Sara Paretsky - Hardball

“What if he beat up a helpless man? What good interpretation could I put on that?” I cried.

“I’m saying, what if he did? People look all helpless and defenseless in a courtroom, but, you don’t know, did he pull a gun, did he attack your pa, maybe threaten his life? You can’t go by only the end of the story, cookie, you got to know the beginning and the middle, too.”

“Uncle Sal is right,” Petra chimed in. “I never knew Uncle Tony, but Daddy talks about him a lot. He was a good person, Vic. You can’t go around making up stories to say he wasn’t.”

“I’m not. I know better than either of you what a good man he was. I grew up with him.” I rubbed my eyes wearily. “Was Peter still here in 1967, Petra? I can’t remember when he moved to Kansas City.”

She flashed the smile that made her look like my father. “I wasn’t around so I can’t be sure, but I think it was in 1970 when Ashland Meats moved down, or maybe ’seventy-one. I know Daddy didn’t marry Mom until 1982. She was some kind of local debutante or something. Queen at the American Royal. You know, the big livestock show. The Queen and King of Meats, that’s what I call their wedding photos.”

I laughed dutifully, but said, “I wonder what Peter remembers from the summer of ’sixty-six. He was still living with Grandma Warshawski over on Fifty-seventh and Fairfield. He must remember the Marquette Park riots.”

“He always says that’s what ruined the South Side. The neighborhood started to change. Grandma Warshawski had to move north to get away from the crime.” My cousin shifted uneasily on the grass as she caught my expression.

The fault lines of race in the city, they run through my family, along with the rest of the South Side. My grandmother had wept when she moved. That unnerved me, as a child, to see an old woman cry.

Granny Warshawski tried to explain her own confused and conflicted feelings about race, about the changing neighborhood. “I know how hard it is to be the stranger in the land, kochanie, but I don’t know these black people. And Grandpa is dead. Peter will find himself a wife someday soon. My friends are gone. I can’t be alone here. I’m scared to be the only white lady on the street.”

I’d been eleven at the time. I’d argued with her, belligerent, self-righteous, even then. Was that what made it hard for me to live with someone else? Was it what Mr. Contreras had just accused me of: that, in my book, I was always the only one who knew anything?

“I don’t suppose Tony confided in Peter, or that your father would even remember after all this time. He’s had meat to worry about, not to mention you, which must be a full-time job. But maybe I’ll give him a call, ask him.”

“I can do that, Vic. I talk to him or Mom just about every day. But maybe Uncle Tony left some kind of record. Do you still own the house he lived in? We could go exploring for secret closets or something.” Petra’s eyes sparkled with excitement.

“Sounds like you want to be a detective yourself,” I said. “Petra Warshawski and the Secret of the Old Closet. No, sweetie, houses in South Chicago were built pretty close to the lath. Not much room for secret hiding places. Anyway, I sold it after he died. And I was lucky to find a buyer, the neighborhood was so depressed.”

“What did you do with his stuff? Did he keep a diary?”

I laughed. “You’re thinking of storybook cops like Adam Dalgliesh or John Rebus, endlessly second-guessing themselves. When Tony needed to unwind, he’d watch the Cubs or play ball himself, have a beer with your uncle Bernie. He didn’t brood or write poetry.”

“But didn’t he leave you anything?” Petra demanded. “Like, I don’t know, his prize bowling ball or something?”

“Neither that nor his polka-playing accordion. Where do you get your stereotypes, Petra?”

“Take it easy, doll,” Mr. Contreras admonished me. “Lots of guys bowl. Not that I liked it much. Pool for me. That, and the horses. Although my ma thought it’d turn me into a dropout and a drunk.”

My dad hadn’t left much. Unlike a lot of cops, he wasn’t a gun collector: he’d had only his service revolver, which I turned in when he died. I’d kept his sole backup, a 9-millimeter Smith & Wesson, for my own use. I’d given his shield to Bobby Mallory.

I had the photo album I’d looked at the other night, some softball memorabilia, a plaque featuring the eight-pound coho he’d caught in Wolf Lake. I’d kept some of the tools from the little shop he’d had behind our old kitchen. I even used them occasionally to repair a broken sink trap or build a simple piece of shelving. Other than that, all I could remember keeping was his dress uniform, which I’d stored in a trunk with my mother’s music and her burnt velvet concert gown.

Petra was all for digging into the mementos then and there. When she heard I hadn’t looked at the trunk for years, she was sure there was something I’d forgotten that would explain everything. Mr. Contreras agreed with her. “You know how it is, doll, you put things away, you forget what they were. Same with Clara’s things. When I went to look for her jewelry to give to Ruthie, I found I’d put all kinds of things in boxes, even her false teeth!”

“I know, I know,” I agreed wearily. “My dad probably had the secret plans for building a gasless car, but I’m not going to look for them tonight. I’m beat. I’m going to bed.”

Petra had drunk a fair amount of Spumante, which made her argumentative and insistent on going to the third floor at once. I got tired of arguing long before she did, and announced I was going to bed. I suggested that she stay the night. I didn’t want her driving in the state she was in. Finally, around eleven, when Mr. Contreras chimed in on my side, she let us put her into a cab.

I helped him clean up, letting his waterfall of talk wash over me. Yes, Petra was a good kid, wonderful news about her promotion. Yes, maybe I was too hard on her. Didn’t I remember being young and enthusiastic? And then he was off to the races on his own youth. I left him in front of the television with a glass of grappa and took Peppy upstairs with me.

In my dreams, though, a saber-toothed tiger was charging me. When I fell helpless to the ground in front of it, it changed shape and became my father.

PETRA SHOWED UP THE NEXT MORNING JUST AS I WAS returning from the lake with the dogs. She’d come to collect her Pathfinder, but when she saw us she climbed out of it and jogged over. The dogs raced to her, fawning and barking, covering her white cargo pants with water and sand. She was as bright as ever, showing no after-effects of her evening with Spumante.

“You know, we could look at that trunk of yours before I go to work,” she said, playing with Mitch’s ears.

“What’s with you and my trunk?” I demanded. “Do you think there are going to be false teeth or rubies or something?”

She grinned at me. “I don’t know. I guess since coming to Chicago, I’ve gotten more interested in my family’s history. I mean, my mom’s family, they’ve been in the Kansas City area for centuries. One of her ancestors was a colonel in the Confederate Army, and another came out to Kansas with the anti-slavery pioneers in the 1850s, so I grew up on all her stories. And her family is, well, so WASPy that Dad’s story was always kind of looked down on. You know, Polish meatpackers. Now I want to know more about the Warshawskis. They seem more interesting since I’ve been in their city, and met you and so on.”

I’d taken her to look at the bungalow on Fairfield Avenue where my grandparents lived when they moved from Back of the Yards. Now Petra wanted to see the house on the city’s Northwest Side, where Grandma Warshawski moved after the ’sixty-six riots, and the tenement in the stockyard district where my dad grew up and her own father had been born.