“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
LINE SPINNERS
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.
“I don’t know if the FBI is involved. Homeland Security took the pictures.” I explained what I’d learned from today’s interview, including the news that the feds photographed everyone entering and leaving.
“That’s so outrageous. Why on earth?”
“I don’t know. When they questioned me in the hospital, they were dancing like rhinos around the subject. They implied it could be because of your tenants. You’re the one who knows if you’re treading on their toes.”
“Treading on their toes? It’s true we protest at the School of the Americas. We work with poor immigrants, with refugees, with people on death row. We’re involved in affordable housing. And peace. But we don’t do anything clandestine or immoral. We don’t sell drugs or weapons or spy on people.”
“You know darned well you’re rocking the whole aircraft carrier with those issues. America as armed camp is the status quo. Peace, letting in immigrants, ending torture, ending the death penalty: no wonder they think you’re a threat. There must be a whole floor of that building on the Potomac dedicated to your Freedom Center.”
“But that means we’re endangering the other tenants,” Zabinska said, worried. “We don’t own the building, but the management company that does has been pretty generous. They let us run the Freedom Center out of the ground-floor apartments. Five of us sisters attached to the center rent there, and we’ve ended up working with a lot of the other tenants because so many are either refugees or are trying to figure out how to get health care or housing vouchers. Maybe we should see about moving the ones who’re most at risk for deportation. Everyone’s pretty scared as it is because of the fire bombs.”
“You’d better be very careful where and how you talk about it,” I warned her. “They probably are listening to all your conversations, not just your phones.”