Hardball

31

A FEW DAYS LATER, I LEFT LOTTY’S FOR HOME. MY GAUZE had come off, revealing puckered red skin underneath. I was to wear special gloves day and night, a kind of lacy mitt. There was to be no swimming for now, and no sun for some months to come. I graduated from my special plastic-lensed dark glasses to ordinary dark glasses. I was cleared for viewing television and computer screens and for driving a car.

I spoke with the doorman several times during my stay with Lotty. He hadn’t seen anyone lurking around, waiting for an injured private eye to emerge. No strangers had come calling for me except the law, my first day there. I was beginning to believe the attack on Sister Frances had been connected to her work at the Freedom Center. The thought didn’t stop my wanting to find her killers, but it eased my nightmares. I hadn’t killed her. I’d only been the helpless witness to her death.

While I was recuperating at Lotty’s, I wasn’t idle. I returned all the calls from the media that had piled up. Sad but true, part of being a successful PI is for people to see your name on the Web.

This was especially important because my temporary agency phoned to say that Marilyn Klimpton was quitting. “She didn’t expect to be there on her own with so many angry clients and all the reporters and so on trying to reach you. Also, you being attacked in that bombing, she’s afraid for her safety, being alone in your office. We don’t think we can send anyone to replace her right now.”

“Then I don’t think you and I will be working together again in the future, either,” I said grandly.

This was just great. Not only was I out of commission but the backlog waiting for me would be growing to Himalayan proportions again. I called my answering service to tell them to handle the phone during normal business hours, and then I started phoning my clients to see what business I could subcontract out and what could wait a few more days for me to get to it personally.

Some people had already moved their inquiries to bigger firms with more detectives. Prudent. If your lead investigator is singed, go where you know there’s backup. I thought of my bills and tried not to panic. I thought of George Dornick’s Mountain Hawk Security and his offer to hire “Tony’s daughter.” I hoped it wouldn’t come to that.

And I worried, too, about my cousin. Something wasn’t right with her story about why she’d shown up at the Freedom Center the night I’d gone back there. It was flattering to think she wanted to emulate me, but I was having a hard time believing it. And the smoke bomb at my old home on Houston… Señora Andarra had told the cops she saw the woman who grew up in the house watching from across the street. Conrad thought that had to be me because he associated only me with growing up in the house. But Señora Andarra probably thought of Petra and me as a family unit… It had been Petra who spoke to her in Spanish.

Although Petra had sworn angrily she hadn’t been playing detective in South Chicago, she hadn’t categorically denied being there last Sunday night. But why would she have been down there? I couldn’t begin to imagine a reason.

I finally put the idea aside and called the management company that handled the Freedom Center building, hoping they could tell me who had sent over a demolition team to gut Sister Frankie’s apartment and prepare it for the builders. They couldn’t or they wouldn’t tell me.

I left a message on Sister Carolyn’s cellphone to see if she could get any information out of the contractors. She was in a meeting with an INS attorney, but she called back several hours later to say she’d talked to someone from both the wrecking crew and the builder. Both contractors insisted they didn’t know who hired them. They had been promised cash, almost double their usual fees, if they would drop everything and take care of the building.

“They didn’t want to tell me even that much, I guess because they were afraid I might report them to the IRS, but I put on my costume and assured them that all I wanted was information.”

Her costume. Oh, the veil, right. I asked who had given them the money, but she said they claimed it was a middle-aged white man, someone they had never seen before.

“Don’t tell me,” I said drily. “He was wearing a trench coat and a felt fedora.”

“I don’t know,” she said. “Would it make a difference?”

“Yeah. It would be a giveaway that they were lying instead of just a probability.”

“You think they really know who sent them?”

I was sitting at Lotty’s kitchen table, my frustration at my inaction just about at the boiling point. “I don’t know, of course, but my best guess is that they owe someone important a favor or they’re gofers for someone important. Maybe they’re a minority-contracting front, I don’t know. But to drop everything like that, they have to have a pretty good idea who sent them. And then your place being under surveillance, and that police seal on Sister Frankie’s door, didn’t stop them for five seconds.”

When we hung up, I called the detectives from the Bomb and Arson squad who had been over to interrogate me. The Latino cop was in.

“You know your crime scene doesn’t exist anymore?” I said.

“What are you talking about?”

“I just got off the phone with one of the nuns who lives there. A building crew showed up, not anyone the sisters hired, and took down the door, stripped the room. I hope you secured any samples you took. Someone’s going to a lot of trouble to keep that fire from being investigated.”

He didn’t exactly thank me. It was more of a snarl, a demand for Sister Carolyn’s phone number, and a warning that I’d better not be behind any destruction of evidence.

I missed Amy Blount badly. I could have sicced her on the contractors, gotten her to track down the ownership trail. I wondered if I could turn it over to my cousin, see how she would handle a routine search through incorporation records. If she failed, I was no worse off than I was when I started.

I tried Petra on her cellphone. She was at the campaign office, and we were interrupted several times by people who came by to see her. Each time, she announced that she was on the phone with “my cousin, you know, the one who got burned in that fire last week? So I’ll get back to you right away, but she needs my help.”

When I finally got her full attention, she was enthusiastic and bubbled over with questions. I gave her the URLs of a couple of websites I subscribe to, and told her I’d e-mail her the passwords so she didn’t have to try to write them down in midconversation.

“If the subcontractors haven’t made it into the database, you’ll have to go to the State of Illinois Building to check their incorporation filings.”

“But what if they incorporated in some other state? Don’t they usually do it in Delaware?”

“If they’re big enough to incorporate in Delaware, you should find them online, but good catch. If you find them, please, little cousin, do not go tracking them down by yourself. Contractors have short fuses and big hammers.”

“Oh, Vic, so do meatpackers. I grew up around them. I know how to talk to people without getting their undies in a bundle. Anyway, I can outrun a guy who’s weighed down by a big hammer. You’ll see.”

I would see. I frowned at the phone, wishing I understood what was really on Petra’s mind, and hoping I hadn’t started her on a quest where she’d get in over her head.

Lotty took the afternoon off to drive me around, first to the hospital, where her presence let me jump to the front of the line.

From the hospital, we drove to the bank. Until I got all my plastic replaced, I didn’t have a way of getting cash, so I brought my passport and cashed a check for a thousand dollars, hoping that would see me through until a new ATM card arrived.

Our last stop was my hairdresser’s, so I could get my weird clumps of hair shorn to a uniform length. Something between baldness and a Marine buzz cut was how it looked at the end, but certainly way more attractive than the Mangy Dog’d do I’d been sporting.

It was a pleasant day, a sort of mini-vacation after the trauma of the past ten days, and we finished it by eating supper with Max at a little bistro on Damen. He and Lotty drove me to my apartment, where Mr. Contreras and the dogs tumbled out to greet me. The dogs showed such ecstasy that the medical resident across the hall threatened to call the cops if Mr. Contreras and I didn’t silence them at once. Even that didn’t dampen my pleasure at coming back to my own home. Lotty gave me a long hug and relinquished me to Mr. Contreras, who insisted on carrying my bag up the stairs.

My pleasure died as soon as I opened the door. I was so shocked that I couldn’t take it in at first. My home had been ripped to shreds. Books lay on the floor, my stereo was dismantled, music had been dumped so the inside of the piano could be inspected, my trunk stood in the living room with my mother’s evening gown wadded up on the floor next to it.

My first reaction was a kind of despair, a desire to get on a plane for Milan and spend the rest of my life in the little hill town where my mother grew up. My second response was fury with my cousin.

“Come on, Vic,” my neighbor protested. “Cut the kid some slack. How could she be behind this?”

“There are no signs of forced entry,” I said. “You let her in with my keys, right? She’s been obsessed with this baseball I found with my dad’s stuff, and this has all the earmarks of a spoiled kid wanting what she wants when she wants it.”

“I let her in, yeah, but that was two days ago when she stopped in for your phone charger. She didn’t stay long enough to do this kind of damage. And, anyway, you got her all wrong. I don’t know what’s wrong with you, cookie, but it’s like you’re jealous of her for being young and pretty and lively. I thought you was better than that. Really, doll, I thought you was.”

“How can you talk like that when my apartment has been trashed! Look at this!” I held up my mother’s gown. “She knows how much this matters to me and she just wads it up and dumps it like it’s an old dish towel.”

“I’m just saying, Petra couldn’t a done this no matter what you think. And I didn’t let anyone else in, so this was a professional, someone who could bypass all your locks and gates and stuff and get in anyway. They had to’ve done this late at night, when me and the dogs was sound asleep. Your cousin wasn’t here in the middle of the night.”

I called Petra’s cellphone, but there wasn’t any answer. I left a message telling her to call me the instant she picked up her voice mail. With the dogs and Mr. Contreras accompanying me, I walked through my apartment, looking at wreckage. The old man was right: Petra wouldn’t have been so wanton. But neither would a professional. Unless it was a professional deliberately trying to terrify me. In which case, they had done a great job.

“But what could they be looking for?” I asked Mr. Contreras. “Except for that Nellie Fox ball, there’s nothing here that anyone would want. Besides, as I keep saying, there’s no sign of forced entry.”

“Maybe Petra forgot to lock up behind her,” my neighbor suggested.

“Then why was it locked when we came up the stairs just now?” I was teetering on the brink of meltdown and kept hysteria out of my voice by effort of will alone.

Mr. Contreras wanted me to call the police, but I’d had my fill of the law. Although the more chaos I saw, the less I thought my cousin had caused it, I didn’t want a crime unit to find some trace of Petra there. If she’d done this, I’d tackle her myself.

I spent the rest of the night cleaning. Mr. Contreras stayed to help, picking up books, helping fold clothes, cleaning the kitchen with me. In my dining room, dishes had been pulled from the shelves with the same recklessness apparent everywhere else. The old man knelt, grunting, to pick up cups and plates and wipe them before putting them back on the shelves.

My mother’s red Venetian wineglasses, which she had wrapped in her underwear and carried in her one small suitcase when she fled Italy, were piled on the floor. I picked them up, my hands shaking so badly I was afraid I would break them, and held each up to the light. I had lost two over the years and cracked a third. Now a fourth had a chip in the base.

I held on to the fourth glass, unable to keep from crying. When Bobby and Eileen Mallory had their first baby, Gabriella had brought these glasses out to drink a toast after the christening. That was the first time I remembered seeing them, and my mother had told me their history. The wineglasses had been a present to her grandmother in 1894 on her wedding day. They had been carried by Gabriella into hiding as a memento, even though they were an unwieldy and fragile burden. She had managed to carry them from Pitigliano to Siena, where she hid in her music teacher’s attic, and then, hours before the Fascists arrived, smuggled them to the hills, where she hid with her father until bribes and luck got her passage on a ship to Cuba. Not one glass had broken. But me? I’d now damaged half of them. Victoria Iphigenia, the ox.

I don’t know how long I sat there, while Mr. Contreras tiptoed around sympathetically putting away books and papers. Peppy came to lay her head in my lap. I put the glass down to stroke her, then finally got to my knees on my way to return the glasses to my breakfront.

I was getting to my feet when I saw that my photo album had been flung under the table. I got down on my knees again and crawled between the legs after it.

My eyes were aching from overuse and my hands were throbbing, but I turned the pages, trying to figure out if any of the pictures were missing. A number had come loose from their little corner mounts. I doggedly went through the album, slipping in the loose ones, including one of my parents toasting each other with the Venetian wineglasses. I winced and turned the page. The picture of my father with his slow-pitch team was missing.

I looked under the table, then sifted through the album a second time, but the picture had disappeared.