, after all? Had Merton killed Lamont to punish him for fingering Sawyer? The Hammer was capable of anything. Murder was all in a day’s work for him.

Tony would have said the same thing, Alito claimed, that a prisoner in his custody with a bloody nose and a black eye had tripped and fallen against his cell bars. “He would not, you lying little two-bit scumbag. You think because Tony’s dead you can drag him down, but you damned well can’t.”

My heart was pounding. I thought I might choke to death, there on the shores of Lake Michigan. Christmas Eve, it came back to me suddenly. Christmas Eve, when I was in bed and my parents were in the kitchen, their reassuring laughter coming up the stairs. Had Bobby been there? Someone, a friend, having a glass of wine, and Alito stopped by. He and my father were arguing.

“You got your promotion. That’s enough, isn’t it?” my father said, and Alito replied, “You want to see him in prison?”

I had crept down the stairs, anxious, and heard my mother sharply call my name. I scurried back up the stairs, lying on the attic floor, straining to hear, but my dad and Alito lowered their voices.

Who would have gone to prison? What were they fighting about?

My shirt was still damp from Hazel’s soaking, and the evening breeze rising across the lake was making me shiver. I walked slowly back to my car, trying to dredge up any more remains of that fugitive memory.

I stopped in Highwood for supper. The little town, halfway between my home and Alito’s, had been settled in the nineteenth century by the Italian artisans who built the North Shore mansions. It’s become a kind of foodie heaven, but I chose one of the old Italian restaurants, where you got a straightforward pasta and the chef was called a cook. I spoke Italian with the owner, who was so pleased he gave me a free glass of Amarone.

For an hour, while we talked about food, and I described a memorable meal I’d eaten in Orvieto, across the square from the cathedral, roast pigeon with fig terrine, I forgot my anxieties. On the way home, though, I kept worrying about my father, and Larry Alito, and Steve Sawyer, the way you do with a sore tooth.

Curtis Rivers and Johnny Merton both thought my father had beaten up Sawyer. That was the only credible explanation for the way the two men reacted to my name and my questions. But Tony would never have done that, not unless Sawyer had jumped him and he’d had to subdue him. But Sawyer had been confused, and badly represented, at his trial. What if-

“What if nothing!” I said aloud. “Tony didn’t beat people up. Ever.”

George Dornick had been the senior detective in the Harmony Newsome investigation. I would call him first thing in the morning, see if he could set my mind at rest.

Despite Bobby’s jeers, it proved easy to get an appointment with Dornick. The Warshawski name doesn’t open many doors in the world, but men who had served with my father were usually willing to see me. At least once, anyway.

When I called at eight, as soon as I got back from running the dogs, Dornick’s secretary said he could fit me in between nine-thirty and ten a.m. meetings. I dressed carefully in an amber jacket over beige slacks-feminine but severely professional-and rode the El into the Loop.

Mountain Hawk Security’s headquarters occupied four floors in one of the glass towers on Wacker that line the Chicago River, and their reception area actually overlooked the river. I got there at nine-thirty to be safe and ended up waiting for over an hour. For a time, I amused myself watching the barges and tour boats while Mountain Hawk personnel passed between elevators and locked glass doors leading to offices. They spoke in urgent tones that stressed the importance of their work. A few clients arrived and were whisked inside.

I was getting bored, and there wasn’t much to read in the waiting room: The Wall Street Journal, SWAT Digest, and company brochures. I spent fifteen minutes on the phone with my temp, Marilyn, and sent a few e-mails, but I was getting restless by the time Dornick came out to greet me.

Dornick was a vigorous man in his sixties. The brown hair in the softball-team photo had turned gray in the way that gets labeled distinguished. Seeing him in his pale summer worsted, I found it hard to believe he could ever have been covered with mud from a slow-pitch game in Grant Park.

He held out a hand and shook mine energetically. “So, you’re Tony’s girl. I should have recognized you at the fundraiser the other night. You look just like him around the eyes. He was a sad loss, a very sad loss. One of the best cops I ever had the privilege of serving with.”

The contrast to Alito couldn’t have been more pronounced. Dornick put an arm around my shoulder and told “Nina” to get us coffee and hold his calls. He steered me into the kind of office you want to see when you need a good program in subduing and manacling the restless masses. Everything was made of polished wood and stone, much of it gleaming black. No paper was visible, but an array of computer consoles kept Dornick in touch with his team. On the wall were the pictures of Dornick that I’d seen on Mountain Hawk’s website.

“This is really impressive,” I said. “How did you put it all together?”

“Twenty years in the Chicago PD got me my law enforcement know-how, and then it was a matter of scrabbling and scrambling. Some of my childhood buddies pitched in their nickels. I had a lucky break early on, busted a Hamas training camp on the Peru-Colombia border. It was a fluke, the way things often are in police work: we were only looking for drugs, and we found armaments that made our eyes pop.” He laughed. “You’d think after being on Chicago’s streets, nothing could surprise you, but that’s until you get into those Latin American jungle outposts.”

Nina brought in coffee-lovely, smooth coffee-probably hand-knitted in one of those jungle outposts.

“Nina tells me you’re in private security yourself, that you have a one-gal shop. You interested in moving up to the majors? I’d be pleased-privileged, really-to bring Tony’s daughter into my organization. I learned more from him in two years on the streets than I ever did anytime after.”

“Yeah, my dad was a great guy. I still miss him. But I’m better on my own. I’ve been my own boss too long to be happy in a big organization. Besides, you probably know that I started in a big outfit, the county Public Defender’s Office.”

Dornick nodded. “I saw your old boss at the Krumas event. You were right to chafe against an SOB like Arnie Coleman, and you were young at the time. A big organization can be a chance to spread your wings rather than have them clipped. You keep Mountain Hawk in the back of your mind the next time you’re out doing surveillance in the rain and know you have to race back to your office to file a missing persons report.”

I was startled: it was as if he had spent a week watching my workload. No doubt about it, he was as smooth as his coffee. I thanked him awkwardly.

Dornick ducked a discreet look at his watch. “So what is it you need today, Vic?”

“I’m following an old cold trail,” I said. “A person who’s been missing for forty-plus years. My closest lead to him is also hard to track down. You were the detective who handled the interrogation when he was arrested for murder: Steve Sawyer, the Harmony Newsome trial.”

Dornick put his coffee cup down and whistled silently. “That is an old cold trail. My God, I do remember the case, though: it was the first murder investigation I’d caught on my own. I was working with Larry Alito. You talk to him? I think he’s up in Wisconsin now.”

“I saw him yesterday. He’s on Lake Catherine, in the Chain of Lakes. He said he didn’t remember any of the details, although I got the feeling that he was hiding a lot behind a can of beer.”

Dornick laughed. “Behind a can? Make it more like a case… One of the reasons I wanted to leave the police. Larry Alito was not a good boy to partner with, I’ll tell you that between you, me, and the kitchen sink. No one could forget the Newsome case. It was so high-profile, the mayor was calling me personally. The dead girl was a really important person in the civil rights movement. We couldn’t afford a black eye as a city, not after the way the riots had played on national TV the summer before.”

“You didn’t have any doubt that you arrested the right man?”

Dornick shook his head. “We had a good snitch on that one. Not a jailhouse snitch, a guy who was undercover for us in the Anacondas.”

“Was that Lamont Gadsden by any chance? He’s the man I’m trying to find.”

A funny look crossed Dornick’s face, the expression Boom-Boom used to assume when he was deciding whether to dare me to do something really insane, like jump off the breakwater into Lake Calumet.

“What the heck, Vic, it’s been all this time. Yes, Gadsden finally turned Sawyer in. We’d been leaning on him for a name, and I guess he and Sawyer were good friends in the Anacondas. You’re not trying to suggest that Sawyer didn’t do it, are you?”

“I’m just trying to find Lamont Gadsden for his mother. You don’t know what became of him, do you? He disappeared the night before the big snow.”

Dornick shook his head. “We wondered, too. We wondered if Hammer Merton found out Lamont was a flipper and had him put away, because we never saw Lamont again. We checked with Hammer, but you know yourself how tough he is to talk to. What do you want with Sawyer?”

“I’m hoping he can tell me something about Lamont. But I’m meeting with a nun from the Mighty Waters Freedom Center. She was with Harmony Newsome when Newsome was killed, and she does have some doubts about whether Sawyer was the murderer.”

Dornick laughed. “Oh, the sisters. The ones who didn’t try to beat our balls off at school look at the world through such rosy glasses. Or they imagine they can be another Sister Helen Prejean, even get hard-asses like me to oppose the death penalty.”

Nina came in. The meeting was over. Dornick ushered me out with a renewed assurance that “Tony’s gal” was always welcome at Mountain Hawk. “And you tell your nun that I’m darned sure we sent the right guy to Pontiac.”

“There isn’t any record of Steve Sawyer in the Department of Corrections,” I said as Dornick turned to go back to his office. “Are you sure it was Pontiac?”

Dornick paused in the doorway. “It might have been Stateville. Not every detail sticks, this far from the trial, and your dad probably could have told you, or Bobby, that we cops don’t follow our perps once they’re sentenced.”

I made appropriate sounds of gratitude for his time. “There’s one last thing, George, and it’s very hard for me to bring up. One reason I’m having trouble on the street with my search is, the guys who grew up with Gadsden and Sawyer think Sawyer was roughed up pretty bad during the arrest.”

Dornick turned again, hands on his hips, eyes bright with anger. “They always say that, Vic. You should know from your time in the PD’s Office, they always bleat about excessive force. We operated by the book, and I mean we dotted every i. We had too much riding on the arrest. And don’t you go dragging Tony’s name through the mud on this. He was the best, Tony Warshawski, and those scumbags were fucking lucky to have him bring them in.”

That was the end of the interview, but his reassurance lingered with me all day, gave me more confidence, as I did a document search at the county archives, as I organized a freelancer I work with to do surveillance at a warehouse in Mokena in the southwest suburbs. On my way back to the city, I toyed with the idea of signing up with Mountain Hawk Security. It would be great to be part of a big operation where someone else went to Mokena.

Dornick had been right about a lot of things, most especially his appreciation of my dad. I’d liked him. So why had I come away with an uneasy feeling, as if something he’d said had triggered not an alarm-that was too extreme-but a warning?

I was sure, in the kind of operation Mountain Hawk Security conducted, that all meetings were secretly recorded. If I could get a copy of the disc Nina made of my conversation, then maybe I’d be able to figure out what was bugging me. I laughed, picturing myself scaling the green glass tower, cutting a square out of one of the windows on the forty-eighth floor, disabling Mountain Hawk’s security measures.

Movie heroes have it so easy. Clint Eastwood would pull out his Magnum and blow people away. “Make my day,” he says, taking out someone’s brains, and we all cheer. Soon the survivors are so nervous, they tell him everything. In life, when you’re scared or being tortured, you’ll say whatever the terrorist wants to hear.

Like Steve Sawyer, coming into court disoriented, confessing to Harmony Newsome’s murder. At that thought, my foot came off the gas, and I slowed so unthinkingly that a van behind me honked furiously. I held up a placatory hand and pulled off at the next exit.

I sat at the curb at the end of the ramp and tried to think. Lamont had flipped on Sawyer-Dornick said that-and Johnny had been furious and killed him, or Curtis killed him for Johnny, and they’d disposed of the body.

Make my day, one of you, make my day. Tell me what happened. I couldn’t imagine a threat or a bribe that would make either Dornick or Alito open his secret diary to me. I didn’t have an in with the state’s attorney, to offer Merton immunity or even a reduction in sentence for talking to me. And, even if I did, Merton still might not talk to me.

Maybe Judge Coleman would explain why he hadn’t called any witnesses when he’d represented-or misrepresented-Sawyer forty years ago. Maybe there had been damning evidence that he kept out of the trial. I looked up the number for the Cook County judges and called Coleman.

Naturally the judge wasn’t available for my call. A clerk said she’d be glad to take a message, in a voice that sounded like she’d be glad if she never used her telephone again. I wanted just to leave my name and number, but the clerk wouldn’t take a message unless I explained my business in some detail. I used to work for the judge, I said. I wanted to go over an old trial, one that dated to his early years in the PD’s Office. I left my number without any expectation of ever hearing from him.

I’d pulled off the road at 103rd Street. Pullman was just a few miles to the east. Maybe Rose Hebert could shed some light on all these players.