Hardball (4 page)

The aide carried a tray of mushy food into Claudia’s room. The television was on, as if grown women needed to have babble shouted at them twenty-four hours a day. The woman who shared the room with Claudia was rubbing the end of her blanket between her fingers, staring vacantly ahead. Claudia herself was asleep, her breath coming out in fast little snorts. Her hair hadn’t been washed, Miss Ella noted grimly, preparing her list of complaints for the head of the ward. That black hair, how it bounced and flipped when Claudia was young, all the way into middle age, really, before it started to go gray and she’d cut it short. She’d let it turn into an Afro, a crown of soft gray curls, while Ella adhered to a life of iron discipline, giving her head over to chemicals and hot irons every month.

Ella sat on her sister’s left side, where she still had feeling and movement. Claudia’s right hand looked soft, young, the hand of the beautiful girl Ella had been so jealous of all those years back, but her left hand was as knotted and gnarled with age as Ella’s own.

“The detective came today,” Ella said. “She took a picture of Lamont away with her, she’ll talk to people, she’ll ask questions. Does that make you happy?”

Claudia squeezed Ella’s hand: yes, thank you, that makes me happy.

“Maybe she’ll even find our boy. And then what?”

“ ’ Ate ’n’ ’ear,” Claudia spoke with difficulty. “ ’ Ate ’n’ ’ear al’ays wron’, Ellie. ’Ill e-d-estroy ’ou.”

She had trouble making her lips move to form consonants. The speech therapist made her work on them during the day, but alone with her sister at night she relaxed and did what came easiest.

Hate and fear. Always wrong, will destroy you.
Ella knew she was saying that because she’d said it so many times in the eighty-five years of their life together. Pastor Karen thought some special gift of empathy lay between Ella and Claudia that helped Ella understand her sister, but it was only habit. She cranked Claudia up in bed and helped her eat a little meatloaf, a few spoonfuls of mashed potatoes, a bite of garish Jell-O.

“ ’ Ank ’ou, Ellie.” Claudia lay down, and Ella sat with her until her sister slid away from her into sleep.

5

IT’S A BIRD . . . IT’S A PLANE ... NO! IT’S SUPERCOUSIN!

TRAFFIC’S BECOME LIKE MARK TWAIN’S OLD BROMIDE: WE all whine about it, but no one tries to fix it. Even me: I complain about the congestion and then keep driving myself everywhere. Trouble is, Chicago’s public transportation is so abysmal, I’d never have time to sleep if I tried to cover my client base by bus and El. As it was, my trip home took over forty minutes, not counting a stop for groceries, and I only had to go seven miles.

When I’d squeezed my car in between a shiny Nissan Pathfinder and a boxy Toyota Scion, I couldn’t summon the energy to get out. As soon as I went inside, my downstairs neighbor and the two dogs would leap on me, all eager for company and two of them eager for exercise.

“A run will do me good.” I repeated the mantra, but couldn’t persuade myself to move. Instead, I stared at the trees through the Mustang’s open sunroof.

In June, summer comes even to the heart of a great city. Even to the world of the steel mills, where I grew up. The light and warmth of spring always fill me with nostalgia, perhaps more this year because I’d been immersed so recently in my mother’s childhood.

After seeing the rich green hills in Umbria, I understood why my mother kept trying to create a Mediterranean garden under the grit of the mills. By July, the leaves, including her camellia, would be dead-looking, coated with sulfur and smoke, but each spring the trees put out hopeful tendrils. This year, it will be different. Maybe the same would be true of my forebodings about my new client. This time, events would prove my pessimism false.

When I’d left Miss Ella’s apartment, I stopped at Karen Lennon’s office. Miss Ella had signed a contract agreeing to a thousand dollars’ worth of investigation—essentially, two full days at half price—to be paid in installments, with seventy-five dollars in cash in advance as a retainer.

A passing nurse’s aide told me Karen was making pastoral calls in New Manor’s skilled-nursing wing. I sat on a scarred plastic chair in her office for almost an hour; my other choice was an armchair whose springs sank almost to the floor. I wasn’t idle: I studied Pastor Karen’s books:
Pastoral Theology in African-American Context
,
Feminist & Womanist Pastoral Theology.
I read a few pages, but when Karen still hadn’t shown up I answered phone calls and did an Internet search for a different client, a high-paying law firm. I hate cruising the Net on a handheld—the screen’s too small, and it takes forever to load text—but Karen Lennon’s computer needed a password to get online.

When Karen finally returned, she was in a hurry, ready to pack up and get out of the building. She tried to give me a welcoming pastoral smile, but she clearly wasn’t ecstatic at my demands for time and information, so I said I’d follow her to the parking garage.

“Did you know that Lamont Gadsden hasn’t been seen for forty years when you asked me out here?” I asked as she locked her office door. “Was that why you were so cagey with me?”

Karen Lennon was still very young. Her soft cheeks flushed, and she bit her lips. “I was afraid you’d say no outright. It’s so long ago. My own mother was only a teenager then.”

It rattled me to realize her mother and I were almost the same age. “Why did Miss Ella wait so long to make inquiries?”

“She didn’t!” Karen stopped in the middle of the building’s lobby, her hazel eyes large and earnest. “They asked questions of Lamont’s friends at the time, they went to the police, who treated them with total racist contempt. They figured there was nothing else they could do.”

“They?” I said. “That was Miss Ella and her sister Claudia, right? I told Miss Ella I needed to see her sister and she refused. She grudged every sentence she spoke to me. What is she trying to hide?”

“Oh, Vic, I don’t know why Miss Ella didn’t tell you, but Miss Claudia had a stroke right at Easter. It’s hard for her to talk, and, when she does get some words out, her speech is terribly slurry. Miss Ella’s the only person who can understand her completely, although I’m getting better at it. It’s been since her stroke that Miss Claudia’s become obsessed with this search. Miss Ella tried to talk her out of it because of how long it’s been and how little hope there is of learning anything, but Miss Claudia wouldn’t rest until her sister promised to find Lamont. Try to find him, anyway. Are you going to look for him?”

I pursed my lips. “I’ll do what I can, but there aren’t many avenues to follow. And Miss Ella isn’t helping by refusing to give me any names of people who knew her son.”

“I can help with that,” Lennon said eagerly. “She isn’t very trustful with strangers. But I’ve been here fourteen months now, and she’s come to realize she can rely on me.”

“Then maybe you’re the one who should try to find Lamont,” I said nastily.

Her rosebud mouth opened in dismay, but she said quietly, “I would, if I had your skills. I told you I Googled you after we met at the hospital. Your press makes you sound more progressive than maybe you really are. It’s why I went out of my way to help your friend Elton, without any expectation of getting paid. I was sure you’d be eager to reciprocate and help someone in Miss Ella’s situation.”

“I don’t know what her situation is,” I said. “Maybe you think of her as an old woman worn out by a life of hard work and injustice, but to me she’s a woman so bitter and withholding I can’t trust anything she says. Even forty years after she last saw him, she is still so angry with her son that she practically chokes talking about him. What if she killed him all those years ago? Or what if he hasn’t been missing, and she’s ashamed of and angry at the life he’s been leading, so she’s told everyone he’s gone?”

Karen’s jaw dropped with shock. “Vic! You can’t think . . . Not Miss Ella! Why, she’s a deaconess in her church.”

“Oh, please,” I said. “The news is full of stories of pastors and priests who’ve stolen money or molested children. I’m not saying I think Miss Ella did any of those things, not even that I think she killed her son. But I am saying she’s hiding something, she’s angry, and that she doesn’t get a free ride.”

“Are you going to help her at all?”

“We agreed I’d do some preliminary work, and I’m cutting my fees for her, but I am not going to go on if she doesn’t keep up her payments.”

Pastor Karen laughed, perhaps relieved that I was going to carry some of the load. “I think she’s scrupulous about money.”

“And remember to ask her for names of Lamont’s friends. That’s going to be where I’ll have to start.”

When Karen said she’d talk to Miss Ella in the morning, I added, “It would help if I could see Miss Claudia. Do you know where she’s living?”

“She’s here, at Lionsgate Manor, in our rehabilitation wing, although it’s hard for me to be hopeful. She and Miss Ella shared a bed in that little apartment until Miss Claudia had her stroke.” Karen shook her head mournfully. “All those years of working their fingers to the bone, both of them, and they couldn’t afford two bedrooms, even at Lionsgate Manor. It doesn’t seem fair.”

Maybe that was what lay behind Miss Ella’s hostility: the rank unfairness of life. Life is unfair. Of course it is. When it snows, the rich ski downhill and the poor shovel their sidewalks, my mother used to say. But Gabriella loved life, me, music—above all, music. When she sang, especially Mozart, she moved to a different world where rich and poor, fair and unfair, didn’t matter, only sound. What did Miss Ella have that brought her to such a place? What did I have, come to think of it?

A heart-stopping thud on my car window brought me back to Racine Avenue. It was Mr. Contreras, my downstairs neighbor. Mitch, the giant lab-golden, jumped up on the car, his paws on the Mustang’s roof, and began to bark. I got out of the car, pushing him out of the way.

“We began to wonder if maybe you had a stroke out here, doll, you was sitting so long. And you got company, cute young gal, says she’s a cousin, although she’s so young I thought maybe she was a niece or something. But, then, families do stretch out both ways, don’t they? She’s on your pop’s side, I guess, since she says she’s a Warshawski. I didn’t know you had any relatives . . .”

Mitch punctuated the old man’s flood of words with hysterical barks. He and Peppy, his mother, had both been clinging to me since my return home. In my absence, a dog service had run them twice a day, but they needed the reassurance that I wasn’t going to abandon them again. Mitch ignored my commands to be quiet and to sit. By the time I’d wrestled him out of the street and into position on the sidewalk, I was panting. Peppy, who’d sat through the whole proceeding with the saintly expression that makes other dogs hate golden retrievers, now started threading herself through my legs, giving little whimpers of greeting.

“Could you start at the beginning?” I asked my neighbor, my hand on Mitch’s collar. “Like my cousin. Who is she? Where is she? And so on.”

Mr. Contreras beamed. He loves family—my family, anyway. He seldom sees his married daughter, Ruthie, or his two grandchildren. “Didn’t you know? Your own cousin, didn’t her ma tell you? She’s come to work in Chicago, and she’s renting a place in Bucktown.”

Bucktown was Chicago’s newest Yuppieville, about a mile south of us. Ten years ago, it was a quiet working-class neighborhood, mostly Polish and Mexican, when the ominous happened: young artists looking for cheap studio space moved in. Now the artists can’t afford the rents and are moving farther west, while the natives are long gone, to the depressed fringe neighborhoods on the far South Side.

I took my groceries out of the trunk and walked up the sidewalk with my neighbor. If this was a Warshawski cousin, it had to be one of my uncle Peter’s kids. He’d been a lot younger than my dad, and had started his family late in life, after he left Chicago for Kansas City, so I didn’t know him or my cousins at all. I’d gotten birth announcements over the years, one daughter after another. Petra, Kimberly, and then a blur of Stephanie, Alison, Jordan, something like that.

As we got to the door, a young woman bounced down the steps with all of Mitch’s enthusiasm. She was tall and blond, and her low-cut, skimpy peasant blouse, with vest, skirt, leggings, and high-heeled boots, proclaimed her a serious Millennium Gen fashionista, but her wide smile was genuine. It made her look so much like a vibrant, feminine version of my father that I put down my groceries and held out my arms.

“Petra?” I ventured.

“I am, I am.” She hugged me back, bending over my five-foot-eight frame and squeezing hard. “Sorry to drop in uninvited, but I just got settled this afternoon, and Daddy told me you lived here, near me, and I didn’t have any appointments, so I came scurrying up to see you. Uncle Sal—isn’t he sweet? He told me to call him that!—he’s been feeding me tea in the garden and telling me all the cases he’s worked on with you. You’re awesome, Tori!”

Tori. My family nickname. Since my cousin Boom-Boom’s death twelve years ago, no one had used it, and it was startling to hear it on this stranger’s lips. And now Mr. Contreras was her “Uncle Sal.” And Mitch was slobbering over her. We were just one big happy family.

Mr. Contreras said he knew “you gals” had a lot of catching up to do, so why didn’t we go on up to my place, and he could make us spaghetti later if we wanted. With the dogs racing ahead of us, stopping at each landing to see if we were following, I led Petra to the third floor.

“You should have let me know you were coming to town,” I said. “I’d have been glad to put you up while you got settled.”

“It happened so fast, I didn’t even know I was coming myself until a week ago. See, I graduated from college in May. And then me and my roomie went to Africa for four weeks. We bought a used Land Rover, we drove all over, then we sold the Rover in Cape Town and flew to Australia. Anyway, when I got off the plane in Kansas City, Daddy was, like, do you have a job? And I’m, like, no, of course not. And he says how Harvey Krumas’s son is running for the Senate. Daddy and Harvey grew up together back in the Stone Age, so of course they’re still best buds. And if Harvey’s kid needs help, then Peter’s kid will pitch in. So, here I am. My poor body still can’t figure out what time zone I’m in.” She laughed again, a loud, husky peal.

“Harvey Krumas, huh? I didn’t know he and your dad were friends.”

“Do you know him?” Petra’s cellphone rang. She looked at the screen and put it back in her pocket.

“No, sweetie, I don’t swim in those rarefied waters.”

Krumas. The name in Chicago meant everything from pork bellies to pension funds. When a new high-rise broke ground here, or in any of a dozen other great cities around the world, you could count on seeing Krumas Capital Management listed among the financial backers.

“I thought maybe since Daddy and Uncle Harvey are such good buds, your dad must’ve known him, too.”

“My dad was twenty when your father was born,” I explained. “I don’t know if Peter even remembers the row house in Back of the Yards. By the time he started school, Grandma Warshawski had bought a bungalow in Gage Park. Then she moved to Norwood, up on the Northwest Side. That’s where she lived when I was a teenager. Your dad took indoor plumbing for granted when he was growing up, but my father and your uncle Bernie—they were the two oldest—they had to empty the slop buckets every morning when they were boys. Between them, Grandma and Grandpa Warshawski didn’t make fifteen dollars a week during the Great Depression.”

“It’s not Daddy’s fault his parents had a hard life,” Petra protested.

“Oh, honey, I wasn’t trying to imply that, just explaining what different worlds our two fathers inhabited even though they were brothers. My dad joined the police because it offered a steady paycheck.”

“But Daddy worked hard!” Petra cried. “He earned every nickel he ever made, down in the yards!”

“I know he did. Our grandmother could never understand why Peter went to work in the stockyards when there were so many better jobs around, but Harvey Krumas’s dad offered Peter a job because he and Harvey were friends, and Peter made the most of it.”

If my uncle hadn’t become wealthy on a grand scale, he had done well—way better than anyone else remotely connected to my family. When the stockyards left Chicago in the sixties, Peter had followed Ashland Meats to Kansas City. By the time my dad died, in 1982, Ashland was a five-hundred-million-dollar concern, and Peter was a senior officer. I’d always been a little bitter that he didn’t do anything to help out with my dad’s medical bills when Tony was dying, but, as I’d just explained to Petra, Tony of course was essentially a stranger to him.