Hardball

39

IN MY DREAM, MISS CLAUDIA WAS STANDING OVER ME. “Lamont will come back,” she said in clear, plain speech. “My Bible tells me so.” She was waving her red leather Bible under my nose. She shook loose the dozens of cardboard page markers. When I put my hands out to catch them, they turned into photographs and floated to the floor before I could reach them.

If I could only study them, they would tell me exactly where Petra was and why she’d run away. But when I gathered up the pictures, they burst into flames in my hands. And suddenly I was holding Sister Frankie, her skin yellow-white beneath the burning candle of her hair. Behind her, Larry Alito and George Dornick were laughing with Harvey Krumas and my uncle. And Strangwell was there, pointing to my uncle and saying, “You know why she had to die.”

I woke sweating and weeping. For a moment, I was disoriented in the black space. I thought I was back in Beth Israel, with bandages over my eyes, and I flailed around my cot trying to find the call button for the nurse. Awareness gradually returned. I swung my legs over the edge of the cot and fumbled my way to a light switch, moving slowly to keep from tripping over the drawers that had been dumped on the floor.

It was eight in the morning, long past time for me to get going. My lease-mate has a shower at the back of her studio because she welds big pieces of steel and polishes them with caustic substances and needs to be able to wash off in a hurry. I stood under a cold spray of water, trying to wake myself up, and returned, shivering, to my own office to put my clothes back on.

I picked up the list I’d made in the middle of the night of the things that Petra seemed to be trying to track and took it with me to the coffee shop across the street. While I waited in line for my espresso, I saw Elton Grainger out front hawking Streetwise and accepting donations with his usual unsteady bow and flourish. I took my drink, along with a bag of fruit, yogurt, juice, and some rolls, and went out to the street.

“Elton! I’ve been hoping for a word with you.” I held out the bag. “Help yourself. Juice? Muffin?”

“Hey, Vic.” His bloodshot blue eyes shifted uneasily from me to the sidewalk. “I’m okay. Don’t need no food today.”

“You always need food, Elton. You know what the doc said at the VA when you passed out in June: you have to stop drinking and start eating so it doesn’t happen again.”

“You leave me to sort that out. I don’t need you hovering over me.”

“Okay. No hovering. You know my place was seriously busted two days ago. I wonder if you saw who went in?”

“Vic, I told you before, I ain’t your doorman.”

I pulled a twenty from my wallet. “Early Christmas tip for the non-doorman. My cousin was there. I want to know if you can ID the two people she was with. They were all wearing coats, even though it was September and hot.”

He eyed the twenty but shook his head. “Don’t know any cousin of yours, and that’s a fact.”

“My cousin, Elton-the tall, cute blonde-you met her with me a couple of times, right after you got out of the hospital. Petra.”

“Sorry, Vic. I know you saved my life and all, but I never heard of her.” He turned away from me to greet a couple who were heading into the shop. “Streetwise. New edition today. Streetwise.”

I couldn’t get him to look at me again. Finally, I pushed the twenty into his hand, along with a blueberry muffin, and walked up the street toward Armitage.

I was fuming. Someone had gotten to Elton, scared him into silence. I should have swung by my office yesterday before starting my journey to South Chicago, should have talked to Elton then. If me saving his life, let alone the twenty-the price of a bed for a night or a week in the tank-couldn’t budge him, someone was putting heavy pressure on him.

Strangwell wouldn’t shake down a homeless guy personally, that was way beneath him. But he knew people who would. Larry Alito, for one. I’d seen him with Les Strangwell the day before Petra disappeared. Strangwell gave him an assignment: “I know what Les wants,” he’d snapped at someone who called to check up on him. Could it have been Dornick?

I turned around and went back to my office, where I once again called up the images from my video camera. It was impossible to tell who was who. If not for my aunt Rachel’s insistence, I wouldn’t have known the figure in the middle was Petra. Today, magnifying details as much as I could, it seemed to me that the man on her left was gripping her arm. His cap was pulled low over his face, his coat collar was pulled high around his chin, but the general shape could have been Alito’s.

I tried to imagine what it would take to get him to tell me the truth about whether he’d been there. Certainly not my girlish charm. Would a threat that the FBI was involved worry him? Not if it came from me. He would have too many contacts from his years in the force to worry about veiled and vague threats from me. Only the possibility that Strangwell and his pals would leave him to take the fall might persuade Alito to start talking.

I looked up his phone number and called the house up in Lake Catherine. When Hazel answered, I asked for her husband.

“Larry doesn’t want to talk to you,” she said in her gravelly South Side voice.

“I don’t want to talk to him, either,” I said, “but there’s something he needs to know. I figure I owe him a tiny favor, since he used to work with my dad. He’s been identified as one of the men who forced my cousin Petra to break into my office two days ago.”

She was silent.

“I’m going to call Bobby Mallory, but I’ll wait four hours before I do. You be sure to let Larry know, okay, Ms. Alito? Larry is one of the guys who-”

“I heard you the first time!”

The connection went, and I stared at the phone. I’d promised to wait four hours to call Bobby, but I hadn’t mentioned the press. I called Murray Ryerson’s cellphone and gave him the same message. Unlike Hazel Alito, Murray had a bucketful of questions, starting with who had made the identification.

“Murray, there’s a good possibility that every call I make is monitored, either by Homeland Security’s Chicago office or by Mountain Hawk Security, or both, so I’m not giving away confidential information over the airwaves. Anyway, it’s not a rock-solid ID. I’d double-check with Les Strangwell at the Krumas campaign-”

“Strangwell?” Murray’s normal baritone rose an octave. “What were you sitting on that the Krumas campaign cares about? Why would they hire-”

“Murray, darling, I’m spreading rumors right now. I don’t have any facts. I don’t think I have anything that the Krumas campaign cares about. All I can tell you for sure is that Strangwell did meet with Alito last week. And he asked Alito to do something for him.”

“Where are you? In your office? I’ll be there in twenty-”

“I can’t set up meeting times and places. I’m going to be on the move for the next few days. So, that’s all for now.”

I hung up on a barrage of questions. The phone rang again, as I checked that I had my wallet, keys, and gun. I pulled my Cubs hat low on my head. No moisturizers or unguents to protect my healing skin today. The Cubs, those frail reeds, would have to look after me.

My phone was still ringing as I locked my office door behind me. If anyone was monitoring my calls, I had only a few minutes to get out of the area before they had a watcher in place. I didn’t run up the street, but I walked fast, and I turned left at the first intersection.

As soon as I left Oakley, I was on a quiet residential street where it was easy to see whether anyone was with me. I moved north and west in a random way until I reached Armitage.

I needed to find a car that couldn’t be traced to me. I couldn’t rent one, I didn’t have my driver’s license. Even if I did, Homeland Security, if they were paying attention to me, they’d know the minute I rented a car or bought a plane ticket. While I was talking to Murray, I had suddenly thought of not only where I could get a car but also a bolt hole, assuming I could cover my tracks coming and going.

I walked to the El stop, not bothering to look around, and rode the train into the Loop. I got off at Washington Street and walked through the underground tunnel into the basement of the Daley Center, where traffic court and a bunch of other civil courts sit. Since I had my gun on me, I couldn’t do the safest thing, go through security and watch who came in after me, so I followed the maze of corridors and came on the underground entrance to a trendy Loop restaurant.

The staff were just gathering for the day, the Hispanic stockmakers and cleaning crew. They looked at me narrowly but didn’t try to stop me. I went through the doors into the kitchen and found an exit that took me into a parking garage. I walked up the ramp and out onto the street and made my way back to the El, where I rode the red line north to Howard Street.

It was a long ride, and I could watch all the changing characters who got on and off. By the time we reached the Evanston border, I was reasonably confident that I was clear. I changed to the Evanston train and rode it three stops. No one was with me when I got off. No bicycles circled around me, no cars passed and then repassed me.

Morrell and I had broken up in Italy, but I still had the keys to his condo. And I knew where he had hung the spare key to his Honda Civic. I couldn’t afford to use the phone to call anyone I knew, but I could spend the night, drive the city, even change my underwear. When I let myself in, I found my favorite rose-stenciled bra still hanging in his bathroom. I thought I’d lost it in Italy.