Hardball

41

MY LEGS GAVE WAY, AND I FOUND MYSELF SITTING ON THE floor. Curtis Rivers looked down at me without pity, but I didn’t want any. “This for your brother”… “This for Peter.” Tony watched Alito and Dornick chain a man to a boiling radiator, watched them run a current through his genitals. My daddy-my wise and good and loving father… My hands were wet. I thought I would see blood when I looked at them, Steve Sawyer’s blood, the blood of every prisoner my father had watched in Dornick’s or Alito’s custody, but it was only tears and snot.

I don’t know how long I sat looking at the dust on the cracked linoleum, watching a spider crawl along the baseboard. I wanted to lie down on that floor and sleep away the rest of my time on the planet. After I’d found Petra, after I’d found Lamont, maybe I could curl up and die.

“This for Peter.” The Christmas Eve conversation I had remembered after seeing Alito came back to me again, my father saying, “You got your promotion. That’s enough, isn’t it?” and Alito replying, “You want to see him in prison?”

At last, I pushed myself up to a standing position again. My shoulders ached.

My father had been tense all fall after the summer of riots. I didn’t remember anything about the demonstrations that Harmony’s brother had organized with Sister Frankie, but they would have been outside my dad’s station. I could picture the tension inside the station, the Mayor’s Office putting heat on them, demanding an immediate arrest.

So the State’s Attorney’s Office organized a frame: get one of the Anacondas; they’re all guilty of something. Who knows why they picked on Sawyer or who put his name in play. Larry Alito? My mind flinched at the idea of naming my father. Arnie Coleman played along as the public defender conveniently assigned to the case. You choose the guy most eager for favors, most likely to play your game.

In Cook County, it didn’t take a genius, or even very much money, to persuade the head of the criminal defenders unit to give you a weak link. After all, by the time I was with the PD, and Coleman had moved into the number one chair, I saw him do it over and over. My coworkers and I knew money was changing hands. We just never knew how much.

I took a shuddering breath and looked at the four men. I needed to be a professional in this situation, which meant I had to pull myself together. I might not have another chance to talk to Kimathi.

“Mr. Kimathi… If I can, I’ll find the person who really did kill Harmony Newsome. But I’m afraid that means I need to ask you a few more questions.”

Kimathi swallowed convulsively and edged behind Curtis.

“At the trial, Mr. Kimathi, what did you mean when you said Lumumba had your picture?”

“That’s right, Lumumba has my picture.”

“But what picture?” I asked.

“He told Johnny. Johnny promised, and then no one came, they all left me. They all afraid the demons coming for them. I covered with demons.” He suddenly thrust his head under my face, bending over and skewing his body so that he looked at me sideways, his tongue sticking out like a Mayan mask. “See my demons? See how they crawling on me?”

I willed myself not to back away. “Those aren’t your demons, Mr. Kimathi. They belong to the detectives who tortured you. You tell those demons to go away, to go home where they belong.”

“Oh, they mine, they been living with me a long time. Pastor Hebert, he told me… he told me I’m bound for hell, hanging out with Johnny and Lumumba instead of coming to church. The demons, Pastor sent them to remind me every day.”

It was close to unbearable, talking to him, but I managed to keep my voice from cracking. “What about the pictures? What pictures did Lumumba have?”

Kimathi pulled his head upright and looked at Curtis, his brow wrinkled in worry. “Lumumba said he had a picture of who killed Harmony, but did I kill her? Did he have my picture?”

“You never killed her, Kimathi,” the machinist said. “And the white girl is right about the demons. They’re not yours. Send them to the person who owns them.”

As Kimathi spoke, I realized that was what my house-and-office wreckers had been hunting: the picture that showed who killed Harmony Newsome. That’s why Petra wanted to see my childhood homes, to see if Tony had taken that vital piece of evidence away, a picture that proved who killed Harmony. Would it be his brother in the frame? Would Tony go that far, out of loyalty to his family, and steal evidence and hide it at home?

“What happened to Lumumba?” I felt as though I were splitting in two, between the emotions pounding inside me and my calm investigator’s voice asking questions.

Curtis shook his head. “Johnny knows. It happened during the blizzard, that much I can tell you.”

“You were at the Waltz Right Inn the night before the storm,” I said.

Rivers nodded fractionally. “Lamont came in with Johnny, like Sister Rose said. They went off into the back room, talked between themselves, then came out, joined the party. Lamont took off about two a.m. And that was the last time we saw him.”

“Johnny went with him?”

“No. And they weren’t fighting. Believe me, if Johnny had wanted to put a hit out on Lamont, we all would have known. But we were scared about what was happening to Steve… to Kimathi. I think Johnny and Lamont were talking about that, talking about whatever pictures Lamont said he had.”

“You think Lamont is dead?”

“I’m sure Lamont is dead,” Curtis said. “Brother didn’t have anyplace to hide that we didn’t know about. Miss Ella, she had family in Louisiana. They would have taken him. But we still would have heard. If anyone knows what happened to Lamont, it’s Johnny. I thought Johnny had seen a demon himself, when the snow cleared and we all crawled out again. After that storm, he would never let anyone mention Lamont’s name on the street around him.”

I squeezed my forehead with my hand. “What can I possibly offer Johnny Merton that would get him to talk to me? He wants the Innocence Project working for him, but frankly-”

“He’s not innocent of what they sent him down for, but he never killed Lamont Gadsden.”

I fished in the handbag, looking for a tissue, before remembering the bag belonged to the shop. The machinist chess player pulled a handkerchief out of his pocket and let me wipe my face and hands. All four of us knew what I could offer Johnny Merton: proof of who really killed Harmony, proof of who killed Lamont and where his body rested.

Kimathi telling his story, me collapsing in the face of it, that had shifted the relationships in the room. Rivers and his friends weren’t on my side, exactly, but I was no longer an enemy. I guess you could say I was on probation.

I looked at the soiled handkerchief. “I’ll wash this and get it back to you, but I have a lot to do first. A lot of ground to cover and not much time. You need to get Kimathi out of here. George Dornick knows where he is, and it would be pathetically easy for them to break in here. Kimathi has to go someplace where no one would think to look. And you have to make double and triple sure that no one is on your back when you move him. They’re sophisticated, and they have a lot of money to throw around.”

Rivers said, “I have a shotgun, and I was in Vietnam. I can look after-”

“No, you can’t. Dornick has firepower that makes Hamburger Hill look like a pie-throwing contest.”

“Listen to her, Curtis,” the lumberjack said softly. “She’s telling you for Kimathi’s sake. No time for ego-tripping here, brother.”

The machinist nodded. “We’ll take him away right now. You want him, Ms. Detective, you ask Curtis. Less you know, the better.”

He turned to Kimathi and began talking to him, cajoling him. Kimathi didn’t want to leave without Curtis. I thought I might start screaming. I wanted him out-now!-before Dornick or anyone else showed up here.

I parted the ropes to leave and realized I was still holding the red handbag. I returned and put it on the counter. “This bag has attached itself to me, Mr. Rivers… And I see, anyway, that I’ve stained it… I lost all my cards and whatnot in the fire, but, if you put it away for me, I’ll pay for it when I get the cash together.”

Rivers studied me up and down with somber eyes, then handed the bag to me. “I’m going to take a chance on you, Ms. Detective. You’ve extended yourself here today. And if you don’t come through with the money, heck, I can leave your body in George Dornick’s office, claim he was responsible.”

It was a feeble joke, but we had all been so tense that we burst out laughing. All but Kimathi, who jerked away when he saw me laugh. “They say I the song-and-dance man… They laugh.” That sobered me up in a hurry.

I asked Rivers to let me out through the back, into the alley, just to give myself a little comfort zone. On my way out, I again urged the chess players to follow with Kimathi as fast as possible.

Once I reached Morrell’s car, I moved quickly, pushed by a nervous energy so frantic that I found myself flooring the accelerator and taking terrible risks in the traffic on the Ryan. At least I wasn’t texting, or playing the tuba, at the same time.

I pulled off the expressway, got out of the car, and tried to take some deep breaths, tried to regain some kind of center, but all I could see was my dad, the face I loved and trusted, looking through a one-way window into an interrogation room.

“You all right, there?” A police car had pulled up behind me without my noticing.

I felt the blood drain into my legs, but I clutched the car door and managed a smile. “Thanks. I had a cramp in my foot and thought I’d better get off to work it out.”

The officer tipped a wave but waited until I got into the car and slowly merged onto the Ryan. He followed me, as I studied traffic in my side mirrors, kept to the speed limit, signaled my lane changes. A bubble of hysteria kept threatening to overwhelm me. We serve and protect: the Chicago police motto. Was he protecting me? Was he making sure I hadn’t pulled over for a drug deal? Was he bored? What did he do in the station when he brought in a suspect?

I left the Ryan again at the main downtown exit and put the car in the underground garage near Millennium Park. I locked the red bag in the trunk. If I got to a point where I had to run, a bag like that would slow me down. It would also be easy for some tracker to follow.

Out on the street, the late August sun was blistering, and all that I had in the way of protection was my Cubs cap. No jacket, no lotions to protect my skin. I felt such a surge of self-loathing, anyway, that it seemed to me it would be good if the sun peeled the skin off my arms.

I was in too much of a hurry for public transportation and hailed a cab to take me to the top of Michigan Avenue. There’s a vertical shopping mall across the street from the Drake Hotel, where my uncle was staying. I went into the mall and found a stationer, where I picked up a pad of paper, an envelope, and a pen.

The Four Seasons Hotel was attached to the mall at the sixth floor. I walked through the connecting door into the subdued colors and calm of wealth, smiled at a concierge, and found an alcove where I could do some writing. I chewed on the capped end of the pen, trying to figure out what I wanted to say.

Dear Peter

Your big brother Tony covered your ass all those years ago, but I know now that you killed Harmony Newsome. There is no statute of limitations on murder, and I don’t feel Tony’s protective attachment to you, I won’t try to save you. What I’m wondering, though, is why you would sacrifice Petra. I thought at least you had a father’s normal love for his children.

If you want to talk to me, I will be in the gazebo across from the Drake for ten minutes. If you don’t show, I’ll be on my way. Will Bobby Mallory sit on the truth for you?

V.I.

I sealed up my note in the envelope and addressed it to my uncle. Across the street, I entered the lower lobby of the Drake, where there’s an arcade of shops. A bellman was standing near the stairs leading to the Drake’s main lobby. I gave him a five and asked him to deliver the envelope at once. Then I walked quickly through the arcade to the hotel’s north entrance.

It was 1:23 when I handed the letter to the bellman. Assume Peter was in his room. Assume the bellman delivered the envelope right away. Peter would call Dornick… or Alito… or Les Strangwell. Something should happen within twenty minutes.

Just across the street from the Drake is a little park, a triangle made by the hotel, Michigan Avenue on the left, and Lake Shore Drive as the hypotenuse. Beyond the drive lie some of the city’s most beautiful sand beaches. This time of year, the Oak Street Beach was packed with tourists, tanners, swimmers, and volleyballers, but the triangular park was essentially empty. A homeless man was asleep on a patch of grass outside its gazebo.

I walked along the row of cars parked on the south side of the triangle. Only one had someone sitting inside. There was a service van in front of one of the condos, and it could have held a surveillance team, but I didn’t think Dornick or Strangwell would feel the need to keep that sophisticated of a watch on Peter.

I walked back to Michigan Avenue, which was filled with shoppers and tourists. A trio of black youths banged homemade drums on the corner.

A tunnel goes under the avenue, but I crossed at street level. I was in the company of a woman who had a leash with a dog at the end of it in one hand and a cellphone in the other that was glued to her ear. A nanny with a baby buggy, also on a cellphone, was behind me. I felt reassuringly anonymous, just one more person in a ball cap enjoying the end of summer.

I sat on a bench in a bus stop on the far corner and watched the park. An elderly man with a toy poodle shuffled over from one of the condos near the hotel. The dog sniffed at late-blooming orange flowers while the man stared vacantly into the distance. A hard-muscled young woman jogged past the gazebo, down a ramp leading under Lake Shore Drive and to the beach. A few bicyclists emerged on the return route.

Seventeen minutes after I’d handed the envelope to the bellman, my uncle appeared. His hair was uncombed, his shirttails hung half out of his trousers. He certainly wasn’t resting easily these days. While he looked in and around the gazebo, I checked the opposite side of the street. No one was lingering on the sidewalks. No new cars hovered in the area. I climbed down the stairs to the tunnel under Michigan Avenue and emerged on the path to the beach.

“Peter!” I called sharply. “Over here!”