Sara Paretsky - Hardball

She flung her arms around me, pressing into the raw new skin on my chest, then ran into the waiting elevator. I stopped in the living room to say good night to Lotty. I was puzzling over Petra’s words, and her behavior, with Lotty-Could Petra be serious about trying to emulate me? Could she be lying about being in South Chicago last Sunday?-when Lotty’s phone rang.

It was Carolyn Zabinska for me. “Vic, we went to Frankie’s place as soon as we got in tonight,” she said without preamble. “A demolition team had come in from nowhere and stripped the room. The building manager said it was an anonymous benefactor who wanted to do something good for the church and that builders would be arriving tomorrow.”

A FEW DAYS LATER, I LEFT LOTTY’S FOR HOME. MY GAUZE had come off, revealing puckered red skin underneath. I was to wear special gloves day and night, a kind of lacy mitt. There was to be no swimming for now, and no sun for some months to come. I graduated from my special plastic-lensed dark glasses to ordinary dark glasses. I was cleared for viewing television and computer screens and for driving a car.

I spoke with the doorman several times during my stay with Lotty. He hadn’t seen anyone lurking around, waiting for an injured private eye to emerge. No strangers had come calling for me except the law, my first day there. I was beginning to believe the attack on Sister Frances had been connected to her work at the Freedom Center. The thought didn’t stop my wanting to find her killers, but it eased my nightmares. I hadn’t killed her. I’d only been the helpless witness to her death.

While I was recuperating at Lotty’s, I wasn’t idle. I returned all the calls from the media that had piled up. Sad but true, part of being a successful PI is for people to see your name on the Web.

This was especially important because my temporary agency phoned to say that Marilyn Klimpton was quitting. “She didn’t expect to be there on her own with so many angry clients and all the reporters and so on trying to reach you. Also, you being attacked in that bombing, she’s afraid for her safety, being alone in your office. We don’t think we can send anyone to replace her right now.”

“Then I don’t think you and I will be working together again in the future, either,” I said grandly.

This was just great. Not only was I out of commission but the backlog waiting for me would be growing to Himalayan proportions again. I called my answering service to tell them to handle the phone during normal business hours, and then I started phoning my clients to see what business I could subcontract out and what could wait a few more days for me to get to it personally.

Some people had already moved their inquiries to bigger firms with more detectives. Prudent. If your lead investigator is singed, go where you know there’s backup. I thought of my bills and tried not to panic. I thought of George Dornick’s Mountain Hawk Security and his offer to hire “Tony’s daughter.” I hoped it wouldn’t come to that.

And I worried, too, about my cousin. Something wasn’t right with her story about why she’d shown up at the Freedom Center the night I’d gone back there. It was flattering to think she wanted to emulate me, but I was having a hard time believing it. And the smoke bomb at my old home on Houston… Señora Andarra had told the cops she saw the woman who grew up in the house watching from across the street. Conrad thought that had to be me because he associated only me with growing up in the house. But Señora Andarra probably thought of Petra and me as a family unit… It had been Petra who spoke to her in Spanish.

Although Petra had sworn angrily she hadn’t been playing detective in South Chicago, she hadn’t categorically denied being there last Sunday night. But why would she have been down there? I couldn’t begin to imagine a reason.

I finally put the idea aside and called the management company that handled the Freedom Center building, hoping they could tell me who had sent over a demolition team to gut Sister Frankie’s apartment and prepare it for the builders. They couldn’t or they wouldn’t tell me.

I left a message on Sister Carolyn’s cellphone to see if she could get any information out of the contractors. She was in a meeting with an INS attorney, but she called back several hours later to say she’d talked to someone from both the wrecking crew and the builder. Both contractors insisted they didn’t know who hired them. They had been promised cash, almost double their usual fees, if they would drop everything and take care of the building.

“They didn’t want to tell me even that much, I guess because they were afraid I might report them to the IRS, but I put on my costume and assured them that all I wanted was information.”

Her costume. Oh, the veil, right. I asked who had given them the money, but she said they claimed it was a middle-aged white man, someone they had never seen before.

“Don’t tell me,” I said drily. “He was wearing a trench coat and a felt fedora.”

“I don’t know,” she said. “Would it make a difference?”

“Yeah. It would be a giveaway that they were lying instead of just a probability.”

“You think they really know who sent them?”

I was sitting at Lotty’s kitchen table, my frustration at my inaction just about at the boiling point. “I don’t know, of course, but my best guess is that they owe someone important a favor or they’re gofers for someone important. Maybe they’re a minority-contracting front, I don’t know. But to drop everything like that, they have to have a pretty good idea who sent them. And then your place being under surveillance, and that police seal on Sister Frankie’s door, didn’t stop them for five seconds.”

When we hung up, I called the detectives from the Bomb and Arson squad who had been over to interrogate me. The Latino cop was in.

“You know your crime scene doesn’t exist anymore?” I said.

“What are you talking about?”

“I just got off the phone with one of the nuns who lives there. A building crew showed up, not anyone the sisters hired, and took down the door, stripped the room. I hope you secured any samples you took. Someone’s going to a lot of trouble to keep that fire from being investigated.”

He didn’t exactly thank me. It was more of a snarl, a demand for Sister Carolyn’s phone number, and a warning that I’d better not be behind any destruction of evidence.

I missed Amy Blount badly. I could have sicced her on the contractors, gotten her to track down the ownership trail. I wondered if I could turn it over to my cousin, see how she would handle a routine search through incorporation records. If she failed, I was no worse off than I was when I started.

I tried Petra on her cellphone. She was at the campaign office, and we were interrupted several times by people who came by to see her. Each time, she announced that she was on the phone with “my cousin, you know, the one who got burned in that fire last week? So I’ll get back to you right away, but she needs my help.”

When I finally got her full attention, she was enthusiastic and bubbled over with questions. I gave her the URLs of a couple of websites I subscribe to, and told her I’d e-mail her the passwords so she didn’t have to try to write them down in midconversation.

“If the subcontractors haven’t made it into the database, you’ll have to go to the State of Illinois Building to check their incorporation filings.”

“But what if they incorporated in some other state? Don’t they usually do it in Delaware?”

“If they’re big enough to incorporate in Delaware, you should find them online, but good catch. If you find them, please, little cousin, do not go tracking them down by yourself. Contractors have short fuses and big hammers.”