Hardball

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.”

“By criticizing George Dornick?” I asked.

“By fingering, if not murdering, Larry Alito.”

I had been watching the second hand go round on the institutional clock on Karen Le

“Alito is dead?” I repeated stupidly.

“Get your head out of your butt.” Bobby was truly furious to use such coarse language talking to me. Even though he disapproves of me, he usually sticks to his no-swearing-at-women-and-children code when we’re speaking. “His body was found down by the river near Cortlandt this afternoon. And Hazel says you’d called up there this morning, threatening him.”

44

WHILE I’D BEEN SPEAKING TO BOBBY, KAREN HAD BEEN standing at her window, aimlessly twitching the blind pull. She turned to me as I hung up. “There are a lot of police cars out front. We don’t usually get so many here. Do you think-?”

“I think I don’t want to find out.” I looked wildly around, hoping a hiding place would open up, but all I saw was my mop. The cops wouldn’t be fooled by a generic jumpsuit and an unused mop. They’d be inspecting all the janitors, even the one I’d seen in the elevator.

“Linen carts… They’re taking dirty linen someplace. Where?”

Karen thought a minute, then pressed a speed-dial number on her phone. “It’s Pastor Karen. I’ve been with one of our critically ill patients and have some soiled linens. Where can I find the nearest bin?… I stupidly carried them down to my office… No, I’ll come back up. I want to get them out of here, and I’m going to have to scrub after handling them, anyway… Number eleven, right.”

Her mouth set in a thin, firm line, she opened her door, looked around, and beckoned me. “Elevator eleven. Let’s go.”

I followed her through the maze of corridors, muscles tensing, to a rear service elevator. We could hear the scratchy echoes of police radios, the frightened shouts of Lionsgate residents wanting to know if there was a killer ru

I let out a loud breath. “Thanks. I’m losing my nerve.”

She put a finger over my mouth, jerking her head toward a camera in the ceiling, and began talking excitedly about the need for the janitor staff to do more for the AIDS cases in the hospital. “I have to scrub now because I’ve been handling infected linens and syringes. Can’t the cleaning crew do more?”

“It’s what happens when you outsource cleaning,” I said, switching on the harsh nasal of the South Side. “They’re paid by the room, not by the hour, and they don’t do the job an in-house service does.”

The elevator was hydraulic, and it seemed to me that in the time it took us to go from the second floor to the sub-basement a crew could have disinfected all fifteen floors of the manor. Karen and I babbled about AIDS and cleaning until my mouth felt like a bell with a very dry clapper hanging in the middle. The hydraulics finally hissed to a halt.

The doors opened onto a holding bay. Two dozen linen-filled carts stood there. Karen muttered that the laundry service would be by at midnight for pickup. The shower rooms for staff stood beyond the bay, and, next to them, a locked dressing room. Karen found a master key on her chain and unlocked the door. Uniforms were inside, hazmat suits, booties, all those things. She tossed me hat, gloves, mask, and a white jumpsuit and told me to get into a cart and get covered. I grabbed my gun and Miss Claudia’s Bible, then stripped out of my gray suit, burying it in the middle of one of the other carts, and pulled on the white jumpsuit. I put on the hat, the gloves, and the mask, and burrowed into the cart. A few minutes later, Karen appeared, and when I peeked at her she looked ominous in her own jumpsuit, hat, gloves, and mask. She flashed a bright red placard at me that read DANGER! HIGHLY INFECTIOUS, then covered me up. She whispered that she was tying the placard over the top of the cart. We’d hope for the best.

She pushed the cart onto the elevator. I lay there as it wheezed up a story to the entrance of the parking garage. The police had placed a guard there. I lay sweating in the linens while he demanded to know who Karen was and what she was doing.

“I’m getting these AIDS-infected linens to our cleaning service as fast as possible.”

“I’m checking all hospital IDs,” he said. A brief silence, and then he said, “You’re the pastor? And you’re handling linens? I don’t think-”

“Officer, it is my job to certify every death in this hospital. It’s my job to go through possessions and make a list for the next of kin. It’s my job to take bloody linens off a bed and cart them off when one of our patients passes and the cleaning crew has finished for the day. I can’t have foul matter in a room overnight. Another lady shares that room, and I won’t have her waking up and seeing the dreadful after-math of someone else’s death. But if you want to carry these out for me, I would be very grateful. My day started at six this morning, and I am weary. I would love to get to my own home.”

I wanted to applaud and cheer. The pastor might have been pushing wanted detectives out of hospitals for years, she was so smooth, so natural, in her mix of admonition and arrogance. The officer apologized, and said hastily he’d leave her to handle the cart.

We bumped quickly through the parking lot. I heard the chirp as she unlocked her car and the thump as she opened the trunk.

“I’m lifting sheets. They’ll block the view to the elevator. Then get into the trunk. You’ll be able to breathe, I think. At least enough until we’re in the clear.”

She was in charge, and I meekly followed her instructions. In another moment, the trunk closed. I heard the rattle of the cart as she rolled it a short distance away. And then we moved smoothly out of the garage. Apparently the cop at the inside entrance had called over to the cops guarding the exit, and there was only a brief halt, before we were in motion again.

Between the bass viol’s case and the Corolla trunk, I would choose the Corolla, but only because I was cushioned by the sheets and could put my knees up. Air was in short supply in both. I was thankful when Karen finally decided it was safe to let me out. She had driven up to a side street next to the campus that housed the University of Illinois’s sprawling medical facilities.

I climbed out and scrabbled through the soiled laundry for my gun and Miss Claudia’s Bible. All of the burrowing and dumping had shaken Miss Claudia’s page markers out of it and damaged the spine and creased some pages. I smoothed the pages out that had gotten creased and put in as many of the page markers as I could find.

“What do you want to do now?” Karen asked.

“I’d like to give you a big smooch. And then I’d like to take a shower. You ever get tired of pastoral work, you could open an agency easy.”

The pastor laughed. “I don’t want to go through that again, ever. When I had to get that cart past that cop, I thought my pressure was going to start pushing blood straight out of my head and all over the garage… Where do you want to go from here?”