Hardball

by Sara Paretsky

  “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 differenc
e 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.

  45

  THE GOOD BOOK… AND THE BAD BALL

  KAREN HAD ALREADY LEFT FOR HER EARLY MEETING WHEN I woke up. She’d made coffee and put a note next to the carafe, asking me to call her on her cellphone before I took off. “Someone needs to know where you are. I’m your pastor. They can’t compel my testimony.”

  I smiled a little at the thought of Karen as my personal pastor. She didn’t get a morning paper, so I took a cup of coffee back to the sofa bed to watch the television news. After the daily economic horror story, Alito’s death dominated the morning shows.

  Only Beth Blacksin, on Global Entertainment’s Channel 13, suggested a sinister falling-out among friends as the motive behind his murder. And while she didn’t name any names, she did say that Alito had been doing freelance security work for an important Illinois political campaign. I blew Murray a silent kiss. He must have talked to Beth, since the Star was also owned by Global.

  Beth’s story would force Dornick and Les Strangwell to spend some energy on damage control, which would take a little heat away from their searches for me and Petra. On the other hand, two of the networks mentioned the “Chicago private eye, whom police badly want to question, after hearing of threats she made against the dead man.” One of them even had put my photograph on the screen, fortunately an old one copied from a newspaper. It had been taken when I had a head full of curls, not my current Marine cut.

  “And I want to question you, too, Bobby,” I muttered. “Who are you covering for? How much did you know back in 1967? You, too, were in Marquette Park during those riots.”

  I got dressed, in my jeans and Karen’s T-shirt. I’d rinsed my underwear out in her bathroom last night, but my socks were kind of funky. I decided to borrow some from Karen, although I felt a few qualms going through her chest of drawers looking for a pair. Her underwear was severely utilitarian, but her socks were fanciful, almost kiddish. I skipped Hello Kitty and some bright red devils and angels and settled on a pair showing Lisa Simpson jumping rope.

  I hoped I wasn’t pushing my luck, assuming that my pastor’s landline was open. After all, she was connected to some of the Freedom Center’s programs and might be getting the same federal scrutiny the nuns got. But I called my answering service, anyway, and found it had been deluged again with media calls, everyone wanting to interview the private eye whom the police badly wanted to question.

  My clients were more squeamish. I spent almost an hour persuading two law firms to stay with me. A third wouldn’t return my calls, and I didn’t blame them. Until I could come out of hiding, I was a pretty sorry excuse for an investigator.

  Bernardo, the big orange cat, appeared and decided I was better than no company at all. He began following me, winding in between my legs, so that I had to be careful not to trip over him. He jumped up onto the table next to the sofa bed while I was stripping the sheets off it and converting it back to a sofa and started sniffing my Smith & Wesson.

  When I snatched the gun out of the way, he began exploring Miss Claudia’s Bible. My attention was on the gun, checking the safety and putting it in my tuck holster, so I didn’t see his leap, just Miss Claudia’s Bible flying off the table.

  “Bernardo!” I cried. “That book took a beating last night. It doesn’t need you throwing it around. We’re holding it in trust.”

  The spine, which had cracked during the flight through the laundry, split completely with the fall. I didn’t want to try to tape it together, which would damage the fragile leather, but I could put a rubber band around it and leave it at Karen’s until I had time to glue it properly.

  The fall had opened the binding along the spine and pulled the leather away from the front cover. It was when I started to press the leather around the edges of the buckram cover boards underneath to hold the leather in place, that I saw the negatives poking out from beneath the endpaper. I sucked in a breath and sat down slowly, as if I were balancing a crate of eggs on my head.

  I carefully peeled the endpaper back completely. There, between the buckram and the paper, were two strips of negatives inside a folded sheet of onionskin. I risked putting my battery back in my cellphone long enough to use the camera, shooting the strips the way I found them in the Bible under the endpaper, then shooting my own fingertips pulling them out. Each strip had twelve exposures on it. On the onionskin wrapping, in faded block letters, Lamont Gadsden had printed PICTURES TAKEN IN MARQUETTE PARK, AUGUST 6, 1966.

  I held the negatives up to the table lamp, but it wasn’t possible to make them out. I’d have to find someone with dependable skills and a real darkroom, not an ordinary photo shop. The Cheviot Labs, a forensic engineering lab I use, was the only place I could think of. They were in the northwest suburbs, which meant risking a trip down near Lionsgate to pick up my car. It was better for me to gamble on being spotted than for me to entrust the negatives to a messenger.

  I called Karen, who was just finishing her meeting, and told her I was going to pick up Morrell’s car. “I’ve found something that I need to get to a lab. I’m going to leave it at your place while I fetch the car because I can’t afford to be found with it on me. I’ll write down what you should do with it in case I don’t make it back here.”

  “Vic, is this about Lamont? If it is, it was me who started you on this journey. I’m going with you to the end. I’ll be home in fifteen minutes. Wait for me in the alley.”

  I didn’t put up even a token argument. I was glad to have my personal pastor take charge. I wrapped the negatives back in their onionskin, then slipped them between the pages of a copy of Harper’s.

  I watched for Karen through the kitchen window, and, as soon as her turquoise Corolla appeared, I ran down the back stairs. While she drove, I told her about the pictures that Steve Sawyer-Kimathi had thought would clear him in court forty years ago.

  She nodded and pushed harder on the accelerator. We reached the Cheviot Labs industrial park a little before eleven. I had called my contact in the company, Sanford Rieff, from Karen’s cell while we were en route. Sanford brought Cheviot’s photography expert out to the lobby with him, introduced him as Theo, and hurried back to a meeting of his own.

  Theo, dressed in black as behooved a would-be auteur, spoke in a rumbly Slavic accent. He had crooked teeth, and a silver pentacle in his left ear, but he handled the negatives carefully, slipping them out of the brittle onionskin Lamont had wrapped around them and into a plastic sleeve.

  “These pictures may provide evidence of a murder,” I said. “One that took place forty years ago. And they’re going to be needed as part of a trial, so do your best. They’re all that remains in the way of evidence, so please-”

  “Don’t screw up? I understand.” Theo smiled reassuringly. “These come from Instamatic camera, my own first camera, a used one I found on black market in Odessa. I treat as my own.”

  He had me watch as he logged the negatives into a database: the number of strips, the number of frames, my name with the date and time I’d brought them in. “Okay? We have cafeteria, we have park, make yourselves comfortable. Maybe one hour, maybe two.”

  I was too restless to sit in their lunchroom. Karen came outside with me but stopped at a bench to make calls of her own while I walked around the perimeter of a little lake. Th
e Canada geese, who’ve become the scourge of the northern United States, were out in force, drilling peg holes in the ground and leaving unappetizing deposits behind them. I skirted the soiled path and went into a small woods. I kept trying not to look at my watch, but I couldn’t bear walking too far from the Cheviot building.

  Finally, a little after one, Theo came to find us, beaming like an obstetrician who’s about to announce a normal delivery. “You can come now. I have made many shots, cropped, shaded. You see what you can see.”

  There had been twenty-four black-and-white negatives in the Bible, but Theo had multiplied them into over a hundred prints, each with several different exposures, some cropped to focus on individual faces. Theo had clipped most to light tables around a conference table. Some were blown up and attached to the walls.

  “That’s Lamont, with Johnny Merton,” I murmured to Karen, as we started with the first picture on the first negative, which showed three black youths, arms linked across one another’s shoulders, wearing the berets that wannabe revolutionaries used to sport. “You can see Johnny’s tattoos. I’m guessing Steve Sawyer is the third man. I’ve never seen a picture of him when he was young.”

  Their faces were solemn but joyful, getting ready for a big adventure. Lamont didn’t appear in any of the other pictures. It had been his camera, after all. He had several shots from the beginning of the march, including one of Martin Luther King, Jr., at the front and Johnny nearby.

  “That might be a collector’s item,” I whispered to Karen. “When this is all over, Miss Ella might sell it, get a little comfort for herself.”

  We moved on to look at Harmony Newsome’s ardent young face. She was arm in arm with a solemn-eyed nun.

  “Frankie,” Karen murmured.