Hardball

38

I DIDN’T KNOW ANY UNOBTRUSIVE WAY TO GET INTO MY office. The alley exit opens only from the inside, and the windows are twelve feet from the ground. It would have to be through the front door.

At this hour of the morning, all the trendy bars and cafés in the area are closed. The coffee shop across the street would open in a few hours, but right now its glass front gleamed black under the streetlamps like a pond.

I moved cautiously down the street, gun in hand. No one was out that I could see. But if pros were conducting surveillance, it could be done by remote camera. They wouldn’t have to be on the street.

A rat leaped from a garbage can at my approach, and I came close to screaming. I had to stop and gulp down the wave of panic that swept over me, as it ran out onto the sidewalk. Still, I couldn’t hold back a little cry. A car drove up the street and turned left onto Cortlandt. It was missing a taillight. Dornick looked like the buttoned-down type who wouldn’t let you work for him if your car was missing a light. Or would he use a car like this to make me think he wasn’t watching me?

Or he could be… Enough! The Age of Fear makes you crazy. I took a breath, crossed the street, and tapped in the new door code to my building. The lock wheezed as it always did, a loud sound in the still night, but I was tired of fear. I boldly opened the door, stopping long enough to tap each of the numbers on the pad so that anyone using a UV spray wouldn’t be able to tell which ones unlocked the door. I flicked on the lights, not caring that they would spill out onto the street and advertise my presence.

My office suite still had a crime scene seal across the door, but I broke it and went into the chaos. For a moment, my spirits flagged again on seeing the mess. I made a feeble stab at straightening things out, putting drawers back in the desk, returning ordnance maps to their shelves, but the chaos was overwhelming. I wondered who I could hire to help since the temporary agency had backed away from me at warp speed.

I tried to remember the date that Petra had been in my office to use my computer, but I could only guess. It had been around two weeks before the Navy Pier fundraiser. I set up a program to find all the Internet sites visited during those weeks.

While the program ran, I knelt to collect papers from the floor, gathering them in a big bundle and laying them on the couch. One of the documents was the transcript of the Steve Sawyer trial. I flipped through the pages, looking again for my father’s name, but instead “Lumumba” jumped out at me.

“Lumumba has my picture,” Steve Sawyer had said on the stand.

Lumumba: Lamont, in the Anaconda’s secret code. Lamont had Sawyer’s picture. What did that mean? Was it some cryptic way of saying that Lamont had fingered him? Or did it mean he was expecting Lamont to testify for him. As in, Lamont has my picture, Lamont has my back.

I wondered if Curtis Rivers would interpret… Curtis Rivers! I smacked my forehead. African names. Kimathi, that was what Rivers called the man who swept the sidewalk in front of his store. While my Internet-search program was running, I pulled up a separate browser window and looked up Kimathi.

Dedan Kimathi, a rebel leader in Kenya in the 1950s. Feeling a sort of nervous dread, I put the name into the Illinois Department of Corrections database. There he was: January 1967, convicted of murdering Harmony Newsome, served forty years, released a year ago January. No time off for good behavior, often in isolation for unspecified, violent outbreaks. Living since his release on Seventieth Place, at the same address as Fit for Your Hoof.

I stared at the screen for a long time, remembering Rivers’s fury when I’d asked where to find Steve Sawyers, of Hammer Merton’s scorn when I asked him the same question.

My brain was frozen. I couldn’t concentrate on those old Anacondas or Miss Claudia’s dying needs. If Petra hadn’t gone missing, I’d have driven straight to Curtis Rivers’s shop and camped out until he and Kimathi-Sawyers emerged. And then I’d have energetically convinced them to tell me what had happened to Lamont-Lumumba. But Petra was fragmenting my mind and sapping my energy.

I closed the browser window. The search program had finished, turning up over a thousand URLs for the ten days I’d bracketed. I started scrolling through them, startled to see the amount of time I spent on the Internet. It took about twenty minutes for me to find where Petra had been, but, once I got there, it was dead easy to follow her in. She’d been updating her MySpace pages. She hadn’t logged in as Petra Warshawski. Instead, her page was called “Campaign Girl.”

I had to create my own MySpace page to look at Petra’s. I signed up under Peppy’s full name, Princess Scheherazade of DuPage, and even created an e-mail address for her. I began to see why people liked using the site. The process of making up Peppy’s biography and interests, the music she listened to-currently, “You Ain’t Nothin’ But a Hound Dog”-took me away from my dark, disaster-filled office and my fears for my cousin’s safety. For twenty minutes, I was in a fantasyland of my own creation.

Campaign Girl loved Natalie Walker’s Urban Angel. She had five hundred friends. To read the messages they sent her, I needed Petra’s password. Trying to figure that out would require either better computer tracking skills or more inside knowledge of Petra than I had. I concentrated on the posts she’d made on her profile page.

She started by explaining that she had to post anonymously because she was working on an important Senate campaign and if she said anything under her own name, or her candidate’s name, she could get both of them in trouble.

“So I’m just Campaign Girl for now. And all of you homeys out there, PLEASE don’t screw up and call me by my real name. Not unless you want me to lose my job. And that goes quintuple for you, Hank Albrecht, wanting stuffy old Janowic to win. My boy is going to beat yours with one hand behind his back. And I have a bottle of beer riding on it.”

I looked up Hank Albrecht, one of Petra’s “friends.” He had gone to college with my cousin and was in Chicago working for the incumbent.

A few days later, Petra was writing about the work she was doing for Brian, whom she scrupulously only called “My Candidate.”

I know all you vegans out there think I’m the wickedest person on the planet, but I love being the meat queen, showing up at a Sunday barbecue loaded down with ribs and sausages. Mostly, it’s for my teammates on the campaign. Whoever thought work would be this much fun?? I’m, like, doing blog searches to see who has bad stuff to put out against My Candidate, like anyone could, and the whole world wouldn’t know it was the biggest crock ever. But everyone who meets My Candidate thinks Mr. President four years down the road, so we have tons of media and money and everything. And I’m, like, Saint Joan on a charger, going out and looking for dragons who want to attack us.

It wouldn’t take a sophisticated code breaker to realize who Petra was, or who her candidate was, based on her posts. In fact, as I skimmed the comments, it was clear that many of her MySpace friends knew that the candidate was Brian. There was competitive ribbing from Hank Albrecht, the guy working for the incumbent. There were passionate pro-Brian posts. And then there were quite a few people who wrote about altogether unconnected stuff: dogs, clothes, favorite restaurants.

Petra wrote about Mr. Contreras and me. I was code-named DC, for “Detecting Cousin.”

Every now and then I go over to see Uncle Sal, not that we’re really related, and DC, who really is my cousin. She’s, like, almost my mom’s age, isn’t that weird? Uncle Sal, who my detecting cousin only calls “Mr. C.,” he can’t get enough of my dad’s company’s ribs or of me. My cousin is jealous of me, isn’t that fun? Uncle Sal likes to flirt with me, and it used to be her, you know. Sometimes they seem like an old married couple having the same kind of squabbles everyone’s parents do. Oh my God, we all may end up like our parents, isn’t that freaky?

I went over yesterday, and Uncle Sal was scolding DC for wanting to go talk to this old gang leader who’s doing a hundred years for murder or whatever. And she’s, like, it bugs me that people are too pissed off at me to answer the simplest questions, and I’m, like, so put on your big-girl underpants and move on. And Uncle Sal thought that was hysterical and laughed his head off. So DC got really huffy but was trying not to show it. I mean, I thought being a detective was more dramatic, like solving murders, collecting clues, not going out to prison to talk to some kind of ignorant black gangbanger.

I remembered that episode, and it made me angry that Petra had put it out for the whole world to read about. I made a face at the computer screen. “Put on your big-girl underpants now, V.I.,” I muttered, and read on.

I focused on her posts about the work she’d done for Brian, wondering if any of dragons she’d been sent to slay would turn out to be biting back, but they seemed innocuous enough. She had tracked down a rumor that Brian had been seen in a Rush Street leather bar. She’d handled a post that he’d taken money from someone who’d been arrested for selling kiddie porn.

She’d written about DC breaking into her apartment the night she dropped her keys by the front door. And then we came to the Navy Pier fundraiser.

We had this huge fundraiser, and I am, like, a superstar because My Candidate chose one of my guests for his big photo op. My guest was a World War II hero, and he wore all his battle medals and everything, and was on the front page of a bunch of papers, including the Washington Post, which my dad always says is a liberal rag, but it’s so important. Anyway, I’m, like, a star at the campaign, even though it was a total fluke, but the head of the campaign, who we all call the Chicago Strangler, was superimpressed and pulled me out of the NetSquad to do special assignments directly for him. Some of my coworkers are a little huffy, ’cause some of them have been with My Candidate from Day 1, and I’m a Joanie-come-lately. But, well, that’s life.

Up through that post, Petra’s tone had been like her speaking voice, breezy, confident. A few days later, she wrote more soberly.

I thought they promoted me because I did such a great job. Turns out it was because I can’t keep my big mouth shut. I said some stuff about something that the Strangler wants to know more about, something that happened a million years ago that could come back to bite my candidate. It’s so confusing. It’s something I said, but I have no idea what, but now the Strangler says I have to dig it up, even though I don’t know anything about what happened or even what I’m really looking for.

It’s like Spy vs. Spy, and I have to spy on my DC, which in some ways is fun, seeing if I can outsmart a person who’s been a detective for twenty years. But mostly I hate it, because the Strangler says I can’t trust anyone. He says if I tell a single soul what I’m looking for, it could get people killed, especially if I tell my detecting cousin. The Strangler says she’ll go out of her way to hurt people I care about, and I know that when she’s angry she goes off the deep end. She saved this homeless guy’s life, but she almost killed me because I didn’t respect her mother’s dress. So watch Campaign Girl morph into Undercover Girl.

A week went by, and Petra made her final post.

If you say something that puts everyone you care about in danger only you don’t know that it’s a big secret, are you really to blame? And then how do you know who is your friend and who is your enemy? I can’t tell anymore. I wish I’d never come to Chicago, but it’s too late. I can’t go home.

I sat back in my chair and rubbed my eyes. Petra, with her perpetual cheerful broadcasting of everything she knew, had said something that put the powerful people around her on alert. DEFCON 3 and dropping. I could hear the alarms ringing in Les Strangwell’s office.

I didn’t know the things that Petra might have talked over in the office-these clearly ranged from my breaking into her apartment for her, since one of her Web posts dealt with that, to my visiting Johnny Merton-because she’d even blurted that out at the Navy Pier fundraiser. Certainly, anyone reading the posts on her MySpace profile would know what she was doing. I imagined the Strangler coldly reading over her shoulder. He could be any one of those five hundred “friends,” invisible, like a shark floating under her toes.

I had an uncomfortable memory of the morning in my apartment when I’d blown up over her pawing through my trunk. My anger had frightened her, and it had created a gulf between us. I thought again of all the times my dad had told me my temper would get me into serious trouble. My God, he’d been right, but I’d never taken his words seriously to heart.

I had to find Petra. I didn’t even know where to begin my search. I felt like something large and clumsy, a rhinoceros, easy to spot as it crashed through the underbrush and about as effectual an ally in times of trouble.

I made a list of things I’d said or done and things Petra seemed interested in:

1. Johnny Merton and the Anacondas.

2. The house in South Chicago, where Petra had stood watching when the thugs threw their smoke bomb through the window.

3. The Nellie Fox baseball.

4. Her obsession with whether my dad had left a diary.

5. Her arrival at the Freedom Center the night I went to collect evidence.

6. Her nervous whisper that she couldn’t look for the contractors who’d been hustled into Sister Frankie’s apartment.

It was four in the morning. I’d slept for seven hours, until Rose Hebert’s phone call woke me. But fatigue, born of stress, my still-healing body, and my recent sleepless nights, was overwhelming me. I went into the little back area and reassembled my cot and air mattress. Oblivious to the threat of another break-in, I sank back into sleep.