Hardball

42

“WHAT THE HELL ARE YOU UP TO?” CLOSE UP, MY UNCLE looked worse than I’d thought. His eyes were bloodshot, he was unshaven, and he smelled of stale alcohol.

“What the hell are you up to, Peter, letting Petra take the fall so that you don’t have to face the-”

“Goddamn you, you ignorant bitch, I am protecting my daughter.” For a moment, we both thought he was going to hit me.

My mouth creased in a sour smile. “Sending her out to find police evidence that Tony squirreled away for you? Involving her in arson and criminal trespass at my old South Chicago house and at my current house and office?”

“You don’t know anything!” His roar brought the cyclists and joggers around us to a brief halt: Did I need help?

I smiled and waved at the concerned citizens, who were happy to leave us to our quarrel. I kept the smile on my lips and my voice light, conversational. We didn’t need to draw a crowd.

“I know that in 1967 Steve Sawyer was brutally tortured into confessing to a murder he never committed. I know he served forty years, doing very hard time, in your stead. And I know he thought there were some photographs proving who really killed Harmony Newsome in Marquette Park during that 1966 riot. I know that Larry Alito brought evidence of the murder over to our South Chicago house back around Christmas 1967 and that Tony took it to keep your sorry ass out of prison.”

“I didn’t kill Harmony Newsome,” Peter hissed.

“Then who did?”

Peter looked around, wondering who was listening. “I don’t know.”

“Brilliant,” I said. “ It wasn’t me, I wasn’t there, I didn’t do it. Every cop and every criminal lawyer hears that line a hundred times their first week on the job. You weren’t in Marquette Park, Tony didn’t take evidence, Larry Alito-”

“Shut up! I was in Marquette Park, okay? Is that a crime? It was my neighborhood park, my friends were all there.”

“What, you guys went there to play ball, and then suddenly, in the third inning, this huge riot broke out? And then what? You got lost in the crowd and started throwing bricks and rocks and stuff in the hopes they’d point you to your way home?”

“You’re just like your tight-assed bitch of a mother, acting like she was the Madonna and all the saints poured into one-”

“Call me any name you like, you two-bit bully, but do not insult Gabriella.” My hands on my hips, my face close to his. He backed away.

The silence lingered between us. Peter was fidgeting, worried about what I knew, what I might say. But I was weary, of him, of fighting, of myself. And when I finally spoke again, it took an effort to go through the motions.

“You went to Marquette Park in 1966, but you didn’t kill Harmony Newsome and you don’t know who did. But you sent Petra out looking for the evidence just in case it came back to bite you. Only it’s bitten Petra instead. Take it from there… Tell me how you’re protecting her.”

His face was white underneath the stubble. “Don’t preach at me. You’re the one who got Petey in trouble in the first place, introducing her to gangbangers and taking her to slums.”

“No, no, no.” My hands were over my ears, trying to stop the barrage of lies. “She wheedled me until I took her to see all the different houses you and Grandma Warshawski and Tony had lived in. I thought at the time Petra was behaving strangely, especially her wanting to see where everyone stored their stuff. I tried to get her to tell me why, and she wouldn’t. But of course she wanted to see if, by any chance, Tony had left behind that photograph!”

“You’re making this shit up to cover your own butt,” my uncle said.

“Peter, someone ID’d Petra, ID’d her standing on Houston Avenue while thugs threw a smoke bomb into the house and ransacked it. What did you have her doing?”

“People make mistakes all the time when they’re asked to ID someone. Petra wasn’t there. You might have bought off a witness-”

“To get my own cousin in trouble? Or for any reason whatsoever?” I wanted to pick him up and bang his head against the concrete barricade above us.

“Do you understand, I am crazy with worry. I will say or do anything to see Petra doesn’t get hurt. And if that means accusing you-of anything-I’ll do it.”

“You know they’ll never let Petra walk away from this,” I said. “When they find her, they’ll dump her body someplace where they can implicate one of Johnny Merton’s boys. They’d like it to be Steve Sawyer, of course, as Dornick suggested in Strangwell’s office yesterday. Dude’s already gone down once instead of you, why not twice?”

“Dornick told me back then that Sawyer was a killer, he and Merton both,” Peter burst out. “Sawyer was just going to prison for a different murder than the one he actually did.”

“Have you ever watched someone put electrodes on a man’s balls and run a current through them?” I asked.

He squirmed, and his hand went reflexively to his crotch.

“After a time-and not a very long time-he’ll say anything to get it to stop. Tony watched Larry Alito and George Dornick do this to Steve Sawyer. He tried to get them to stop, and they told him they were doing it for you.”

“I didn’t kill the girl, damn it!” Sweat poured from Peter’s face, although it could have been the hot sun of course. My own face was aching from the sun hitting my burns through the Cubs cap.

“Why did you send Petra out to look for the photos?”

“I didn’t.” He was hoarse. “I didn’t know what she was up to. Rachel was worried about Petey, said she sounded strange, subdued, not like herself, and she stopped calling every day the way she usually did. I thought it was the work on the campaign. Strangwell’s a hard boss. Petey isn’t used to that much discipline or responsibility.”

“Was Strangwell at Marquette Park with you in 1966?”

He shook his head. “Les is a friend of Harvey’s, helped him on the PR side, taught him how to handle congressional hearings, that kind of thing. Harvey was Les’s most important client before the Strangler became a political op, so of course Les moved in to run the kid’s campaign.”

“Dornick?” I prodded. “Was he at Marquette Park with you?”

“Dornick was a cop. He was in the park, but he was holding the line around King. We razzed him about it at-” He stopped, realizing how bad that sounded in today’s context.

“We?” I prodded.

“All of us from the neighborhood,” he muttered.

“Harvey Krumas was there, too?”

“I said all of us from the neighborhood, and that’s all I’m saying.”

“If you didn’t kill Ms. Newsome, why did Tony cave and take evidence when Dornick and Alito threatened to send you to prison?”

“They could manipulate the evidence, Tony knew that.”

“And that Nellie Fox baseball…What was it evidence of?”

“I don’t know what you’re talking about,” he muttered unconvincingly.

“That’s what Alito dropped off at my dad’s, isn’t it? The night he said you’d go to prison if Tony didn’t hide it?”

“That baseball didn’t prove one damned thing. George thought he was being so cute-” He cut himself short when he realized how much he was revealing, then continued. “Tony believed me when I swore to him that I never hurt that black girl. Why can’t you cut me the same slack?”

“Because, my dear uncle, you are willing to let George Dornick put a bullet through my head to protect yourself all over again. And despite your protestations that you’d do anything for Petra, I don’t see you going to Bobby Mallory, spilling your guts, so that your kid can come out of wherever she’s hiding and stop fearing for her own life! I’d love to know what they’re giving you that’s wonderful enough for you to let everyone around you-your brother, me, but, most of all, your daughter-take the fall for you.”

I waited a moment, hoping he’d say something, anything, to give me a handle to turn. When he remained silent, I started down the stairs that led to the tunnel under Michigan Avenue. Peter called after me; I waited for him at the bottom.

“Leave town, Vic.” He pulled out his wallet and tried to shove a fistful of twenties at me. “Leave town until all this blows over.”

“Peter, it’s not going to blow over. Bobby Mallory is already pulling a thread out of this ball of yarn. Don’t tell me your friends can force him to drop the investigation.”

He looked around again. “If Homeland Security tells Mallory to stop, he’ll stop.”

The interrogation I’d undergone after Sister Frankie’s death-Homeland Security had been there and wanted to know what the nun had told me before she died-had that been at Dornick’s behest? Did he, or Strangwell, have so much clout they could shut down a Chicago Police investigation?

“So they’re waiting for me to produce the photographs before they kill me,” I said slowly. “Once they have the pictures and I’m dead, they’ll feel safe.”

My uncle shifted uneasily. Maybe no one had said it out loud to him, but they’d made it clear that he’d get Petra in exchange for me and whatever evidence was still floating around from Marquette Park all those years ago. “Where are you going? What are you doing now? If you talk to Bobby-”

“I’m not telling you what I’m doing because I don’t want to be an easier target for your pal George than I already am. If you have anything to say to me, put it out on the Web. I’ll try to find a safe place to check my e-mails now and then.”

He grabbed my arm, trying to hector me into making a public declaration that I would drop the investigation, but I was angry, scared, and short of time. I shoved him away and sprinted through the tunnel and up the other side. I jumped into the first cab that came along and rode south to Millennium Park.

The skin on my arms and scalp was throbbing from where the sun had burned the raw patches. There are a couple of big fountains in the park, slabs of glass where water falls from the top and children dance and slide in it as it hits the ground. I held my burning arms and head under the water, not minding that my clothes were getting wet, keeping myself just turned away enough that the water didn’t hit my back hip and my gun sitting in its tuck holster.

I don’t know how long I stood, soothed by the water, oblivious to the exuberant children around me. I finally trudged on leaden feet to the garage entrance. A man was selling Streetwise.

“Come on, beautiful, let’s have a smile on that gorgeous face of yours. Nothing is this bad. Not if you have a roof over your head and a family that loves you.”

“I don’t.” I walked past him into the garage.

In Morrell’s Honda, I leaned back in the seat, my wet clothes squelching against the vinyl upholstery. I could picture Morrell’s expression-annoyance quickly suppressed-at my dripping in his car. Suppressed, because he’d see how distraught I was, my confidence in my father’s essential rightness undermined. Morrell was so kind-and, well, moral-he would always put his need for order behind another person’s need for compassion.

“This for your brother.” That’s what Steve Sawyer-Kimathi said Dornick and Alito had told Tony. We’re torturing Kimathi for your brother’s sake. And Tony had turned around and left them to it.

“Nothing is this bad. Not if you have a roof over your head and a family that loves you.” What kind of love had Tony given me-all that wise, patient advice-what had it been grounded in? And my mother: how much had she known about Steve Sawyer and her husband’s brother and her husband?

I thought of some of the men I’d known over the years: my ex-husband, Murray, Conrad. My ex-husband and Murray Ryerson were ordinary, ambitious men, but Morrell at least was decent, even heroic. Maybe I carried some taint I’d never been aware of, something I’d been unwilling to face. Melodrama. The trouble was, I’d never imagined any taint could be attached to my father.

I was unexpectedly wracked again by sobs, so violent that they banged me against the steering wheel. I tried not to howl out loud, the last vestige of reason warning me not to attract attention.