Hardball

33

AFTER PETER AND RACHEL LEFT, I HAD A LONG TALK WITH Mr. Contreras, which included a promise to involve him in any action necessary to rescue Petra. I even shared with him the list I’d made of all the odd questions I had about my cousin during the past few weeks: the Nellie Fox baseball, her relentless interest in the contents of my trunk, her wish to see any storage places in the old family home in Back of the Yards, her effort to tour my own childhood home in South Chicago, her arrival at Sister Frankie’s gutted apartment last week, the smoke bomb that forced the Andarra family to vacate the house the night before Sister Frankie’s murder.

At first he put up a spirited defense of her youth and impulsiveness, but by the time I got to her late-night trip to the Freedom Center even Mr. Contreras was uneasy. “But, doll, if she was doing something she shouldn’ta been, it was because she was pushed into it. You listen to me. She’s as good as gold, little Peewee, and don’t you go thinking otherwise. When you get to the end of this story, you’re going to find Johnny Merton was behind it. Mark my words.”

“Let’s find her first and argue over who got her in over her head later, right?”

He agreed gruffly, and watched while I printed out a couple of shots I’d taken of Petra on my cellphone. I also printed random pictures off the Web of young blond women: some celebrities, some pictures that people had posted on their blogs, finishing with a few shots of myself.

I uploaded the photo I’d snapped of Alito and Strangwell at the Prudential Plaza the other day. It wasn’t a very clear shot, but it was the only one I could find of Alito. Strangwell was highly visible. His website showed him with various Illinois politicos, with U.S. presidents and a Supreme Court justice, and with entertainers like Michael Jordan. I guess if you were coming to Strangwell for help, the portraits showed you what kind of access a thousand dollars an hour bought you. I printed a couple of those images, and pulled one of Dornick from the Mountain Hawk Security website as well.

The old man finally left when I went into the bathroom to get ready for my day outside. As I covered my face and arms with protective creams, it seemed somehow wrong to be tending to my body when my cousin’s life might be in danger. I put on my hat, my gloves, checked the clip in my gun and put it in its tuck holster, and went out the back door.

Jake Thibaut was on his little porch with a cup of coffee. “That’s a fetching costume. You going undercover on a Civil War plantation?”

I tried to smile but found my voice cracking instead. “It’s because of the fire. Because of… Sorry, my cousin has vanished in a way that has me pretty freaked. I’ve got to go, see what I can find out.”

He walked down the five steps to our common landing. “You need any kind of help from me? You know, anything that doesn’t involve a handgun or some kind of physical heroism?”

I started to say no, then remembered that Thibaut had seen the people who broke into my apartment as they left early Tuesday morning. I pulled my folder of photographs from my briefcase and showed them to him.

“I know it was dark, and these aren’t great shots, but could any of these guys be the ones you saw?”

“It’s impossible to say.” He tapped the picture of Alito and Strangwell. “They’re sitting, so I can’t tell how tall they are. This one”-he was touching Alito-“he’s broad enough, but… I’d have to see them walking. I measure people’s height against Bessie. My bass,” he added when he saw my puzzled look.

I put the pictures back in the folder. As I started down the stairs, Thibaut said, “They looked menacing. Remember that.”

I nodded soberly. Menacing didn’t even begin to cover the way these people had acted.

I went out the back gate and picked up my car in the alley. In the frenzy we’d all been in since last night, no one had talked about seeing if Petra were at home, doped or… or not dead. I was going to make her apartment my first port of call, then head to South Chicago.

I hadn’t had time to replace the lump of melted plastic in my wallet with a new driver’s license, and I didn’t want to waste an hour explaining that to a traffic cop, so for the few miles that lay between me and Petra’s loft I stayed within the thirty-mile-per-hour limit, stopped at all stop signs, and even braked when the light turned yellow.

My picklocks were still in my glove compartment. I rang Petra’s bell, but there was no answer, even though I leaned on it for a good thirty seconds. I didn’t want to be seen using my picks in broad daylight, so I got inside on the tried-and-true method of ringing every bell in the building. There is usually someone careless enough to buzz you in, and I was lucky with the third bell I pushed.

I took the stairs up to the fourth floor two at a time. By the time I reached Petra’s door, I had a stitch in my side where my gun was poking me. The woman who’d buzzed me in was shouting up the stairwell. I tried to steady my voice when I called down an apology, I’d rung the wrong door. The voice of an educated white woman was reassuring to her, and she called back an acknowledgment. I heard her door close, and I knelt to work Petra’s lock.

My hands were shaking. I was slow, exhaustingly slow, and my cotton gloves kept slipping on the picks. I took off the stupid gloves but still felt like I was stirring molasses with my fingers.

When I finally got inside, the apartment had a churchlike quiet. A tap was dripping somewhere. That ping of water on enamel was all I could hear. I found myself tiptoeing through the big room that made up the bulk of the loft, looking for any signs of my cousin or anything that would give me a hint about where she’d gone.

Petra hadn’t bothered much with furnishing the place. She had an overstuffed sofa, one of those big, sacklike things, covered in a kind of taupe denim. An outsize teddy bear was sitting in the middle of it, staring at the windows, with a sad smile on its face. Its wide plastic eyes unnerved me. I finally turned it facedown.

She had a television on a rolling stand, a rolling computer table, and an armchair that matched the sofa. She had no curtains for the long row of windows, just the blinds that came with the apartment.

I hadn’t been here, except the night I unlocked the door for her, so I had no idea what might be missing if she’d left under her own steam. No drugs in the bathroom, but her electric toothbrush and Waterpik were still in their stands. Her tube of Tom’s Toothpaste was carefully rolled from the bottom up.

In the area where she slept, she had a futon and a dresser. A change of clothes was tossed carelessly across the futon, trailing onto the floor, and more clothes were half on hangers or had been allowed to fall to the closet floor.

A stack of wicker baskets by the bed held books, magazines, and a box of condoms. I wished I knew who she was dating or whether the box was simply there for insurance. I flipped through The Lost Diary of Don Juan, hoping that the lost diary of Petra Warshawski might fall out, but I didn’t see anything in her handwriting, not even a checkbook. With someone in the Millennium Gen, you couldn’t tell if that meant she had run away, taking her checkbook with her, or that she did all her banking online.

The one thing I had hoped to find was her laptop, so I could see who she’d been e-mailing what to. Although she seemed to do most of her communicating by texting, a computer might have longer documents, more of a key to what she was doing. At a minimum, I could have seen what websites she’d been visiting lately.

The big room flowed into a kitchen with a tiled work island and a big cooktop, with a grill and a restaurant-sized exhaust fan. The fancy appliances seemed wasted on my cousin. Her refrigerator held wine and blueberry yogurt and not much else. In the morning, she’d grab a carton and eat it on the bus. At lunch, she’d pick up a sandwich and eat it at her desk. And at night, the group of friends she’d made would all go out for Thai or Mexican. Or so I pictured it.

A door by the refrigerator led to a small deck and back stairs. When I pulled the door open, it swung crazily on its hinges and then fell off. I jumped out of the way just in time to avoid a smash on the head.

The noise, the shock of the door collapsing under my hand… I leaned against the work island, shaking. When my heart was more or less normal, I saw my gun was in my right hand. I hadn’t noticed drawing it.

Whoever had come in through the back hadn’t bothered with the finesse of picklocks; they’d simply crowbarred the hinges out of the doorjamb and then propped the door up when they left.

What had they taken? The computer? My cousin at gunpoint? I moved the door and went down the back stairs. There were cigarette butts on one landing, but they looked old, the residue of a smoker sent outside to indulge, not a recent watcher. The stairs ended in an asphalt areaway that was separated from the alley by a high fence and a gate. I opened the gate. Its lock was still in place. But a row of parking spaces lay behind the gate, and the intruder could have waited out there for someone to park and simply followed that person in.

I propped the gate open and walked the length of the alley. My cousin’s shiny Pathfinder was sitting there, all locked up. I opened it and looked through the receipts and empty drink containers. I got down on my knees and looked under the seats, in the glove compartment, in the spare-tire compartment, under the hood, under the fenders. I detected that Petra drank a lot of smoothies and bottled water, didn’t go in for soft drinks, ate at El Gato Loco, and wasn’t careful with her credit-card chits. After searching the alley, the only other clue I found was that a lot of people drink at night and can’t be bothered to find a trash can for their empties.

I returned to Petra’s place through the back. I needed to do something about the broken kitchen door. On my way out through the front, I saw the building-management company name on a plaque. I called them to report the broken door. And called Bobby Mallory to tell him that someone had broken into Petra’s apartment.

“That ‘someone’ wasn’t you, was it, Vicki?”

“They broke the back door getting in. I was there just now, trying to see what was missing, and I’m wondering if they stole her computer. Or maybe forced her at gunpoint to go into my office.”

Bobby catechized me on what my aunt and uncle were up to. When I told them they were meeting with the FBI this morning, he was skep tical. The Bureau was stretched too thin with terror watching, he claimed. He didn’t think they could find Petra even if she’d been kidnapped.

Bobby’s comments only increased my own high level of terror. I wished I knew whether my next step was a waste of time or not. Fear paralyzes you, makes it hard to act creatively.

It wasn’t until I’d driven three blocks that I realized I had company. After the fire bombs, after the trashing of my home and office, after Petra’s disappearance, I should be taking triple precautions, making sure no one had planted bugs or bombs in my car before climbing into it, riding around the block two or three times to make sure I was clean before I went anywhere. It was only this sixth sense I’d gotten from all my years in the business that made me note that the bike messenger, the same one who’d been riding behind me on my way over to Petra’s, was in my side mirror again.

A bike was a great way to do a tail within the city. Any maneuver I made, he could react faster to than a car. Of course, he couldn’t follow me onto Lake Shore Drive. But anyone smart enough to use a messenger as a tail had a car or two as backup.

I pretended I hadn’t noticed him and got onto the drive. I didn’t bother to check for tails. If they wanted me to know, they’d reveal themselves. If they didn’t, my best strategy was not to try to flush them out now.

I pulled off at the first downtown exit, and stopped at the second hotel I came to. I turned my car over to the valet, explained I was going to a meeting and that I wasn’t a guest, and went inside.

There’s a network of underground passages that connect the hotels and high-rises on the east side of the Loop. I took the lobby escalator down, slipped behind a pillar, and knelt down. I didn’t see anyone behind me, but I still took off my Scarlett O’Hara hat and left it behind a potted palm. It just made me too damned easy to track.

I waited until a group of women all came down together, laughing and talking, and moved just in front of them so that we all seemed to be walking along the underground corridor together. They peeled off at one of the subterranean take-out joints.

I darted into a neighboring gift shop, where I bought a Cubs cap. Going up and down escalators, buying a frozen yogurt, I didn’t see the same face twice. I bought a red CHICAGO sweatshirt at another gift shop and pulled it on over my linen jacket. Although the weight of the sweatshirt on a hot day made me feel as though I were encased in a burka, I wasn’t instantly recognizable.

Still underground, I finally headed to my original destination: the Illinois Central station. There was a twenty-minute wait for the next train to South Chicago. I bought a ticket and stood near the door leading to the tracks. When they called my train, I waited until the last possible moment before sliding through the doors and down the stairs. I thought I was clean, but you never know.

The slow ride to South Chicago was like a backward journey through my life, the ride I’d taken with my mother so many times as a child, past the University of Chicago, where my mother had wanted me to study. “The best, Victoria. You need to have the best,” she would say when the train stopped there to let off students.

Ninety-first Street. End of the line. A certain desolation attached to the conductor’s announcement. Life ends here. I walked the four blocks from the station to my old home.

At least Señora Andarra’s grandson and his friends weren’t visible this morning, but a couple of helpless-looking men were sitting on a curb with a bottle in a brown paper bag. Somewhere, a car stereo was pouring out a bass so loudly that the air was vibrating from it.

At my old home, I saw the boarded-over window that had been broken to throw in the smoke bomb. The prisms across the top were splintered, too. I concentrated instead on the decorative-glass fanlight over the front door, which was still intact.

I rang the bell. After a few minutes, when I wondered if she’d gone out, Señora Andarra opened it the length of its stubby chain. “Esta ventana,” I stumbled in my bad Spanish, pointing at the fan. “Mi madre amó esta ventana también.”

The fact that my mother also loved that window didn’t make Señora Andarra smile, but it did keep her from slamming the door in my face. Using painful pidgin Spanish interlaced with English and Italian, I tried to explain that I was a detective, that I had photographs. Could she look at them, let me know if any of the people in them had been at her house when the bomb came through the window?

The whole time I spoke, she stared at me through the crack in the door, her dark eyes frowning in her nut-colored face. When I finally stumbled to an end of my story, she took the folder from me. As I’d feared, she singled Petra out with no trouble.

“¿Su hija?” she asked.

I was tired of everyone thinking Petra was my daughter, so I dutifully explained she was my cousin. “Mi prima. ¿Y los hombres?”

I thought she lingered on the shot of Alito with Strangwell, but I couldn’t be sure. She finally shook her head, and said she didn’t know any of them, hadn’t seen any of them. I walked back to the station and waited for the northbound train to whisk me back to civilization, or whatever it was.