Sara Paretsky - Hardball

When the whistle blew as she left, he said, “They hurt Dayo, Johnny will get revenge one way or another. That won’t make him confess to snatching your cousin.”

“Here’s how I see it. Either my cousin is dead or she’s bolted, and they don’t know where she’s run. If she’s dead, if they killed her, first they make Johnny crazy by screwing with his kid and then they get a Stateville snitch to claim he heard Johnny confess to putting a contract out on Petra-on my cousin-because he’s still mad at me for various reasons.”

It was painful to talk casually about Petra in such a way, clinical, detached, as if she were a movie script I was reading. The really hard sentence came next.

“They say they’ll put the rap on Kimathi. They’ll say he killed Petra as payback.” I braced myself in case Rivers or his friends came after me.

“And, by God, he would be in his rights to.” Curtis Rivers’s voice was soft with a menace that chilled my bones.

“Why?”

“Why?” Rivers spat at me. “What, is he supposed to be just one more Jesus-loving nigger, getting tortured but saying ‘I forgive them all because hate curdles the soul’? He doesn’t forgive you, and I don’t forgive you.”

“I’m not asking you to forgive me, but I would very much like to know what I did to earn this anger.” I had dug my fingers into the soft calfskin of the bag I was still holding in an effort to keep the trembling in my legs out of my voice and hands.

“You would like to know! As if you don’t-”

“Mr. Rivers, we had this conversation two months ago. I was ten years old when Harmony Newsome was murdered. All I know about the story is from reading newspapers, reading the trial transcript, and from a brief conversation with Sister Frances, which was cut short by her murder.”

“And you were conveniently at her side when she died.”

“I held her in my arms as her hair burned.” My voice did tremble at that. “I have raw wounds on my scalp and arms and chest and nightmares that don’t go away.”

“And so does Kimathi have those nightmares.”

“Tell me what happened, Mr. Rivers.”

The chess players had been silent, almost motionless, during our interchange, but the machinist said, “You got to tell her, Curtis. You were out of bounds just now over Sister Frankie. Ms. Detective here never caused Frankie’s death, and you know it.”

The lumberjack nodded in agreement. Rivers scowled at his friends but went into the back of the shop. I heard the deep rumble of his voice and frightened cries from Kimathi. More rumbling, fewer cries, and Rivers came back out with Kimathi clutching his arm.

“This woman here, her daddy was Officer Warshawski. Tell her what happened when they came for you.”

“She’s going to take away my nature,” Kimathi whispered.

“There’s three of us here, we’re bigger than she is, she can’t cut you or hurt you. And you are safe at night, she can’t break in through all my gates.”

I held out my hands, empty hands. “I can’t hurt you, Mr. Kimathi.”

“It was all on account of Harmony’s death, the way the police reacted to Harmony’s death, I mean,” the machinist said softly. “The city didn’t care about Harmony. But Harmony’s brother did. Saul was sixteen; he was proud of his sister, and her death was almost a mortal blow to him. Until Sister Frankie persuaded him that they could use the lessons of the movement as a call for justice in Harmony’s death. Saul and Frankie, they started holding a vigil outside the police station every Sunday. They got TV crews down, they got the papers to write it up. Cops knew they had to pick up someone or the South Side would blow up all over again. So they picked on Kimathi here.”

Kimathi was trembling, looking at his feet.

“Tell her what happened. ‘Officer Warshawski came and picked me up in his squad car,’ ” Rivers prompted.

“He pick me up, he take me to the station,” Kimathi whispered, his eyes large, flicking a glance up at me.

I kept my hands open in front of me. My heart was pounding so hard that the pulses in my neck were choking me.

“I was surprised. I didn’t know I killed Harmony. She so sweet, so pretty, so special. Too special for me. I tell that to the officer, and he say, ‘Save your story for the detectives and the lawyers, son, I’m just the man with the warrant for your arrest.’ And then he say, like they do, ‘You have the right to remain silent,’ and all that stuff.”

“And then?” My mouth was dry, and the words came out in a harsh squawk.

“The detectives come in. They laugh. I’m the party… I’m the death of the party to them, a big joke. They tell me I kill Harmony. They tell me confess, make it all easy, only I didn’t remember killing her. Now I can’t remember, one way or another. The demons, they come and claw at me day and night… Maybe the demons kill Harmony. Maybe the demons say, ‘Kimathi, you a devil, too. You in the gang. Just like pastor always said, you a child of the devil, you bound for hell. Go ahead, kill that sweet girl for all us demons.’ ”

“You never killed a soul in your life, Kimathi,” Rivers said. “Those detectives messed up your body and messed up your mind. You tell this white girl how they did.”

“They chain me up.” He was so ashamed at the memory that he looked at the floor. Tears seeped from the corners of his eyes. “They chain me, they call me nigger. They say I the song-and-dance man, dance for them. They put me on the radiator. They burn the skin off my butt, it bleed. They laugh. They say I singing for them. Then they put electricity on my manhood, they run a current. They say, ‘This nigger boy a good dancer.’ They laugh. They tell me next they gon’ cut off my manhood. So I tell them the words they want to hear, that I kill Harmony, that blessed child of Jesus.”

I felt tears spilling from my own eyes and a revulsion so strong it doubled me over.

“Yes, a pretty story, white girl, isn’t it?” Rivers said.

“And Tony Warshawski?” I managed to whisper.

“He come in the room, two times, maybe more… I’m hurting too bad to count.”

“And what did he do?”

“He tell them to stop. But they tell him, ‘Don’t act like Jesus Christ on the dashboard, Warshawski. This for your brother.’ ”

MY LEGS GAVE WAY, AND I FOUND MYSELF SITTING ON THE floor. Curtis Rivers looked down at me without pity, but I didn’t want any. “This for your brother”… “This for Peter.” Tony watched Alito and Dornick chain a man to a boiling radiator, watched them run a current through his genitals. My daddy-my wise and good and loving father… My hands were wet. I thought I would see blood when I looked at them, Steve Sawyer’s blood, the blood of every prisoner my father had watched in Dornick’s or Alito’s custody, but it was only tears and snot.

I don’t know how long I sat looking at the dust on the cracked linoleum, watching a spider crawl along the baseboard. I wanted to lie down on that floor and sleep away the rest of my time on the planet. After I’d found Petra, after I’d found Lamont, maybe I could curl up and die.

“This for Peter.” The Christmas Eve conversation I had remembered after seeing Alito came back to me again, my father saying, “You got your promotion. That’s enough, isn’t it?” and Alito replying, “You want to see him in prison?”

At last, I pushed myself up to a standing position again. My shoulders ached.

My father had been tense all fall after the summer of riots. I didn’t remember anything about the demonstrations that Harmony’s brother had organized with Sister Frankie, but they would have been outside my dad’s station. I could picture the tension inside the station, the Mayor’s Office putting heat on them, demanding an immediate arrest.