Hardball

by Sara Paretsky

  I put the gun down and unlocked the kitchen door. When Thibaut reached the upper landing, he jumped almost as much as I had on hearing him.

  “V. I. Warshawski! Don’t sneak up on me like that! I don’t have insurance that covers dropping bass down stairs when surprised by detectives.”

  “Sorry,” I said. “I’m so edgy these days that, when I heard you, I thought it was my housewreckers on their way back. Where were you playing?”

  “Ravinia. And then we went out for a drink or three. What are you doing up at this hour? Any word on your cousin?” He drew the bass up next to him.

  “If anyone has heard about my cousin, they’re not telling me.” I measured myself against the bass’s case, an idea coming to me. “How drunk are you?”

  “Bass players don’t get drunk. It’s one of our hallmarks. Long, tall instruments give their players hollow legs. Why, you want me to bow a perfect fourth for you?”

  “I want you to smuggle me in your case out to someplace where I can catch a cab and not be seen.”

  He was quiet for a minute, and then said, “How drunk are you?”

  “Not drunk. Terrified.”

  He rested the bass against his back door. “You don’t seem like the terrifiable type.”

  “No, of course not. We PI’s thrive on death and danger. We don’t have the feelings ordinary people do. I’m a disgrace to the club, letting trifles like a missing cousin and a murdered nun rattle me.”

  In the dim light coming from my kitchen window, I saw him give me a speculative look. “Anyone going to shoot at me or set me on fire if I wheel you out to Belmont Avenue?”

  “Anything is possible. You ever been held up by a junkie who thinks he can sell your fiddle for a fix?”

  Thibaut laughed softly. “One advantage of playing a really big instrument: people know they can’t race off down the street with it. Let me put Bessie to rest, and I’ll be with you. I hope you’re clean. I don’t want sweat and grease or anything on the inside of the case.”

  I went back into my place and carefully wiped all the protective cream from my face and arms. I realized I was hungry; I hadn’t eaten since breakfast yesterday morning. Fatigue and anxiety had kept me from thinking about food, but I was suddenly ravenous. Thibaut came into my kitchen as I was hastily putting together a cheese sandwich.

  “You can’t eat inside the case,” he said. “Probably you won’t be able to breathe in it, either. The old guy downstairs is going to sue me if you suffocate?”

  “Nah. He’ll just let the dogs chew on your bass.”

  Thibaut helped himself to a chunk of the pecorino I was eating. “I can’t carry you down the stairs. I’m not sure the case would hold your weight, but I’m sure I can’t.”

  “I’ll come down the front stairs and get out to the garden through the basement door. When you’re at the bottom of the back stairs, I’ll try to creep along in your shadow. I’ll wait to climb into the case until you’re at the back gate. You can wheel me down the alley to your car.”

  I went into my bathroom to rub mascara on my cheekbones so they wouldn’t reflect light back from the streetlamps; I hoped it wouldn’t come off in Thibaut’s case. I put on a navy windbreaker and stuck my keys and my new wallet, with cash and passport inside, in my hip pocket. I checked that the safety on the Smith & Wesson was on, pulled a Cubs cap low over my forehead, and ran as lightly as I could down the front stairs.

  The only difficult moment came as I passed Mr. Contreras’s front door. Mitch let out a sharp bark and a whine, demanding to join me. Once I went past him and into the basement, he quieted down.

  When I slid back the bolt on the basement exit, Thibaut was just bumping his case down the last flight of back-porch steps. I waited for him to reach the walk, then slipped into his shadow. He worked the move like a pro, not looking over his shoulder for me but pulling out his phone and complaining to someone he addressed as Lily, “You must be stoned as well as drunk to want to practice the Schulhoff piece this hour of the night. But, my little chickadee, to hear is to obey. I’m on my way.”

  At the back gate, I managed to stuff my sixty-eight-inch frame into the fifty-six-inch case. As Thibaut had warned, I could barely breathe. The few minutes where he bumped along the broken concrete into the alley and, panting and wheezing, laid the case across the flattened-out entrance to the backseat were an agony for my spine and neck. Once I was on the seat, he unhooked the case’s hinges. I pushed the lid up a few inches with my knees so that I could straighten out my spine.

  Again without looking over his shoulder, Thibaut asked for my office address. I told him he could drop me on Belmont, where I’d flag a cab.

  “V. I. Warshawski, I didn’t seriously risk the life of this twenty-two-hundred-dollar case to drive you four blocks. Tell me where you’re going.”

  I didn’t put up a serious fight. I was glad of the offer. I sent him on a route up past Wrigley Field, turning onto side streets until he was sure no one was following him. Finally we drove to an intersection a block north and east of my office. If the office was under surveillance, I didn’t want anyone registering Thibaut’s car in a database.

  I flexed my spine and did a few neck stretches before leaning into the driver’s window to thank him. “Who’s Lily?”

  “The fox terrier we had when I was a kid. When all this is over, I’ll play a concert for you. The Schulhoff concertino, to commemorate my most exciting performance since my Marlborough Festival debut.”

  He squeezed my fingers where they rested on his open window. The warmth of his hand stayed with me as I slipped into the shadow of the buildings on Oakley.

  38

  CONFESSION IN MYSPACE

  I DIDN’T KNOW ANY UNOBTRUSIVE WAY TO GET INTO MY office. The alley exit opens only from the inside, and the windows are twelve feet from the ground. It would have to be through the front door.

  At this hour of the morning, all the trendy bars and cafés in the area are closed. The coffee shop across the street would open in a few hours, but right now its glass front gleamed black under the streetlamps like a pond.

  I moved cautiously down the street, gun in hand. No one was out that I could see. But if pros were conducting surveillance, it could be done by remote camera. They wouldn’t have to be on the street.

  A rat leaped from a garbage can at my approach, and I came close to screaming. I had to stop and gulp down the wave of panic that swept over me, as it ran out onto the sidewalk. Still, I couldn’t hold back a little cry. A car drove up the street and turned left onto Cortlandt. It was missing a taillight. Dornick looked like the buttoned-down type who wouldn’t let you work for him if your car was missing a light. Or would he use a car like this to make me think he wasn’t watching me?

  Or he could be… Enough! The Age of Fear makes you crazy. I took a breath, crossed the street, and tapped in the new door code to my building. The lock wheezed as it always did, a loud sound in the still night, but I was tired of fear. I boldly opened the door, stopping long enough to tap each of the numbers on the pad so that anyone using a UV spray wouldn’t be able to tell which ones unlocked the door. I flicked on the lights, not caring that they would spill out onto the street and advertise my presence.

  My office suite still had a crime scene seal across the door, but I broke it and went into the chaos. For a moment, my spirits flagged again on seeing the mess. I made a feeble stab at straightening things out, putting drawers back in the desk, returning ordnance maps to their shelves, but the chaos was overwhelming. I wondered who I could hire to help since the temporary agency had backed away from me at warp speed.

  I tried to remember the date that Petra had been in my office to use my computer, but I could only guess. It had been around two weeks before the Navy Pier fundraiser. I set up a program to find all the Internet sites visited during those weeks.

  While the program ran, I knelt to collect papers from the floor, gathering them in a big bundle and laying them on the couch. One of the documents w
as the transcript of the Steve Sawyer trial. I flipped through the pages, looking again for my father’s name, but instead “Lumumba” jumped out at me.

  “Lumumba has my picture,” Steve Sawyer had said on the stand.

  Lumumba: Lamont, in the Anaconda’s secret code. Lamont had Sawyer’s picture. What did that mean? Was it some cryptic way of saying that Lamont had fingered him? Or did it mean he was expecting Lamont to testify for him. As in, Lamont has my picture, Lamont has my back.

  I wondered if Curtis Rivers would interpret… Curtis Rivers! I smacked my forehead. African names. Kimathi, that was what Rivers called the man who swept the sidewalk in front of his store. While my Internet-search program was running, I pulled up a separate browser window and looked up Kimathi.

  Dedan Kimathi, a rebel leader in Kenya in the 1950s. Feeling a sort of nervous dread, I put the name into the Illinois Department of Corrections database. There he was: January 1967, convicted of murdering Harmony Newsome, served forty years, released a year ago January. No time off for good behavior, often in isolation for unspecified, violent outbreaks. Living since his release on Seventieth Place, at the same address as Fit for Your Hoof.

  I stared at the screen for a long time, remembering Rivers’s fury when I’d asked where to find Steve Sawyers, of Hammer Merton’s scorn when I asked him the same question.

  My brain was frozen. I couldn’t concentrate on those old Anacondas or Miss Claudia’s dying needs. If Petra hadn’t gone missing, I’d have driven straight to Curtis Rivers’s shop and camped out until he and Kimathi-Sawyers emerged. And then I’d have energetically convinced them to tell me what had happened to Lamont-Lumumba. But Petra was fragmenting my mind and sapping my energy.

  I closed the browser window. The search program had finished, turning up over a thousand URLs for the ten days I’d bracketed. I started scrolling through them, startled to see the amount of time I spent on the Internet. It took about twenty minutes for me to find where Petra had been, but, once I got there, it was dead easy to follow her in. She’d been updating her MySpace pages. She hadn’t logged in as Petra Warshawski. Instead, her page was called “Campaign Girl.”

  I had to create my own MySpace page to look at Petra’s. I signed up under Peppy’s full name, Princess Scheherazade of DuPage, and even created an e-mail address for her. I began to see why people liked using the site. The process of making up Peppy’s biography and interests, the music she listened to-currently, “You Ain’t Nothin’ But a Hound Dog”-took me away from my dark, disaster-filled office and my fears for my cousin’s safety. For twenty minutes, I was in a fantasyland of my own creation.

  Campaign Girl loved Natalie Walker’s Urban Angel. She had five hundred friends. To read the messages they sent her, I needed Petra’s password. Trying to figure that out would require either better computer tracking skills or more inside knowledge of Petra than I had. I concentrated on the posts she’d made on her profile page.

  She started by explaining that she had to post anonymously because she was working on an important Senate campaign and if she said anything under her own name, or her candidate’s name, she could get both of them in trouble.

  “So I’m just Campaign Girl for now. And all of you homeys out there, PLEASE don’t screw up and call me by my real name. Not unless you want me to lose my job. And that goes quintuple for you, Hank Albrecht, wanting stuffy old Janowic to win. My boy is going to beat yours with one hand behind his back. And I have a bottle of beer riding on it.”

  I looked up Hank Albrecht, one of Petra’s “friends.” He had gone to college with my cousin and was in Chicago working for the incumbent.

  A few days later, Petra was writing about the work she was doing for Brian, whom she scrupulously only called “My Candidate.”

  I know all you vegans out there think I’m the wickedest person on the planet, but I love being the meat queen, showing up at a Sunday barbecue loaded down with ribs and sausages. Mostly, it’s for my teammates on the campaign. Whoever thought work would be this much fun?? I’m, like, doing blog searches to see who has bad stuff to put out against My Candidate, like anyone could, and the whole world wouldn’t know it was the biggest crock ever. But everyone who meets My Candidate thinks Mr. President four years down the road, so we have tons of media and money and everything. And I’m, like, Saint Joan on a charger, going out and looking for dragons who want to attack us.

  It wouldn’t take a sophisticated code breaker to realize who Petra was, or who her candidate was, based on her posts. In fact, as I skimmed the comments, it was clear that many of her MySpace friends knew that the candidate was Brian. There was competitive ribbing from Hank Albrecht, the guy working for the incumbent. There were passionate pro-Brian posts. And then there were quite a few people who wrote about altogether unconnected stuff: dogs, clothes, favorite restaurants.

  Petra wrote about Mr. Contreras and me. I was code-named DC, for “Detecting Cousin.”

  Every now and then I go over to see Uncle Sal, not that we’re really related, and DC, who really is my cousin. She’s, like, almost my mom’s age, isn’t that weird? Uncle Sal, who my detecting cousin only calls “Mr. C.,” he can’t get enough of my dad’s company’s ribs or of me. My cousin is jealous of me, isn’t that fun? Uncle Sal likes to flirt with me, and it used to be her, you know. Sometimes they seem like an old married couple having the same kind of squabbles everyone’s parents do. Oh my God, we all may end up like our parents, isn’t that freaky?

  I went over yesterday, and Uncle Sal was scolding DC for wanting to go talk to this old gang leader who’s doing a hundred years for murder or whatever. And she’s, like, it bugs me that people are too pissed off at me to answer the simplest questions, and I’m, like, so put on your big-girl underpants and move on. And Uncle Sal thought that was hysterical and laughed his head off. So DC got really huffy but was trying not to show it. I mean, I thought being a detective was more dramatic, like solving murders, collecting clues, not going out to prison to talk to some kind of ignorant black gangbanger.

  I remembered that episode, and it made me angry that Petra had put it out for the whole world to read about. I made a face at the computer screen. “Put on your big-girl underpants now, V.I.,” I muttered, and read on.

  I focused on her posts about the work she’d done for Brian, wondering if any of dragons she’d been sent to slay would turn out to be biting back, but they seemed innocuous enough. She had tracked down a rumor that Brian had been seen in a Rush Street leather bar. She’d handled a post that he’d taken money from someone who’d been arrested for selling kiddie porn.

  She’d written about DC breaking into her apartment the night she dropped her keys by the front door. And then we came to the Navy Pier fundraiser.

  We had this huge fundraiser, and I am, like, a superstar because My Candidate chose one of my guests for his big photo op. My guest was a World War II hero, and he wore all his battle medals and everything, and was on the front page of a bunch of papers, including the Washington Post, which my dad always says is a liberal rag, but it’s so important. Anyway, I’m, like, a star at the campaign, even though it was a total fluke, but the head of the campaign, who we all call the Chicago Strangler, was superimpressed and pulled me out of the NetSquad to do special assignments directly for him. Some of my coworkers are a little huffy, ’cause some of them have been with My Candidate from Day 1, and I’m a Joanie-come-lately. But, well, that’s life.

  Up through that post, Petra’s tone had been like her speaking voice, breezy, confident. A few days later, she wrote more soberly.

  I thought they promoted me because I did such a great job. Turns out it was because I can’t keep my big mouth shut. I said some stuff about something that the Strangler wants to know more about, something that happened a million years ago that could come back to bite my candidate. It’s so confusing. It’s something I said, but I have no idea what, but now the Strangler says I have to dig it up, even though I don’t know anything about what happened or
even what I’m really looking for.

  It’s like Spy vs. Spy, and I have to spy on my DC, which in some ways is fun, seeing if I can outsmart a person who’s been a detective for twenty years. But mostly I hate it, because the Strangler says I can’t trust anyone. He says if I tell a single soul what I’m looking for, it could get people killed, especially if I tell my detecting cousin. The Strangler says she’ll go out of her way to hurt people I care about, and I know that when she’s angry she goes off the deep end. She saved this homeless guy’s life, but she almost killed me because I didn’t respect her mother’s dress. So watch Campaign Girl morph into Undercover Girl.

  A week went by, and Petra made her final post.

  If you say something that puts everyone you care about in danger only you don’t know that it’s a big secret, are you really to blame? And then how do you know who is your friend and who is your enemy? I can’t tell anymore. I wish I’d never come to Chicago, but it’s too late. I can’t go home.

  I sat back in my chair and rubbed my eyes. Petra, with her perpetual cheerful broadcasting of everything she knew, had said something that put the powerful people around her on alert. DEFCON 3 and dropping. I could hear the alarms ringing in Les Strangwell’s office.

  I didn’t know the things that Petra might have talked over in the office-these clearly ranged from my breaking into her apartment for her, since one of her Web posts dealt with that, to my visiting Johnny Merton-because she’d even blurted that out at the Navy Pier fundraiser. Certainly, anyone reading the posts on her MySpace profile would know what she was doing. I imagined the Strangler coldly reading over her shoulder. He could be any one of those five hundred “friends,” invisible, like a shark floating under her toes.