Hardball

“Oh, Vic, I don’t know why Miss Ella didn’t tell you, but Miss Claudia had a stroke right at Easter. It’s hard for her to talk, and, when she does get some words out, her speech is terribly slurry. Miss Ella’s the only person who can understand her completely, although I’m getting better at it. It’s been since her stroke that Miss Claudia’s become obsessed with this search. Miss Ella tried to talk her out of it because of how long it’s been and how little hope there is of learning anything, but Miss Claudia wouldn’t rest until her sister promised to find Lamont. Try to find him, anyway. Are you going to look for him?”

I pursed my lips. “I’ll do what I can, but there aren’t many avenues to follow. And Miss Ella isn’t helping by refusing to give me any names of people who knew her son.”

“I can help with that,” Le

“Then maybe you’re the one who should try to find Lamont,” I said nastily.

Her rosebud mouth opened in dismay, but she said quietly, “I would, if I had your skills. I told you I Googled you after we met at the hospital. Your press makes you sound more progressive than maybe you really are. It’s why I went out of my way to help your friend Elton, without any expectation of getting paid. I was sure you’d be eager to reciprocate and help someone in Miss Ella’s situation.”

“I don’t know what her situation is,” I said. “Maybe you think of her as an old woman worn out by a life of hard work and injustice, but to me she’s a woman so bitter and withholding I can’t trust anything she says. Even forty years after she last saw him, she is still so angry with her son that she practically chokes talking about him. What if she killed him all those years ago? Or what if he hasn’t been missing, and she’s ashamed of and angry at the life he’s been leading, so she’s told everyone he’s gone?”

Karen’s jaw dropped with shock. “Vic! You can’t think… Not Miss Ella! Why, she’s a deaconess in her church.”

“Oh, please,” I said. “The news is full of stories of pastors and priests who’ve stolen money or molested children. I’m not saying I think Miss Ella did any of those things, not even that I think she killed her son. But I am saying she’s hiding something, she’s angry, and that she doesn’t get a free ride.”

“Are you going to help her at all?”

“We agreed I’d do some preliminary work, and I’m cutting my fees for her, but I am not going to go on if she doesn’t keep up her payments.”

Pastor Karen laughed, perhaps relieved that I was going to carry some of the load. “I think she’s scrupulous about money.”

“And remember to ask her for names of Lamont’s friends. That’s going to be where I’ll have to start.”

When Karen said she’d talk to Miss Ella in the morning, I added, “It would help if I could see Miss Claudia. Do you know where she’s living?”

“She’s here, at Lionsgate Manor, in our rehabilitation wing, although it’s hard for me to be hopeful. She and Miss Ella shared a bed in that little apartment until Miss Claudia had her stroke.” Karen shook her head mournfully. “All those years of working their fingers to the bone, both of them, and they couldn’t afford two bedrooms, even at Lionsgate Manor. It doesn’t seem fair.”

Maybe that was what lay behind Miss Ella’s hostility: the rank unfairness of life. Life is unfair. Of course it is. When it snows, the rich ski downhill and the poor shovel their sidewalks, my mother used to say. But Gabriella loved life, me, music-above all, music. When she sang, especially Mozart, she moved to a different world where rich and poor, fair and unfair, didn’t matter, only sound. What did Miss Ella have that brought her to such a place? What did I have, come to think of it?

A heart-stopping thud on my car window brought me back to Racine Avenue. It was Mr. Contreras, my downstairs neighbor. Mitch, the giant lab-golden, jumped up on the car, his paws on the Mustang’s roof, and began to bark. I got out of the car, pushing him out of the way.

“We began to wonder if maybe you had a stroke out here, doll, you was sitting so long. And you got company, cute young gal, says she’s a cousin, although she’s so young I thought maybe she was a niece or something. But, then, families do stretch out both ways, don’t they? She’s on your pop’s side, I guess, since she says she’s a Warshawski. I didn’t know you had any relatives…”

Mitch punctuated the old man’s flood of words with hysterical barks. He and Peppy, his mother, had both been clinging to me since my return home. In my absence, a dog service had run them twice a day, but they needed the reassurance that I wasn’t going to abandon them again. Mitch ignored my commands to be quiet and to sit. By the time I’d wrestled him out of the street and into position on the sidewalk, I was panting. Peppy, who’d sat through the whole proceeding with the saintly expression that makes other dogs hate golden retrievers, now started threading herself through my legs, giving little whimpers of greeting.

“Could you start at the begi

Mr. Contreras beamed. He loves family-my family, anyway. He seldom sees his married daughter, Ruthie, or his two grandchildren. “Didn’t you know? Your own cousin, didn’t her ma tell you? She’s come to work in Chicago, and she’s renting a place in Bucktown.”

Bucktown was Chicago’s newest Yuppieville, about a mile south of us. Ten years ago, it was a quiet working-class neighborhood, mostly Polish and Mexican, when the ominous happened: young artists looking for cheap studio space moved in. Now the artists can’t afford the rents and are moving farther west, while the natives are long gone, to the depressed fringe neighborhoods on the far South Side.

I took my groceries out of the trunk and walked up the sidewalk with my neighbor. If this was a Warshawski cousin, it had to be one of my uncle Peter’s kids. He’d been a lot younger than my dad, and had started his family late in life, after he left Chicago for Kansas City, so I didn’t know him or my cousins at all. I’d gotten birth a

As we got to the door, a young woman bounced down the steps with all of Mitch’s enthusiasm. She was tall and blond, and her low-cut, skimpy peasant blouse, with vest, skirt, leggings, and high-heeled boots, proclaimed her a serious Mille

“Petra?” I ventured.

“I am, I am.” She hugged me back, bending over my five-foot-eight frame and squeezing hard. “Sorry to drop in uninvited, but I just got settled this afternoon, and Daddy told me you lived here, near me, and I didn’t have any appointments, so I came scurrying up to see you. Uncle Sal-isn’t he sweet? He told me to call him that!-he’s been feeding me tea in the garden and telling me all the cases he’s worked on with you. You’re awesome, Tori!”

Tori. My family nickname. Since my cousin Boom-Boom’s death twelve years ago, no one had used it, and it was startling to hear it on this stranger’s lips. And now Mr. Contreras was her “Uncle Sal.” And Mitch was slobbering over her. We were just one big happy family.

Mr. Contreras said he knew “you gals” had a lot of catching up to do, so why didn’t we go on up to my place, and he could make us spaghetti later if we wanted. With the dogs racing ahead of us, stopping at each landing to see if we were following, I led Petra to the third floor.

“You should have let me know you were coming to town,” I said. “I’d have been glad to put you up while you got settled.”