Who would have gone to prison? What were they fighting about?
My shirt was still damp from Hazel’s soaking, and the evening breeze rising across the lake was making me shiver. I walked slowly back to my car, trying to dredge up any more remains of that fugitive memory.
I stopped in Highwood for supper. The little town, halfway between my home and Alito’s, had been settled in the nineteenth century by the Italian artisans who built the North Shore mansions. It’s become a kind of foodie heaven, but I chose one of the old Italian restaurants, where you got a straightforward pasta and the chef was called a cook. I spoke Italian with the owner, who was so pleased he gave me a free glass of Amarone.
For an hour, while we talked about food, and I described a memorable meal I’d eaten in Orvieto, across the square from the cathedral, roast pigeon with fig terrine, I forgot my anxieties. On the way home, though, I kept worrying about my father, and Larry Alito, and Steve Sawyer, the way you do with a sore tooth.
Curtis Rivers and Johnny Merton both thought my father had beaten up Sawyer. That was the only credible explanation for the way the two men reacted to my name and my questions. But Tony would never have done that, not unless Sawyer had jumped him and he’d had to subdue him. But Sawyer had been confused, and badly represented, at his trial. What if-
“What if nothing!” I said aloud. “Tony didn’t beat people up. Ever.”
George Dornick had been the senior detective in the Harmony Newsome investigation. I would call him first thing in the morning, see if he could set my mind at rest.
Despite Bobby’s jeers, it proved easy to get an appointment with Dornick. The Warshawski name doesn’t open many doors in the world, but men who had served with my father were usually willing to see me. At least once, anyway.
When I called at eight, as soon as I got back from running the dogs, Dornick’s secretary said he could fit me in between nine-thirty and ten a.m. meetings. I dressed carefully in an amber jacket over beige slacks-feminine but severely professional-and rode the El into the Loop.
Mountain Hawk Security’s headquarters occupied four floors in one of the glass towers on Wacker that line the Chicago River, and their reception area actually overlooked the river. I got there at nine-thirty to be safe and ended up waiting for over an hour. For a time, I amused myself watching the barges and tour boats while Mountain Hawk personnel passed between elevators and locked glass doors leading to offices. They spoke in urgent tones that stressed the importance of their work. A few clients arrived and were whisked inside.
I was getting bored, and there wasn’t much to read in the waiting room: The Wall Street Journal, SWAT Digest, and company brochures. I spent fifteen minutes on the phone with my temp, Marilyn, and sent a few e-mails, but I was getting restless by the time Dornick came out to greet me.
Dornick was a vigorous man in his sixties. The brown hair in the softball-team photo had turned gray in the way that gets labeled distinguished. Seeing him in his pale summer worsted, I found it hard to believe he could ever have been covered with mud from a slow-pitch game in Grant Park.
He held out a hand and shook mine energetically. “So, you’re Tony’s girl. I should have recognized you at the fundraiser the other night. You look just like him around the eyes. He was a sad loss, a very sad loss. One of the best cops I ever had the privilege of serving with.”
The contrast to Alito couldn’t have been more pronounced. Dornick put an arm around my shoulder and told “Nina” to get us coffee and hold his calls. He steered me into the kind of office you want to see when you need a good program in subduing and manacling the restless masses. Everything was made of polished wood and stone, much of it gleaming black. No paper was visible, but an array of computer consoles kept Dornick in touch with his team. On the wall were the pictures of Dornick that I’d seen on Mountain Hawk’s website.
“This is really impressive,” I said. “How did you put it all together?”
“Twenty years in the Chicago PD got me my law enforcement know-how, and then it was a matter of scrabbling and scrambling. Some of my childhood buddies pitched in their nickels. I had a lucky break early on, busted a Hamas training camp on the Peru-Colombia border. It was a fluke, the way things often are in police work: we were only looking for drugs, and we found armaments that made our eyes pop.” He laughed. “You’d think after being on Chicago’s streets, nothing could surprise you, but that’s until you get into those Latin American jungle outposts.”
Nina brought in coffee-lovely, smooth coffee-probably hand-knitted in one of those jungle outposts.
“Nina tells me you’re in private security yourself, that you have a one-gal shop. You interested in moving up to the majors? I’d be pleased-privileged, really-to bring Tony’s daughter into my organization. I learned more from him in two years on the streets than I ever did anytime after.”
“Yeah, my dad was a great guy. I still miss him. But I’m better on my own. I’ve been my own boss too long to be happy in a big organization. Besides, you probably know that I started in a big outfit, the county Public Defender’s Office.”
Dornick nodded. “I saw your old boss at the Krumas event. You were right to chafe against an SOB like Arnie Coleman, and you were young at the time. A big organization can be a chance to spread your wings rather than have them clipped. You keep Mountain Hawk in the back of your mind the next time you’re out doing surveillance in the rain and know you have to race back to your office to file a missing persons report.”
I was startled: it was as if he had spent a week watching my workload. No doubt about it, he was as smooth as his coffee. I thanked him awkwardly.
Dornick ducked a discreet look at his watch. “So what is it you need today, Vic?”
“I’m following an old cold trail,” I said. “A person who’s been missing for forty-plus years. My closest lead to him is also hard to track down. You were the detective who handled the interrogation when he was arrested for murder: Steve Sawyer, the Harmony Newsome trial.”
Dornick put his coffee cup down and whistled silently. “That is an old cold trail. My God, I do remember the case, though: it was the first murder investigation I’d caught on my own. I was working with Larry Alito. You talk to him? I think he’s up in Wisconsin now.”
“I saw him yesterday. He’s on Lake Catherine, in the Chain of Lakes. He said he didn’t remember any of the details, although I got the feeling that he was hiding a lot behind a can of beer.”
Dornick laughed. “Behind a can? Make it more like a case… One of the reasons I wanted to leave the police. Larry Alito was not a good boy to partner with, I’ll tell you that between you, me, and the kitchen sink. No one could forget the Newsome case. It was so high-profile, the mayor was calling me personally. The dead girl was a really important person in the civil rights movement. We couldn’t afford a black eye as a city, not after the way the riots had played on national TV the summer before.”
“You didn’t have any doubt that you arrested the right man?”
Dornick shook his head. “We had a good snitch on that one. Not a jailhouse snitch, a guy who was undercover for us in the Anacondas.”
“Was that Lamont Gadsden by any chance? He’s the man I’m trying to find.”
A funny look crossed Dornick’s face, the expression Boom-Boom used to assume when he was deciding whether to dare me to do something really insane, like jump off the breakwater into Lake Calumet.
“What the heck, Vic, it’s been all this time. Yes, Gadsden finally turned Sawyer in. We’d been leaning on him for a name, and I guess he and Sawyer were good friends in the Anacondas. You’re not trying to suggest that Sawyer didn’t do it, are you?”