Hardball (2 page)

2

WILD PARENT

“WHAT DID YOU DO TO HER?” PETER GRABBED MY shoulders and shook me.

“Let go!” I snapped. “This isn’t the way—”

“Answer me, damn you!” He was hoarse, his face swollen with fury.

I tried twisting from his grasp—I didn’t want to fight him—but he dug his hands deeper into my back. I kicked him on the shin, hard. He yelped, more from surprise than pain. His hold on me loosened, and I backed away. He lunged for me, but I ducked and moved farther back, rubbing my shoulders. My uncle was almost seventy, but his fingers still held the strength he’d gotten on the slaughterhouse floor in his teens.

The two dogs were making ominous noises in the back of their throats. Still gasping for breath, I put a hand on their shoulders:
Easy, Mitch. Easy, Peppy. Sit.
They had caught my anxiety and were yawning and mewling in worry.

“There’s no call for you to carry on like that.” Mr. Contreras had risen to his feet when Peter attacked me. He was an old man himself, close to ninety, but he was ready to fling himself into battle. “Vic here would never put your gal in harm’s way. You can take it from me.”

Considering that Mr. Contreras had flung accusations of his own at me when I reported Petra’s disappearance, I was grateful that he was willing to support me in front of her parents.

“You, whoever you are, mind your own damned business.” My uncle was happy to have a fresh target to attack.

“Peter, yelling, this anger, it isn’t going to help.”

Rachel spoke from the shadows behind the piano. Peter and Mr. Contreras and I were all startled. In the rage of the moment, we’d forgotten my aunt was there.

When I finally tracked her and Peter down the previous night, they were at a campsite in the Laurentian Mountains with their four younger daughters. It was Peter’s secretary in Kansas City who got me the relevant phone numbers and arranged for the corporate jet to fly into Quebec City to pick up the family. Peter and Rachel drove all night to get to the airport. Ashland Meat’s jet dropped Rachel and Peter at O’Hare and went on to Kansas City with the other daughters, where they would stay with Rachel’s mother.

“Petra was pretty nervous the last few days,” I said to Rachel. “She said nothing was bothering her, but I’m thinking now maybe this was weighing on her, this plan to let these thugs into my office.”

“Damn you,” Peter roared. “Petra does not know thugs. You do. You’re the one fucking around with the Anacondas, going out to Stateville to see Johnny Merton behind bars.”

“How do you know about Merton?” I was startled.

Rachel gave a strained, apologetic smile. “Petra and I talk every day, sometimes three times a day. She told us about your meetings with this man in prison. It was interesting news to her.”

“And I heard about it from Harvey, too,” Peter snapped. “He says Vic here disobeyed a direct order from a local judge to stop looking into the affairs of these old gangbangers.”

If I hadn’t been so distraught myself, I would have laughed. “Disobeyed a direct order? I’m not in the Army, Peter. That judge used to be my boss at the PD. He’s afraid I’m going to make him look bad because he did a terrible job on an old case involving one of Johnny Merton’s street soldiers.”

“So what if he did? One less gang member on the street for any reason is all to the good.”

“But, Vic, how can you be sure it was Petra in your office last night?” Rachel said.

She’d asked the question before, but she was so worried she kept forgetting the answer. I explained again about finding her daughter’s bracelet outside the back door.

“And, yes, it could have belonged to someone else, but I don’t think so.”

“Even if it was hers, what makes you think she opened the door?” Peter demanded. “Maybe it was that sculptor who shares the building. How do you know she isn’t connected to some mob operation?”

I opened and shut my mouth several times but didn’t speak. Tessa Reynolds is African-American, and I didn’t want to find out that her race was driving my uncle’s wild suggestion. She’s also African-American aristocracy, her mother a famous lawyer, her father a highly successful engineer. They worry that I’m dragging Tessa down into the mud, the cases I get and the people who show up at the building. I’d already had an anxious call from Tessa’s mother after last night’s break-in made the late news.

I was too tired, and too confused, to pursue that line of thinking. Instead, I booted up my laptop. I’d e-mailed myself the camera footage that showed the trio who’d come into my office yesterday afternoon. Now I showed the images to Rachel and Peter.

“Does any of them look like Petra to you?”

“Of course not!” Peter stomped away from the machine and pulled out his cellphone. “This is a fucking waste of time. Why are we even sitting here for, letting Vic spin us around in circles? She’s just trying to get off the hook for putting Petey in harm’s way.”

Rachel shook her head; tears were slowly welling and falling along her nose. “That’s Petra in the middle.”

“How can you be sure? Of all the—”

“Peter, it’s the Crocodile Dundee hat and outback oilcloth coat she got in Melbourne. She was so proud of them. Even in this picture, I can tell.” She looked at me through her wet lashes. “Vic, someone must have forced her to do this. We’re meeting with Special Agent Hatfield at the FBI in an hour. Give me some names, some people the FBI can talk to.”

“Yeah, cookie,” Mr. Contreras put in. “This ain’t the time to hold your cards close to your chest, the way you like to do.”

“Have you talked to her college roommate, to Kelsey?” I asked. “I don’t know her last name, but she’s the person Petra talks about most.”

“Kelsey Ingalls. She called me when she saw the news online this morning. She said she’d tried calling Petra—we all have, and we keep getting rolled over to her voice mail.” Rachel’s voice quavered. “Vic, there must be someone you’ve talked to who can lead the FBI or the police to Petra. Please,
please
tell me their names.”

I shook my head helplessly. “My apartment was trashed a few nights ago, and I did wonder if a cop, ex-cop, named Alito had been involved, but I don’t have any real reason to suspect him. Other than that, Johnny Merton, the head of the Anacondas, if he was mad enough at me he might do anything, but I was talking to him when this was going on. He didn’t lose his cool with me until the end of the meeting.”

Peter seized on Johnny and the Anacondas. If Peter had known I was working with violent criminals, he’d never have let Petra come within twenty miles of me.

“I understand,” I said, when he’d shouted himself hoarse. “But look at the times recorded on my door monitor. It looks as though Petra was waiting for Tessa—my lease-mate, the sculptor, you know—for her to leave. There’s a ten-minute gap. Tessa leaves, Petra types in the code and goes in with those two punks.”

“Vic, coincidences happen,” Rachel said, trying to stay calm. “How would Petra know people like that? She just graduated from college in May, she’s never lived in Chicago, she’s been working in an office downtown with a bunch of other twenty-somethings. She’s just a suburban Midwest girl who’s never seen a criminal in her life and wouldn’t recognize one if she did. I’m not saying it’s your fault, but you’re the one who knows gangsters and people like that. Not Petra. Please,
please
turn your files over to the FBI or to Bobby Mallory. They can look into everyone you’ve been talking to.”

“Bobby came to my office last night,” I said.

He had pushed his way past the cops filling the entryway and found me underneath my desk, trying to see if anything else of my cousin had been discarded there along with her bracelet. Despite the many good women who have worked for him in the last fifteen years, my presence at a crime scene still gives him heartburn.

“There you are, Vicki. One of the boys who’s smarter than he looks saw your last name on a sheet and brought it to me. Who’s Petra, Peter’s kid? What insane business did you involve her in? Does Peter know? He’ll turn your guts into sausage casing if you hurt his kid.”

“Not guilty, Bobby,” I said wearily, crawling out. “She’s working on the Krumas campaign. I don’t know why she came here or who she let in.”

I showed him the video footage and explained how she’d happened to have my front-door combination. He frowned over the photos, then demanded of the patrol units if they’d done anything to get the footage over to a video-technology team.

Once Bobby showed up, the tempo of the investigation accelerated. Aggressive cops became subdued and helpful, lethargic ones became energetic, and an evidence team magically appeared and began dusting the whole mess for prints, blood, any trace of anything. Bobby called the FBI, in case it was a kidnapping; they sent a special agent over around eleven, and I had to answer useless questions all over again.

In the middle of it all, I started getting calls from reporters, and a television crew parked outside my office. Brian Krumas himself called while I was talking to the FBI’s special agent. The candidate was at a high-end fundraiser in Hollywood, but of course his staff had heard about Petra’s disappearance. Krumas talked to Bobby and then to me.

“You’re Petra’s cousin, right? We met at the Navy Pier event, didn’t we? I’m giving you my private number, Vic, and I want you to call me the instant you have any news of her, okay?”

I copied the number into my PDA and went back to the FBI. No matter how mediagenic you are yourself—and Brian Krumas was being touted as a glamorous new Bobby Kennedy—disappearing blond twenty-somethings are national news, and you need to do damage control.

When I finally got home, I didn’t sleep much. I kept jolting awake, trying not to imagine what could be happening to Petra, trying instead to think of places I should look for her, and wondering who she had invited into my office.

“You shouldn’t be talking to a lowlife like Johnny Merton, anyway,” Mr. Contreras said. “I been telling you that since the first time you drove out there, but no one except you ever knows right from wrong. The rest of us are too ignorant to have opinions. And now you’ve got Petra in trouble.”

“I know just how many counts Merton was charged with. It wouldn’t surprise me one bit to know he had my girl kidnapped and forced her to open your office,” Peter roared, swinging around the room to put his nose almost against mine. “If any harm comes to her because of you, whatever it is, I will inflict it on you tenfold. Do you hear me?”

I stood very still, not speaking. If harm came to Petra because of me, I didn’t think I could live with myself anyway, but her father’s wild rage was impossible to respond to. His phone rang, and he finally backed away from me to answer it.

I turned to face Rachel. “You go see Derek Hatfield. He’s a good field agent.”

“What will you do?” she asked.

“I’m putting my own best agent on the case,” I said bleakly.

My best agent had been unable to find Lamont Gadsden. My best agent had left a trail of desolation at the Mighty Waters Freedom Center. I hoped she could do a better job looking for Petra.

3

NO GOOD DEED REMAINS UNPUNISHED

LAMONT GADSDEN AND MY COUSIN PETRA. IT WAS HARD to imagine two people with less in common: an old buddy of Hammer Merton’s from Chicago’s South Side, a Millennium Gen text messager from an upscale Kansas City suburb. If it hadn’t been for me, and some terrible luck, their lives would never have collided.

Petra being my cousin, it wasn’t surprising that she looked for me when she showed up in Chicago at the start of the summer, a fresh-minted college graduate with an internship in her daddy’s hometown.

It was sheer luck, the bad kind, that I agreed to look for Lamont Gadsden. Sometimes when I want someone to blame, someone outside my family, I snarl unfairly at a homeless guy named Elton Grainger.

Elton was the unwitting deus ex machina who led me into the Gadsden morass. Elton had been working my street off and on for several years. I knew him to say “Hey” to. I bought
Streetwise
from him, bought coffee or sandwiches for him from time to time. Once, during a blizzard, I’d offered him shelter in my office, but he turned me down. Then, one golden June afternoon, he collapsed in front of my office.

If I’d let him lie, maybe Petra would never have vanished, maybe Sister Frankie would still be alive. There’s a lesson in that about the fate that awaits the Good Samaritan.

It happened as I was tapping in the code to my office building.

“Vic, where you been? I haven’t seen you in weeks! You’re looking good.” He flourished a copy of
Streetwise
. “New issue today.”

“I’ve been in Italy.” I fumbled in my wallet for the U.S. money that still looked weird to me. “My first true vacation in fifteen years. It’s hard to be back.”

“Foreign travel. I got all that out of my system at nineteen when Uncle Sam paid my airfare to Saigon.”

I pulled out a five, and Elton fell to the sidewalk. I dropped keys and papers and knelt next to him. He’d hit his head as he went down and was bleeding in an ugly way, but he was breathing, and I could feel his pulse in an irregular, feathery beat, like some fragile ballerina dancing against the music.

The next few hours were a blur of ambulance, emergency room, hospital admissions. They wanted a lot of details, but I didn’t know him except as the homeless guy who’d worked this stretch of West Town the last several years. About the only personal thing he’d told me was that he’d lost his wife as his drinking got heavier. He’d never mentioned children. Today was the first time I’d heard about Vietnam. He’d been a carpenter and sometimes still got daywork. As for health care, I couldn’t help the hospital with their paperwork. He was homeless. I hoped he had a green card for city health services, but I had no way of knowing.

I wanted to get back to my office—I’d been away ten weeks and had an entire Himalayan range of paper waiting for me—but I didn’t feel easy leaving Elton until there was some kind of prognosis or resolution in his care. In the end, it took two hours before an intern who was stretched to the breaking point came in, and that was only because I kept going to the triage nurse and pushing Elton’s case: his crisis, asking for oxygen, heart monitoring, something. He had regained consciousness while lying on the gurney, but his skin was cold and waxy, and his pulse was still very weak.

A white woman in her early thirties, who seemed to be caring for an elderly black man, gave me a wry smile the third time I went up to the counter. “It’s hard, isn’t it? The staffing cutbacks have been too steep. They just can’t keep up with the patient load.”

I nodded. “I just got back from a long stay in Europe yesterday. I haven’t adjusted—to the time zone or our health-care system.”

“Is he your brother?” She pointed toward Elton’s gurney.

“He’s a homeless guy who collapsed in front of my building.”

The woman pursed her soft rosebud mouth. “Would you like me to look in on him if they manage to stabilize him? I have friends at some of the homeless agencies here in town.”

I agreed thankfully. Finally the intern, who didn’t look old enough for high school let alone an inner-city hospital, came over to the gurney. He asked Elton some questions about his drinking and smoking and sleeping. He listened to Elton’s heart and called for an EKG, an EEG, and an echocardiogram. And oxygen.

“He’s got some arrhythmia going on,” the intern told me. “We’ll see how serious it is. If he’s homeless and drinking, it takes a toll.”

Elton smiled at me and pressed my fingers weakly with nicotine-stained fingers. “You run on, Vic. I’ll be okay here. Thanks for—you know, God bless, all that.”

He produced a grubby green card from an inner pocket, so I knew they wouldn’t put him straight out on the street. I caught a cab back to my office and put Elton—not out of my mind, but to the bottom of it. I was exhausted from travel, but I’d been away too long to give myself decompression time before returning to work.

I’d been in Italy, with Morrell, where we’d rented a cottage in Umbria, in the hill country, near my mother’s childhood home. Morrell had finally recovered from the bullets that almost killed him in the Khyber Pass two years earlier. He wanted to test his legs, see if he was ready for journalism’s front lines—he was aching to return to Afghanistan—despite the death of some three hundred journalists in Iraq and Afghanistan since we began our endless war.

My needs were even more personal: I’d grown up speaking Italian with my mother, but I’d never visited her home. I wanted to meet relatives, I wanted to listen to music where Gabriella had learned it, see paintings in their Umbrian and Tuscan light, drink Torgiano in the hills where the grapes grew.

Morrell and I visited the remnants of Gabriella’s family, elderly Catholic cousins who exclaimed how much like Gabriella I looked but who wouldn’t talk about the years she’d had to live in hiding with her father, an Italian Jew. They claimed not to remember my grandfather, who had been denounced and sent to Auschwitz the day after someone smuggled Gabriella to the coast and a Cuba-bound freighter.

No one knew what had become of Gabriella’s younger brother, Moselio. Gabriella herself hadn’t heard from him since he joined the partisans in 1943, and I hadn’t been optimistic. My mother’s been dead a long time, but I still miss her. I was hoping for too much from her Pitigliano family.

Morrell and I toured the Siena Opera House, where Gabriella had performed her only professional singing role, Iphigenia, in Jommelli’s opera, thanks to which I have the most insane middle name in Chicago. We even met a frail diva, now almost ninety, who remembered Gabriella from their student days together in the conservatory.
“Una voce com’una campana dorata.”
A voice like a golden bell, as I knew: Gabriella used to fill our five-room bungalow in South Chicago to the bursting point when she sang.

When she arrived in Chicago, a poor, clueless immigrant, Gabriella answered an advertisement for a singer in a Milwaukee Avenue bar, where the backroom boys tried to take off her clothes while she sang
“Non mi dir, bell’idol mio.”

My dad had rescued her from that, my dad wandering in for a beer in the middle of a scorching July afternoon and pulling her away from the groping hands of the bar manager. My father had been a Chicago cop, a kind and gentle man who adored my mother from that day forward.

Looking at the Baroque cupids holding up a plaster banner in the Siena Opera, I felt the gulf between the stage and the music, where Gabriella began her life, and the bungalow in the middle of the steel mills where she ended it. How could my father and I have ever been enough to make up for all that Italy’s racial laws forced her to renounce?

That part of the trip had been difficult, but when we left Siena, and Pitigliano, Morrell and I spent a pleasant two months together. It became clear to us both, though, that this trip marked the farewell tour of our affair. We had thought when we planned this vacation that it would deepen our relationship. Since we worked at unusual jobs that kept us from home for long stretches, we’d never spent concentrated time together. As the time came for Morrell to catch his train to Rome and the direct flight to Islamabad, we both realized we were ready to say good-bye.

I flew home from Milan a few days later, sad, wondering what it was that had kept Morrell and me from a deeper, tighter bond. Was I too messy or Morrell too compulsively tidy? Maybe I was too prickly, as some of my friends suggested, for anyone to get close to me. Or maybe, ultimately, each of us reserved our deepest commitments for work. Morrell’s career as a journalist covering international human-rights issues looked so much more glamorous than my own, so much more deserving of a deep commitment. After all, I spend my time looking at frauds and sleazy con artists.

That thought depressed me, too, as I left Elton at the hospital and rode a cab back to my office. When the cab reached the rehabbed warehouse I share with my sculpting friend, I had to remind myself again that I was back in America—this time, over the issue of tips, which are never as big in Europe as they need to be here. I took a breath and typed in the code on the keypad at the door. Elton’s crisis was over, my vacation was over.

I unlocked my inner-office door. Amy Blount, a young history Ph.D. who’s done research projects for me in the past, had organized my documents so rigorously that they just about saluted when I opened the door. The trouble was, there were too damned many of them. My whole worktable was covered with neatly labeled papers, while my desk held a stack of the most urgent papers.

While I was away, I only went to an Internet café twice a week to check for messages. Amy held down the fort for me, handling small projects and responding to routine inquiries. We spoke only when something came up that she couldn’t handle.

Right before I came home, Amy suddenly found an academic position; she’d been looking for three years. She had to leave for Buffalo in a hurry to start the summer term. She’d organized my papers, and left a pot of crimson gerbera daisies, a little wilted from their time alone but a gallant splash of color in my cavernous space.

This afternoon, I poured water into the daisies and pretended to be interested in the mountain range of files on my big, long worktable. Unfortunately, on top of the highest peak stood my credit-card bills. Pay within ten days to avoid loss of credit rating, a kidney, or any hope of filling your car again.

I looked at the AmEx bill out of the corner of my eye, as if that would make it smaller. The dying U.S. dollar meant I definitely should not have cheered myself with those Lario boots the day before I left Milan. Or that Antonella Mason acrylic Morrell and I found on a side trip to Treviso.

I made a face and forced myself to start digging. Fast turnaround on my own past-due invoices had to be my first priority. I put in a call to a temporary agency to find someone to help, and started returning the stack of my most crucial phone calls: those from clients with real money to spend.

A little before five, I had to stop. My body thought it was midnight, and I was starting to forget who I was talking to, or what language I was speaking, in the middle of complicated sentences.

I was putting a few files in my briefcase—the pessimist says the case is half full, the optimist that she’ll read them over supper—when the outer bell rang. I have a surveillance camera at the door so that I don’t have to run down the hall every time the UPS man is delivering a ton of steel to my lease-mate. I looked at the image on my computer screen.

It’s not a sophisticated system, but I thought I recognized the young woman I’d seen at the hospital earlier today with Elton. Elton! I’d completely forgotten him. My stomach tightened. Had she come to deliver bad news in person? I pushed the lock release and moved hurriedly down the hall to greet her.

When I asked about Elton, she took my hand reassuringly. “No, no. He seems to be okay. I talked to him for a bit this afternoon. He’s a vet, Vietnam, so he can be moved to the VA. He’ll get better care there.”

I thanked her for coming around in person to tell me, assuming Elton had given her my office address.

She smiled in embarrassment. “I didn’t come on his account, I’m afraid. But he told me you’re a detective, and you seem like the kind of person I need.”

Oh, boy. I do a good deed and I get a client. Who says we have to wait for our reward in heaven? When I ushered her into my office, she stood hesitantly in the doorway, looking around, the way people do whose ideas of private eyes are taken from Humphrey Bogart and James Ellroy movies.

“What is it you need detecting, Ms.—?”

“Lennon. Karen Lennon. It isn’t for me but one of my old ladies.” She sat on the couch and clasped her hands together on one plump knee. “I’m a chaplain. I work in the Beth Israel system and am assigned to Lionsgate Manor—it’s an assisted-living facility that Beth Israel runs—and my clients are mostly old and mostly women. One of my ladies, her son is missing. She and her sister, they’re the ones who raised him, they need to find him, it’s the only way they can be at peace before they die. I’ve been trying to figure out what I could do to help them. When I saw how compassionate you were with that homeless man and found out you were a detective, I thought I could probably trust you to treat my ladies right.”

“You know, not to turn down work, but the police have a whole department devoted to missing persons.”

“My ladies are African-American and very old,” Karen said. “They have bad memories of the police. A private detective wouldn’t carry all that baggage, in their eyes.”

“I don’t work for free, the way the cops would,” I said. “Or the Salvation Army—they have a service.”

“The Army says Miss Ella’s son’s been missing too long for them to do much for her, although they did file a report.” She hesitated. “She’s living on her small Social Security check, didn’t get a pension after all her years screwing gizmos together for the phone company. I looked you up online and saw the voluntary organizations you serve—women’s shelters, rape crisis, reproductive rights—I thought you probably would do pro bono work if the people were in dire need.”