Hardball

He, too, was near here. When Elton wouldn’t give me a straight answer or look in me in the face, I’d been sure he’d seen Petra ru

I’d been heading gradually west from the station while making my purchases. I waited at a bus stop and got on the westbound bus. I fished some singles out of my pocket for the fare, then watched through the back window as we trundled along. It was a tiresomely slow ride, but I was too spent to walk. And at least this way, I could see if anyone had spotted me.

At Damen Avenue, I got off the bus and set out on foot. Chicago streets are tangled here because of the way the river snakes through the Northwest Side. I needed to get under the Ke

Rush hour was over. People were begi

On leaden feet, I walked under the expressway and turned east and then north again. The railway embankment was surrounded by razor wire, but there was a gap hidden by the Ke

I didn’t spot Elton’s shack at first, and wondered if in his paranoia he had misdirected me. However, a faint trail led through the underbrush and refuse, and I followed it to the river. The water here was a thick brownish green. Ducks bobbed in it, along with plastic bottles and sticks. There wasn’t a visible current, and mosquitoes rose in clouds from the thicket of shrubs that lined the bank.

From the river’s edge, I looked back and finally saw the shack, almost invisible against the underbrush and discarded tires. It had a faded logo from the C &NW railroad on it; I suppose they’d once used it for storage. As I got closer, I saw Elton had put a rain barrel on the roof and fixed up a showerhead. There weren’t any windows in the shack, and the boards it was built with were gray-black with damp, but he had covered any holes with a variety of metal, Styrofoam, and plastic sheeting.

I clambered up the embankment and made my way around to the side where the door was. “Elton? You home? It’s V. I. Warshawski. We need to talk.”

I rapped smartly on the panel and heard a movement from inside the shack, an intake of a sob. I pulled open the ramshackle door. My cousin Petra blinked at me from a nest of sleeping bags.

“Vic! How did you know? Who told you? Who’s with you?”

I couldn’t speak. I was so overcome with relief at the sight of Petra that I just stood there, shaking my head in wonder.

47

I WAS ON THE FLOOR, HOLDING PETRA, WHILE SHE SOBBED against my shoulder. “Vic, I’m so scared, it’s so awful, don’t yell at me. I didn’t mean… I didn’t want-”

“I’m not going to yell at you, little cousin,” I said softly, stroking her dirty hair, “when it’s my hot temper that made you too scared to trust me.”

“They told me if I talked to anyone, they’d shoot Mom and the girls and Daddy would go to prison, I didn’t know what to do. They said you wanted Daddy to go to prison, you were just using me, and if I didn’t help them, if I talked to you about what I was doing, you’d punish me and him and Mom and everyone.”

“Who are they? Les Strangwell? Dornick?”

She swallowed a sob and nodded.

Mosquitoes were swarming into the shack, biting us through our clothes. I had to close the door, although there wasn’t much air in the small space. With the door shut, it smelled of damp river mud and stale sweat. The only light came from a couple of makeshift skylights Elton had created by cutting squares in the roof and filling them with discarded windowpanes. Outside, the sun was starting to set. I could just make out my cousin’s bleached, frightened face.

“It started with the Nellie Fox baseball, didn’t it?” I said. “The day you found it in my trunk, you talked about it in the office.”

“Me and my ultra-big mouth! It was only partly the ball. Everything started at the fundraiser when I talked about Joh

“I see. So he told you I had some kind of evidence that would destroy the campaign and you had to find it?”

A train thundered overhead, shaking the shack. We had to wait for it to pass before we could talk. When the noise finally died away, we could hear the ordinary sweet sounds of a summer’s evening, the birds’ last songs, the little insects chirruping.

“The evidence?” I prodded my cousin when she remained silent.

“At first, it seemed like a game, going around to all those places where Daddy and his folks used to live, and then it turned scary. When that nun got killed and you were in the hospital, they told me there would be something in her apartment, and they sent this horrible, horrible man to take me there. That was when I started to get really afraid and I almost told you, but then I thought of what they said about you being, like, an old lover of Joh

“What!” I was jolted into sitting up. “Petra! Jesus, no! I represented him when I was a public defender, but he was one of the scariest people I ever met, at least until I got to know Les Strangwell. And you don’t sleep with your clients even if you want to. Please, tell me you believe me on this!”

“Don’t get mad at me, Vic, I can’t take it!” Her voice held an undercurrent of hysteria. She’d been alone with her fears too long.

“No, baby, I’m not mad at you. But it upsets me that they would tell such a big lie about me. I like you enough that I don’t want you to believe it, that’s all.”

“Okay,” she muttered.

I waited a tick, hoping for more, something like “Of course I don’t believe it,” but when she said nothing I pushed her to finish her story. “So you came along to Sister Frankie’s apartment with the horrible man… Was that Larry Alito?… And when you found me there, you signaled to him to leave. And then you texted him and told him to come get the bag of evidence.”

“It sounds awful,” she whispered, “hearing you say it out loud, but it got worse. They told me you had these old pictures, that was what they wanted to find, but they wanted the baseball, too. See, every morning Mr. Strangwell would ask for a report from me on what you were doing and what you were looking for, and when I told him you wanted me to do a little work for you, then he was really excited and said to do everything you asked and report back to him. But when I looked up those contractors, I saw their address was the same as Uncle Harvey’s Chicago apartment, and that was weird. So I asked Mr. Strangwell, and then he said… he said…” For a moment, she couldn’t go on, but then she managed to pull herself together. “That was when the Strangler said if I didn’t do exactly what he said, Mom and the girls would die and Daddy would go to prison.”