Sara Paretsky - Hardball

It was a small room, and getting six chairs around the round table meant we all had to be careful to keep our knees to ourselves. I was sorry in a way that I’d kept them out of Lotty’s place, but if they were uncomfortable inhaling one another’s bad breath, which the woman from OEM had to a remarkable degree, they wouldn’t stay long.

I kept my big plastic glasses on mostly to annoy them. They would want to try to read my facial tics, how I moved my eyes and so on, and now they couldn’t.

“You look like the bad end of a catfight,” Torgeson said. “You get your hair caught in a wringer over at the nun’s place when you went back there?”

“Everyone’s taping this, right? So the FBI and OEM and CPD are all going to get the same useful transcript. The real question here is”-I paused long enough to see that they were all leaning forward, hoping for some gem of self-revelation-“why is a woman always characterized as being in a catfight after an altercation? I’m sure with the research you’ve done on me, you know I have two dogs, so it’s a good bet I’d be more responsive to a dogfight metaphor. And yet your underlying sexism made you-”

“Enough,” Torgeson barked. “You know damned well what I was talking about.”

I shook my head. “Mind reading isn’t one of my skills. And I haven’t been tapping your phone, so I can’t rely on your conversations to tell me what you’re thinking or talking about.”

“Ms. Warshawski, we know you left Beth Israel to return to the nun’s apartment four nights ago.” It was the white guy from Bomb and Arson.

When I didn’t say anything, he said, “Well?”

“Is there a question?” I said.

“What were you doing at the nun’s building four nights ago?” he said, his voice tight from the effort not to lose his temper.

“I was in the hospital four nights ago,” I said.

When the HIV nun had escorted me back inside, she’d flashed her hospital ID at the security guard and stopped to chat briefly with one of the nurses. No one looked at me, a rookie nun, new to the HIV/ AIDS service, head lowered. No one on the fifth floor had commented on my absence, either, when I slipped back into my room or the next morning, so I didn’t think it had been noticed.

“You were seen entering the Freedom Center building,” the woman from OEM said. “What were you doing there?”

“I was seen?” I echoed. “That’s an old, old ploy. I need more than that to persuade me I was at Kedzie and Lawrence instead of in my hospital bed.”

The OEM woman pulled a set of stills from her briefcase and laid them on the small round table in the middle of the room. We all took turns looking at them. They were time-stamped, and they showed a woman whose dark hair held a few white streaks wearing jeans and a white shirt. They were shot from behind, so you couldn’t see where her hair had been shaved back from her temples. Nor could you see that she was using the edge of her plastic lenses to snap the tongue back in the front-door lock.

“I don’t know,” I said. “It’s not like this person is wearing a jacket marked ‘V. I. Warshawski.’ And I think I’d remember if I’d been there. You have some shots showing me leaving, some where I could see my face? I don’t recognize myself from behind.”

There was a momentary silence. I’d left wearing a nun’s veil, my face down, two other sisters and my cousin holding me close. They had the shots, but they probably didn’t know what to make of them.

“Look, Warshawski, this isn’t supposed to be an antagonistic meeting,” the Latino guy from Bomb and Arson said. “We assume you’re on the same team we are.”

“And what team would that be, Detective?’

“That you want to catch Sister Frances’s killer,” he said.

“Oh, I definitely want to do that,” I agreed.

“Then why don’t you tell us what you were doing at her apartment?” That was the FBI’s Lyle Torgeson.

I yawned. “I wasn’t at her apartment.”

“Let’s forget four nights ago,” Torgeson said. “The night of the fire… You agree you were there that night?… Tell us why.”

“Right. I went to talk to Sister Frances about Steve Sawyer.”

“We know about that,” the man from Homeland Security said.

“You have bugs planted in her room?” I asked. “They’re good quality, I guess, if they survived the fire and you retrieved them. Not like the crap weapons you buy from China and sell to Afghanistan.”

“You were bugging the room?” the white Bomb and Arson detective said, turning to the feds. “Why the fuck were you doing that?”

“National security,” the Homeland Security man said. “I can’t say any more.”

“Beautiful umbrella,” I murmured. “From now on, whenever I do anything particularly embarrassing, I’ll just cry ‘National security!’ and refuse to say anything else.”

“That’s enough,” Torgeson snapped. “What were you doing in Sister Frances’s apartment?”

“National security,” I said.

The two Bomb and Arson squad detectives swallowed smiles. Harmony did not reign supreme between the federal and local law enforcers. I let them bicker with one another for a few minutes.

“I have a question for you,” I said. “You know why I went to see Sister Frances, to discuss the case of the man who’d been convicted of killing Harmony Newsome in Marquette Park forty years ago. Sister Frances was marching with Ms. Newsome that hot summer day and said she didn’t think it was possible that Steve Sawyer killed Ms. Newsome. Are you reopening the case?”

“He was tried, convicted, did his time. We’re not interested.” That was the Latino cop.

“Then why was that the last question OEM asked me in the hospital, why did I care what Sister Frances had to say about that old murder?”

“I think you misheard. You were drugged, in a lot of pain,” Torgeson said.

“You’re the ones with the tape recorders.” I looked at my fingertips. “Go listen to the conversation. I don’t have anything else for you.”

The crowded room was momentarily quiet. Then the Bomb and Arson team started asking me questions that I could answer, to lead them step-by-step through my brief time with Sister Frances. It wasn’t meaningful or helpful, but I was the only witness.

The more times I recounted the Molotov cocktails sailing in on us, the less real they became. It was easy to describe them glibly, as if they were a plot detail in a thriller and not a death-dealing event.

When I finished, I asked what residue they’d found in the bottles: gasoline? rocket fuel? jellied bomb accelerant?

“We can’t answer questions like that,” the Homeland Security man said. “They’re in connection with an investigation linked to our national security.”

It was my turn to remember I needed to keep a leash on my temper. “What about the perps? You must have pictures of them, time-stamped and everything, right? Anything you can show on the street for an ID?”

“We can’t comment. It’s an investigation linked to our national security.”

“But these pictures aren’t?” I picked up the stills of me at the entrance to the Freedom Center building. “That’s good. I’ll show them to Sister Carolyn, see if she knows who this might be. Given that someone was in Sister Frances’s apartment that night, she might recognize who.”

“If you weren’t there, how do you know someone was in the dead nun’s apartment?” Torgeson pounced.

“You just told me.” I got to my feet, holding the stills. The woman from OEM leaned over, spraying me with her fetid breath, and grabbed the pictures.

“These are government property and are highly classified.”

“I know,” I said. “‘An investigation linked to our national security. ’ ”