Sara Paretsky - Hardball

“Maybe a little stronger,” Karen said. “She ate some ice cream, Miss Ella says.”

Miss Claudia was sleeping, too, her breath sounding much the same as her neighbor’s, shallow, ragged. I sat on the bed, ignoring the client’s outraged snort, and massaged Miss Claudia’s left hand, her good hand.

“It’s V. I. Warshawski, Miss Claudia,” I said in a deep, clear voice. “I’m the detective. I’m looking for Lamont. You told Pastor Karen you wanted to see me.”

She stirred but didn’t wake. I repeated the information several times, and, after a bit, her eyes fluttered open.

“ ’ Ti ve,” she asked.

“I found Steve,” I said.

“She’s asking, are you the detective,” Miss Ella corrected me.

“I’m the detective, Miss Claudia. I found Steve Sawyer. He’s very ill. He was in prison for forty years.”

“Sad. Hard. ’Mont?”

I clasped her hand more tightly. “Curtis… You remember Curtis Rivers? Curtis says Lamont is dead. But he doesn’t know where he’s resting. He says Johnny knows.”

Her fingers gave mine a weak response. Miss Ella said, “The Anacondas! I knew it was their doing.”

“I don’t think Johnny killed Lamont, but he knows what happened to him. I’ll try my best to get him to tell me.” I was speaking slowly to Miss Claudia, wondering how much sense she could make of my words.

Miss Ella huffed. “You’ll try and you’ll get the same results you’ve come up with all summer. Nothing.”

I didn’t try to answer or even look at her but kept my attention on her sister. Miss Claudia lay silent for a moment, taking conscious, deeper breaths, preparing herself for a major effort. “Bible.” She pronounced both consonants clearly. “Lamont Bible… You take.”

She turned her head on the pillow so I could see what she intended. The red leather Bible was on the nightstand by her head. “Find ’Mont. He dead, bury with him. He ’live, give him.” Another deep breath, another effort. “Promise?”

“I promise, Miss Claudia.”

“Lamont’s Bible?” Miss Ella was outraged. “That’s a family Bible, Claudia. You can’t-”

“Quiet yourself, Ellie.” But the effort in making clear speech was too hard for Miss Claudia, and she sank back into half-intelligible syllables: “ ’ Hite girl, ’hite ’tive, I want give.”

Miss Claudia watched me until she was sure I had the Bible, sure I was tucking it into the big side pocket of my overalls, not handing it to her sister. She closed her eyes and gasped for air. Miss Ella favored her sister and me both with bitter words. Especially her sister, who had always traded on her looks, never cared how much Ella worked and did, and spoiled Lamont when Ella told her time and again that she had ruined him by sparing the rod. If Miss Claudia heard, she didn’t respond. She had worn herself out speaking to me. I knew she wasn’t asleep because, as she lay there, her eyes fluttered open from time to time, looking from my face to my pocket where the end of the big red Bible was sticking out.

Holding her hand, I sang to her the song of the butterfly, the favorite of the lullabies of my childhood. “Gira qua e gira là, poi si resta supra un fiore; / Gira qua e gira là, poi si resta supra spalla di Papà” (Turning here, turning there, until she rests upon a flower; / Turning here, turning there, until she rests on Papà’s shoulder).

Miss Ella sniffed loudly, but I sang it through several times, calming myself along with Miss Claudia, until she was deeply asleep. When I got up to go, Miss Ella stayed in the chair, I suppose not wanting to dignify her sister’s bequest to me by acknowledging me, but Pastor Karen followed me into the hall.

“I know you’re under a lot of stress right now, and I’m sure your cousin is your biggest worry, so it was a really good thing you did, coming over here to see Miss Claudia.” She put a hand on my arm. “This man you mentioned, Curtis… Do you think he’s telling the truth about Lamont?”

“Oh, I think so. He doesn’t know what happened to Lamont, but it involved Johnny Merton, and it was so terrible that it shocked Merton into silence. And Merton… You’d have to know him to understand that a death he’d find shocking might turn you or me as mad as… as poor Steve Sawyer.”

I gently dislodged Lennon’s hand. “Something about Lamont, or Johnny and Steve Sawyer and the Anacondas, is connected to my cousin. The man who’s running security for the Krumas campaign, where my cousin worked, he was the cop who interrogated Sawyer forty years ago and tortured him into confessing.”

Karen gasped. “Torture? Are you sure?”

Sawyer-Kimathi’s mangled, burned body flashed in my head: “They say I the song-and-dance man… They laugh.” Would I ever be able to forget that? “Yes, oh yes. I wish I wasn’t, but… I know it happened. I don’t understand it, not all of it, but my uncle, and Harvey Krumas, the candidate’s father, they grew up together, and they still watch each other’s backs. The murder that happened in Marquette Park all those years ago, they’re both implicated in it, and that means-”

I couldn’t bear to go on, couldn’t bear to add that that meant my own uncle was implicated in Sister Frankie’s murder because his old buddy Harvey rushed a contracting crew over to her place to bury any evidence I might be able to dig up. I pressed my hands against my temples as if that would push all that knowledge out of my head.

“This is terrible, Vic. Why aren’t you going to the police?”

My smile was twisted. “Because Dornick is an ex-cop with lots of pals on the force, and I don’t know who there I can trust anymore.”

Karen started to ask me how Lamont was tied to Dornick, but my own words reminded me that Bobby Mallory had been trying to reach me. I interrupted her to ask if I could use her office phone to make a few calls.

We rode down to the second floor in silence, Karen shaking her head as if mourning all the sorry souls I’d told her about. While she unlocked her office door, I once again connected my cellphone long enough to look up Bobby’s unlisted home number.

Eileen Mallory answered. “Oh, Vicki, I’m so sorry about Petra. This is a terrible week. We never knew Peter at all well, but please tell him and Rachel that if there’s anything we can do, anything at all-a place to stay, extra help from Bobby’s team-they must let us know.”

I thanked her awkwardly and said Bobby had been trying to reach me. He hadn’t come home yet. She gave me his cellphone number. And another message, a personal one for me, so warm and loving it made my eyelids prick.

Bobby’s response wasn’t nearly so tender. “Where are you?” he demanded as soon as I answered.

“Wandering around the city like a demented ghost,” I said. “I understand you wanted to talk to me.”

“I want to see you at once.”

I looked at Karen Lennon’s scarred desktop. “You know, Bobby, that is not going to happen. I am hiding from George Dornick, hoping I find Petra before he does.”

“If Dornick’s on your ass, I’ll give him a medal for bringing you in.”

“That would be one you would hand him at my funeral, then, and you could congratulate each other on laying me and a lot of ugly department history to rest.”

I wasn’t sure how much time I would have before Bobby’s tech team figured out where I was calling from. I decided I could stay on the phone for three more minutes.

“Victoria, you have crossed an acceptable line. You’ve always imagined that you could do my job and that of thirteen thousand other good, decent cops better than we can. You’ve always imagined when we chew you out, it’s because we’re stupider or more corrupt than you. But now you have gone further than I will allow.”