“You were seen entering the Freedom Center building,” the woman from OEM said. “What were you doing there?”
“I was seen?” I echoed. “That’s an old, old ploy. I need more than that to persuade me I was at Kedzie and Lawrence instead of in my hospital bed.”
The OEM woman pulled a set of stills from her briefcase and laid them on the small round table in the middle of the room. We all took turns looking at them. They were time-stamped, and they showed a woman whose dark hair held a few white streaks wearing jeans and a white shirt. They were shot from behind, so you couldn’t see where her hair had been shaved back from her temples. Nor could you see that she was using the edge of her plastic lenses to snap the tongue back in the front-door lock.
“I don’t know,” I said. “It’s not like this person is wearing a jacket marked ‘V. I. Warshawski.’ And I think I’d remember if I’d been there. You have some shots showing me leaving, some where I could see my face? I don’t recognize myself from behind.”
There was a momentary silence. I’d left wearing a nun’s veil, my face down, two other sisters and my cousin holding me close. They had the shots, but they probably didn’t know what to make of them.
“Look, Warshawski, this isn’t supposed to be an antagonistic meeting,” the Latino guy from Bomb and Arson said. “We assume you’re on the same team we are.”
“And what team would that be, Detective?’
“That you want to catch Sister Frances’s killer,” he said.
“Oh, I definitely want to do that,” I agreed.
“Then why don’t you tell us what you were doing at her apartment?” That was the FBI’s Lyle Torgeson.
I yawned. “I wasn’t at her apartment.”
“Let’s forget four nights ago,” Torgeson said. “The night of the fire… You agree you were there that night?… Tell us why.”
“Right. I went to talk to Sister Frances about Steve Sawyer.”
“We know about that,” the man from Homeland Security said.
“You have bugs planted in her room?” I asked. “They’re good quality, I guess, if they survived the fire and you retrieved them. Not like the crap weapons you buy from China and sell to Afghanistan.”
“You were bugging the room?” the white Bomb and Arson detective said, turning to the feds. “Why the fuck were you doing that?”
“National security,” the Homeland Security man said. “I can’t say any more.”
“Beautiful umbrella,” I murmured. “From now on, whenever I do anything particularly embarrassing, I’ll just cry ‘National security!’ and refuse to say anything else.”
“That’s enough,” Torgeson snapped. “What were you doing in Sister Frances’s apartment?”
“National security,” I said.
The two Bomb and Arson squad detectives swallowed smiles. Harmony did not reign supreme between the federal and local law enforcers. I let them bicker with one another for a few minutes.
“I have a question for you,” I said. “You know why I went to see Sister Frances, to discuss the case of the man who’d been convicted of killing Harmony Newsome in Marquette Park forty years ago. Sister Frances was marching with Ms. Newsome that hot summer day and said she didn’t think it was possible that Steve Sawyer killed Ms. Newsome. Are you reopening the case?”
“He was tried, convicted, did his time. We’re not interested.” That was the Latino cop.
“Then why was that the last question OEM asked me in the hospital, why did I care what Sister Frances had to say about that old murder?”
“I think you misheard. You were drugged, in a lot of pain,” Torgeson said.
“You’re the ones with the tape recorders.” I looked at my fingertips. “Go listen to the conversation. I don’t have anything else for you.”
The crowded room was momentarily quiet. Then the Bomb and Arson team started asking me questions that I could answer, to lead them step-by-step through my brief time with Sister Frances. It wasn’t meaningful or helpful, but I was the only witness.
The more times I recounted the Molotov cocktails sailing in on us, the less real they became. It was easy to describe them glibly, as if they were a plot detail in a thriller and not a death-dealing event.
When I finished, I asked what residue they’d found in the bottles: gasoline? rocket fuel? jellied bomb accelerant?
“We can’t answer questions like that,” the Homeland Security man said. “They’re in connection with an investigation linked to our national security.”
It was my turn to remember I needed to keep a leash on my temper. “What about the perps? You must have pictures of them, time-stamped and everything, right? Anything you can show on the street for an ID?”
“We can’t comment. It’s an investigation linked to our national security.”
“But these pictures aren’t?” I picked up the stills of me at the entrance to the Freedom Center building. “That’s good. I’ll show them to Sister Carolyn, see if she knows who this might be. Given that someone was in Sister Frances’s apartment that night, she might recognize who.”
“If you weren’t there, how do you know someone was in the dead nun’s apartment?” Torgeson pounced.
“You just told me.” I got to my feet, holding the stills. The woman from OEM leaned over, spraying me with her fetid breath, and grabbed the pictures.
“These are government property and are highly classified.”
“I know,” I said. “‘An investigation linked to our national security. ’ ”
She glared at me. “I’d strongly advise you not to suggest to a nun that she take a bolt cutter to a room that’s been secured by the police.”
I smiled at her. We were playing a game where the person who keeps her temper longest wins. “You know, we live in a county where patronage workers get paid a hundred thousand dollars a year not to work. So it cheers me no end to see that you really are earning the salary my tax dollars pay for. You’ve been hard at it, and I’ll see you get a note stuck in your personnel file.”
30
EVEN THOUGH I’D WALKED AWAY TRIUMPHANT FROM THAT skirmish, there was no way I could win a larger battle with the law. The real question, if I could get my tired brain to return to duty, was why they cared so much. Their questions, their whole attitude, seemed more about Sister Frances’s and my conversation than her murder.
I had to be honest enough to admit my arrival at the murder scene two days later warranted investigation. But why did they have such an elaborate stakeout on the building in the first place?
The interrogation had worn me out. I tried to make some notes, in big block capitals with a felt-tipped marker, but the effort put me to sleep. When I woke, it was because the doorman was calling on the house phone: Sister Carolyn Zabinska had arrived.
“You don’t look well. Are you up to talking?” she greeted me.
Her own face was pinched and gray with grief. She was tall and sturdily built, but her shoulders were bent forward with pain.
“It’s just my hair,” I said, steering myself away from self-pity. “I tried to trim it with sewing shears and was singularly inept. The FBI was ruder. They said I looked like the losing end of a catfight.”
“Yes, the FBI. That’s what I want to talk about… One of the things, anyway.”
She followed me onto the balcony off the living room, where Lotty has a little table and chairs in the summer. I offered refreshments, and left her standing there, looking out over Lake Michigan, while I burrowed in Lotty’s kitchen. She practically survives on Viennese coffee, but I found some German herbal infusions in the back of a drawer. When I returned to the balcony with a tray, precariously balanced between my bandaged palms, Sister Carolyn sat down and asked how I knew the FBI was watching the Freedom Center building.