Sara Paretsky - Hardball

“Smoke bomb. Someone broke a window and threw it into the living room while they were eating supper. Everyone ran out the back door, and a couple of lowlifes came in through the broken window and helped themselves while the family was waiting for the fire department.”

“Scum,” I agreed. “I’m very sorry to know this, of course, especially if they broke one of those windows with the prisms across the top. Those prisms were what made my mother feel she could tolerate living in South Chicago.”

“You don’t know anything about this, Ms. W.?”

I knew I was furious, but I was still so tired, and lethargic from the residue of morphine in my system, that I couldn’t feel the anger. “Conrad, I’m tired, I’m in pain, I held a burning woman in my arms a few nights ago and couldn’t save her life. Don’t make me play twenty questions. And don’t accuse me of things you know are simply beyond me. One more innuendo about this, about how I might be implicated in an attack on the people who live in my childhood home, and you will never speak to me again. Even if you want to buy me World Series tickets, you’ll funnel your invitation through my attorney.”

He sucked in a breath. “The lady says she saw you. She says she went around to the front of the house to wait for us and the fire department and saw you across the street watching it all.”

I made a face. “Oh, please. It was dark, right? And she’d seen me once through an inch-wide chain bolt. She saw someone else and is confused. Or she knows who really did it and is so frightened of that person that she wants to finger a stranger.”

Conrad stood up and looked down at me. “I believe in you, Vic. I really do. I’m the only person in the Fourth District who knows you grew up in that house, and I’m keeping it that way. For now. But I’d like to put you in a lineup for Señora Andarra… for my own peace of mind, if nothing else.”

THE NEXT FEW DAYS WERE A TIME OF FRUSTRATING INACTION while I let my eyes heal enough that I could get to work. Lotty took me home with her, and I continued to build up my strength, using the gym in her building’s basement, making phone calls during the day while she was at her clinic or the hospital.

My first day at Lotty’s, Mr. Contreras came over in the morning before Lotty left for work. He brought a small suitcase with clothes that Petra had packed; he would have been embarrassed to rummage in my underwear drawer himself. He also brought the dogs, which annoyed Lotty because her apartment is full of glass tables and museum-quality artwork, including a small statue of Andromache salvaged from the ruins of her grandparents’ art collection. Mitch’s exuberant energy made her so tense that she terminated the visit quickly, on grounds that I didn’t have the stamina for it.

“You mean you don’t,” I said. But I took the dogs out to the hall behind the kitchen, where we waited for the service elevator.

“Peewee wants to visit,” Mr. Contreras said. “I told her I was sure you’d want to see her.”

“Absolutely. The sooner, the better. Can you go up to my place and collect my phone charger so she can bring it with her?” I couldn’t tie up Lotty’s phone but I needed to start connecting myself to the land of the living. “And here are my car keys. Get her to drive you over to pick up my car on Kedzie before I get a hundred meter violations and twenty boots.”

I didn’t think I could stand to use my old handbag again. When I had stuck my hand in to fish out my keys, it came out covered in ash. Sister Carolyn had known I was a PI only because my license had been the plastic on top when she looked at my wallet. The credit cards underneath it had fused together with my driver’s license. I called my card companies for replacements, but I’d have to go in person to the Secretary of State’s Office for a new PI license.

After Mr. Contreras left, Lotty went to her clinic on Damen. I resisted the impulse to go back to bed and phoned Sister Carolyn instead. I wanted to know if she’d been able to find any more bottle fragments in Sister Frankie’s apartment.

“The police came almost as soon as you’d left. They wanted to know who broke the seal on Frankie’s door. I told them it must have been the intruder we chased down the stairs. They put a padlock on the door, so we can’t get in.”

“Bolt cutters,” I said absently, flexing my fingers inside their gauze wrappers, imagining working a pick into the padlock.

“We’ll think about that,” the nun said drily. “But I want to know who’s watching our building. When you were here, you said it was the federal government.”

“The feds came to see me in the hospital: someone from Homeland Security, someone from the FBI, and local guys from the Bomb and Arson squad. It was the day after the fire, so I don’t remember it clearly. They know who lives in your building, all the families. Come to think of it, they’re probably listening to this conversation, so forget the bolt cutters.”

“Eavesdropping!” Zabinska was almost speechless with fury.

I suggested she come see me at Lotty’s so we could talk about it privately. I wanted to speak to her anyway, now that I was more alert mentally, to learn anything Sister Frankie might have said to her about Steve Sawyer’s involvement in Harmony Newsome’s murder.

Before Lotty left, she had made me promise to stay inside. But I wanted to be in motion. After doing as much of a workout as I could handle, and having a phone meeting with Marilyn Klimpton at my office, I wandered restlessly around Lotty’s apartment. In the side room where she keeps her television (off-limits) and her library overflow (off-limits), I found a sewing basket with a pair of shears in it. I went into the bathroom and started chopping my hair.

When I was five, my father gave me a doll for Christmas that had a huge halo of dark hair. It was JFK’s first year in office, and dolls all had the Jackie do. Boom-Boom and I took a pair of scissors to that doll, and, by the time we’d finished, she looked much as I did now. Dentists shouldn’t drill their own teeth and detectives shouldn’t cut their own hair. At least, not when their hands were wrapped up in boxer’s tape.

A little after one, when I thought I might go mad from inaction, the cops showed up. They knew I’d been sprung; they probably knew Lotty wasn’t home. It was time to talk.

I put on my heavy dark glasses to underline my invalid status. Just to be prudent, I rode the elevator to the lobby to make sure they were really cops, not robbers. I hadn’t actually seen any of their faces in the hospital, but their voices told me these were essentially the same players who’d interrogated me last week.

The FBI had sent Lyle Torgeson again, but the feds had beefed up their presence with someone from Homeland Security. The city had sent only the woman from the Office of Emergency Management instead of the duo who’d come to my hospital room. The CPD sent the same two guys from the Bomb and Arson squad, a young white man with a crew cut who was already developing a paunch and a Latino about my own age who was balding and had big fatigue circles around his eyes.

“I don’t have Dr. Herschel’s permission to bring all these strangers into her home,” I told the doorman. “Is there a conference room we could use?”

“There’s a room in the building manager’s office,” the doorman said doubtfully. “It’s kind of small, though.”

“We can take you down to Thirty-fifth and Michigan,” the Latino Bomb and Arson guy suggested.

“You have a warrant?… Then we’ll meet here. There are only six of us, after all.”

The doorman called up to the building manager to see if the room was free and to send someone down to escort us so that he wouldn’t have to abandon his post at the entrance.