Sara Paretsky - Sisters on the Case

Victoria was too exhausted to run; she limped up to the car and started pounding on the door. ‘‘What happened to Tomas? Where’s my dad? What have you done with him?’’

‘‘Who are you?’’ the stranger demanded. ‘‘Tomas doesn’t have any kids!’’

‘‘ My dad, Officer Warshawski!’’ she screamed. ‘‘Tomas said he was going to kill Tony, where is he?’’

The stranger opened the door. The look on his face was terrifying. For some reason, the girl held up her camera, almost as a protection against his huge angry face, and took his picture. He yanked at the camera strap, almost choking Victoria; the strap broke and he flung the camera onto the grass. As she bent to pick it up, he grabbed her. She bit him and kicked at him, but she couldn’t make him let go.

The battle between the cops and the protestors went on for five hours after Dr. King and his fellow marchers left the park. By the end of the day, every cop felt too limp and too numb to care about the cars that were still burning, or those that were overturned or dumped into the lagoons ringing the park. Firefighters were working on burning cars, but they were moving slowly, too.

Some patrolmen returning to their squad cars couldn’t get far: women had poured sugar into the gas tanks. After going a few hundred feet, the fuel filters clogged and the cars died. When a fireman came on the body shoved under a bush, he called over to a cop uselessly fiddling with the carburetor of his dead squad car.

The policeman walked over on heat-swollen legs and knelt, grunting in pain as his hamstrings bent for the first time in nine hours. The man under the bush was around forty, blond, sunburnt. And dead. The cop grunted again and lifted him by the shoulders. The back of the man’s head was a pulpy mess. Not dead from a heat stroke, as the officer had first assumed, but from the well-placed blow of a blunt instrument.

A small crowd of firefighters and police gathered. The cop who’d first examined the body sat heavily on his butt. His eyelids were puffy from the sun.

‘‘You guys know the drill. Keep back, don’t mess the site up any more’n it already is.’’ His voice, like all his brother officers’, was raspy from heat and strain.

‘‘Guy here says he knows something, Bobby,’’ a man at the edge of the ragtag group said.

Bobby groaned, but got to his feet when the other cop brought over a civilian in a Hawaiian print shirt. ‘‘I’m Officer Mallory. You know the dead man, sir?’’

The civilian shook his head. ‘‘Nope. Just saw one of the niggers hit him. Right after we got King, one of them said he’d do in the first whitey crossed his path, and I saw him take a Coke bottle and wham it into this guy.’’

The police looked at each other; Bobby returned to the civilian. ‘‘That would have been about when, sir?’’

‘‘Maybe five, maybe six hours ago.’’

‘‘And you waited this long to come forward?’’

‘‘Now just a minute, Officer. Number one, I didn’t know the guy was dead, and number two, I tried getting some cop’s attention and he told me to bug off and mind my own business. Only he didn’t put it that polite, if you get my drift.’’

‘‘How far away were you? Close enough to see the man with the Coke bottle clearly?’’

The civilian squinted in thought. ‘‘Maybe ten feet. Hard to say. People were passing back and forth, everyone doing their own thing, like the kids are saying these days, no one paying much attention-me neither, but I could make a stab at describing the nigger who hit him.’’

Bobby sighed. ‘‘Okay. We’re waiting for a squad car that works to come for us. We’ll drive you to the Chicago Lawn station. You can make a statement there, give us a description of the Negro you say you saw, and the time and all that good stuff… Boys, you’re as beat as me, but let’s see if we can find that Coke bottle anywhere near here.’’

Turning to the man next to him, he muttered, ‘‘I hope to Jesus this guy can’t make an ID. The whole town will explode if we arrest some Negro for killing a white guy today.’’

As they picked through the litter of cups and bottles and car jacks that the rioters had dropped, looking for anything with hair or blood on it, a squad car drove up near them. The uniformed driver came over, followed by a civilian man with his son.

‘‘Mallory! We’re looking for Tony Warshawski. Seen him?’’

Bobby looked up. ‘‘We weren’t on the same detail. I think he’s over by Homan-oh-’’ He suddenly recognized the civilian: Tony’s brother Bernie.

Bobby Mallory had been Tony Warshawski’s protégé when he joined the force. Fifteen years later, he’d moved beyond Tony with promotions the older man no longer applied for, but the two remained close friends. Bobby had spent enough weekends with Tony and Gabriella that he knew Bernie and Marie as well; Bobby was an enthusiastic supporter of Boom-Boom’s ambition to supplant the Golden Jet with the Blackhawks. He wished he could also support the freedom Tony and Gabriella gave their own only child, but he hated the way they let her run around with Boom-Boom, like a little hooligan. Thank God Eileen was raising his own girls to be proper young ladies.

‘‘We’re falling down, we’re that tired, Warshawski,’’ Bobby said. ‘‘What’s up?’’

Bernie shook his son’s shoulder and Boom-Boom said, ‘‘It’s my cousin, Tori, Officer Mallory. Victoria. She-my uncle Tomas-after lunch we heard him say he was going to kill Tony because of Wujek Tomas losing his job and he thought it was Tony’s fault, except he also blamed it on the ni-Negroes-so Victoria took off for the park here to warn Uncle Tony and she didn’t come home and we saw it on TV, the fight, and I told my dad and he said we should come here and try to find her, or anyway, find Uncle Tony, and then Dad and I, we saw you, and maybe you know, like, is she okay?’’

Bobby Mallory rubbed his sunburnt forehead. ‘‘Vicki came here? God damn it, who let her do such a stupid dangerous thing?’’

‘‘She took off, sir, and my ma, she had ahold of me, so I couldn’t follow.’’

‘‘Which is the only good news of the day,’’ Bernie Warshawski said. ‘‘Otherwise we’d be looking for both of you. We saw where Tori chained up her bike at the Seventy-first and Stony bus-’’

He caught sight of the body under the shrub. ‘‘But-that’s Tomas. Marie’s brother! What happened to him? He come with the St. Czeslaw crowd and pass out?’’

He moved over to kneel next to Tomas. ‘‘Come on, man, get up. You’ve had your fun, now get on your feet-’’

Bernie dropped the shoulder in horror: Tomas was never going to get up again. When Boom-Boom started to join his father at his uncle’s body, Bobby grabbed him and pulled him back.

‘‘We gotta get a meat wagon for this guy. Bernie, give his name and particulars to one of the officers here while I get on the squawk box in the squad car. And let’s see if you recognize our helpful witness… Lionel!’’

One of the uniformed men limped forward. Bobby introduced him to Bernie Warshawski, but when they went to look for the man in the Hawaiian shirt who claimed to have seen Tomas’s assailant, he had disappeared. Just like a damned civilian-don’t get involved! Or maybe he didn’t want to have to explain what he’d been doing in the park all afternoon. Maybe he’d thrown the brick that hit Martin Luther King hard enough to knock him to the ground. Jesus! They’d been lucky King hadn’t needed medical help.

Bobby used the squad car radio to summon a detective. When a man arrived to look after Tomas Wojcek’s body and to organize a search of the grass around him, he turned his own aching body and numbed mind to the task of finding Tony Warshawski.