I walked back to Michigan Avenue, which was filled with shoppers and tourists. A trio of black youths banged homemade drums on the corner.
A tunnel goes under the avenue, but I crossed at street level. I was in the company of a woman who had a leash with a dog at the end of it in one hand and a cellphone in the other that was glued to her ear. A nanny with a baby buggy, also on a cellphone, was behind me. I felt reassuringly anonymous, just one more person in a ball cap enjoying the end of summer.
I sat on a bench in a bus stop on the far corner and watched the park. An elderly man with a toy poodle shuffled over from one of the condos near the hotel. The dog sniffed at late-blooming orange flowers while the man stared vacantly into the distance. A hard-muscled young woman jogged past the gazebo, down a ramp leading under Lake Shore Drive and to the beach. A few bicyclists emerged on the return route.
Seventeen minutes after I’d handed the envelope to the bellman, my uncle appeared. His hair was uncombed, his shirttails hung half out of his trousers. He certainly wasn’t resting easily these days. While he looked in and around the gazebo, I checked the opposite side of the street. No one was lingering on the sidewalks. No new cars hovered in the area. I climbed down the stairs to the tunnel under Michigan Avenue and emerged on the path to the beach.
“Peter!” I called sharply. “Over here!”
42
ROUGHING UP THE UNCLE
“WHAT THE HELL ARE YOU UP TO?” CLOSE UP, MY UNCLE looked worse than I’d thought. His eyes were bloodshot, he was unshaven, and he smelled of stale alcohol.
“What the hell are you up to, Peter, letting Petra take the fall so that you don’t have to face the—”
“Goddamn you, you ignorant bitch, I am protecting my daughter.” For a moment, we both thought he was going to hit me.
My mouth creased in a sour smile. “Sending her out to find police evidence that Tony squirreled away for you? Involving her in arson and criminal trespass at my old South Chicago house and at my current house and office?”
“You don’t know anything!” His roar brought the cyclists and joggers around us to a brief halt: Did I need help?
I smiled and waved at the concerned citizens, who were happy to leave us to our quarrel. I kept the smile on my lips and my voice light, conversational. We didn’t need to draw a crowd.
“I know that in 1967 Steve Sawyer was brutally tortured into confessing to a murder he never committed. I know he served forty years, doing very hard time, in your stead. And I know he thought there were some photographs proving who really killed Harmony Newsome in Marquette Park during that 1966 riot. I know that Larry Alito brought evidence of the murder over to our South Chicago house back around Christmas 1967 and that Tony took it to keep your sorry ass out of prison.”
“I didn’t kill Harmony Newsome,” Peter hissed.
“Then who did?”
Peter looked around, wondering who was listening. “I don’t know.”
“Brilliant,” I said. “ It wasn’t me, I wasn’t there, I didn’t do it. Every cop and every criminal lawyer hears that line a hundred times their first week on the job. You weren’t in Marquette Park, Tony didn’t take evidence, Larry Alito—”
“Shut up! I was in Marquette Park, okay? Is that a crime? It was my neighborhood park, my friends were all there.”
“What, you guys went there to play ball, and then suddenly, in the third inning, this huge riot broke out? And then what? You got lost in the crowd and started throwing bricks and rocks and stuff in the hopes they’d point you to your way home?”
“You’re just like your tight-assed bitch of a mother, acting like she was the Madonna and all the saints poured into one—”
“Call me any name you like, you two-bit bully, but do not insult Gabriella.” My hands on my hips, my face close to his. He backed away.
The silence lingered between us. Peter was fidgeting, worried about what I knew, what I might say. But I was weary, of him, of fighting, of myself. And when I finally spoke again, it took an effort to go through the motions.
“You went to Marquette Park in 1966, but you didn’t kill Harmony Newsome and you don’t know who did. But you sent Petra out looking for the evidence just in case it came back to bite you. Only it’s bitten Petra instead. Take it from there . . . Tell me how you’re protecting her.”
His face was white underneath the stubble. “Don’t preach at me. You’re the one who got Petey in trouble in the first place, introducing her to gangbangers and taking her to slums.”
“No, no, no.” My hands were over my ears, trying to stop the barrage of lies. “She wheedled me until I took her to see all the different houses you and Grandma Warshawski and Tony had lived in. I thought at the time Petra was behaving strangely, especially her wanting to see where everyone stored their stuff. I tried to get her to tell me why, and she wouldn’t. But of course she wanted to see if, by any chance, Tony had left behind that photograph!”