Hardball (25 page)

32

VANISHING COUSIN

WE FINISHED A LITTLE AFTER ONE. MR. CONTRERAS LEFT the dogs with me for protection, and I made sure all my door and window bolts were shot home on the inside, but, even so, I slept badly. Every time Mitch scratched or a car honked too loudly, I jumped awake, heart pounding, sure the next minute would bring a home invasion or a Molotov cocktail through a window. Finally, around five, the lightening sky made me feel safe enough that I dropped off.

The dogs woke me at nine, whining to get down to the back garden. I slumped out after them, sitting on the back porch with my head on my knees, until the hot sun burning my neck reminded me that I couldn’t be outside without protection.

Back inside, I tried my cousin again. She answered just as I thought the call was going to roll over again to her voice mail.

“Uh, Vic, uh, I can’t do that thing for you that you asked me.”

“Petra! I can barely hear you. What’s going on?”

“I can’t talk to you now.”

She was still speaking in almost a whisper. I answered sharply that I needed some answers from her at once about what she’d been doing in my apartment.

“I wasn’t there,” she said. “Except when I went to make your bed and stuff.”

“You didn’t look around for that baseball you wanted?”

“I did look in the trunk, but I put everything back again. So don’t get too mad at me, please, Vic. I can’t talk right now, I’ve got to go. And I can’t find those guys for you.”

She whispered so fast before hanging up that I couldn’t squeeze in another word. I walked to the front window and frowned down at the street. I’d told my cousin the other night that I was an expert at detecting line spinners, but I’m not sure how true that boast was. Someone very skillful was spinning me around, but whether they were using Petra or she was a willing participant or even just a bystander I couldn’t make up my mind.

I flicked the cord on the blinds and realized I was standing in such a way that anyone on the street could see me if they wanted to aim a gun or a bottle at me. Whatever Petra might or mightn’t have done, it was impossible to picture her throwing a Molotov cocktail at anyone. Or even the smoke bomb that had driven the family out of my childhood home last weekend. Mr. Contreras was right. She was exuberant and careless, not mean-spirited or cruel. That was how I would write her up at her performance review.

I heard the dogs whining and scratching at the back door and went to let them in. I knelt to talk to them. “I’ll take you guys for a good walk tonight after the sun goes down, but this is it for now.”

I dressed carefully, in a high-necked T-shirt and loose-fitting linen trousers and jacket that covered my arms and chest. I put on the white cotton gloves I needed to protect my hands and found a wide-brimmed straw hat that I sometimes wore at the beach. When I was finished, I looked like Scarlett O’Hara protecting her fragile skin, but it couldn’t be helped.

To complete my protective gear, I went to the safe in the back of my bedroom closet. My intruders had shaken out my wardrobe, but they’d missed the safe, which is built in behind my shoe bag. Occasionally, I have a document so sensitive, I don’t want to leave it in my office overnight. Otherwise, all that I keep in it is my mother’s diamond drop earrings and pendant and my Smith & Wesson.

I made sure the gun was still clean—I hadn’t been to the range for several months—and checked the clip. I didn’t know for sure that I was in someone else’s sights, but it made me feel a little better when I snapped my tuck holster over my belt loops.

I went door-to-door, in the best detective tradition, to find out if anyone had seen the person who’d gone into my apartment. And how they’d made it past all my locks without forcing them. Of course, some people were out at work, but the older Norwegian woman, who’s lived on the second floor for a decade, had been home, as had the grandmother of the Korean family. Neither of them had seen or heard anything unusual.

Jake Thibaut came blear-eyed to the door in a T-shirt and shorts. I’d woken him, but I couldn’t help it. And how was I to know what time he got in at night? He didn’t recognize me at first.

“It’s the hair,” he finally decided. “You cut off all your curls.”

I ran my fingers through the buzz cut and winced as I touched the bruises. I kept forgetting about my hair when I don’t look in the mirror.

“Did you hear anything in my apartment two nights ago? Someone came through with something like a forklift and knocked the place apart.”

“Two nights ago?” He rubbed his eyes. “I was playing out in Elgin. I didn’t get home until two or so, but maybe I saw your forklifters leaving. I was getting my bass out of the back of my car when I saw two strange men coming down the walk.”

I sucked in a breath. “Black? White? Young?”

He shook his head. “I thought maybe they were clients of yours, paying a secret visit, so I didn’t get close.They had that kind of Edward G. Robinson look that makes you think that you should keep your distance.”

“Were they driving or on foot?”

“I’m pretty sure they got into a big dark SUV up the street, but I’m not good with cars. I can’t tell you what the make was.”

“You didn’t see a tall woman with spiky hair lurking about, did you?”

He laughed. “You mean that girl who comes to visit you—what, your cousin, is she? No, she came around a few times while you were away, visiting the old guy, but she wasn’t part of that team. These guys were bulky, not skinny and spiky.”

I left with a measure of both relief and worry: relief at the reassurance that Petra hadn’t been involved in this break-in and worry about who had sent people to search my apartment.

I picked up my car from the alley, where Mr. Contreras had put it when he rescued it. I’d left my briefcase in the trunk some million or so years ago when I’d gone to visit Sister Frankie. When I opened it to stick in a new set of papers for some meetings I’d scheduled that afternoon, the first thing I saw was the Nellie Fox baseball. I’d completely forgotten about stashing it in there.

I laughed softly to myself. Poor Petra. She could have boosted the ball without my knowing the difference if she’d only thought to look in the trunk. I held it up to the sun, squinting at it through my dark glasses. It was stained and worn. Someone had played with it, maybe Grandpa Warshawski. He died when I was little, but he’d been a Sox fan.

The ball also had holes in it, and that was mystifying. A couple of them went all the way through the ball, so I wondered if my dad and his brother Bernie had run fishing line through it to hang it up for batting practice. I tucked the ball back into my briefcase and drove to my office.

Until she sank under the weight of my media calls, Marilyn Klimpton had done a good job of sorting files and papers. Even though messages had built up, and some incoming documents needed sorting, the office looked in pretty good shape, especially compared to the mounds of papers I’d found on my return from Italy.

I booted up my computer and looked at the message page from my answering service. Among the nuisance calls from media outlets were a pointless threat not to tamper with evidence from the Emergency Management woman and some client queries. There also was a message from Greg Yeoman, Johnny Merton’s lawyer. I was on the list of confirmed visitors to Stateville for tomorrow afternoon, could I please call to confirm.

I suddenly felt so tired, I went to the cot in my back room to lie down. I’d forgotten about putting in the call to Yeoman. I had done it after I saw Miss Claudia at Lionsgate Manor, I remembered now. The murder of Sister Frances, my own injuries, the invasion of my apartment had all pushed Ella Gadsden and her sister completely out of my mind. I lay there in the dark for close to an hour. I finally got back on my feet and called Greg Yeoman to confirm that I would make the drive out to Stateville the following afternoon.

Thinking about Sister Frances reminded me that I wanted some background on the demolition and building contractors who were taking care of her apartment. Petra was going to find out about them for me, but she couldn’t do it. And it really wasn’t that big of a job.

Sister Carolyn had given me the contractors’ names: Little Big-Man Wreckers and Rebound Construction. Both were owned by a man named Ernie Rodenko, at 300 West Roscoe. His seemed to be a midsize company, doing about ten million in business every year, and specializing in fire and flood rehab. The address would put him at the intersection of Roscoe and Lake Shore Drive, which wasn’t zoned for business, so his office must be in his home. Which meant I might drop in on him, in the evening, when I could go out without all my unguents and hats and so on.

I entered the address in my PDA and continued working through my messages. In the afternoon, an appointment took me to a building in the east Loop, across a wide plaza from the skyscraper where Krumas for Illinois had its headquarters. After my meeting, I wondered if I should drop in on Petra, to see if she might tell me something face-to-face that she couldn’t say over the phone.

It could be, of course, that she’d been chewed out by her boss for too many personal calls. Maybe her old boss didn’t care much about in-office discipline, but Petra was on Les Strangwell’s staff now. From what I knew of Strangwell, you belonged to him body and soul. You didn’t fritter away time on your cousin’s projects when you had to get Brian Krumas into the Senate. In case Strangwell was keeping a close watch on my cousin, I decided to leave her alone.

Before returning to the hot summer afternoon, I turned into the coffee bar in my client’s building lobby for an iced cappuccino. As I waited for them to make my drink, I stared idly around the way one does and caught sight of a familiar face at one of the spindly tables tucked into the corner of the bar. The thinning dark hair combed sharply back from a jowly red face, I’d seen him, two weeks ago in Lake Catherine.

What had brought Larry Alito into downtown Chicago on a hot July day and into a coffee bar instead of a beer joint? I was going to slide back into the shadows when I realized my outsize hat, dark glasses, and gloves made a pretty good disguise. I collected my drink and went to sit on one of the high stools by the window near Alito’s table.

The man he was talking to looked like many other middle-aged middle managers with spreading middles. He had fine sandy hair that had receded to the middle of his head, which he wisely had trimmed short instead of trying for a comb-over. With his turned-up nose and pursed mouth, he had the expression of a perpetually surprised baby. Only his small gray eyes, cold and shrewd, made it clear that it was he, not Alito, who was running the meeting.

I couldn’t hear any of their conversation because the coffee bar had a sound track with a loud bass thumping. The two men were going over a set of papers in a manila folder, and the man running the meeting was tapping the papers with his thumb. He wasn’t happy with the work Alito had given him. I pulled out my cellphone and took a quick shot of the two of them while pretending to be texting. When they got up, I waited until they were almost to the building lobby before I followed them.

As they reached the lobby, they separated without looking or speaking to each other. The meeting commander headed for the exit, while Alito studied the door to a FedEx shop near the coffee bar. I knelt on one knee to adjust my socks. Alito may have been a crappy cop, but he’d spent three decades studying wanted posters and he might recognize me close up despite my disguise. From my kneeling position on the floor, I looked out at the plaza and saw that the commander was going into the building where the Krumas campaign had its offices.

Alito’s phone rang, and I stood, moving behind him to a newsstand where I picked up a pack of gum. “Yeah,” he said into the phone, “Les already told me, and I know what he wants. You think I’m some kind of retard, you have to double-check everything I do? . . . Oh, the same to the horse you rode in on!”

He snapped his cellphone shut and stormed through the revolving door. “Les” had told him, had he? That man with the sandy hair and cold eyes: that was Les Strangwell.

I took my coffee out onto the plaza and sat in the shade. What line connected Strangwell to Alito? Of course, ex-cops do freelance work all the time, but what kind of security work did the Krumas campaign . . . George Dornick. Dornick was advising Brian on terrorism and Homeland Security issues. He was Alito’s ex-partner. Maybe Dornick was throwing some crumbs his way.

But what crumbs? I thought of my apartment. Someone who knew how to pick locks in a sophisticated way had gotten in there. A cop would have access to all kinds of tools. And George Dornick, with his special security services, had access to even more. But what could I have that Dornick, let alone Les Strangwell, might want? The picture of my dad’s softball team? Larry Alito had been in it, as had Dornick, Bobby Mallory, and a lot of other guys.

Alito was proud of his police service. It defined him. I couldn’t imagine any reason why he would want the picture unless it was pure spite against me. But there wasn’t any reason for that, either.

I didn’t have enough data to make up a believable story. I gave up trying, and took the El back to my office. Elton Grainger was out front, hawking
Streetwise.
He didn’t recognize me at first. But when he realized I’d been in a fire, he was all sympathy.

“And a nun got killed, you say? Oh, Vic, I don’t have a TV, I don’t see the news. That’s terrible. No wonder you haven’t been around. How’s that cute cousin of yours?”

“Cute as ever.” I tried not to grind my teeth. “Anyone been coming around looking for me while I’ve been away?”

“I haven’t been looking. But I’ll put out a guest book. Anyone comes up to the door, they got to sign in with me.”

He parodied a hotel doorman, and I had to laugh. Of course it was idiotic to think Elton would pay attention to anyone scouting out my office. I typed in the code on the door lock and went inside, keeping a hand on the handle of my gun in its tuck holster.

When I was inside, I searched the office, from the cot to the bathroom I shared with my sculpting lease-mate, but no one was there. I answered a few e-mails. But I had reached the end of my stamina, and set out for home.