Sara Paretsky - Hardball

I started to feel cold in my backless dress. When I returned to the melee, the band was playing a martial medley. The candidate and his inner circle had appeared. Krumas was working his way through a wildly cheering crowd, shaking hands here, kissing a woman there-always choosing a woman hovering on the fringes of a group, never the most striking in the knot he was passing through.

He was, as Petra said, extraordinarily beautiful in person. You wanted to lean over and stroke that thick head of hair. And, even at a distance, his smile seemed to say, You and I, we have a rendezvous with destiny.

I craned my head to see if Mr. Contreras had been allowed to stay at Table 1. I finally saw him, looking a little forlorn, squeezed between Brian’s sister, or maybe sister-in-law, and a stocky young man who was talking across my neighbor to another man on Mr. Contreras’s left. I threaded my way to his side, prepared to rescue him, if that’s what he wanted, or to stay on the sidelines until he was ready to leave.

Harvey Krumas appeared from some place in the crowd and stood behind his wife, with a small fist of cronies in attendance. I recognized the head of the Fort Dearborn Trust but none of the others, although a stocky Asian man was probably head of a Singapore company in which Krumas had a large stake.

The candidate’s father was in his late sixties, with a thick head of curly gray hair and a square face that was starting to give way to jowls. When he saw me near Mr. Contreras, he bent to ask his wife about me. His heavy face eased into a smile, and he beckoned to me. It was only when I crossed to his side of the table that I realized Arnie Coleman was part of the group around him.

“Little Petra’s talked about you-her big cousin, Vic, the detective. You’re Tony’s girl, right? Tony Warshawski was the staid and steady guy on the street,” he explained to his friends. “Bailed me and Peter out more than once, back when we were wilder than we can afford to be these days. Bet you don’t know that old Gage Park neighborhood, do you, Vic? Not much to detect there these days, except a boatload of poverty and crime a pretty gal like you shouldn’t touch.”

“Warshawski used to work for me in the PD’s Office, Harvey,” Arnie Coleman said. “She was always getting her hands dirty up to her nose.”

Krumas was surprised to have Coleman turn his party chitchat into something so venomous, and I was astonished, too. Who knew his animosity ran as deep as that after all this time?

“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.

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.