Hardball by Sara Paretsky Read Free Book Online Page A

Gabriella loved life, me, music—above all, music. When she sang, especially Mozart, she moved to a different world where rich and poor, fair and unfair, didn’t matter, only sound. What did Miss Ella have that brought her to such a place? What did I have, come to think of it?
    A heart-stopping thud on my car window brought me back to Racine Avenue. It was Mr. Contreras, my downstairs neighbor. Mitch, the giant lab-golden, jumped up on the car, his paws on the Mustang’s roof, and began to bark. I got out of the car, pushing him out of the way.
    “We began to wonder if maybe you had a stroke out here, doll, you was sitting so long. And you got company, cute young gal, says she’s a cousin, although she’s so young I thought maybe she was a niece or something. But, then, families do stretch out both ways, don’t they? She’s on your pop’s side, I guess, since she says she’s a Warshawski. I didn’t know you had any relatives . . .”
    Mitch punctuated the old man’s flood of words with hysterical barks. He and Peppy, his mother, had both been clinging to me since my return home. In my absence, a dog service had run them twice a day, but they needed the reassurance that I wasn’t going to abandon them again. Mitch ignored my commands to be quiet and to sit. By the time I’d wrestled him out of the street and into position on the sidewalk, I was panting. Peppy, who’d sat through the whole proceeding with the saintly expression that makes other dogs hate golden retrievers, now started threading herself through my legs, giving little whimpers of greeting.
    “Could you start at the beginning?” I asked my neighbor, my hand on Mitch’s collar. “Like my cousin. Who is she? Where is she? And so on.”
    Mr. Contreras beamed. He loves family—my family, anyway. He seldom sees his married daughter, Ruthie, or his two grandchildren. “Didn’t you know? Your own cousin, didn’t her ma tell you? She’s come to work in Chicago, and she’s renting a place in Bucktown.”
    Bucktown was Chicago’s newest Yuppieville, about a mile south of us. Ten years ago, it was a quiet working-class neighborhood, mostly Polish and Mexican, when the ominous happened: young artists looking for cheap studio space moved in. Now the artists can’t afford the rents and are moving farther west, while the natives are long gone, to the depressed fringe neighborhoods on the far South Side.
    I took my groceries out of the trunk and walked up the sidewalk with my neighbor. If this was a Warshawski cousin, it had to be one of my uncle Peter’s kids. He’d been a lot younger than my dad, and had started his family late in life, after he left Chicago for Kansas City, so I didn’t know him or my cousins at all. I’d gotten birth announcements over the years, one daughter after another. Petra, Kimberly, and then a blur of Stephanie, Alison, Jordan, something like that.
    As we got to the door, a young woman bounced down the steps with all of Mitch’s enthusiasm. She was tall and blond, and her low-cut, skimpy peasant blouse, with vest, skirt, leggings, and high-heeled boots, proclaimed her a serious Millennium Gen fashionista, but her wide smile was genuine. It made her look so much like a vibrant, feminine version of my father that I put down my groceries and held out my arms.
    “Petra?” I ventured.
    “I am, I am.” She hugged me back, bending over my five-foot-eight frame and squeezing hard. “Sorry to drop in uninvited, but I just got settled this afternoon, and Daddy told me you lived here, near me, and I didn’t have any appointments, so I came scurrying up to see you. Uncle Sal—isn’t he sweet? He told me to call him that!—he’s been feeding me tea in the garden and telling me all the cases he’s worked on with you. You’re awesome, Tori!”
    Tori. My family nickname. Since my cousin Boom-Boom’s death twelve years ago, no one had used it, and it was startling to hear it on this stranger’s lips. And now Mr. Contreras