Hardball (12 page)

“We had a pretty rough crew as clients, Mr. Krumas,” I said. “People like Johnny ‘the Hammer’ Merton. I don’t know if you remember him from the roaring sixties, but I guess he was quite a figure on the South Side in his day.”

“Merton?” Krumas frowned. “Name rings a bell, but I can’t . . .”

“Head of a street gang, Harvey,” Coleman said. “You probably saw his name in the papers when we finally got him locked up good and proper. After Vic here kept him loose for too many more years.”

“Is that the man you went to see yesterday?” Petra had popped up next to Krumas. “Vic drove out to the prison to visit him, and he’s, like, covered with snakes or something, didn’t you say?”

“Tattoos,” I explained to a startled Harvey.

“You haven’t taken up the baton again for Merton, have you, Vic? He’s locked up for a reason. No maverick investigator is going to come up with any evidence that will overturn his convictions.” Coleman announced.

“Oh, she’s not trying to get him out of jail,” Petra said. “She’s just working on a case that goes back to when you and Daddy lived in Gage Park, Uncle Harvey, some guy who went missing in a snowstorm or something. I made her drive me down to see the house Daddy lived in, and I couldn’t believe it! Like, it would totally fit into our basement in Overland Park.”

“A guy who went missing in a snowstorm?” Krumas was bewildered.

“The big snow of ’sixty-seven,” I explained, wondering at my cousin’s capacity for burbling forth disjoint news. I looked at Coleman and added, just to be malicious, “Black guy, a friend of Johnny Merton’s. They were protecting Dr. King from the rioters in Marquette Park in ’sixty-six. Were you already with the PD then, Judge? Did you make sure those good boys who threw bricks and stuff got acquitted?”

“That’s when this city began to go to hell,” Coleman growled. “If your father was with the cops, he probably told you that.”

“Meaning what, Judge?” I could feel my eyes glittering.

“Meaning men ordered to turn on their neighbors, on decent churchgoers, trying to protect their families.”

“Are you referring to Dr. King?” I asked. “If I remember correctly, he was a churchgoer—”

“That’s enough!” Jolenta Krumas turned to look at us. “This is Brian’s big night. I don’t want a lot of sniping and backbiting to interfere with it.”

“Jolenta’s the boss.” Harvey crossed his arms over his wife’s shoulders. “And she’s right as always. Vic, good to meet Tony’s girl. I can’t believe you’ve been stirring up the South Side all these years, and we never met. Don’t be a stranger from now on.”

The words were pleasant, but they were a definite dismissal. Coleman smirked as I retreated to Mr. Contreras’s side, while he got to stay next to power and glory. A moment later, though, the candidate appeared. Brian kissed his mother, embraced his father, and then was taken by Petra to meet Mr. Contreras. She was flanked by the campaign’s PR staff, and it was my side of the table, not Arnie’s, that Beth Blacksin’s Global Entertainment cameras began shooting.

14

DREAMS OF OLDEN TIMES

THERE WAS A BLIZZARD, A WHITE WALL OF SNOW. I WAS choking as I fought my way through it. I needed to find my father, I needed to make sure he was safe. Someone had blown up St. Czeslaw’s. Even though they were Christians they had blown up their own church. Father Gribac was standing in front of the burning building, waving his arms, shouting that the cardinal had it coming. “If he wants to give the church to the niggers, we’ll see there’s no church left to give them!”

Every time I tried to pass him, the priest shoved me backward. My father was a policeman, he was trying to protect the church, they might have blown him up, too. “Papà! ” I tried to shout, but, dream-like, I had no voice.

I sat up, sweating and weeping. I’m a grown woman, and there are still nights when I need my father so badly that the pain of losing him cuts through and takes my breath away.

I supposed the dream came from seeing my ex-husband the night before, that and meeting Harvey Krumas. Dick Yarborough had loved my father. Tony was what kept our brief marriage together as long as it lasted. Even though Dick left me almost as soon as the funeral was over, whenever I see him he brings my dad to mind.

And then there was Harvey Krumas, the candidate’s father. Tony used to keep him and my uncle Peter on the straight and narrow, Harvey said last night, as if my dad being a cop meant he monitored people’s lives. It had been a misery of my childhood, parents saying to my playmates, “Victoria’s father is a cop. He’ll arrest you if you don’t behave.” Apparently that was also how Harvey and Peter had seen Tony, not as a person, just a uniform.

“But if you hang out with a prize creep like Arnie Coleman, you probably need someone to keep you on the straight and narrow,” I said out loud.

My voice startled Peppy, asleep on the floor by my side. She twitched and whimpered.

“Yeah, you haven’t seen your birth father for years and years, either, have you, girl?” I leaned over to rub her head.

Father Gribac had been the pastor at St. Czeslaw’s, the church my aunt Marie attended. Actually, nobody had blown up St. Czeslaw’s, but Father Gribac sure had fanned fires of hatred in South Chicago after the riot-filled summer of ’sixty-six. Marie was just one of the crowd of furious St. Czeslaw parishioners who vowed to do everything they could to show King and the other agitators he’d brought with him that they should stay in Mississippi or Georgia where they belonged. She was furious that the cardinal made every priest read a letter to the parish on brotherhood and open housing.

“Our Chicago Negroes always knew their place before these Com munists came to stir them up,” Marie fumed.

Father Gribac read Cardinal Cody’s letter, since he was a good soldier in Christ’s Army, but he also preached a thundering sermon, telling his congregation that Christians had a duty to fight Commu nists and look after their families. We heard all about it from Aunt Marie when she dropped in on my mother a few days after my tenth birthday.

“If we don’t stop them in Marquette Park, they’ll be here in South Chicago next. Father Gribac says he’s tired of the cardinal sitting in his mansion like God on His throne, not caring about white people in this city.
We’re
the ones who built these churches. But Cardinal Cody wants to let those ni—”

“Not that word in my house, Marie,” my mother had said sharply.

“Oh, you can be as high and mighty as you like, Gabriella, but what about us? What about the lives we worked so hard to make?”

My mother had answered in her ungrammatical English. “Mama Warshawski, she tells me always the hard times Polish peoples have in this city in 1920. The Germans are here first, next the Irish, and they are not wanting for Polish peoples to work at their work. Mama Warshawski tells me how they are calling Papà Warshawski names when he looks for work, stupid Pollack and worse. And Tony, he must do many hard jobs at the police, they are Irish, they not liking Polish peoples. Is always the way, Marie, is sad, but is always the way, the ones coming first want to keep out the ones coming second.”

I hugged my knees, shivering as my sweat dried. It seemed as though everywhere I turned these days, I was being forced to think back forty years to those hot riot-filled days. Or to the January blizzard that followed. Johnny Merton, Lamont Gadsden, and now, tonight, Arnie Coleman, with his veiled racist comments:
That’s when this city started going to hell . . . cops forced to turn on their own neighbors.

They had busted up the South Side, those riots. My father, coming home after four days on shift without a break, had been shaken by the hatred he’d experienced, directed at him and his fellow officers, and even at some nuns who were marching with Dr. King.
“You can’t believe the insults these Catholic boys shouted at the sisters. People I went to Mass with when I was a boy,”
I’d heard him tell my mother when he finally got off duty.

I pulled on a sweatshirt and shorts. Peppy followed me into the dining room, where I knelt in front of the built-in cupboards and pulled out the drawer where I keep a photo album of my parents.

I brooded over their wedding picture: City Hall, 1945. My mother, in a severely tailored suit, looking like Anna Magnani in
Open City.
My father, in his dress uniform, bursting with astonished pride to be marrying “the most extraordinary woman I ever met.”

Petra’s father, Peter, a late thought in my grandparents’ life, was a child in a sailor suit in the family photo. My grandfather, who died when I was small, was there, tall and big-boned like all the Warshawskis. Boom-Boom’s parents appeared in several photos, my aunt Marie characteristically looking sourly at her immigrant sister-in-law, my uncle Bernard giving Gabriella a most unbrotherly kiss. I looked more closely at that picture. Maybe that explained some of Aunt Marie’s sourness.

Pictures of me didn’t appear until much later. I was a late thought, too, in a way. My mother had three miscarriages before I was born, and two more after, a sign, or maybe a cause, of the cancer that grew inside her and silently overwhelmed her.

I found a family shot at the beach when I was three: my mother, in a rare moment of relaxation, looking more like Claudia Cardinale than Anna Magnani; me, grinning over my sand bucket; my dad, in swimming trunks, bending over her and me. His two pepperpots, he called us.

I flipped the pages. Softball in Grant Park. My dad played on one of the teams the department fielded. I used to know most of the men he played with. I frowned over the team picture now, reading the names printed underneath in my father’s curious boxy script. Bobby Mallory, in his rookie year on the force, playing shortstop. Two men who’d died in the last few years had been in the outfield.

My eyes widened in surprise as I looked at the man next to Bobby: George Dornick. He’d been part of Brian Krumas’s entourage last night. After the drumrolls and trumpets gave Krumas a royal fanfare, those of us lurking around his father’s table met the candidate and entourage. Dornick was running a big private security firm these days. He was advising the candidate on terrorism and Homeland Security issues.

It’s not strange to find ex-cops running private security firms. It was strange meeting him last night and now seeing him forty years younger, with his hair still brown and thick, grinning with my dad and Bobby and the other men I’d known. If Tony hadn’t died, maybe he’d have gotten rich doing private security, too.

I finally put the album away and went back to bed, but I couldn’t relax into sleep again. I found a bottle of blueberry juice in the cupboard and took a glass out to the back porch. Peppy, who’d wandered down into the yard, gave a short bark. I leaned over to see the back gate starting to open. Peppy stood stiff-legged, growling. I called to her, but she stayed at attention, growling more loudly as a luminous white shape appeared.

I started down the stairs in my bare feet but stopped on the second-floor landing when I realized it was my new neighbor returning home with his bass in its large white case. Peppy changed at once from warrior to cheerleader, circling around him as he came up the stairs.

“That’s a good feeling, someone to greet you at the end of a hard day. I was feeling sorry for myself just now, coming home to an empty apartment.” He was in black tie tonight, but he’d put the tie in a pocket and undone his shirt. “What are you doing up so late?”

“Indigestion. I ate too many politicians for dinner last night. What about you? Isn’t it three or something?”

“We finished at Ravinia, and one thing led to another,” he said vaguely, making me suppose he’d been with a lover. He leaned the bass against his kitchen door. “What politicians were you eating?”

“My cousin—the tall kid you may have seen around here—she has a bit part in the Krumas machine. She dragged me to a high-end event. At least my ex saw me looking my best, not the way my clients will in a few hours.”

“Oh, these exes! At least yours probably isn’t an oboe player. Their main relationship is with their reeds.”

“Mine was wound up most in his billable hours. But I brought my own faults to the table,” I added somberly, thinking again of Morrell and my failure to make that relationship work.

I left Jake Thibaut at the third-floor landing and went back inside. I tried to sleep the few hours that remained before I had to go downtown for my seven-thirty meeting. After I finished my presentation—more by luck than skill—I went to my office to check in with Marilyn Klimpton from the temporary agency. I tried to focus on reports and e-mail, but I was too sleep-deprived. I went back home to bed.

15

OLD TRIAL . . . OR SOMETHING LIKE IT

I WAS AWAKENED A LITTLE BEFORE THREE BY ANOTHER family drama: Mr. Contreras’s daughter, Ruthie, arriving from Rolling Meadows with her two sons, was shouting at her father from the doorstep. Mitch and Peppy were barking furiously.

Once again, I went to the street window to look down. The dogs were waving their tails as they barked to show they didn’t mean serious harm. Ruthie was standing on the cement slab in front of the door while her teenage sons lingered behind, looking as though they’d rather be anywhere than here. From above, I had a clear view of the black roots sprouting in Ruthie’s bleached hair.

“We have to find out about you on the news. You don’t have the common decency to call and say, ‘Oh, by the way, I’m going to meet all the bigwigs on earth,’ let alone invite me and your grandsons to go with you. Your own flesh and blood, and you show up on TV with that so-called detective.”

My cousin Petra suddenly appeared in the scene, dancing up the sidewalk, in stovepipe jeans and her high-heeled boots, clutching a sheaf of newspapers. The dogs ran to greet her, barks turning to squeaks of pleasure.

“Uncle Sal!” Petra’s husky voice drowned out Ruthie’s nasal whine. “Uncle Sal, just look! Wasn’t that a fabulous party? Weren’t we all incredibly brilliant? And you are a
star
, Uncle Sal. Did you see the
Herald-Star
? And the
Washington Post
used the same photo.”

I ran to the bathroom and stood under a cold-water shower for a minute. I hadn’t bothered with the papers on my blear-eyed way to and from the Loop this morning, but I’d tucked my copy of the
Star
into my briefcase. I looked at it now.

There Mr. Contreras was with Brian Krumas, on the front page of the ChicagoLand section. Krumas, a lock of hair falling over his forehead à la Bobby Kennedy, had one hand on Mr. Contreras’s shoulder, the other clutching Mr. Contreras’s arm just behind the elbow, so that the camera’s focus was on my neighbor’s medals. His Bronze Star gleamed as brightly as the candidate’s smile. Petra’s value to the campaign must have quintupled overnight when she got that photo staged.

I pulled on my jeans and a T-shirt and went down to join the party, or whatever it was. “Autograph, autograph.” I thrust my copy of the paper at Mr. Contreras. He was smiling so widely I thought his ears might split open.

“Isn’t he wonderful?” Petra said. “Uncle Sal, you’re a hero! There’s no stopping you now!”

She was oblivious to Ruthie’s broad insults:
“What hole did you crawl out of? I don’t remember no cousins called Petra. This here is his real family.”
Her sons were embarrassed and her father offended, but Petra ignored her, demanding that I let them go up to my apartment to look at my computer.

“He’s on YouTube. He’ll want to see that. And you guys will, too, won’t you?”

The grandsons shuffled their feet and mumbled, adolescents unnerved by Petra’s Valkyrie sexuality. Her cellphone rang as we were clambering up the stairs. Petra looked at the number, then announced it was her office, she had to take the call.

“He does? Really? . . . No, I’m at my cousin’s . . . Yeah, my cousin Vic . . . I suppose in half an hour.” She hung up and turned apologetically to Mr. Contreras. “That was Tania, my boss at the campaign. They never need me for anything. Anything important, I mean. In fact, Tania told me I worked so hard last night I could take today off, but now I’m supposed to go to the office right away for a meeting. Vic, can you show Uncle Sal the YouTube footage? All you have to do is search for last night’s event. I gotta run.”

She clattered down the stairs in her high-heeled boots, leaving Ruthie fuming even more.
Who did she think she was?

“She’s my cousin, Ruthie, so let it ride, okay?” I took the unhappy family up to my apartment and set up my laptop for them. The grandsons could navigate YouTube for their grandfather, but, while everyone was shouting out on the walk, I’d gotten a text message of my own. The transcript from the Harmony Newsome murder trial was ready for me to pick up.

I rode the El downtown. Finding the trial record hadn’t been hard: they’re all on microfilm down at the county building. Getting it translated had been tougher. The reporter who’d transcribed Steve Sawyer’s trial was long gone. Her machine and her shorthand notes were also long gone. Finding someone who could make sense of the document hadn’t been cheap: I had to shell out almost two thousand dollars for the transcript. I handed in my credit card with a sour face. Miss Ella, allegedly, was paying me a thousand dollars for my initial inquiries. I was now close to that much in the hole. How much further could I really afford to go?

I rode back to my office, feeling so bitter about the money I was losing on Miss Ella’s business that I couldn’t bring myself to look at the transcript. The temp was typing letters and e-mails that I’d dictated during the last few days. She handed me a list of a half dozen phone calls to return.

While I was holding for Darraugh Graham, I finally flipped through Steve Sawyer’s trial record. For a murder trial, it wasn’t very long, only nine hundred pages, many of them filled with yes-or-no answers. Not much defense. As Darraugh’s PA came back on the line to apologize for keeping me waiting, my own name suddenly jumped out at me.

Testimony of arresting officer, Tony Warshawski. My father sent to pick up Steve Sawyer? This couldn’t be, my dad, back in my life, in this unbelievable coincidence. Johnny Merton’s bitter comment suddenly came to me, that it was damned funny that
I,
of all people, didn’t know where Sawyer was.

“Vic? Vic, are you still there?”

“Caroline,” I said weakly. “Tell Darraugh I’ll have to call him back. Or if it’s urgent, he can reach me on my cell tonight.”

I hung up without waiting for her response and took the file over to my couch. I couldn’t make sense of any of it. Merton, Sawyer, my dad: they began to whirl in my head like an old top until I felt so dizzy I couldn’t see anything at all. “Enough melodrama!” I said out loud, startling Marilyn Klimpton: “Shape up, Warshawski. Pull yourself together!”

I went to the little kitchen I share with Tessa and made myself a black coffee. Sitting cross-legged on my office couch, I went back to the beginning and read the whole transcript. The trial had lasted a day and a half.

Harmony Newsome had died in Marquette Park on August 6, 1966. The day of the civil rights march, accompanied by an eight-hour riot performed by the local community.

At first, police and fire officials thought Newsome had fainted. It wasn’t until they couldn’t revive her in the ambulance that the fire department realized she was dead. Because of the confusion in the park and the amount of debris left behind, police had been unable to locate exactly where she died or to find the murder weapon.

The medical examiner testified that Newsome had been killed when a sharp object penetrated her brain through the eye. The detectives in charge of the case, Larry Alito and George Dornick, testified, claiming that right after Christmas, 1966, an unnamed neighborhood informant led them to Steve Sawyer. Otherwise, given the crowds in the park when Newsome was killed, they probably would never have made an arrest.

Marilyn Klimpton was leaning over me. It was five-thirty, and she was leaving for the day. “Sorry to interrupt, but I called your name three times, and you didn’t hear me. I’ve left letters for you to sign. And you still need to get back to Darraugh Graham.”

I smiled as best I could and attempted to follow her report on her progress today. As soon as the door closed behind her, I went back to the transcript. After three days in custody, Sawyer had confessed to the murder. Alito read the confession out in court. Sawyer had been in love with Newsome, but she wouldn’t pay attention to him. She got “hincty” when she went away to college.

JUDGE GERRY DALY: Hincty? Is that some kind of colored word?

ASST. STATE’S ATTORNEY MELROSE: I believe so, Your Honor.

JUDGE DALY: Could I have that in English, Counselor? (Laughter in the courtroom.)

ASST. STATE’S ATTORNEY MELROSE: I believe it means “stuck-up,” Your Honor, although I don’t speak their lingo, either.

According to Sawyer’s confession, he thought he could kill her during the riots and have the murder be blamed on the white people in the park. Judge Daly questioned Sawyer briefly. The public defender assigned to Sawyer raised no objections, either during the reading of the testimony or during the judge’s questioning. He didn’t call any witnesses. He didn’t try to get the name of Alito’s and Dornick’s snitch.

Sawyer’s responses to the judge seemed vague and unconnected, and he kept saying, “Lumumba has my picture. He has my picture.”

The jury deliberated an hour before returning their guilty verdict.

I reread my father’s testimony, shivering. It was as though my nightmares of the early morning had been a prophecy of what I would find here. My father, sent to execute the warrant, described Sawyer’s shock and his attempt to flee, described cuffing him, described telling him his rights. Miranda was new that year. The transcript included some ribald byplay between State’s Attorney Melrose and Detective Dornick over Sawyer’s rights.

Dornick and Alito, the detectives in charge. Larry Alito had been my dad’s patrol partner for a year or so around 1966. My dad hadn’t liked him much, and I could remember him complaining about Alito to my mother. There was one night when he came home depressed: Alito had been promoted to detective, while he, Tony, with ten times the experience, was still in uniform. My mother consoled him, saying, “At least you don’t have to work with that
prepotente
any longer.”

The sky outside my high windows darkened as I sat on the couch, staring into nothingness. When I finally turned on a light, I saw it was after eight o’clock. I signed my letters and took a last look at the transcript before putting it into the Gadsden file. I’d been brooding so much over my father that I hadn’t noticed the name of Steve Sawyer’s lawyer. Arnold Coleman, my old boss, now a judge. He’d been a green, young public defender in 1966, but he couldn’t have been so green he didn’t know he was supposed to raise an occasional objection. Like to the racially charged language in the court.

And why hadn’t he demanded the identity of Detective Alito’s snitch? Could that have been Lamont Gadsden?