Hardball

My uncle shook his head like a cornered bull. “My girl wants to look at her family roots, and you want it to be some filthy story involving the Anacondas or whatever mud you wallow in.”

I thought of Petra’s fixation with the Nellie Fox baseball. I dumped the red sweatshirt and Scarlett O’Hara hat on the conference room table and pulled the ball from my case.

“Why did Petra want this so badly, Peter?”

Peter and Brian both bent over my hand, looking at the ball with the same puzzlement, and then my uncle’s face turned the color of putty. Sweat covered his face so fast it was as if he had sunk in a pool of water.

“What is it?” Brian asked.

“It’s nothing. It’s an old baseball,” Peter muttered. But he was clutching a chair back for support.

I began to worry about his heart, but when I said I’d get water and call Rachel he brushed my hand away with a violent gesture. “Leave Rachel out of this.”

“My apartment was ransacked two nights before Petra disappeared. Is this what they were looking for?”

“How should I know?” my uncle said. His voice had lost its belligerence. “You’re the one who’s so friendly with the blacks in this city, not me.”

“The people in my apartment weren’t black. Someone saw them.” Of course my witness said he couldn’t make out their race, but my patience was wearing thin. “Did Petra mention the ball in one of her daily chats home? Did you tell her to come back to my place to get it?”

“Nellie Fox. She knew I was a Nellie Fox fan, so she-”

“Peter, who are you protecting? Petra had never heard of Fox. When I mentioned his name, she thought the Sox had put a woman at second. Why won’t you tell me what the story is with this ball?”

“There is no story. There’s nothing to know about it.”

I rolled the ball in my hand while my uncle watched uneasily. The door opened, and Strangwell and Dornick came in with Harvey Krumas, who looked in surprise at my uncle and me. Once again, though, it was Strangwell who spoke first.

“Brian, the kids said you’d popped in here. We’ve got Global Entertainment in the situation room. Gina’s here to do your makeup.”

The candidate let Strangwell lead him away, but Harvey Krumas and Dornick demanded to know why Peter wasn’t back at the Drake lying down. “You look like crap, Pete. What’s going on here?”

“Brian wanted to talk to me,” I said. “Peter wanted to stay close to me. We were talking about what Petra might have been looking for in my childhood home. Any hunches?”

Dornick said, “I don’t know Petra, so I don’t know what might have struck her fancy. Girls her age get romantic ideas about family history sometimes. Maybe she thought there were Warshawski heirlooms.”

“Mr. Krumas? You know her better than I do. You’re her ‘Uncle Harvey,’ after all. Peter says she wasn’t looking for a baseball.”

“This is outrageous,” Harvey fumed. “Pete’s sick with worry-we all are-and you’re treating this like some video game.”

I tossed the baseball in the air, caught it, and put it into my briefcase. “You’re right. I’ll get this to a lab, see what they can tell me about it, and start searching for Petra.”

“No!” Peter said. “How many times do I have to repeat it? Stay the fuck out of this!”

Dornick said, “Out of curiosity, Vicki-Vic-if you were going to look for her, where would you start?”

“I started at her apartment, but someone had been there ahead of me. Since Peter doesn’t want me looking, I’m not going to hunt elsewhere. But I would probably talk to Larry Alito.”

“Alito?” Krumas and Dornick spoke his name in unison. Then Dornick said, “I wouldn’t trust much that an alkie like Larry would have to say.”

“He met with Les Strangwell a couple of days ago. I’d like to know what Strang-”

“How do you know that?” Krumas demanded.

“I’m an investigator, Mr. Krumas. It’s my job to find out stuff. I’m not sure what it would take to get Alito to tell me about that conversation, or some of the other things he knows, but-”

“Guy would sell his wife for a six-pack, probably turn in his own kid for a keg. Stay away from him, Vic, he’s bad news.” Dornick was giving me an indulgent smile, as if I were a toddler who needed extra coaching.

“He’s short-tempered and he drinks, but he’s an experienced cop. And Strangwell wanted him for an urgent, confidential assignment the day before Petra disappeared.”

Dornick laughed. “You think Larry has something to do with Petra’s disappearance? I’m surprised you’ve made it in this field as long as you have, Vic. An imagination like yours belongs on TV. Speaking of which, what are you imagining about that Nellie Fox baseball?”

“And you know it’s a Nellie Fox baseball because…”

The words hung in the air. For a moment, Harvey looked like a stuffed bear on a mantelpiece. And then Dornick laughed, and said, “Lucky guess. Fox was the household god in your grandfather’s family for everyone except your renegade father. Pete, let me give you a lift up to the Drake. Vic, listen to your uncle and stay the hell away from searching for Petra.”

36

I LEFT THE MEN HAILING CABS ON MICHIGAN AVENUE. I wanted to see all three of them out of sight before reclaiming my car, but even then I took a roundabout route, catching a bus down Michigan to the south end of Grant Park, where only a handful of tourists passed the homeless guys lying on the grass, and it would be easier to see if I had company.

Everything in the meeting I’d just left was setting off warning bells. When Peter should have been with his wife, or talking to cops, or even talking to me, why was he huddled with Harvey Krumas and George Dornick in a meeting in the office of Chicago’s most feared political op? And then there were the repeated injunctions for me to stay away from Petra, as if they knew where she was or maybe had received some kind of threat or even a ransom note.

It wasn’t until I sat at the foot of a statue on a shallow flight of stairs that I realized how tired I was. Using the red sweatshirt from my briefcase as a pillow, I leaned back against the crumbling concrete steps and shut my eyes.

The Nellie Fox baseball meant something important, even devastating, to Peter. Harvey Krumas and Dornick both knew about the ball; that was clear from their reactions. Petra had been ordered to get it from me. That was why she had behaved so oddly about it, with her clumsy story about wanting it for a surprise present for her father. Dornick or Krumas, or even Les Strangwell, had learned that I had the ball probably because Petra had burbled away about it at the office.

I could almost hear her gusty laugh as she informed her pod mates in the NetSquad: “Can you believe I thought the White Sox had played a woman at second? Daddy would disown me if he learned I didn’t know about Nellie Fox! My cousin says he was, like, a big star a hundred years ago.”

All the Millen Gen interns texted or Twittered constantly. Nellie Fox, transgender ballplayer, would become part of Twitter that day. That part was easy to imagine. Word filtered up to… Whom? The candidate? The Chicago Strangler? The candidate’s father? One of them told Petra she had to get the baseball from me.

That much I could believe, but I wasn’t sure that the ball was what the thugs who’d torn apart my house and office had been hunting for. Why had they taken the picture of the slow-pitch team if all they wanted was the ball?

“It doesn’t make sense,” I said, so lost in thought I spoke out loud.

“That’s what I be saying all along. It don’t make no sense. Those rockets they send up, they messing with the weather. Then they use their cellphones to watch you, see if you know what they up to.”

The speaker had been around the corner of the statue’s plinth from me, on another short flight of steps. When he realized I was actually listening to him, he asked for a donation so he could get something to eat. I stared at him without seeing him. They use their cellphones to watch you.