Hardball

19

WHEN YOU GET HOME FEELING THAT YOU’VE BEEN pummeled by all sides in the Hundred Years’ War and you’re longing to lie in the tub for a decade or so to soak away your wounds, the last thing you want is to see your high-spirited cousin’s shiny Pathfinder parked out front. I tried to slink past my neighbor’s place unnoticed, but the dogs betrayed me, whining and scratching at his front door. A moment later, they all bounded into the hall, dogs, cousin, and Mr. Contreras.

“Uncle Sal’s picture got me a kind of promotion,” Petra called. “We’re celebrating! Come on in.”

I protested feebly that I was exhausted, but they ignored that. Mr. Contreras bustled inside to get a glass of Spumante while the dogs circled me, yipping as if I really had been away for a century. The commotion brought the neighbor across the hall into the entryway. She’s a plastic-surgery intern who is perpetually affronted by the dogs. She keeps trying to get the co-op board to declare the building pet-free, but the Korean family on the second floor, who have three cats, was so far fighting on Mr. Contreras’s and my side.

“Really, the dogs won’t hurt you, they’re super-friendly!” Petra called to the doctor. “See Mitch? He’ll take food right out of my mouth, won’t you, boy?”

She put a taco chip between her lips and invited the dog to jump up on her. Before the intern had a stroke or called the cops, I bundled my team into Mr. Contreras’s living room.

“The coals are just about ready,” the old man beamed. “We wasn’t going to wait more than five minutes longer for you, doll, but now I can put the steaks on.”

I don’t much like Spumante. While Mr. Contreras took the steaks-a gift from Uncle Peter-out to the grill, I poured my glass down the sink and went upstairs for whisky. I looked wistfully at my bathtub, but settled for a quick shower. With clean hair and clothes and a glass of Johnnie Walker, I felt, if not revived, at least strong enough to cope with the outgoing personalities on the first floor.

They were all out back now, the dogs sitting at attention around the grill in case one of the steaks dropped to the ground. Petra’s hearty laugh floated up the back stairs to me. I could hear Jake Thibaut playing his bass next door. It would have been pleasant just to sit on the steps, listening to the music, drinking my whisky, but I let duty be my guide and went down to the garden.

I asked Petra about her promotion. “Does this mean you’re working directly for Brian Krumas now?”

“Don’t I wish! Although, maybe I don’t. There’s so much responsibility at the high levels of the campaign, making sure all the facts are right, the speeches are just so, that Brian knows who’s saying what about him and what he needs to think about. I’m happy to be a worker bee, although Mr. Strangwell-he’s, like, Brian’s most important adviser-he met with me personally. He wants me to brief him about the same stuff I tell my real boss.”

“That sounds like a serious jump up the ladder,” I said. “How does your real boss feel about it?”

“Oh, Tania’s used to people moving around in the operation. She’s totally cool. I wish you’d met her at the fundraiser, but she was pretty much spending the whole night with national media types.”

“What’s Strangwell like?” I’d never met him, but you can’t operate on even the fringes of Chicago politics without knowing about him. If he was advising Brian Krumas personally, it meant the national party might well be grooming Brian for a post-Barack Obama presidential run.

Petra gave an exaggerated shudder. “He’s kind of scary, he’s so serious. Everyone else in the campaign, we’re all young and we joke around, it’s how we get the job done, but he’s Mr. Serious. In my pod, they all call him the Chicago Strangler. And when he looks at you and tells you he wants something done, you feel like, gosh, better drop everything and do this now. And, even then, you’re afraid it won’t be good enough.”

“What does he have you doing, then?”

“Really, just more of what I’ve been doing, looking for attacks on Brian, seeing what’s out there, but getting more focused, you know?” She gulped down her Spumante. “That’s enough of the boring old campaign. Did you go see any more snake charmers today?”

“Snake? Oh, Anacondas! Very good, little cousin. I’ll call Johnny Merton that the next time I visit and see what kind of reaction that gets me. No, just burrowing around in the past. Even more boring than the campaign, I assure you.”

“Why would you want to do that? Are you, like, trying to get on America’s Most Wanted, find some criminal who’s been on the run for forty years or something?”

“If Vic ever went after one of them old crimes, she’d only be doing it to prove the FBI or the cops or someone had arrested the wrong person. Nothing gets done right if she ain’t done it herself.” My neighbor’s tone did not make his words a compliment.

“So do they have the wrong man in prison for murder or something?” Petra asked, eyes so wide that her long mascaraed lashes were flat against her brows.

“I don’t know if the guy I’m looking for is guilty or innocent. He’s disappeared.”

“So leave him lay,” Mr. Contreras said roughly.

“I would,” I answered slowly, “but… I read the trial transcript… and my dad was the person who arrested him. And… and I want to know what went on when he picked up the guy.”

Mr. Contreras insisted that that was all the more reason for me to leave it alone. “Who knows what your pa faced when he was on the job. With your cockeyed way of looking at things, you’d put the worst interpretation on it.”

“What if he beat up a helpless man? What good interpretation could I put on that?” I cried.

“I’m saying, what if he did? People look all helpless and defenseless in a courtroom, but, you don’t know, did he pull a gun, did he attack your pa, maybe threaten his life? You can’t go by only the end of the story, cookie, you got to know the beginning and the middle, too.”

“Uncle Sal is right,” Petra chimed in. “I never knew Uncle Tony, but Daddy talks about him a lot. He was a good person, Vic. You can’t go around making up stories to say he wasn’t.”

“I’m not. I know better than either of you what a good man he was. I grew up with him.” I rubbed my eyes wearily. “Was Peter still here in 1967, Petra? I can’t remember when he moved to Kansas City.”

She flashed the smile that made her look like my father. “I wasn’t around so I can’t be sure, but I think it was in 1970 when Ashland Meats moved down, or maybe ’seventy-one. I know Daddy didn’t marry Mom until 1982. She was some kind of local debutante or something. Queen at the American Royal. You know, the big livestock show. The Queen and King of Meats, that’s what I call their wedding photos.”

I laughed dutifully, but said, “I wonder what Peter remembers from the summer of ’sixty-six. He was still living with Grandma Warshawski over on Fifty-seventh and Fairfield. He must remember the Marquette Park riots.”

“He always says that’s what ruined the South Side. The neighborhood started to change. Grandma Warshawski had to move north to get away from the crime.” My cousin shifted uneasily on the grass as she caught my expression.

The fault lines of race in the city, they run through my family, along with the rest of the South Side. My grandmother had wept when she moved. That unnerved me, as a child, to see an old woman cry.

Granny Warshawski tried to explain her own confused and conflicted feelings about race, about the changing neighborhood. “I know how hard it is to be the stranger in the land, kochanie, but I don’t know these black people. And Grandpa is dead. Peter will find himself a wife someday soon. My friends are gone. I can’t be alone here. I’m scared to be the only white lady on the street.”

I’d been eleven at the time. I’d argued with her, belligerent, self-righteous, even then. Was that what made it hard for me to live with someone else? Was it what Mr. Contreras had just accused me of: that, in my book, I was always the only one who knew anything?

“I don’t suppose Tony confided in Peter, or that your father would even remember after all this time. He’s had meat to worry about, not to mention you, which must be a full-time job. But maybe I’ll give him a call, ask him.”

“I can do that, Vic. I talk to him or Mom just about every day. But maybe Uncle Tony left some kind of record. Do you still own the house he lived in? We could go exploring for secret closets or something.” Petra’s eyes sparkled with excitement.

“Sounds like you want to be a detective yourself,” I said. “Petra Warshawski and the Secret of the Old Closet. No, sweetie, houses in South Chicago were built pretty close to the lath. Not much room for secret hiding places. Anyway, I sold it after he died. And I was lucky to find a buyer, the neighborhood was so depressed.”

“What did you do with his stuff? Did he keep a diary?”

I laughed. “You’re thinking of storybook cops like Adam Dalgliesh or John Rebus, endlessly second-guessing themselves. When Tony needed to unwind, he’d watch the Cubs or play ball himself, have a beer with your uncle Bernie. He didn’t brood or write poetry.”

“But didn’t he leave you anything?” Petra demanded. “Like, I don’t know, his prize bowling ball or something?”

“Neither that nor his polka-playing accordion. Where do you get your stereotypes, Petra?”

“Take it easy, doll,” Mr. Contreras admonished me. “Lots of guys bowl. Not that I liked it much. Pool for me. That, and the horses. Although my ma thought it’d turn me into a dropout and a drunk.”

My dad hadn’t left much. Unlike a lot of cops, he wasn’t a gun collector: he’d had only his service revolver, which I turned in when he died. I’d kept his sole backup, a 9-millimeter Smith & Wesson, for my own use. I’d given his shield to Bobby Mallory.

I had the photo album I’d looked at the other night, some softball memorabilia, a plaque featuring the eight-pound coho he’d caught in Wolf Lake. I’d kept some of the tools from the little shop he’d had behind our old kitchen. I even used them occasionally to repair a broken sink trap or build a simple piece of shelving. Other than that, all I could remember keeping was his dress uniform, which I’d stored in a trunk with my mother’s music and her burnt velvet concert gown.

Petra was all for digging into the mementos then and there. When she heard I hadn’t looked at the trunk for years, she was sure there was something I’d forgotten that would explain everything. Mr. Contreras agreed with her. “You know how it is, doll, you put things away, you forget what they were. Same with Clara’s things. When I went to look for her jewelry to give to Ruthie, I found I’d put all kinds of things in boxes, even her false teeth!”

“I know, I know,” I agreed wearily. “My dad probably had the secret plans for building a gasless car, but I’m not going to look for them tonight. I’m beat. I’m going to bed.”

Petra had drunk a fair amount of Spumante, which made her argumentative and insistent on going to the third floor at once. I got tired of arguing long before she did, and announced I was going to bed. I suggested that she stay the night. I didn’t want her driving in the state she was in. Finally, around eleven, when Mr. Contreras chimed in on my side, she let us put her into a cab.

I helped him clean up, letting his waterfall of talk wash over me. Yes, Petra was a good kid, wonderful news about her promotion. Yes, maybe I was too hard on her. Didn’t I remember being young and enthusiastic? And then he was off to the races on his own youth. I left him in front of the television with a glass of grappa and took Peppy upstairs with me.

In my dreams, though, a saber-toothed tiger was charging me. When I fell helpless to the ground in front of it, it changed shape and became my father.