Sara Paretsky - Hardball

Zabinska and the sister who worked with the HIV moms each took one of my arms and guided me out the door and down the stairs, with Petra and the third sister following. We were moving slowly because of me and had reached only the top of the third flight when we heard a crash from the floor below us.

Sister Carolyn dropped my arm. “That came from Frankie’s place.”

Feet pounded down the hall below us. Sister Carolyn ran down the stairs. The HIV sister stayed with me, but the other nun ran after Sister Carolyn and my cousin pelted after her. I wanted to lead the charge, but I had to grab the banister and move one slow step at a time.

We reached the turn in the landing in time to see a man running down the stairs, followed by the nuns and Petra. We heard Sister Carolyn demanding that the man stop, and then the front door opened, tires squealed. A moment later, Petra and the nuns reappeared.

“Someone went into the apartment and made off with your bag,” Zabinska announced. “How did they know to look for it?”

“Don’t know.” I shook my head wearily. It was hard for me to think. “Feds been watching building, you know that? Maybe them. Should’ve remembered. Maybe followed me from hospital… Thought I was clear, but not too clever right now.”

“The feds have been watching us?” the HIV nun echoed. “How do you know that?”

“In hospital… Told me…” I was starting to drift.

“We almost had him,” Sister Carolyn said. “He was wearing a stocking cap, and I grabbed it instead of his shoulder. Then he opened the door so hard he hit Mary Lou in the nose, and we got tangled up with each other. Now I’m really angry. If he was a federal agent, he’ll have some real explaining to do, beating up a nun in her own home.”

Mary Lou’s nose was bleeding. The HIV nun sat her on the stairs and tilted her head back, stanching the blood with her own veil. Other tenants came into the stairwell: more nuns, families with small children. The noise grew to a clamor that I couldn’t take in my current state. I collapsed on the stair next to Mary Lou with my plastic dark glasses back over my eyes.

“I need to lie down.” I was panting. “Sisters… Go to Sister Frankie’s… Look for bottle fragments… Bring flashlights… Bring camera, bring clean bag… Take pictures where you find… Pick up with glove… something clean… Put in bag… Seal… label… Now!”

Again the sisters murmured among themselves. The HIV nun, who had the hospital pass, would go with me to Beth Israel. Sister Carolyn and Sister Mary Lou would take care of hunting for more glass fragments.

Petra ran ahead to get her Pathfinder while the three nuns got me down the stairs. As they helped me into the backseat of the SUV, Sister Carolyn handed me my purse.

“You’re not what I was expecting when I looked in your billfold and saw that you were a detective.”

“That’s okay. You and your pals weren’t what I expected when I learned you were nuns.”

She smiled and cupped her hands on my forehead, a caress that was a blessing. “We’ll pray for your speedy recovery.”

When the resident made rounds the next morning, he was dismayed to see that I’d had a setback. He ordered me to stay in the hospital an extra day. Lotty saw that I had fresher bruises on my arms and legs than could have come from the fire, but she didn’t ask, and I didn’t tell.

I walked up and down the hall a dozen times, trying to build my stamina, but I had to go back to bed afterward, which was infuriating. That was basically how I spent the day, walking and sleeping, Mid-afternoon, I went downstairs for another espresso.

When I returned to my room, I found Conrad Rawlings in the visitor’s chair. Conrad is a cop. We’ve been friends, enemies, lovers, collaborators, off and on for over a decade.

I was happier to see him than I would have thought possible a few days earlier. “Have you been transferred up here?”

“Nope. Still down in your old ’hood. You and fire: you can’t leave it alone, can you?” The words were harsh, but his tone was sympathetic enough to take the sting out of them. “Your eyes going to be okay?”

“They tell me,” I said gruffly.

“I read the report. Nasty fire, that, killing a nun and all.”

“Was there any word about the accelerant?” I demanded. “It looked like it had to be rocket or jet fuel, it burned so fiercely and so fast.”

He shook his head. “Early days for forensic results. But fires are tricky. Gasoline could get the job done if the perp was lucky, you know that. So don’t go starting a conspiracy theory, trying to put cops or the FBI in your sights just because some woman from OEM rubbed you the wrong way.”

“Is that why you came up here?” I demanded. “To tell me to pull back from holding the feds accountable? Damn it, Conrad, they’ve been watching the Freedom Center. They could have done something besides watching it all unfold for them on their-”

“Whoa, there, Ms. W.! I’m not here on anybody’s business but my own.”

I looked at him, puzzled. Nothing I’d been working on lately involved South Chicago, but I waited for him to speak. Make the interrogation come to you, don’t race out to meet it. That was advice I’d always given my clients in my public defender days, and it’s the hardest advice to follow.

“You and fire, Ms. W.,” he repeated. “I don’t know if it follows you around or you bring it with you.”

He waited for a while. But when I still didn’t respond, he said, “You were in South Chicago last Saturday.”

In the trauma and drama of the last few days, I’d forgotten taking my cousin around the South Side. “How nice of you to come all the way up here to tell me.”

He smiled briefly, not warmly. “You stopped at a house on Ninety-second and Houston. You wanted to get inside.”

I watched him through my dark glasses.

“Any particular reason?” Conrad asked.

“I am damned tired of cops and feds asking me to justify every step I take. Is this Iran or America? Or isn’t there any difference anymore?”

“They had a fire Sunday night. When we got there, the lady, a Señora Andarra, told us two women had been there, and they said they had grown up in the house and wanted to look around. She was afraid they were from a rival gang to her grandson’s. She was afraid they set the fire to punish her for not letting them into the house.”

“That sounds like me, all right, gangbanger torching an old lady’s house.”

Conrad leaned forward. “You showed me the house once, the place where you grew up, your ma’s tree and everything.”

That was true. In the spring, before I left for Italy, I’d been coaching a basketball team in my old high school, and Conrad and I had occasionally had a drink together after the games. One evening, in a fit of nostalgia, I’d shown him my home, along with the place on the breakwater where Boom-Boom and I used to jump into Lake Calumet, and various other high points of my childhood.

I sat up. “I have a young cousin who’s spending the summer in Chicago. She wanted a tour of historic Warshawski family sites. If you go to Back of the Yards and Gage Park, you’ll find we’ve been there, too. If those two places have been torched, I’ll start to get seriously interested in your questions. Was anyone hurt at the Houston Street fire?”

“Nope. Old lady got herself, her daughter, her grandkids out. And, not only that, in a rare moment of civic cooperation the fire department came before things got out of hand. Anyway, there never really was a fire, so the structure is okay.”

“That’s a mercy.” I lay back down again.

“You going to ask me how it started?”

“Faulty wiring? Geraldo doing reefer in bed?”