Hardball

26

THANKS TO WHATEVER LOTTY INJECTED INTO MY IV, I slept the clock around. When I woke, the pain in my arms and eyes had subsided to a manageable throb. When a volunteer came in to help me with some kind of liquid goop that I’d been cleared to consume, I asked if she’d also help me with the phone.

I called Mr. Contreras first. He had seen the story on the news, but the hospital was blocking my calls, he said. He had called Lotty, who reassured him, but it was still a relief to him to hear from me in person.

“Don’t worry about the dogs none, doll, on account of I got that service you used when you was in Italy to come around. And Peewee”-his nickname for my cousin-“she’s been rallying around. She took Mitch into work with her this morning, and, last night, she went up to your place to get the sheets changed and everything, and even bought you yogurt, so you’ll be comfy when they let you out.”

That was reassuring, sort of. After the business with my trunk, it made me tense to think of my cousin wandering around my apartment. Maybe she’d collected the Nellie Fox ball and hoped, with her usual optimism, that I wouldn’t notice it was gone.

“Then there’s that nice fella who just moved in, the musician: he’s been helping with the dogs, too,” Mr. Contreras added. “But Murray Ryerson, he’s been around, him and some other reporters. I told him he should be ashamed, acting like a hyena following after the lions, picking up the food they did all the work finding.”

Mr. Contreras has never been crazy about any of the men in my life, but for some reason he actively dislikes Murray. I deflected the complaint as best I could and patiently answered his questions. I even took his rough words of comfort in stride: I wasn’t to blame myself. Nuns who went around working for terrorists knew they were taking risks. It wasn’t my fault someone had fire-bombed her the night I chose to visit.

After he and I finished, I got the volunteer to dial my office so that I could speak with Marilyn, the temp. She was overwhelmed by phone calls. It hadn’t occurred to me, but of course I was a media sensation.

“If it bleeds, it leads” is the old news bromide. And, if a nun bleeds, it leads for days. Julian Bond had called, as had Willie Barrow and other prominent civil rights veterans. Immigrant rights activists had held a vigil outside the hospital, and two men Sister Frankie had helped free from death row were staging a hunger strike outside police headquarters, demanding action in finding her killers. Since I’d been with her when she was murdered, I was understandably a person of interest to the TV crews.

“They keep calling, and some have been here, thinking you were hiding out. What should I tell them?”

“That it will be a week before I’m well enough to talk to anyone, and they should go away and find blood someplace else.”

We went through the more manageable part of my incoming calls. The subcontractor doing surveillance for me in Mokena. Some outstanding reports to clients, which I managed to dictate to her. And messages to various other clients, to tell them I’d be back in my office within the week and would talk to them then.

In the afternoon, I was wheeled to the ophthalmology department, and my eyes were unbandaged. Although the doctor had the blinds pulled and the overhead lights turned off, even the murky gray light made me wince. At first, I could see nothing but spark-filled spirals. After a few minutes, though, shapes swam into focus.

The doctor examined me closely. “You are very lucky, Ms. Warshawski. The burns on the lids were not severe and are already healing. For the next few weeks, you’ll need to wear dark glasses with photochromic lenses whenever you are outside, whether the sun is shining or not, and anytime you’re in a brightly lit room. If you wear glasses, you need to get prescription sunglasses to use in front of a computer for the next month or two. And stay away from TV and computers altogether for two more days. That’s a serious order, okay?”

He gave me an antibiotic salve to put on and under the lids twice a day, and told me it was safe to wash my hair.

When they brought me back to my room, with a pair of those outsize plastic sunglasses they give people after cataract surgery, the resident came around to inspect the rest of my body. My arms were rough and red. I’d been wearing a linen jacket, since I’d dressed professionally for my meeting, and while the fabric had charred it had spared my skin from more severe burns.

My hands had suffered the worst damage. When the dressings came off next week, I’d need to wear cotton gloves anytime I went outside.

When I finally crept into the bathroom and looked in the mirror, I looked sunburned, but my face only had a few blisters along the hairline. I’d apparently buried my face in the throw while I tumbled Sister Frances out of her room, which also had saved me from serious burns. What made me look bizarre wasn’t my shiny red cheeks but the clumps of hair missing from my head. I looked like a dog with mange.

Even so, I had been staggeringly lucky to escape the full force of the fire. If only I’d pulled Sister Frankie down instead of screaming at her… I could see the bottle hitting her head over and over again every time I closed my eyes.

The resident had said they would discharge me tomorrow if I continued to hold my own. In the meantime, they were removing my IVs. I could switch to oral antibiotics and actual food.

“You know you’ve created a kind of media circus at the hospital?” The resident was a young man, and a media circus was clearly a welcome change of pace for him.

Apparently, the hospital security staff had found one reporter trying to get into my room while I was asleep that morning. They had gotten the city to arrest another man they’d discovered at one of the nursing-station computers calling up Sister Frankie’s and my charts.

“We put a block on incoming calls to your room. The switchboard says they’ve clocked a hundred seventeen calls.”

I hadn’t thought there could be a plus to a hospital stay, but missing a hundred seventeen media calls proved me wrong.

When the doctor finally remembered he had other beds to visit, I put on plastic mitts to protect my hands and took a shower in the little bathroom. I felt better physically, but exhaustion, medication, and depression made me go back to the bed in a sort of numb lethargy.

I put on my heavy glasses and lay half dozing. Someone brought a species of lunch. I begged for coffee, thinking caffeine might lift some of the fog in my brain. The attendant said it wasn’t on my diet, and I lay back down, nauseated by the wobbly red Jell-O on the tray.

By and by, I thought of my clothes. My wallet had been in my handbag and that was probably melted into the remains of Sister Frances’s home, but I often stuff loose bills into my pockets. I found eleven dollars and thirteen cents in my smoky clothes. My cellphone was there, too, but the battery was dead.

I pulled my Lario boots onto my bare feet and put on my torn and charred linen jacket. I looked in the little mirror in the bathroom. Between the costume, my clumpy hair, and the outsize glasses, I looked like I belonged on the Uptown streets outside the hospital, collecting cigarette butts. I made it down the hall on wobbly legs; two days in bed, with no food and a lot of shock, had atrophied my muscles. A hospital security guard at the nursing station looked at me curiously but didn’t try to stop me. I rode down to the first-floor lobby.

Hospitals have realized that the cash register chings louder if they install an espresso machine. They don’t study how to make it good, figuring a clientele under stress will drink anything. I wasn’t in a position to be picky, either. I ordered a triple espresso from an attendant who, taking in my costume and my mangy head, asked to be paid first.

While he pulled my shots, I looked across the lobby to the front of the building. The media circus had shut down most of its rings, with only one camera truck still there. As I squinted through my glasses, I could just make out a couple of people with picket signs-the immigrant rights activists, perhaps, or maybe a striking local or even abortion protestors. The lenses were too opaque for me to be able to read the signs themselves.

My hands were so thickly wrapped that I had to hold the cup with my fingertips, and I had trouble opening the sugar packets. I finally tore them with my teeth, spraying sugar over myself and the floor before managing to get some in my coffee. I was heading for the elevators when I spotted my old pal Murray Ryerson from the Herald-Star at the reception desk. He was collecting a visitor’s pass and grinning with satisfaction at the clerk. So much for the lockdown on reporters.

I felt vulnerable and exposed, with no underwear under a shabby hospital gown, only my smoky jacket keeping my breasts and buttocks from public view. I retreated into a chair behind a potted plant and watched until Murray was inside an elevator.

As I waited, Beth Blacksin from Global Entertainment went up to the reception desk and started gesticulating in indignation, pointing at the elevator. So Murray had scammed his way in. A hospital security guard joined Beth.

Hospitals have a million exits and stairwells. I left the coffee shop by the far end and went into the first stairwell I came to. One flight, and I felt as though I’d been sandbagged, my legs wobbling, my head dizzy. I leaned against the wall and drank some of my coffee. It was bitter-they hadn’t cleaned the machine heads anytime recently-but the caffeine steadied me.

A doctor came running down the stairs but paused when he saw me. “Do you belong here?”

I held out my wrist with my plastic patient tag looped above my gauze hands. “I got turned around when I went downstairs for coffee.”

He read my tag. “Your room is on the fifth floor. You’d better take an elevator. I’m not sure you should be up and about at all… Definitely not climbing five flights of stairs.”

He opened the door to the first floor and held it while I walked past him. “I can call for a wheelchair.”

“No, the nurses told me I needed to start walking. I’ll be okay.”

He was in a hurry and didn’t stay to argue with me. I looked at my tag. Sure enough, it had my room number on it. That was a mercy: I hadn’t bothered to check it when I left.

I found a secondary elevator bank and saw a sign for the hospital library. Carrying my coffee in my fingertips, I walked past the Orthopedic Outpatient Clinic and Respiratory Diseases and came to the library. To my relief, this was merely a room filled with donated books, mostly unread review copies with publicists’ letters still inside the front covers. No staff were present to question whether a person in heavy dark glasses and no underwear ought to be there.

I turned out the overhead lights and curled up in an armchair. Time to stop feeling sorry for myself and guilty about Sister Frankie. Time to think, to work.

The feds had been watching Sister Frances’s apartment and hadn’t intervened in the attack on her. Did that mean they wanted her dead or had they been out getting pizza and not noticed whoever threw the Molotov cocktails?

The coffee helped, but not enough to get my muzzy brain fully functioning. I uncoiled myself from the armchair and took some of the publicity letters out of the books. Scrabbling in the drawers of a little desk, I found an old pencil stub. It would have to do. I couldn’t see well enough to write, and the pencil stub was too blunt for cursive, so I used block letters.

1. FEDS WATCHING FRANKIE: WHY?

2. LAMONT GADSDEN = SNITCH: TRUE?

3. WHAT IN BOTTLES-PRO OR STREET-GRADE ACCELERANT?

Who would tell me any of these things? There was something else, too, another important question, nagging the back of my mind. I took off my boots, tucked my legs under me, and let my mind drift. I dozed and woke and dozed, but it was Lotty’s anger that kept coming to the surface. It couldn’t be about Lotty. It must be the law enforcement people she sent about their business yesterday. They had asked something odd.

I stuffed the paper into my jacket pocket and bent to pull my boots on. When I stood, I had to clutch the chair to keep from falling over. It was infuriating to be so weak. I needed to be out on the streets, talking to people, not so shaky that a walk down a hospital corridor did me in. I made my unsteady way back to my room.

I had just sunk down on my egg-carton mattress when a nurse looked in. “Where have you been? We’ve been looking all over the hospital for you! Didn’t you hear us page you?”

“Sorry. I was testing my legs and got so tired I fell asleep in a chair. I didn’t hear anything.”

She took my temperature and felt my pulse and disappeared to spread the good news that I was back. As soon as she was gone, the bathroom door opened, and Murray came out.

“Well, well, Warshawski. They were telling the truth. You’re not dead yet.”

“Ryerson, get the fuck out of my hospital room.” I was startled into fury.

“Oh, those sweet words.” He grinned and peered at me. “You know, you do look pretty strange, if you don’t mind my saying so.”

“I do mind. I survived a fire. It was extremely unpleasant. Now leave.”

“After you talk to me, my fire-eating private eye.”

“I’ll talk to you if you do something for me.”

He bowed low over his tape recorder. “As you command, O Queen, so shall it be done.”

“I need some clothes. I can’t wear these. And my wallet and credit cards and whatnot are all at the sister’s apartment.”

Murray sat up. “I’m not going to your place. You know the old guy hates me. He’d sic that hellhound of yours on me, and I’d be fish food before I could explain why I was rummaging in your closet.”

“Buy me something, then. Jeans, a long-sleeved white shirt, and a bra. That’s all I need.”

“A bra? You mean, like brassiere? Ix-nay.”

“Murray, you were wearing a twenty-something blonde at Krumas’s fundraiser. You can’t tell me you blush and get prickly heat in a lingerie department. Size 36-C. And size 12 shirt, 31 long jeans. You record all that for posterity?”

“Okay,” Murray scowled. “I got it. Now, what were you doing at Sister Frances Kerrigan’s home to get her killed?”

I sat up in bed and looked at my arms. “Somehow, I don’t seem to have a shirt on.”

“Before we talk? Do you know what it took to get in here? I had to find the name of a patient and pretend to be visiting her. And then I had to skulk around until I could get at a computer and hack in to find your room number. They won’t let me back in. I’m not leaving until you talk.”

“Yeah, I figured you’d welsh on your end of the deal, but don’t worry your perfectly groomed head. Mr. Contreras will be glad to bring me some clothes. He loves me most when I’m on the DL.” I closed my eyes behind my dark lenses and leaned back against the pillows.

“Oh, damn you, you manipulative bitch, Warshawski!”

“I’m going to call the nurse in ten seconds, Ryerson. I’m not the bottom-feeder who hacked into a hospital computer system.”

“You’re the bottom-feeder who got a nun fried.”

I sat up and pulled off my shades. “You put that out anywhere-in print, on a blog, in a text message-and you will spend the rest of your life defending a libel action, do you hear me?”

There was an uneasy silence between us, before Murray said, “You were there when she was attacked.”

I ignored him. “And to speak in such language about Sister Frances’s death… She worked her whole life for social justice and civil liberties, and you think you can talk about her death like a Chris Matthews gag line! Do you know what it’s like to hold someone whose head is on fire, burning on top her body like the wick on a candle? Get out of here!”

“I’m sorry, V.I., okay? We all spend too much time trying to think of the next clever, cynical thing to say. That was tasteless and thoughtless. I apologize.” He pulled out his cellphone, in contravention of all the posted signs, and called someone to buy me clothes. He even gave his gofer a credit-card number and told her to deliver them to the hospital.

I put my shades back on. The dim light in the room was making my eyes hurt. And, besides, I’d started crying, which I didn’t want Murray to see.

“What are your sources saying?” I asked after a moment. “Do they think she was attacked because of her immigrant work?”

“We’re not getting anything off the street about that,” Murray admitted. “The nun in charge of the Freedom Center, a Sister Carolyn Zabinska, says they got death threats back when the Iraq war started-the nuns were opposed to it and started these weekly vigils against it-but no one’s ever threatened them because of their prison or immigrant-aid work.”

He paused. “People are wondering why she was attacked the very night you visited her.”

I lay very still in the bed, eyes closed. “What people? Besides you, of course.”

“Just what I hear around,” Murray said.

“Ever since Global bought the Star, you’ve been more on the entertainment side than the crime beat,” I said, still angry, wanting to prick him as he had me. “So who you hear from doesn’t carry the punch it used to.”

“When have I ever skimped on a story, Warshawski?” Murray was furious now, too. “You on your pedestal, it’s easy to work solo as an investigator, but I have to work for a company if I want to write for a newspaper. And my sources trust me.”

I looked at my wrapped hands and wished I worked for a big company where someone would pick up the slack when I was on the disabled list. “So what are your sources telling you about the perps? Lawrence Avenue was hopping when I rang Sister Frankie’s bell. They all suffer from witness-phobic amnesia?”

I couldn’t see his face through my lenses in the darkened room, but Murray was still breathing hard. He didn’t speak for a long moment, but, despite my nasty accusation, he was a reporter through and through. He wanted my story and knew he had to answer some questions if I was going to talk.

“There are a ton of witnesses to the perps. A Ford Expedition drove up at high speed, honking. Everyone jumped out of the way, and the Expedition pulled up onto the sidewalk. A guy-or maybe a gal, but they’re pretty sure a guy-with a stocking pulled over his head got out, threw the bottles, jumped back in, and the Expedition took off before anyone really realized what was happening.”

“License plate?”

“No one bothered. Or they know and aren’t telling. I’ve heard both stories,” Murray said. “One of my sources says the boys in the alley recognized the SUV and are afraid to admit it for fear of being targeted next. Someone who will fire bomb a nun will pretty much do anything.”

I was quiet for a moment, digesting that. “The FBI and OEM had a stakeout going. Any news out of them?”

“Yeah, the news that the First Amendment is DOA. We have to clear anything we print through them. Turds! And so’s my editor. Bitch just nodded and blinked, and said the rules have changed and we need to follow them if we’re going to bring people the news.”

His words brought my own police interrogation back to me. That was the question nagging at me, the woman from Emergency Management wanting to know what Sister Frances had told me about Harmony Newsome. I lay back against the mattress, feeling sick again. OEM already knew about Harmony Newsome when they talked to me.

In halting words, I explained why I’d been at the Freedom Center: the old murder, the search for Lamont. And the fact that OEM already knew about my interest in Harmony Newsome before their investigator talked to me.

“Is that because they were monitoring Sister Frankie’s calls?” I finished. “Or mine? Or both? Murray, if she died because I was there-”

“Hey, hey, Wonder Woman, don’t get all weepy now,” Murray protested.

I couldn’t help it. The doubts that had nagged me all summer about my personality, why I couldn’t keep a relationship alive. Did I bring destruction to everyone around me?