GOING HOME, I DROVE EAST ALL THE WAY TO THE BIG LAKE before starting south. I stayed on the local roads. It made for a longer trip, with all the stoplights in the little towns, but the breeze off Lake Michigan was cool, and it was easier to think without the congestion and impatience that clogged the tollway.
Partway down the coastal road, I stopped to walk over to the lake. The water was a purply gray in the summer twilight; I could see running lights away from the shore, but I was alone on the beach. Crickets and frogs chirped around me.
Alito hadn’t been surprised to see me. Who had warned him? I didn’t want to think it was Bobby. That opened the door on a kind of ugly possibility that I couldn’t bear to examine: my father’s best friend in league with a drunk, abusive cop.
Maybe Arnie Coleman had called after seeing me at the Krumas fundraiser. I tried to remember what I’d said when we were sparring at the Krumas table. It was Petra who blurted out that I was working on a case going back to Gage Park in the sixties. And I had mentioned Johnny Merton. If the Sawyer trial lay heavy on Coleman’s conscience, he could have connected the dots, although I had a hard time imagining anything lying heavy on my old boss’s conscience.
The other thing that this afternoon’s interview showed was that Alito knew Lamont Gadsden’s name. Had Lamont been his snitch, then, after all? Had Merton killed Lamont to punish him for fingering Sawyer? The Hammer was capable of anything. Murder was all in a day’s work for him.
Tony would have said the same thing, Alito claimed, that a prisoner in his custody with a bloody nose and a black eye had tripped and fallen against his cell bars. “He would not, you lying little two-bit scumbag. You think because Tony’s dead you can drag him down, but you damned well can’t.”
My heart was pounding. I thought I might choke to death, there on the shores of Lake Michigan. Christmas Eve, it came back to me suddenly. Christmas Eve, when I was in bed and my parents were in the kitchen, their reassuring laughter coming up the stairs. Had Bobby been there? Someone, a friend, having a glass of wine, and Alito stopped by. He and my father were arguing.
“You got your promotion. That’s enough, isn’t it?” my father said, and Alito replied, “You want to see him in prison?”
I had crept down the stairs, anxious, and heard my mother sharply call my name. I scurried back up the stairs, lying on the attic floor, straining to hear, but my dad and Alito lowered their voices.
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.