Hardball

44

WHILE I’D BEEN SPEAKING TO BOBBY, KAREN HAD BEEN standing at her window, aimlessly twitching the blind pull. She turned to me as I hung up. “There are a lot of police cars out front. We don’t usually get so many here. Do you think-?”

“I think I don’t want to find out.” I looked wildly around, hoping a hiding place would open up, but all I saw was my mop. The cops wouldn’t be fooled by a generic jumpsuit and an unused mop. They’d be inspecting all the janitors, even the one I’d seen in the elevator.

“Linen carts… They’re taking dirty linen someplace. Where?”

Karen thought a minute, then pressed a speed-dial number on her phone. “It’s Pastor Karen. I’ve been with one of our critically ill patients and have some soiled linens. Where can I find the nearest bin?… I stupidly carried them down to my office… No, I’ll come back up. I want to get them out of here, and I’m going to have to scrub after handling them, anyway… Number eleven, right.”

Her mouth set in a thin, firm line, she opened her door, looked around, and beckoned me. “Elevator eleven. Let’s go.”

I followed her through the maze of corridors, muscles tensing, to a rear service elevator. We could hear the scratchy echoes of police radios, the frightened shouts of Lionsgate residents wanting to know if there was a killer running loose in the halls, but we didn’t actually see any cops. Karen pushed the button on elevator 11. There was a stairwell nearby, and I could hear the pounding of feet. Our elevator arrived, but I stood frozen, watching the stairwell door until Karen shoved me into the elevator and pressed the button to close the doors.

I let out a loud breath. “Thanks. I’m losing my nerve.”

She put a finger over my mouth, jerking her head toward a camera in the ceiling, and began talking excitedly about the need for the janitor staff to do more for the AIDS cases in the hospital. “I have to scrub now because I’ve been handling infected linens and syringes. Can’t the cleaning crew do more?”

“It’s what happens when you outsource cleaning,” I said, switching on the harsh nasal of the South Side. “They’re paid by the room, not by the hour, and they don’t do the job an in-house service does.”

The elevator was hydraulic, and it seemed to me that in the time it took us to go from the second floor to the sub-basement a crew could have disinfected all fifteen floors of the manor. Karen and I babbled about AIDS and cleaning until my mouth felt like a bell with a very dry clapper hanging in the middle. The hydraulics finally hissed to a halt.

The doors opened onto a holding bay. Two dozen linen-filled carts stood there. Karen muttered that the laundry service would be by at midnight for pickup. The shower rooms for staff stood beyond the bay, and, next to them, a locked dressing room. Karen found a master key on her chain and unlocked the door. Uniforms were inside, hazmat suits, booties, all those things. She tossed me hat, gloves, mask, and a white jumpsuit and told me to get into a cart and get covered. I grabbed my gun and Miss Claudia’s Bible, then stripped out of my gray suit, burying it in the middle of one of the other carts, and pulled on the white jumpsuit. I put on the hat, the gloves, and the mask, and burrowed into the cart. A few minutes later, Karen appeared, and when I peeked at her she looked ominous in her own jumpsuit, hat, gloves, and mask. She flashed a bright red placard at me that read DANGER! HIGHLY INFECTIOUS, then covered me up. She whispered that she was tying the placard over the top of the cart. We’d hope for the best.

She pushed the cart onto the elevator. I lay there as it wheezed up a story to the entrance of the parking garage. The police had placed a guard there. I lay sweating in the linens while he demanded to know who Karen was and what she was doing.

“I’m getting these AIDS-infected linens to our cleaning service as fast as possible.”

“I’m checking all hospital IDs,” he said. A brief silence, and then he said, “You’re the pastor? And you’re handling linens? I don’t think-”

“Officer, it is my job to certify every death in this hospital. It’s my job to go through possessions and make a list for the next of kin. It’s my job to take bloody linens off a bed and cart them off when one of our patients passes and the cleaning crew has finished for the day. I can’t have foul matter in a room overnight. Another lady shares that room, and I won’t have her waking up and seeing the dreadful after-math of someone else’s death. But if you want to carry these out for me, I would be very grateful. My day started at six this morning, and I am weary. I would love to get to my own home.”

I wanted to applaud and cheer. The pastor might have been pushing wanted detectives out of hospitals for years, she was so smooth, so natural, in her mix of admonition and arrogance. The officer apologized, and said hastily he’d leave her to handle the cart.

We bumped quickly through the parking lot. I heard the chirp as she unlocked her car and the thump as she opened the trunk.

“I’m lifting sheets. They’ll block the view to the elevator. Then get into the trunk. You’ll be able to breathe, I think. At least enough until we’re in the clear.”

She was in charge, and I meekly followed her instructions. In another moment, the trunk closed. I heard the rattle of the cart as she rolled it a short distance away. And then we moved smoothly out of the garage. Apparently the cop at the inside entrance had called over to the cops guarding the exit, and there was only a brief halt, before we were in motion again.

Between the bass viol’s case and the Corolla trunk, I would choose the Corolla, but only because I was cushioned by the sheets and could put my knees up. Air was in short supply in both. I was thankful when Karen finally decided it was safe to let me out. She had driven up to a side street next to the campus that housed the University of Illinois’s sprawling medical facilities.

I climbed out and scrabbled through the soiled laundry for my gun and Miss Claudia’s Bible. All of the burrowing and dumping had shaken Miss Claudia’s page markers out of it and damaged the spine and creased some pages. I smoothed the pages out that had gotten creased and put in as many of the page markers as I could find.

“What do you want to do now?” Karen asked.

“I’d like to give you a big smooch. And then I’d like to take a shower. You ever get tired of pastoral work, you could open an agency easy.”

The pastor laughed. “I don’t want to go through that again, ever. When I had to get that cart past that cop, I thought my pressure was going to start pushing blood straight out of my head and all over the garage… Where do you want to go from here?”

Morrell’s car was still down near Lionsgate Manor. We agreed it might not be smart for me to show up there again tonight. Everything I wanted to do involved making phone calls, from talking to Murray Ryerson to finding Petra’s college roommate.

“You can make those calls from my house,” Karen offered. “I have an early meeting tomorrow, and it’d be easier on me if you spent the night with me than driving you up to Evanston.”

She rented the second floor of an old workman’s cottage on the Northwest Side. It was on a quiet street, a few blocks from the river, with a little balcony where she sat in the mornings to drink coffee. She showed me to the bathroom and gave me towels and soap. I was a good four inches taller than Karen, but I could wear her T-shirts. She gave me one to sleep in.

When I got out of the shower, Karen had opened a bottle of wine and set out a plate of cheese and crackers. A big orange cat she called Bernardo materialized and wrapped himself around her legs. Somehow, despite the traumas of the day, just being able to sit and talk naturally, even to laugh without worrying about who was eavesdropping, raised my spirits.

After a glass of wine, I felt able to call Murray for details about Alito’s murder. Karen had one of those phone services that lets you mask the number you’re calling from, so I didn’t need to worry about it showing up on Murray’s caller ID. Of course, as soon as Murray heard my voice he wanted to know where I was. And a lot of other tedious stuff.

“Murray, darling, as I said earlier, I’m on the move. The more time you waste asking frivolous questions, the less we have for a heart-to-heart. I haven’t heard the news, except a report that Alito’s body fetched up on the riverbank down by one of those big scrap-metal yards. Tell me what happened.”

“Warshawski, it’s all take with you and no give. I bought you a shirt, I bought you jeans, I let Dr. Herschel take a piece off me, and now this?”

“I know, Murray. Every time I see you in that sky-blue Mercedes convertible, I’m thinking, There he goes, the people’s reporter, never thinking of himself, always giving. So give.”

“Oh, damn you, Warshawski! Alito was shot at close range, very close range, by someone who probably had an arm around him, very pally, and then dumped him over the bridge. What I’m hearing, whoever killed him must’ve thought Alito would go into the river or get buried in scrap. Instead, he landed in a pile that was due to be brought up for remelting. The guy operating the forklift fainted, almost fell onto a molten rebar belt.”

Murray paused a beat, then said, “A lot of people think it’s quite a coincidence, you calling me this morning to tell me you’d spotted Alito breaking into your office and him showing up dead this afternoon.”

I drank some more wine. “Murray, does anyone at the Star feel attached to facts these days? Say, just in the interest of protecting the paper from a libel suit? I told you I’d found a witness who ID’d Alito. I couldn’t have spotted him at my office myself because I wasn’t there. I was in Stateville with the Hammer at the time Alito was breaking in.”

Murray brushed that off. “I talked to the widow… What’s her name? Hazel? Right… She said you’d threatened him.”

“Yep, I been hearing that. I told her exactly what I told you. I have a witness who ID’d him. Period, end of story.” I twirled the wineglass around, watching the light change the colors on the surface. I had changed Alito’s life, too, twirling a story around him as if he were wine in a glass.

“Of course I threatened him,” I said roughly. “I didn’t know my words would get him killed. I hoped they’d goad him into doing something that would betray himself or his handlers to me. But when I spoke, I pushed him and his handlers to the brink.

“Alito wasn’t going to take the fall alone, not if Mallory or the FBI were coming after him, so he called… whoever hired him. Let’s say, oh, George Dornick, his old partner when they were both with the force. Or one of Dornick’s clients… Call him Les, just to give him a name. Alito’s a drunk. He has a pension and a little boat and nothing else. Les and George are afraid he’ll crack. He can do heavy lifting for them, but not if he’s going to lead someone like Bobby Mallory straight to them.”

“Les?” Murray exploded. “Like Les Strangwell?”

“Good night, Murray. Sweet dreams.”

I hung up, and grimaced at Karen. “I think I really did send Larry Alito to his death. I think… I don’t like myself very much today.”

“Did someone really identify him going into your building?”

I shook my head. “It was a hunch, and apparently an accurate one, since it must have sent him scrambling to Dornick, or even Strangwell.”

I repeated Murray’s description of the murder. “It must have been Dornick… I can’t see Strangwell embracing Alito, either… But his old partner? The man who gave him odd jobs to help him run his boat and his little retirement bungalow on the water? Yes, Alito would feel he had to trust him.”

“Maybe you did set in motion the events that got him murdered today. But you can’t be greedy over guilt, you know. If he hadn’t been the kind of person who would break into your office, your phone call wouldn’t have made any difference in his life.” Karen looked at me earnestly, her round young face flushed.

“ ‘ Greedy over guilt.’ I like that. I have been greedily guilty all day.” My distress over my father swept through me again, a wave that made me shut my eyes in pain.

I changed the subject. We ended up drinking the whole bottle of wine and laughing over family stories, like the one about her grandmother whose father wouldn’t let her learn to drive so she took the family car and drove it into the horse pond and then calmly went in the house, packed a suitcase, and took off for Chicago.

It was close to midnight when I finally helped my hostess pull the sofa apart and turn it into a guest bed. For the first time in a week, I slept eight hours. Like a tranquil baby.