“I know you’re under a lot of stress right now, and I’m sure your cousin is your biggest worry, so it was a really good thing you did, coming over here to see Miss Claudia.” She put a hand on my arm. “This man you mentioned, Curtis… Do you think he’s telling the truth about Lamont?”
“Oh, I think so. He doesn’t know what happened to Lamont, but it involved Johnny Merton, and it was so terrible that it shocked Merton into silence. And Merton… You’d have to know him to understand that a death he’d find shocking might turn you or me as mad as… as poor Steve Sawyer.”
I gently dislodged Lennon’s hand. “Something about Lamont, or Johnny and Steve Sawyer and the Anacondas, is connected to my cousin. The man who’s running security for the Krumas campaign, where my cousin worked, he was the cop who interrogated Sawyer forty years ago and tortured him into confessing.”
Karen gasped. “Torture? Are you sure?”
Sawyer-Kimathi’s mangled, burned body flashed in my head: “They say I the song-and-dance man… They laugh.” Would I ever be able to forget that? “Yes, oh yes. I wish I wasn’t, but… I know it happened. I don’t understand it, not all of it, but my uncle, and Harvey Krumas, the candidate’s father, they grew up together, and they still watch each other’s backs. The murder that happened in Marquette Park all those years ago, they’re both implicated in it, and that means-”
I couldn’t bear to go on, couldn’t bear to add that that meant my own uncle was implicated in Sister Frankie’s murder because his old buddy Harvey rushed a contracting crew over to her place to bury any evidence I might be able to dig up. I pressed my hands against my temples as if that would push all that knowledge out of my head.
“This is terrible, Vic. Why aren’t you going to the police?”
My smile was twisted. “Because Dornick is an ex-cop with lots of pals on the force, and I don’t know who there I can trust anymore.”
Karen started to ask me how Lamont was tied to Dornick, but my own words reminded me that Bobby Mallory had been trying to reach me. I interrupted her to ask if I could use her office phone to make a few calls.
We rode down to the second floor in silence, Karen shaking her head as if mourning all the sorry souls I’d told her about. While she unlocked her office door, I once again connected my cellphone long enough to look up Bobby’s unlisted home number.
Eileen Mallory answered. “Oh, Vicki, I’m so sorry about Petra. This is a terrible week. We never knew Peter at all well, but please tell him and Rachel that if there’s anything we can do, anything at all-a place to stay, extra help from Bobby’s team-they must let us know.”
I thanked her awkwardly and said Bobby had been trying to reach me. He hadn’t come home yet. She gave me his cellphone number. And another message, a personal one for me, so warm and loving it made my eyelids prick.
Bobby’s response wasn’t nearly so tender. “Where are you?” he demanded as soon as I answered.
“Wandering around the city like a demented ghost,” I said. “I understand you wanted to talk to me.”
“I want to see you at once.”
I looked at Karen Lennon’s scarred desktop. “You know, Bobby, that is not going to happen. I am hiding from George Dornick, hoping I find Petra before he does.”
“If Dornick’s on your ass, I’ll give him a medal for bringing you in.”
“That would be one you would hand him at my funeral, then, and you could congratulate each other on laying me and a lot of ugly department history to rest.”
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 Lennon’s wall, but that news jolted me.
“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 running loose in the halls, but we didn’t actually see any cops. Karen pushed the button on elevator 11. There was a stairwell nearby, and I could hear the pounding of feet. Our elevator arrived, but I stood frozen, watching the stairwell door until Karen shoved me into the elevator and pressed the button to close the doors.
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.