Hardball

Situations like this usually key me up. I get just nervous enough to be sharp while remaining confident about my ability to deal with whatever comes along. It was Petra’s disappearance, coupled with Sister Frankie’s death, that made me so skittish.

Deep breaths, V.I., I admonished myself, deep yoga/singer breaths. You and the breath are one. After a near miss with a Herald-Star delivery van, I decided meditation and driving weren’t an ideal mix and returned to skittishness. I forced myself to believe I was in the clear, got off the side streets and took the main ones to Beth Israel. When I got there, I circled until I found street parking. At the emergency-room entrance, I went in, head up, a confident walk; security didn’t try to stop me even though I didn’t have a badge on.

I’ve known Max’s secretary, Cynthia Dowling, for years. She had stopped by my room when I’d been laid up the previous week. Today, she congratulated me on my quick recovery. Max was in a meeting, she said. Naturally. Executive directors are always in meetings.

I gave her the note I’d written. “You haven’t seen me since I was released from the hospital, have you, Cynthia?”

She smiled, but her eyes were worried. “I don’t even know your name, so I can’t say that I’ve seen you today. I’ll see that Max gets this when he’s alone. Do you know anything about your cousin?”

I shook my head. “Not enough of a whisper to even have a direction to follow. But I’m talking to people who can talk to people, and maybe one of them will finally start giving me real news.”

I left by a side door and jogged back to Morrell’s car. I drove down Damen Avenue as the closest route to the expressway. The light at Addison turned yellow just as I got to the intersection. Without a driver’s license, without an insurance card for the Honda-Morrell kept his in his wallet-I was being very law-abiding. I came to a virtuous halt. The car behind me honked in a

“Roscoe, Belmont, Wellington.” I counted off the streets out loud, nervous about needing to get to the South Side ahead of Dornick. “Roscoe!” I shouted.

The car behind me honked again, this time because the light was green, and then zoomed around me, almost colliding with the northbound traffic. Roscoe. Brian Krumas had told Peter he could stay in the Roscoe Street apartment. The contractors who had shown up at the Freedom Center were owned by a guy with offices on West Roscoe. I made a U-turn just as the light was turning yellow again, forgetting my need to be utterly obedient to traffic signals and having my own near miss with an oncoming bus. Stupid, stupid. What had been his name? The exact address? The nuns at the Freedom Center could tell me.

I’d almost reached Irving Park Road when I realized that if I drove to the Freedom Center, I’d show up on Homeland Security cameras. I needed a phone or a computer. Therefore, I needed to find an Internet café. I drove along Addison toward the lake. Just before Wrigley Field, I found what I needed.

I paid cash for a card that I could stick into one of their machines. Compared to my Mac Pro, the Windows machine they had was painfully cumbersome to use, but I logged on to one of my search engines and hunted contractors on Roscoe Street. Rodenko, that was it, 300 West Roscoe. Harvey Krumas had an unlisted phone number, but I found him, too, through my best search engine, Lifestory. The house in Barrington Hills, a place in Palm Springs, a flat in London. And the pied-à-terre in Chicago. At 300 West Roscoe.

Three hundred West Roscoe? I stared at the address. Harvey Krumas was Ernie Rodenko? He owned Ernie Rodenko? Either way, he had quickly mustered a couple of small-time contractors to clean up Sister Frankie’s apartment and used his home address for the holding company. However it had been worked, when Petra looked up the subcontractors, broadcasting the news all over the office in her loud, cheerful voice, Les Strangwell heard her. Les was protecting Harvey. Or was it Brian? Did it matter?

I felt odd: cold, hot, queasy, remote. I wasn’t fit to drive, not the fifteen miles to Curtis Rivers’s shop, but it was all I could think of. I had to find Steve Sawyer before Harvey and Strangwell and George Dornick turned him into a fall guy for Petra.

I have no memory of leaving the Internet café to go to my car or of driving to the South Side. I don’t remember if I stayed on Damen or went to the Ryan. I didn’t look for tails. I was an automaton moving through space. It wasn’t until I was walking away from the car that I came back to earth. I leaned against a light pole and sang a few vocal exercises, forcing myself to breathe, to get some semblance of calm for the hard interview ahead.

When I reached Fit for Your Hoof, Kimathi-Sawyer wasn’t on the street. I opened the door to the shop and parted the ropes to the interior. I’d forgotten the whistle and the recorded “Welcome to Chicago” a

The chess players were sitting at their board. The balding man with the paunch was still wearing his Machinists T-shirt; the ski

The Sun-Times was on the counter. My cousin’s picture had made the front page. HAVE YOU SEEN ME? the screamer headline read. The radio was still tuned to NPR. It was Worldview time in Chicago. The men had been talking, but when they looked up and saw me, the room became so quiet that even Jerome MacDonald seemed to sink to a whisper.

“You’re not welcome here,” Rivers said.

“Gosh, and you’ve been so subtle up to now I never would have guessed. Tell me about Steve Sawyer.”

“I’ll tell you all I’ve said before, which is you’ve got a hell of a nerve to come here and ask about him.”

“He changed his name legally to Kimathi, didn’t he, before the trial? But Lamont never went that far. He was Lumumba only to the i

Rivers shifted the toothpick from one side of his mouth to the other but didn’t speak. I saw a red handbag on one of the ropes made of the kind of leather that I love, a soft, supple calfskin.

“At his trial, Kimathi-Steve was expecting Lamont to show up with some pictures, wasn’t he? And Lamont never arrived.” I stuck up an arm and unclipped the bag.

“Ask your daddy about that, Ms. Detective. Oh, right, your daddy is dead. Pretty convenient, isn’t it?”

I looked inside the handbag. There was a zip compartment where you could put your wallet and a pocket that would just hold your cellphone. I was not going to lose my temper. And I wasn’t going to start yelling about my father.

“You remember George Dornick, of course, since you remember Tony Warshawski,” I said, still peering into the bag.

The cold eyes on the far side of the counter didn’t give anything away.

“And you’ve seen the news that my cousin is missing.” I paused again but still got no response.

Rivers picked up the Sun-Times. “Cute blond white girl, of course it’s big news. I’m sure the cops can find some black man to implicate before the day is done.”

The chess players were watching me as if I were some complicated move on their board. I looked up from the handbag at Rivers.

“They already have.”

Rivers turned off the radio. The quiet became absolute. I found a price tag tucked into an outside compartment: five hundred thirty dollars. A bag like this would be triple that at a downtown store. I put it over my shoulder and went to inspect myself in a narrow strip of mirror behind the ropes.

“Joh

“Man’s in Stateville. Hard to see how he could be out grabbing white chicks off the street.”

“They figure he still has a lot of friends around town who’d do a favor for him. They’re going to try to pressure him through his daughter.” I turned around, not in a hurry, and leaned against the mirror.