Hardball (31 page)

40

THE SHOEMAKER’S TALE

MORRELL’S HONDA STARTED ON THE FIRST TRY, WHICH was a relief. I’d worried that the battery might have run down after sitting in the garage for three months.

Going to Morrell’s place had left me melancholy. Little traces of my life surfaced wherever I looked—a pot of my moisturizer in the bathroom;
Sleeping Arrangements,
which I’d read aloud to him when he was recuperating from his bullet wounds, next to the bed. When I put away the juice I’d bought, I found a container of Mr. Contreras’s homemade tomato sauce in the freezer.

Morrell and I had spent two years together. He had put me back together when I’d been tortured and left for dead on the Kennedy Expressway, I’d helped him when he’d been left for dead in Afghanistan. Maybe that was the only time we could really help each other, when we were near death. When we were near life, we couldn’t sustain the relationship.

The tomato sauce made me realize I needed to notify Mr. Contreras, as well as Lotty and Max, about where I’d vanished to. The easiest person to tell would be Max because I could slip into Beth Israel through a side door and get to his office. If anyone was tracking me, they’d be keeping an eye on Lotty’s clinic, on Damen Avenue, as well as her condo on Lake Shore Drive. Since Max lived in Evanston, if my friends wanted to reach me Max could slip a note under Morrell’s door on his way home.

It felt queer to be alone in an apartment and to know I couldn’t use the phone. It was like being in an isolation tank. I quickly wrote a note to Max, telling him where I was, how to reach me in this age of the Internet, and asking him to get word to Lotty and Mr. Contreras.

I picked Morrell’s car keys from the top dresser drawer in his bedroom. Morrell’s extreme tidiness, which had been a source of friction between us—or maybe it was my extreme messiness that bothered him—was useful when it came to finding anything in a hurry. In my apartment, a team of skilled searchers had torn the place apart without finding what they wanted.

As soon as I pulled out of Morrell’s garage, I felt nervous and exposed. Morrell had been out of my life all summer. I didn’t think anyone hunting me would know about him, but I could be wrong. When all this was over and I had found Petra safe and sound, I would have to invest in a GPS jammer. That would force anyone tracking me to follow me physically instead of doing it the lazy electronic way.

Situations like this usually key me up. I get just nervous enough to be sharp while remaining confident about my ability to deal with whatever comes along. It was Petra’s disappearance, coupled with Sister Frankie’s death, that made me so skittish.

Deep breaths, V.I.,
I admonished myself,
deep yoga/singer breaths. You and the breath are one.
After a near miss with a
Herald-Star
delivery van, I decided meditation and driving weren’t an ideal mix and returned to skittishness. I forced myself to believe I was in the clear, got off the side streets and took the main ones to Beth Israel. When I got there, I circled until I found street parking. At the emergency-room entrance, I went in, head up, a confident walk; security didn’t try to stop me even though I didn’t have a badge on.

I’ve known Max’s secretary, Cynthia Dowling, for years. She had stopped by my room when I’d been laid up the previous week. Today, she congratulated me on my quick recovery. Max was in a meeting, she said. Naturally. Executive directors are always in meetings.

I gave her the note I’d written. “You haven’t seen me since I was released from the hospital, have you, Cynthia?”

She smiled, but her eyes were worried. “I don’t even know your name, so I can’t say that I’ve seen you today. I’ll see that Max gets this when he’s alone. Do you know anything about your cousin?”

I shook my head. “Not enough of a whisper to even have a direction to follow. But I’m talking to people who can talk to people, and maybe one of them will finally start giving me real news.”

I left by a side door and jogged back to Morrell’s car. I drove down Damen Avenue as the closest route to the expressway. The light at Addison turned yellow just as I got to the intersection. Without a driver’s license, without an insurance card for the Honda—Morrell kept his in his wallet—I was being very law-abiding. I came to a virtuous halt. The car behind me honked in annoyance.

“Roscoe, Belmont, Wellington.” I counted off the streets out loud, nervous about needing to get to the South Side ahead of Dornick. “Roscoe!” I shouted.

The car behind me honked again, this time because the light was green, and then zoomed around me, almost colliding with the northbound traffic. Roscoe. Brian Krumas had told Peter he could stay in the Roscoe Street apartment. The contractors who had shown up at the Freedom Center were owned by a guy with offices on West Roscoe. I made a U-turn just as the light was turning yellow again, forgetting my need to be utterly obedient to traffic signals and having my own near miss with an oncoming bus. Stupid, stupid. What had been his name? The exact address? The nuns at the Freedom Center could tell me.

I’d almost reached Irving Park Road when I realized that if I drove to the Freedom Center, I’d show up on Homeland Security cameras. I needed a phone or a computer. Therefore, I needed to find an Internet café. I drove along Addison toward the lake. Just before Wrigley Field, I found what I needed.

I paid cash for a card that I could stick into one of their machines. Compared to my Mac Pro, the Windows machine they had was painfully cumbersome to use, but I logged on to one of my search engines and hunted contractors on Roscoe Street. Rodenko, that was it, 300 West Roscoe. Harvey Krumas had an unlisted phone number, but I found him, too, through my best search engine, Lifestory. The house in Barrington Hills, a place in Palm Springs, a flat in London. And the pied-à-terre in Chicago. At 300 West Roscoe.

Three hundred West Roscoe? I stared at the address. Harvey Krumas was Ernie Rodenko? He owned Ernie Rodenko? Either way, he had quickly mustered a couple of small-time contractors to clean up Sister Frankie’s apartment and used his home address for the holding company. However it had been worked, when Petra looked up the subcontractors, broadcasting the news all over the office in her loud, cheerful voice, Les Strangwell heard her. Les was protecting Harvey. Or was it Brian? Did it matter?

I felt odd: cold, hot, queasy, remote. I wasn’t fit to drive, not the fifteen miles to Curtis Rivers’s shop, but it was all I could think of. I had to find Steve Sawyer before Harvey and Strangwell and George Dornick turned him into a fall guy for Petra.

I have no memory of leaving the Internet café to go to my car or of driving to the South Side. I don’t remember if I stayed on Damen or went to the Ryan. I didn’t look for tails. I was an automaton moving through space. It wasn’t until I was walking away from the car that I came back to earth. I leaned against a light pole and sang a few vocal exercises, forcing myself to breathe, to get some semblance of calm for the hard interview ahead.

When I reached Fit for Your Hoof, Kimathi-Sawyer wasn’t on the street. I opened the door to the shop and parted the ropes to the interior. I’d forgotten the whistle and the recorded “Welcome to Chicago” announcement and flinched as they sounded.

The chess players were sitting at their board. The balding man with the paunch was still wearing his Machinists T-shirt; the skinny, darker one had on an outsize lumberjack’s shirt. Curtis Rivers stood behind the counter watching them play, a toothpick jutting at a jaunty angle from his mouth.

The
Sun-Times
was on the counter. My cousin’s picture had made the front page. HAVE YOU SEEN ME? the screamer headline read. The radio was still tuned to NPR. It was
Worldview
time in Chicago. The men had been talking, but when they looked up and saw me, the room became so quiet that even Jerome MacDonald seemed to sink to a whisper.

“You’re not welcome here,” Rivers said.

“Gosh, and you’ve been so subtle up to now I never would have guessed. Tell me about Steve Sawyer.”

“I’ll tell you all I’ve said before, which is you’ve got a hell of a nerve to come here and ask about him.”

“He changed his name legally to Kimathi, didn’t he, before the trial? But Lamont never went that far. He was Lumumba only to the inner Anaconda circle.”

Rivers shifted the toothpick from one side of his mouth to the other but didn’t speak. I saw a red handbag on one of the ropes made of the kind of leather that I love, a soft, supple calfskin.

“At his trial, Kimathi-Steve was expecting Lamont to show up with some pictures, wasn’t he? And Lamont never arrived.” I stuck up an arm and unclipped the bag.

“Ask your daddy about that, Ms. Detective. Oh, right, your daddy is dead. Pretty convenient, isn’t it?”

I looked inside the handbag. There was a zip compartment where you could put your wallet and a pocket that would just hold your cellphone. I was not going to lose my temper. And I wasn’t going to start yelling about my father.

“You remember George Dornick, of course, since you remember Tony Warshawski,” I said, still peering into the bag.

The cold eyes on the far side of the counter didn’t give anything away.

“And you’ve seen the news that my cousin is missing.” I paused again but still got no response.

Rivers picked up the
Sun-Times.
“Cute blond white girl, of course it’s big news. I’m sure the cops can find some black man to implicate before the day is done.”

The chess players were watching me as if I were some complicated move on their board. I looked up from the handbag at Rivers.

“They already have.”

Rivers turned off the radio. The quiet became absolute. I found a price tag tucked into an outside compartment: five hundred thirty dollars. A bag like this would be triple that at a downtown store. I put it over my shoulder and went to inspect myself in a narrow strip of mirror behind the ropes.

“Johnny.” I continued to study my silhouette.

“Man’s in Stateville. Hard to see how he could be out grabbing white chicks off the street.”

“They figure he still has a lot of friends around town who’d do a favor for him. They’re going to try to pressure him through his daughter.” I turned around, not in a hurry, and leaned against the mirror.

“His daughter?” Rivers frowned. “What can they do to her? What I hear, she may not be proud of him. But she doesn’t pretend she doesn’t know him.”

“I don’t know what they
will
do, but I’ll tell you what they
can
do. Plant evidence that she’s trafficking drugs for him. Plant computer files that show she’s dipping into private funds at the law firm where she works.” I fiddled with the opening on the bag, a clever little tongue in hard leather that slipped into a catch.

When the whistle sounded and the loudspeaker announced “Welcome to Chicago,” we all jumped. I had my hand inside my tuck holster; Rivers had his under the counter. A woman parted the ropes, bringing in a pair of high heels that needed new soles. Rivers bantered with her but kept an eye on me.

When the whistle blew as she left, he said, “They hurt Dayo, Johnny will get revenge one way or another. That won’t make him confess to snatching your cousin.”

“Here’s how I see it. Either my cousin is dead or she’s bolted, and they don’t know where she’s run. If she’s dead, if they killed her, first they make Johnny crazy by screwing with his kid and then they get a Stateville snitch to claim he heard Johnny confess to putting a contract out on Petra—on my cousin—because he’s still mad at me for various reasons.”

It was painful to talk casually about Petra in such a way, clinical, detached, as if she were a movie script I was reading. The really hard sentence came next.

“They say they’ll put the rap on Kimathi. They’ll say he killed Petra as payback.” I braced myself in case Rivers or his friends came after me.

“And, by God, he would be in his rights to.” Curtis Rivers’s voice was soft with a menace that chilled my bones.

“Why?”

“Why?” Rivers spat at me. “What, is he supposed to be just one more Jesus-loving nigger, getting tortured but saying ‘I forgive them all because hate curdles the soul’? He doesn’t forgive you, and I don’t forgive you.”

“I’m not asking you to forgive me, but I would very much like to know what I did to earn this anger.” I had dug my fingers into the soft calfskin of the bag I was still holding in an effort to keep the trembling in my legs out of my voice and hands.

“You would like to know! As if you don’t—”

“Mr. Rivers, we had this conversation two months ago. I was ten years old when Harmony Newsome was murdered. All I know about the story is from reading newspapers, reading the trial transcript, and from a brief conversation with Sister Frances, which was cut short by her murder.”

“And you were conveniently at her side when she died.”

“I held her in my arms as her hair burned.” My voice did tremble at that. “I have raw wounds on my scalp and arms and chest and nightmares that don’t go away.”

“And so does Kimathi have those nightmares.”

“Tell me what happened, Mr. Rivers.”

The chess players had been silent, almost motionless, during our interchange, but the machinist said, “You got to tell her, Curtis. You were out of bounds just now over Sister Frankie. Ms. Detective here never caused Frankie’s death, and you know it.”

The lumberjack nodded in agreement. Rivers scowled at his friends but went into the back of the shop. I heard the deep rumble of his voice and frightened cries from Kimathi. More rumbling, fewer cries, and Rivers came back out with Kimathi clutching his arm.

“This woman here, her daddy was Officer Warshawski. Tell her what happened when they came for you.”

“She’s going to take away my nature,” Kimathi whispered.

“There’s three of us here, we’re bigger than she is, she can’t cut you or hurt you. And you are safe at night, she can’t break in through all my gates.”

I held out my hands, empty hands. “I can’t hurt you, Mr. Kimathi.”

“It was all on account of Harmony’s death, the way the police reacted to Harmony’s death, I mean,” the machinist said softly. “The city didn’t care about Harmony. But Harmony’s brother did. Saul was sixteen; he was proud of his sister, and her death was almost a mortal blow to him. Until Sister Frankie persuaded him that they could use the lessons of the movement as a call for justice in Harmony’s death. Saul and Frankie, they started holding a vigil outside the police station every Sunday. They got TV crews down, they got the papers to write it up. Cops knew they had to pick up someone or the South Side would blow up all over again. So they picked on Kimathi here.”