Hardball (15 page)

I sat at the curb at the end of the ramp and tried to think. Lamont had flipped on Sawyer—Dornick said that—and Johnny had been furious and killed him, or Curtis killed him for Johnny, and they’d disposed of the body.

Make my day, one of you, make my day. Tell me what happened. I couldn’t imagine a threat or a bribe that would make either Dornick or Alito open his secret diary to me. I didn’t have an in with the state’s attorney, to offer Merton immunity or even a reduction in sentence for talking to me. And, even if I did, Merton still might not talk to me.

Maybe Judge Coleman would explain why he hadn’t called any witnesses when he’d represented—or misrepresented—Sawyer forty years ago. Maybe there had been damning evidence that he kept out of the trial. I looked up the number for the Cook County judges and called Coleman.

Naturally the judge wasn’t available for my call. A clerk said she’d be glad to take a message, in a voice that sounded like she’d be glad if she never used her telephone again. I wanted just to leave my name and number, but the clerk wouldn’t take a message unless I explained my business in some detail. I used to work for the judge, I said. I wanted to go over an old trial, one that dated to his early years in the PD’s Office. I left my number without any expectation of ever hearing from him.

I’d pulled off the road at 103rd Street. Pullman was just a few miles to the east. Maybe Rose Hebert could shed some light on all these players.

18

DUBIOUS JUDGE, FRIGHTENED WOMAN

ROSE ANSWERED THE DOOR IN ANOTHER SOBER DRESS, this one a navy dotted Swiss. She looked at me with a flicker of eagerness.

“Have you learned something about Lamont?”

It was painful to tell her no, to watch the dull, heavy expression settle on her face again. “I need some advice or insight—something like that—into Johnny Merton or Curtis Rivers.”

She gave a self-derisive bark of laughter. “I don’t know enough about life or those two men to have insights into their minds.”

“You’re selling yourself short, Ms. Hebert,” I said gently. “I don’t have news for you, but I’ve been to see both men, and I’ve talked to people who knew Steve Sawyer. There’s been a suggestion that Lamont might have flipped on Steve, might have led the police to Steve Sawyer, might have said Sawyer was Harmony Newsome’s murderer.”

“Oh no! I . . . Oh—”

The house bell had begun to ring behind her, and she turned fearfully away from me. “He wants to know who’s at the door, what’s keeping me so long.”

I grabbed her wrist and led her down the shallow stone steps. “Maybe he’s ninety-three, but he’s not too old to learn how to cope with frustration. Where can we sit where you’ll be comfortable?”

She looked back at the house but finally muttered that there was a coffee shop on Langley where she often stopped for breakfast on her way home from the hospital. We drove over to the Pullman Workers Diner in my Mustang, where the waitresses greeted Rose by name and looked at me with frank curiosity. Rose ordered coffee and blueberry pie. I had a slice of rhubarb to keep her company.

“I don’t even know where to start,” she murmured when we’d been served. “It’s all so wrong. Steve, Harmony, I don’t believe that. But even if he did kill her, Lamont—oh, he and Steve were best friends growing up—Lamont would never have turned him in to the police.”

“Did Harmony live in your neighborhood?”

“She and her family, they were up the street from us, but they went to a Baptist church that Daddy said wasn’t a true church. And they were rich. Mr. Newsome, he was a lawyer. And Harmony’s brother, he went off to law school and became a professor out east someplace. Harmony was in college down in Atlanta. She got involved in the civil rights movement down there, and, when she came home for summer vacations, she talked it up in her church’s youth group. She talked at a lot of the churches in our neighborhood, but not at Daddy’s church, because he thinks women don’t belong speaking up in church, like it says in Saint Paul. And, besides, he doesn’t think church people belong marching on the streets. We belong in the pews.”

She bent over her coffee, stirring it as fiercely as if it were her father, or her own life, she were attacking. “I shouldn’t say this, but I was so
jealous
of Harmony. She was so pretty. She got to go to a fancy college, Spelman, while I had to scrimp to put together money for nursing school. And, then, the boys were all
spellbound
by her. When I first heard she was dead, I was glad.”

I reached across the table and pressed her free hand. “You didn’t kill her by being jealous of her, you know.”

She looked up briefly, her face contorted in pain. “All the boys followed her around, even the ones who went to our church, which is why I never could believe Lamont really cared about me. I figured he thought I’d be an easy mark, big old ugly girl like me no one else wanted. If he couldn’t have Harmony, he’d make do with me. But I don’t think any of the boys would have killed her, not out of jealousy like they claimed Steve did. She never went out with him, never went out with any local boys. Far as I knew, she was in love with the movement, not with any boy, not even some college boy in Atlanta with her same background.”

“Were Steve and Lamont at the Marquette Park march?”

“Daddy ordered everyone in our church to stay away, but Lamont and Steve, they ignored him. Johnny Merton, he’d taken part in the deal the gangs made with Dr. King, that they wouldn’t fight that summer, and, in exchange, they provided protection along the march routes.”

She sucked in a breath, remembering, and continued very softly. “Oh, Daddy was angry. He hated having his authority crossed. When Steve and Lamont did what Johnny wanted, not what their own pastor said, he read them out of the congregation. It was a terrible, terrible Sunday, and after church Daddy told me my own soul was in danger if I ever even spoke to Lamont Gadsden again. Even so, if I had to go to the store or something, I’d take a route that led me past his home, or Carver’s Lounge, where he and the other Anacondas shot pool . . .” Her voice trailed away.

This morning, George Dornick told me Lamont had been the person who fingered Steve Sawyer for him and Alito. I remembered the funny look he’d given me when I’d asked. Maybe it had really been Pastor Hebert, furious with his two parishioners, wanting to get the police to take care of them for him?

“How angry was your father with Steve and Lamont?” I asked Rose abruptly. “Could he have turned them in to the police?”

“What a terrible suggestion! How dare you even think a thing like that!” She pushed her chair away from the table. “Daddy is the holiest man on the South Side!”

Like Tony had been the best cop on the South Side? Were we daughters always like this, always ready to leap to our fathers’ defense even against the evidence?

I looked into her flushed face. “Ms. Hebert, I apologize for speaking so bluntly. I shouldn’t have said the first thought that came into my mind. You say you don’t believe Lamont was a police informant, and certainly not your father. Who, then?”

She twisted her fingers together. “Does it have to be one or the other?”

“No. It could be someone I haven’t even heard of, some two-bit player in the Anacondas. But I went over to Stateville to see Johnny, and he’s pretending he never heard of Lamont. That makes me think, well, I’m sorry to give you the harsh unedited workings of my mind again, but—”

“You think Johnny murdered Lamont? I wondered, too, when he disappeared . . . But it’s hard for me to see a reason . . . Unless Lamont snitched out Steve . . . Yes, that could be a reason . . . But . . .” Her words twisted around with as much agitation as her fingers.

“Oh, that Johnny Merton, there’s nothing I wouldn’t believe of him. And yet, he set up a clinic in our neighborhood. He made the government give our children the same milk they handed out in the white schools. He looked after his little girl like she was the crown jewel. Dayo, that was what Johnny called her. And that made Daddy mad all over again because it was African. It means ‘joy arrives.’ ”

She gave an unhappy bark of laughter. “My daddy would have looked at me and said, ‘Joy departs,’ so why am I standing up for him?”

“Where was your mother when you were growing up?” I asked.

“Mama died when I was eight. My granny, she took me in for a while, but her heart was bad. And, anyway, Daddy wanted me home where he could keep an eye on me.”

I paid for the pie and the coffee and drove Rose back to her home. During the short ride, she tried cleaning her face with a tissue. She couldn’t face her father looking distressed.

“He’ll think it’s about sex. At my age, with my life, he’s still sure I’m off having sex with strange men.”

“Go for it,” I said mischievously, pulling up in front of her house. “It’s not too late, you know.”

She looked at me, startled, almost afraid. “You are a very strange woman. Where would I even find a man who’d look twice at me?”

As she got out of the car, I remembered a final question. “Do you know where Steve Sawyer is now? I think Curtis Rivers and Merton both do, and they won’t say.”

She shook her head slowly. “He was in prison a long time. I know Curtis, he visited Steve. But I heard, maybe he even died there. Don’t be thinking Curtis would tell me. He doesn’t like me any more than, well, he seems to like you. He thinks I was always carrying tales back to Daddy when we were in high school. He can’t forgive that.”

She hesitated, then leaned back into the car. “You’re a good listener, and I appreciate that. I’m grateful.”

“That’s good. I’m glad.” I was a good listener because I needed her to tell me things, a thought which embarrassed me enough that I added, “You can always give me a call, you know, and talk to me again.”

She walked heavily up the steps, her shoulders stooped. No one would look at you with love, or even lust, if you were so bowed over, but she didn’t need me to tell her that.

I turned around and headed back to the expressway. By now, it was the height of the afternoon rush, and the Ryan was about as express as a turtle with corns. I was stalled on the overpass above the Sanitary Canal when my cellphone rang. I figured the risks of talking while driving didn’t extend to talking while parking, but I did almost hit the car in front of me when the woman at the other end said she was Judge Coleman’s secretary and could I hold for him.

“Judge! Thanks for returning my call. I’d like to stop by to ask you about one of your old clients.”

“We can do this by phone. I told you the other night to leave Johnny Merton alone.”

I ground my teeth. “Not the Hammer. One of your first clients, Judge, when you were a new-minted PD. Remember the Steve Sawyer trial?”

He didn’t say anything.

“Harmony Newsome’s murder. Do you remember her?”

He turned so quiet that I thought at first the connection had gone. Someone behind me honked. A gap of four feet had opened in front of me. I scooted forward, glancing at the oily surface of the canal. The day was hot and humid, and the water looked as though every person murdered in Cook County in the last century had rotted in it.

The judge suddenly spoke again. “Why this interest in ancient history, Warshawski?”

I thought my answer over carefully. If I’d been able to meet with Coleman in person, transcript in hand, I would have tried to ask about all the gaps in the record—why he didn’t try to find out the name of the snitch, why he let the obvious collusion between the cops and the state’s attorney go by unchallenged—but, on the phone, I didn’t have any way of pressuring him.

“Steve Sawyer’s name keeps coming up in a missing-persons search I’m doing, but he’s disappeared as well. In fact, there’s no record of him at all after his trial. I’m hoping you have your old notes. I’m trying to find which prison he was sent to.”

“That trial was forty years ago, Warshawski. I remember it, my first high-profile case.” He laughed thinly across the airwaves. “I learned a lot from that trial, but I couldn’t possibly keep track of all the lowlifes who went through Twenty-sixth and California during my time there.”

I was finally on the farside of the canal. “Of course not, Judge, but the transcript did raise a number of interesting procedural questions.”

“Why did you read the transcript?” he demanded.

Of all the questions he might have asked, that was the oddest. “Looking for traces of Steve Sawyer, Judge. It was exciting to see your name there. Mine, too. My dad was the cop they sent to make the collar.”

Cellphones don’t give you good reception, but I thought I heard a quick intake of breath, almost a gasp. “You have questions about the trial, ask your father.”

“He’s been dead for years, Judge, and I’m not a big believer in séances.”

“You were a smart-ass know-it-all when you worked in the courts, Warshawski, and it doesn’t sound to me like you’ve changed any. I don’t owe you a damned thing, but I’m still going to tell you for your own good to leave all that old history in the archives. Merton, Newsome, the boy who killed her, leave it alone.”

He cut the connection before I could thank him. Just as well. I couldn’t have kept the savagery out of my voice much longer.

19

EXUBERANT COUSIN

WHEN YOU GET HOME FEELING THAT YOU’VE BEEN pummeled by all sides in the Hundred Years’ War and you’re longing to lie in the tub for a decade or so to soak away your wounds, the last thing you want is to see your high-spirited cousin’s shiny Pathfinder parked out front. I tried to slink past my neighbor’s place unnoticed, but the dogs betrayed me, whining and scratching at his front door. A moment later, they all bounded into the hall, dogs, cousin, and Mr. Contreras.

“Uncle Sal’s picture got me a kind of promotion,” Petra called. “We’re celebrating! Come on in.”

I protested feebly that I was exhausted, but they ignored that. Mr. Contreras bustled inside to get a glass of Spumante while the dogs circled me, yipping as if I really had been away for a century. The commotion brought the neighbor across the hall into the entryway. She’s a plastic-surgery intern who is perpetually affronted by the dogs. She keeps trying to get the co-op board to declare the building pet-free, but the Korean family on the second floor, who have three cats, was so far fighting on Mr. Contreras’s and my side.

“Really, the dogs won’t hurt you, they’re super-friendly!” Petra called to the doctor. “See Mitch? He’ll take food right out of my mouth, won’t you, boy?”

She put a taco chip between her lips and invited the dog to jump up on her. Before the intern had a stroke or called the cops, I bundled my team into Mr. Contreras’s living room.

“The coals are just about ready,” the old man beamed. “We wasn’t going to wait more than five minutes longer for you, doll, but now I can put the steaks on.”

I don’t much like Spumante. While Mr. Contreras took the steaks—a gift from Uncle Peter—out to the grill, I poured my glass down the sink and went upstairs for whisky. I looked wistfully at my bathtub, but settled for a quick shower. With clean hair and clothes and a glass of Johnnie Walker, I felt, if not revived, at least strong enough to cope with the outgoing personalities on the first floor.

They were all out back now, the dogs sitting at attention around the grill in case one of the steaks dropped to the ground. Petra’s hearty laugh floated up the back stairs to me. I could hear Jake Thibaut playing his bass next door. It would have been pleasant just to sit on the steps, listening to the music, drinking my whisky, but I let duty be my guide and went down to the garden.

I asked Petra about her promotion. “Does this mean you’re working directly for Brian Krumas now?”

“Don’t I wish! Although, maybe I don’t. There’s so much responsibility at the high levels of the campaign, making sure all the facts are right, the speeches are just so, that Brian knows who’s saying what about him and what he needs to think about. I’m happy to be a worker bee, although Mr. Strangwell—he’s, like, Brian’s most important adviser—he met with me personally. He wants me to brief him about the same stuff I tell my real boss.”

“That sounds like a serious jump up the ladder,” I said. “How does your real boss feel about it?”

“Oh, Tania’s used to people moving around in the operation. She’s totally cool. I wish you’d met her at the fundraiser, but she was pretty much spending the whole night with national media types.”

“What’s Strangwell like?” I’d never met him, but you can’t operate on even the fringes of Chicago politics without knowing about him. If he was advising Brian Krumas personally, it meant the national party might well be grooming Brian for a post-Barack Obama presidential run.

Petra gave an exaggerated shudder. “He’s kind of scary, he’s so serious. Everyone else in the campaign, we’re all young and we joke around, it’s how we get the job done, but he’s Mr. Serious. In my pod, they all call him the Chicago Strangler. And when he looks at you and tells you he wants something done, you feel like, gosh, better drop everything and do this
now.
And, even then, you’re afraid it won’t be good enough.”

“What does he have you doing, then?”

“Really, just more of what I’ve been doing, looking for attacks on Brian, seeing what’s out there, but getting more focused, you know?” She gulped down her Spumante. “That’s enough of the boring old campaign. Did you go see any more snake charmers today?”

“Snake? Oh, Anacondas! Very good, little cousin. I’ll call Johnny Merton that the next time I visit and see what kind of reaction that gets me. No, just burrowing around in the past. Even more boring than the campaign, I assure you.”

“Why would you want to do that? Are you, like, trying to get on
America’s Most Wanted,
find some criminal who’s been on the run for forty years or something?”

“If Vic ever went after one of them old crimes, she’d only be doing it to prove the FBI or the cops or someone had arrested the wrong person. Nothing gets done right if she ain’t done it herself.” My neighbor’s tone did not make his words a compliment.

“So do they have the wrong man in prison for murder or something?” Petra asked, eyes so wide that her long mascaraed lashes were flat against her brows.

“I don’t know if the guy I’m looking for is guilty or innocent. He’s disappeared.”

“So leave him lay,” Mr. Contreras said roughly.

“I would,” I answered slowly, “but . . . I read the trial transcript . . . and my dad was the person who arrested him. And . . . and I want to know what went on when he picked up the guy.”

Mr. Contreras insisted that that was all the more reason for me to leave it alone. “Who knows what your pa faced when he was on the job. With your cockeyed way of looking at things, you’d put the worst interpretation on it.”

“What if he beat up a helpless man? What good interpretation could I put on that?” I cried.

“I’m saying, what if he did? People look all helpless and defenseless in a courtroom, but, you don’t know, did he pull a gun, did he attack your pa, maybe threaten his life? You can’t go by only the end of the story, cookie, you got to know the beginning and the middle, too.”

“Uncle Sal is right,” Petra chimed in. “I never knew Uncle Tony, but Daddy talks about him a lot. He was a good person, Vic. You can’t go around making up stories to say he wasn’t.”

“I’m not. I know better than either of you what a good man he was. I grew up with him.” I rubbed my eyes wearily. “Was Peter still here in 1967, Petra? I can’t remember when he moved to Kansas City.”

She flashed the smile that made her look like my father. “I wasn’t around so I can’t be sure, but I think it was in 1970 when Ashland Meats moved down, or maybe ’seventy-one. I know Daddy didn’t marry Mom until 1982. She was some kind of local debutante or something. Queen at the American Royal. You know, the big livestock show. The Queen and King of Meats, that’s what I call their wedding photos.”

I laughed dutifully, but said, “I wonder what Peter remembers from the summer of ’sixty-six. He was still living with Grandma Warshawski over on Fifty-seventh and Fairfield. He must remember the Marquette Park riots.”

“He always says that’s what ruined the South Side. The neighborhood started to change. Grandma Warshawski had to move north to get away from the crime.” My cousin shifted uneasily on the grass as she caught my expression.

The fault lines of race in the city, they run through my family, along with the rest of the South Side. My grandmother had wept when she moved. That unnerved me, as a child, to see an old woman cry.

Granny Warshawski tried to explain her own confused and conflicted feelings about race, about the changing neighborhood. “I know how hard it is to be the stranger in the land,
kochanie,
but I don’t know these black people. And Grandpa is dead. Peter will find himself a wife someday soon. My friends are gone. I can’t be alone here. I’m scared to be the only white lady on the street.”

I’d been eleven at the time. I’d argued with her, belligerent, self-righteous, even then. Was that what made it hard for me to live with someone else? Was it what Mr. Contreras had just accused me of: that, in my book, I was always the only one who knew anything?

“I don’t suppose Tony confided in Peter, or that your father would even remember after all this time. He’s had meat to worry about, not to mention you, which must be a full-time job. But maybe I’ll give him a call, ask him.”

“I can do that, Vic. I talk to him or Mom just about every day. But maybe Uncle Tony left some kind of record. Do you still own the house he lived in? We could go exploring for secret closets or something.” Petra’s eyes sparkled with excitement.

“Sounds like you want to be a detective yourself,” I said. “
Petra Warshawski and the Secret of the Old Closet.
No, sweetie, houses in South Chicago were built pretty close to the lath. Not much room for secret hiding places. Anyway, I sold it after he died. And I was lucky to find a buyer, the neighborhood was so depressed.”

“What did you do with his stuff? Did he keep a diary?”

I laughed. “You’re thinking of storybook cops like Adam Dalgliesh or John Rebus, endlessly second-guessing themselves. When Tony needed to unwind, he’d watch the Cubs or play ball himself, have a beer with your uncle Bernie. He didn’t brood or write poetry.”

“But didn’t he leave you anything?” Petra demanded. “Like, I don’t know, his prize bowling ball or something?”

“Neither that nor his polka-playing accordion. Where do you get your stereotypes, Petra?”

“Take it easy, doll,” Mr. Contreras admonished me. “Lots of guys bowl. Not that I liked it much. Pool for me. That, and the horses. Although my ma thought it’d turn me into a dropout and a drunk.”

My dad hadn’t left much. Unlike a lot of cops, he wasn’t a gun collector: he’d had only his service revolver, which I turned in when he died. I’d kept his sole backup, a 9-millimeter Smith & Wesson, for my own use. I’d given his shield to Bobby Mallory.

I had the photo album I’d looked at the other night, some softball memorabilia, a plaque featuring the eight-pound coho he’d caught in Wolf Lake. I’d kept some of the tools from the little shop he’d had behind our old kitchen. I even used them occasionally to repair a broken sink trap or build a simple piece of shelving. Other than that, all I could remember keeping was his dress uniform, which I’d stored in a trunk with my mother’s music and her burnt velvet concert gown.

Petra was all for digging into the mementos then and there. When she heard I hadn’t looked at the trunk for years, she was sure there was something I’d forgotten that would explain everything. Mr. Contreras agreed with her. “You know how it is, doll, you put things away, you forget what they were. Same with Clara’s things. When I went to look for her jewelry to give to Ruthie, I found I’d put all kinds of things in boxes, even her false teeth!”

“I know, I know,” I agreed wearily. “My dad probably had the secret plans for building a gasless car, but I’m not going to look for them tonight. I’m beat. I’m going to bed.”

Petra had drunk a fair amount of Spumante, which made her argumentative and insistent on going to the third floor at once. I got tired of arguing long before she did, and announced I was going to bed. I suggested that she stay the night. I didn’t want her driving in the state she was in. Finally, around eleven, when Mr. Contreras chimed in on my side, she let us put her into a cab.

I helped him clean up, letting his waterfall of talk wash over me. Yes, Petra was a good kid, wonderful news about her promotion. Yes, maybe I was too hard on her. Didn’t I remember being young and enthusiastic? And then he was off to the races on his own youth. I left him in front of the television with a glass of grappa and took Peppy upstairs with me.

In my dreams, though, a saber-toothed tiger was charging me. When I fell helpless to the ground in front of it, it changed shape and became my father.