Sara Paretsky - Hardball

A man’s voice came clearly through the open window above me. “You didn’t even get her name? Sheesh, Hazel, don’t you ever think?”

“Oh, for heaven’s sake, Larry, you think every person you meet is going to scam you.”

“And you didn’t find out what she wants?”

“You gotta pay extra if you want me to be your secretary, Mr. Alito.” Hazel’s voice was part sarcasm, part seduction, a disturbing window into their relationship.

Alito grumbled, but the conversation faded, and, a moment or two later, he joined me on the deck. He was fresh from the shower, his thinning hair still dark with water, but his eyes were almost as red as his sunburned nose. He was carrying a can of beer. From the smell of his breath as he came up to me, it was his fifth or sixth of the afternoon.

“Detective Alito, I’m V. I. Warshawski, Tony Warshawski’s daughter.”

“That a fact.” He looked at me without enthusiasm.

“Fact,” I said brightly. “I found a picture of your old slow-pitch team the other night. My dad played first, I think… Is that right?”

“How should I remember? Tony Warshawski on first, what’s on second, that right?”

I laughed dutifully. “You know my dad’s been dead for some years now.”

“Yeah. Sorry I forgot to send flowers, but we didn’t stay in touch.”

“And I became a detective, but private. I’m not with the force.”

“Private dicks, they give me a pain in the whasis.” He swallowed deeply from his beer can and set it on the deck railing.

“I’m looking up an old case that my dad and you both worked.”

He didn’t say anything, but a pulse in his neck started to jump.

“Steve Sawyer.”

“Don’t ring a bell.” The tone was indifferent, but he grabbed the beer can and took another deep swallow. “Hazel! Bring me another!”

His wife had been standing at the grill with her plate of raw meat, waiting for me to finish so she could make dinner. She reached into a cooler by the grill and brought out another can. What a fun evening for her.

“You and Tony had been partners on patrol in ’sixty-six, and then you got moved to the detective branch at-”

“I can read my own history in the obituary pages. What’s your point?” He grabbed the can from his wife and popped the top.

“It was a high-profile case at the time. A young civil rights worker was murdered during a demonstration in Marquette Park, and months went by without an arrest. Then you picked up Steve Sawyer.”

“Tony picked up Sawyer,” Alito corrected me.

“I thought you didn’t remember Sawyer.”

“All those shines marching in the park, you saying that brought it all back to me.” He smirked.

“I didn’t say that,” I said sharply. “I said a civil rights demonstration.”

“Yeah, it was a demonstration full of shines.” He laughed, and, in the background, Hazel laughed tinnily, too.

I gritted my teeth but said, “So if it’s all come back to you, who was the snitch?”

“Snitch? What snitch?”

“At the trial, you said your snitch had pointed you to Sawyer. No one ever asked for your informant’s name. I’m asking you now.”

“Ah, jeez, what a dumb-ass question! Like, I remember every two-cent junkie who wanted a fix bad enough to finger his friends.”

“What about Lamont Gadsden? How well do you remember him from your old beat?”

The question took him off guard, and he slopped beer down the front of his Sox T-shirt. He hollered to Hazel to bring over a towel. When she’d mopped his shirt, he said, “What were we talking about?”

“Lamont Gadsden.”

“He another of your shine friends? Name doesn’t ring a bell. If that’s what you came for, you wasted a tankful of gas.” The words and tone were right, but his forehead was beaded in sweat.

I looked at him steadily. “When Sawyer came into court, he was badly disoriented, didn’t seem to know who he was or where he was, going by the trial transcript. What do you remember about that?”

“He tripped and fell against the bars of his cell. You could ask Tony, if he hadn’t croaked, and he’d tell you the same. Now, get the fuck off my property.”

“What do you mean, Tony’d tell me the same?” I felt as though someone had punched me in the gut.

“What I said. Everyone says your father was too good to be true, right? The level cop, not the cop who had community complaints or IAD smelling his shorts before he put them on? Well, I could tell you a thing or two about Saint Anthony.”

“Maybe the whole South Side had reason to hate your guts, but Tony Warshawski was the best damned cop in Chicago. You were lucky you had the chance to work with him. But you got hincty, like you claim Steve Sawyer did, didn’t you, and bought yourself a-”

I saw his fist coming a half second too late. I swerved, and he missed my jaw, but the blow socked my right shoulder. I kicked him on the shin and went for his solar plexus, but water suddenly poured over my head, my eyes, my mouth, and I was choking: Hazel had turned the hose on us, spraying her husband as thoroughly as she was me. Alito and I backed away from each other, breathing hard. I stared at him for a long second, then turned abruptly and opened the door to the kitchen.

“You can’t go through the house, you’re all wet,” Hazel observed in her unemotional nasal voice.

I followed her off the deck without looking again at her husband. She pointed me toward a narrow path that separated her house from the one next door. As I walked up the lane to my car, I could see curtains twitch at windows along the way. If I had to live with Larry Alito, I wouldn’t fill the house with china kittens. I’d have a large collection of axes.

GOING HOME, I DROVE EAST ALL THE WAY TO THE BIG LAKE before starting south. I stayed on the local roads. It made for a longer trip, with all the stoplights in the little towns, but the breeze off Lake Michigan was cool, and it was easier to think without the congestion and impatience that clogged the tollway.

Partway down the coastal road, I stopped to walk over to the lake. The water was a purply gray in the summer twilight; I could see running lights away from the shore, but I was alone on the beach. Crickets and frogs chirped around me.

Alito hadn’t been surprised to see me. Who had warned him? I didn’t want to think it was Bobby. That opened the door on a kind of ugly possibility that I couldn’t bear to examine: my father’s best friend in league with a drunk, abusive cop.

Maybe Arnie Coleman had called after seeing me at the Krumas fundraiser. I tried to remember what I’d said when we were sparring at the Krumas table. It was Petra who blurted out that I was working on a case going back to Gage Park in the sixties. And I had mentioned Johnny Merton. If the Sawyer trial lay heavy on Coleman’s conscience, he could have connected the dots, although I had a hard time imagining anything lying heavy on my old boss’s conscience.

The other thing that this afternoon’s interview showed was that Alito knew Lamont Gadsden’s name. Had Lamont been his snitch, then, after all? Had Merton killed Lamont to punish him for fingering Sawyer? The Hammer was capable of anything. Murder was all in a day’s work for him.

Tony would have said the same thing, Alito claimed, that a prisoner in his custody with a bloody nose and a black eye had tripped and fallen against his cell bars. “He would not, you lying little two-bit scumbag. You think because Tony’s dead you can drag him down, but you damned well can’t.”

My heart was pounding. I thought I might choke to death, there on the shores of Lake Michigan. Christmas Eve, it came back to me suddenly. Christmas Eve, when I was in bed and my parents were in the kitchen, their reassuring laughter coming up the stairs. Had Bobby been there? Someone, a friend, having a glass of wine, and Alito stopped by. He and my father were arguing.