Hardball

by Sara Paretsky

  “Peewee wants to visit,” Mr. Contreras said. “I told her I was sure you’d want to see her.”

  “Absolutely. The sooner, the better. Can you go up to my place and collect my phone charger so she can bring it with her?” I couldn’t tie up Lotty’s phone but I needed to start connecting myself to the land of the living. “And here are my car keys. Get her to drive you over to pick up my car on Kedzie before I get a hundred meter violations and twenty boots.”

  I didn’t think I could stand to use my old handbag again. When I had stuck my hand in to fish out my keys, it came out covered in ash. Sister Carolyn had known I was a PI only because my license had been the plastic on top when she looked at my wallet. The credit cards underneath it had fused together with my driver’s license. I called my card companies for replacements, but I’d have to go in person to the Secretary of State’s Office for a new PI license.

  After Mr. Contreras left, Lotty went to her clinic on Damen. I resisted the impulse to go back to bed and phoned Sister Carolyn instead. I wanted to know if she’d been able to find any more bottle fragments in Sister Frankie’s apartment.

  “The police came almost as soon as you’d left. They wanted to know who broke the seal on Frankie’s door. I told them it must have been the intruder we chased down the stairs. They put a padlock on the door, so we can’t get in.”

  “Bolt cutters,” I said absently, flexing my fingers inside their gauze wrappers, imagining working a pick into the padlock.

  “We’ll think about that,” the nun said drily. “But I want to know who’s watching our building. When you were here, you said it was the federal government.”

  “The feds came to see me in the hospital: someone from Homeland Security, someone from the FBI, and local guys from the Bomb and Arson squad. It was the day after the fire, so I don’t remember it clearly. They know who lives in your building, all the families. Come to think of it, they’re probably listening to this conversation, so forget the bolt cutters.”

  “Eavesdropping!” Zabinska was almost speechless with fury.

  I suggested she come see me at Lotty’s so we could talk about it privately. I wanted to speak to her anyway, now that I was more alert mentally, to learn anything Sister Frankie might have said to her about Steve Sawyer’s involvement in Harmony Newsome’s murder.

  Before Lotty left, she had made me promise to stay inside. But I wanted to be in motion. After doing as much of a workout as I could handle, and having a phone meeting with Marilyn Klimpton at my office, I wandered restlessly around Lotty’s apartment. In the side room where she keeps her television (off-limits) and her library overflow (off-limits), I found a sewing basket with a pair of shears in it. I went into the bathroom and started chopping my hair.

  When I was five, my father gave me a doll for Christmas that had a huge halo of dark hair. It was JFK’s first year in office, and dolls all had the Jackie do. Boom-Boom and I took a pair of scissors to that doll, and, by the time we’d finished, she looked much as I did now. Dentists shouldn’t drill their own teeth and detectives shouldn’t cut their own hair. At least, not when their hands were wrapped up in boxer’s tape.

  A little after one, when I thought I might go mad from inaction, the cops showed up. They knew I’d been sprung; they probably knew Lotty wasn’t home. It was time to talk.

  I put on my heavy dark glasses to underline my invalid status. Just to be prudent, I rode the elevator to the lobby to make sure they were really cops, not robbers. I hadn’t actually seen any of their faces in the hospital, but their voices told me these were essentially the same players who’d interrogated me last week.

  The FBI had sent Lyle Torgeson again, but the feds had beefed up their presence with someone from Homeland Security. The city had sent only the woman from the Office of Emergency Management instead of the duo who’d come to my hospital room. The CPD sent the same two guys from the Bomb and Arson squad, a young white man with a crew cut who was already developing a paunch and a Latino about my own age who was balding and had big fatigue circles around his eyes.

  “I don’t have Dr. Herschel’s permission to bring all these strangers into her home,” I told the doorman. “Is there a conference room we could use?”

  “There’s a room in the building manager’s office,” the doorman said doubtfully. “It’s kind of small, though.”

  “We can take you down to Thirty-fifth and Michigan,” the Latino Bomb and Arson guy suggested.

  “You have a warrant?… Then we’ll meet here. There are only six of us, after all.”

  The doorman called up to the building manager to see if the room was free and to send someone down to escort us so that he wouldn’t have to abandon his post at the entrance.

  It was a small room, and getting six chairs around the round table meant we all had to be careful to keep our knees to ourselves. I was sorry in a way that I’d kept them out of Lotty’s place, but if they were uncomfortable inhaling one another’s bad breath, which the woman from OEM had to a remarkable degree, they wouldn’t stay long.

  I kept my big plastic glasses on mostly to annoy them. They would want to try to read my facial tics, how I moved my eyes and so on, and now they couldn’t.

  “You look like the bad end of a catfight,” Torgeson said. “You get your hair caught in a wringer over at the nun’s place when you went back there?”

  “Everyone’s taping this, right? So the FBI and OEM and CPD are all going to get the same useful transcript. The real question here is”-I paused long enough to see that they were all leaning forward, hoping for some gem of self-revelation-“why is a woman always characterized as being in a catfight after an altercation? I’m sure with the research you’ve done on me, you know I have two dogs, so it’s a good bet I’d be more responsive to a dogfight metaphor. And yet your underlying sexism made you-”

  “Enough,” Torgeson barked. “You know damned well what I was talking about.”

  I shook my head. “Mind reading isn’t one of my skills. And I haven’t been tapping your phone, so I can’t rely on your conversations to tell me what you’re thinking or talking about.”

  “Ms. Warshawski, we know you left Beth Israel to return to the nun’s apartment four nights ago.” It was the white guy from Bomb and Arson.

  When I didn’t say anything, he said, “Well?”

  “Is there a question?” I said.

  “What were you doing at the nun’s building four nights ago?” he said, his voice tight from the effort not to lose his temper.

  “I was in the hospital four nights ago,” I said.

  When the HIV nun had escorted me back inside, she’d flashed her hospital ID at the security guard and stopped to chat briefly with one of the nurses. No one looked at me, a rookie nun, new to the HIV/ AIDS service, head lowered. No one on the fifth floor had commented on my absence, either, when I slipped back into my room or the next morning, so I didn’t think it had been noticed.

  “You were seen entering the Freedom Center building,” the woman from OEM said. “What were you doing there?”

  “I was seen?” I echoed. “That’s an old, old ploy. I need more than that to persuade me I was at Kedzie and Lawrence instead of in my hospital bed.”

  The OEM woman pulled a set of stills from her briefcase and laid them on the small round table in the middle of the room. We all took turns looking at them. They were time-stamped, and they showed a woman whose dark hair held a few white streaks wearing jeans and a white shirt. They were shot from behind, so you couldn’t see where her hair had been shaved back from her temples. Nor could you see that she was using the edge of her plastic lenses to snap the tongue back in the front-door lock.

  “I don’t know,” I said. “It’s not like this person is wearing a jacket marked ‘V. I. Warshawski.’ And I think I’d remember if I’d been there. You have some shots showing me leaving, some where I could see my face? I don’t recognize myself from behind.”

  There was a momentary silence. I’d left wearing a nu
n’s veil, my face down, two other sisters and my cousin holding me close. They had the shots, but they probably didn’t know what to make of them.

  “Look, Warshawski, this isn’t supposed to be an antagonistic meeting,” the Latino guy from Bomb and Arson said. “We assume you’re on the same team we are.”

  “And what team would that be, Detective?’

  “That you want to catch Sister Frances’s killer,” he said.

  “Oh, I definitely want to do that,” I agreed.

  “Then why don’t you tell us what you were doing at her apartment?” That was the FBI’s Lyle Torgeson.

  I yawned. “I wasn’t at her apartment.”

  “Let’s forget four nights ago,” Torgeson said. “The night of the fire… You agree you were there that night?… Tell us why.”

  “Right. I went to talk to Sister Frances about Steve Sawyer.”

  “We know about that,” the man from Homeland Security said.

  “You have bugs planted in her room?” I asked. “They’re good quality, I guess, if they survived the fire and you retrieved them. Not like the crap weapons you buy from China and sell to Afghanistan.”

  “You were bugging the room?” the white Bomb and Arson detective said, turning to the feds. “Why the fuck were you doing that?”

  “National security,” the Homeland Security man said. “I can’t say any more.”

  “Beautiful umbrella,” I murmured. “From now on, whenever I do anything particularly embarrassing, I’ll just cry ‘National security!’ and refuse to say anything else.”

  “That’s enough,” Torgeson snapped. “What were you doing in Sister Frances’s apartment?”

  “National security,” I said.

  The two Bomb and Arson squad detectives swallowed smiles. Harmony did not reign supreme between the federal and local law enforcers. I let them bicker with one another for a few minutes.

  “I have a question for you,” I said. “You know why I went to see Sister Frances, to discuss the case of the man who’d been convicted of killing Harmony Newsome in Marquette Park forty years ago. Sister Frances was marching with Ms. Newsome that hot summer day and said she didn’t think it was possible that Steve Sawyer killed Ms. Newsome. Are you reopening the case?”

  “He was tried, convicted, did his time. We’re not interested.” That was the Latino cop.

  “Then why was that the last question OEM asked me in the hospital, why did I care what Sister Frances had to say about that old murder?”

  “I think you misheard. You were drugged, in a lot of pain,” Torgeson said.

  “You’re the ones with the tape recorders.” I looked at my fingertips. “Go listen to the conversation. I don’t have anything else for you.”

  The crowded room was momentarily quiet. Then the Bomb and Arson team started asking me questions that I could answer, to lead them step-by-step through my brief time with Sister Frances. It wasn’t meaningful or helpful, but I was the only witness.

  The more times I recounted the Molotov cocktails sailing in on us, the less real they became. It was easy to describe them glibly, as if they were a plot detail in a thriller and not a death-dealing event.

  When I finished, I asked what residue they’d found in the bottles: gasoline? rocket fuel? jellied bomb accelerant?

  “We can’t answer questions like that,” the Homeland Security man said. “They’re in connection with an investigation linked to our national security.”

  It was my turn to remember I needed to keep a leash on my temper. “What about the perps? You must have pictures of them, time-stamped and everything, right? Anything you can show on the street for an ID?”

  “We can’t comment. It’s an investigation linked to our national security.”

  “But these pictures aren’t?” I picked up the stills of me at the entrance to the Freedom Center building. “That’s good. I’ll show them to Sister Carolyn, see if she knows who this might be. Given that someone was in Sister Frances’s apartment that night, she might recognize who.”

  “If you weren’t there, how do you know someone was in the dead nun’s apartment?” Torgeson pounced.

  “You just told me.” I got to my feet, holding the stills. The woman from OEM leaned over, spraying me with her fetid breath, and grabbed the pictures.

  “These are government property and are highly classified.”

  “I know,” I said. “‘An investigation linked to our national security. ’ ”

  She glared at me. “I’d strongly advise you not to suggest to a nun that she take a bolt cutter to a room that’s been secured by the police.”

  I smiled at her. We were playing a game where the person who keeps her temper longest wins. “You know, we live in a county where patronage workers get paid a hundred thousand dollars a year not to work. So it cheers me no end to see that you really are earning the salary my tax dollars pay for. You’ve been hard at it, and I’ll see you get a note stuck in your personnel file.”

  30

  LINE SPINNERS

  EVEN THOUGH I’D WALKED AWAY TRIUMPHANT FROM THAT skirmish, there was no way I could win a larger battle with the law. The real question, if I could get my tired brain to return to duty, was why they cared so much. Their questions, their whole attitude, seemed more about Sister Frances’s and my conversation than her murder.

  I had to be honest enough to admit my arrival at the murder scene two days later warranted investigation. But why did they have such an elaborate stakeout on the building in the first place?

  The interrogation had worn me out. I tried to make some notes, in big block capitals with a felt-tipped marker, but the effort put me to sleep. When I woke, it was because the doorman was calling on the house phone: Sister Carolyn Zabinska had arrived.

  “You don’t look well. Are you up to talking?” she greeted me.

  Her own face was pinched and gray with grief. She was tall and sturdily built, but her shoulders were bent forward with pain.

  “It’s just my hair,” I said, steering myself away from self-pity. “I tried to trim it with sewing shears and was singularly inept. The FBI was ruder. They said I looked like the losing end of a catfight.”

  “Yes, the FBI. That’s what I want to talk about… One of the things, anyway.”

  She followed me onto the balcony off the living room, where Lotty has a little table and chairs in the summer. I offered refreshments, and left her standing there, looking out over Lake Michigan, while I burrowed in Lotty’s kitchen. She practically survives on Viennese coffee, but I found some German herbal infusions in the back of a drawer. When I returned to the balcony with a tray, precariously balanced between my bandaged palms, Sister Carolyn sat down and asked how I knew the FBI was watching the Freedom Center building.

  “I don’t know if the FBI is involved. Homeland Security took the pictures.” I explained what I’d learned from today’s interview, including the news that the feds photographed everyone entering and leaving.

  “That’s so outrageous. Why on earth?”

  “I don’t know. When they questioned me in the hospital, they were dancing like rhinos around the subject. They implied it could be because of your tenants. You’re the one who knows if you’re treading on their toes.”

  “Treading on their toes? It’s true we protest at the School of the Americas. We work with poor immigrants, with refugees, with people on death row. We’re involved in affordable housing. And peace. But we don’t do anything clandestine or immoral. We don’t sell drugs or weapons or spy on people.”

  “You know darned well you’re rocking the whole aircraft carrier with those issues. America as armed camp is the status quo. Peace, letting in immigrants, ending torture, ending the death penalty: no wonder they think you’re a threat. There must be a whole floor of that building on the Potomac dedicated to your Freedom Center.”

  “But that means we’re endangering the other tenants,” Zabinska said, worried. “We don’t own the building, but the management company that does
has been pretty generous. They let us run the Freedom Center out of the ground-floor apartments. Five of us sisters attached to the center rent there, and we’ve ended up working with a lot of the other tenants because so many are either refugees or are trying to figure out how to get health care or housing vouchers. Maybe we should see about moving the ones who’re most at risk for deportation. Everyone’s pretty scared as it is because of the fire bombs.”

  “You’d better be very careful where and how you talk about it,” I warned her. “They probably are listening to all your conversations, not just your phones.”

  She was outraged, of course, especially when I explained how hard it is to detect or block a sophisticated eavesdropper, which the feds certainly are. We talked over her options. Technological solutions were outside her budget, and playing cloak-and-dagger, with codes and meetings off premises, was too time-consuming.

  “Besides, that kind of secretiveness would drive us mad. It’s so counter to our vows and our mission. But maybe we should start leaving through the alley when we want to be private.”

  I made a face. “It would be easy to mount tiny surveillance cameras on the light poles in the alley. It depends on how much they care about you.”

  Sister Carolyn pushed the heels of her hands against her eyes. “I know these are important matters, but it’s hard to pay attention to them right now. We’re all still in shock at losing Frankie. The violence of the attack, that’s very hard to absorb. But losing her… I wasn’t ready for that. I’m the head of the Freedom Center, but she was our real leader, spiritually, psychologically, in all the ways that count most. I need to understand why she was killed.”

  I bit my lower lip. “I wish I knew, but I don’t.”

  “When I looked in your wallet and saw your PI license, I thought maybe you’d come to spy on her. I didn’t realize then that the government was already spying on us. I thought maybe an anti-immigrant group had hired you.”

  I went through my tired story about hunting for Lamont Gadsden and Steve Sawyer. When I mentioned Karen Lennon’s name, Sister Carolyn’s heavy expression lightened for a moment.