“So how did you get all these boys in blue to show up in time to save my life?” I asked.
She’d swum the river, she said, but she hadn’t been able to climb up the slick logs that lined the far bank. “There was some kind of iron ring. I got hold of that and screamed my head off. There’re these town houses up above, and someone heard me and came outside. She’d heard the shots and was feeling pretty nervous.”
The woman who responded to her screams called the police. When a squad car arrived, Petra cried out that muggers were shooting at me across the river. The cops in the squad car summoned the boat.
“Oh, Petra, little cousin, you’ve been scared, but you showed real courage and real resourcefulness. When all this is over, you keep remembering that. Put all those bad faces away in a drawer and put your own courage out in the living room.”
Petra gave a little sigh and curled against me. The cops didn’t try to pull her away.
The night wore on interminably from there. The paddy wagon unloaded us at headquarters. When we’d all been placed in a big interrogation room at Thirty-fifth and Michigan and left to glower at one another for an hour or so, Bobby made an entrance in his shirtsleeves. Terry Finchley followed, in a suit and tie, carrying a briefcase bulging with manila folders.
“Bobby! Good to see you.” Dornick switched on his hail-fellow voice, a hearty baritone. “Congratulations on the promotion. Well deserved.”
Bobby ignored him. And he didn’t look at me, either. When he spoke, it was to the air above our heads. “I’m trying to get Harvey Krumas down here. Peter Warshawski is on his way over from the Drake. We’ll wait to get started.”
Finchley unloaded his briefcase. We could all read the label on the top folder: HARMONY NEWSOME. At that point, Dornick demanded that he be allowed to call his lawyer.
Bobby, still not looking at him, nodded at Terry, who handed Dornick a cellphone.
When Dornick demanded privacy, Finchley gave his thinnest smile. “You were a cop for a lot of years, Mr. Dornick. You know the drill.”
Dornick’s eyes glittered with fury. If he managed to walk away from any charges tonight, none of us would be safe in our beds. He called his lawyer. He was short and to the point. Then I took the phone to call Freeman Carter’s cellphone.
Freeman was at dinner at the Trefoil. He first talked to Bobby, then came back on the phone with me. “You’re going to be there awhile, Vic. Don’t say anything stupid. I’ll see you by ten.”
I was astonished, looking at the clock, to see it was only a little before nine. I thought I’d been on the river fighting George Dornick my whole life. Another twenty minutes had dragged by before Peter came in, flanked by two cops.
“Petra! Oh my God, you’re safe, Petey . . . Petey . . .” He was at her side, clinging to her, but she pushed him away.
“Daddy, don’t touch me, don’t come near me . . . not until you explain what you did.”
“Don’t talk, Warshawski,” Dornick growled.
“No, you don’t need to talk, Mr. Warshawski,” Bobby agreed. “I’m going to do that. You just take one of those empty seats.”
He laid a slim file on the table: the photo book I’d sent him this afternoon. “We’re going to start at the beginning: Marquette Park, 1966. I was a rookie, and that was a hell of a time to join the police force. Another rookie in my class was Larry Alito. He had the great good luck to be partnered with Tony Warshawski . . . the best cop who ever wore this uniform.”
Bobby looked directly at me for the first time when he said that. I bit my lips together.
“Alito’s badge number was 8963. You can see it here, on the chest of the man picking up a baseball. That ball was a murder weapon used to kill a black girl in the park that day. Harmony Newsome, pride of her family, marching next to a nun. A black kid named Steve Sawyer confessed to the murder, we all know that.”
“Good police work,” Dornick said. “Case closed.”
“Bad police work,” Bobby snapped. “Case reopened. No proper forensic evidence was presented at the trial. We didn’t have the murder weapon then, but it should have been possible to tell from the bruising and contusions and so on that she’d been struck by a projectile, not by someone stabbing her in the eye at close range.”
He tossed the photo book across the table at my uncle. “You and someone else are in these pictures. He throw that ball or you?”
Peter licked his lips, but he looked at the pictures. “Harvey. He told me Dornick said that someone at the march had taken pictures. Damn it, did Tony have them all along?”
Petra was looking at her father, her face strained, very white underneath its layer of grime. When he saw her expression, he winced and looked away.
“Harvey Krumas?” Bobby said.