Of course, Bobby would have met Harvey Krumas and my uncle Peter through my dad. If Peter and Harvey had grown up with George Dornick, I guess it wasn’t surprising Bobby would have met Dornick, too. And since Alito and Dornick worked together, Bobby would have known Alito as well.
Maybe I was reading too much into Bobby’s reaction to their names. But that didn’t stop me from digging around on the Web.
There were hundreds of hits for George Dornick. Dornick had started Mountain Hawk Security when he retired from the force. His website told me that the firm specialized in training police officers around the world in how to do everything from recognizing and combating terrorists to identifying clandestine drug labs. Mountain Hawk provided tactical training for officers needing help with close quarters combat, use of Tasers and other “restraining devices,” wilderness survival for desert- and mountain-based forces, and how to use cars as offensive weapons in urban environments.
“Our clients expect total confidentiality, and we provide that, along with world-class training, so we regret that we can’t supply you with a client list. We have worked with police forces throughout the Americas, in cities, in jungles, and in the punishing Sonoran Desert. We have also sent our experienced personnel into combat zones to provide support for American troops. With offices and equipment in nine strategic locations around the globe, we can be at your next training meeting within hours.”
I found pictures of Dornick, looking alert and combat ready, with everyone from Chicago’s mayor to the president of Colombia. I saw Dornick demonstrate the use of Tasers to women at a domestic-violence shelter and read articles about contracts he’d received from San Diego, Waco, and Phoenix to conduct special border-patrol training sessions. I couldn’t find information about his life as a policeman, but he’d left the force some fifteen years ago.
Alito looked more like the average cop. Forty years on the force, retired to a small lake in northern Illinois. The little bit of press he’d gathered showed a mixed picture. He’d been cited for bravery during a hostage crisis involving armed robbers at a strip mall on Roosevelt Road. Then, six months later, he was accused of using excessive force at the same incident, for killing both robbers, as the situation unraveled. He’d injured one of the hostages, which was why he’d been cen sured, and an unnamed coworker quoted him as saying, “She’s lucky to be alive, and they’re better off dead, so what’s the beef?”
Since a lot of the citizenry agreed that a dead armed robber saved the city the expense of a trial, the letters to the editor were predictably pro-Alito, with a segue into the importance of every American being fully armed at all times.
I stared blankly at the computer for a few minutes, then pulled up a map of Alito’s home. He lived just a mile south of the Wisconsin border, near one of the little lakes that dot the hills northwest of Chicago. A lot of Chicagoans have weekend homes up there. Some, like Alito, retire to live there year-round.
According to MapQuest, the sixty-mile trip from Western and North to Lake Catherine should take about eighty minutes, but they were assuming you were driving at three in the morning during a rare period when neither the Kennedy nor the Edens was under construction. I reached the north shore of Lake Catherine two and a half hours after leaving my office.
It’s true the birds were chirping, the sun was shining, and the air was clearer than on Milwaukee Avenue, but my mood was much grumpier, and I was desperate for a bathroom. That involved back-tracking to the nearest service station, where I spent a little fortune filling my Mustang, used the mercifully clean washroom, and bought a chili dog to tide me over. I’d been so intent on my searches that I’d forgotten lunch, a major violation of the Warshawski family motto: “Never skip a meal.”
It was close to five o’clock when I finally pulled off the road at the top of Queen Anne’s Lace Lane and walked down to Alito’s house. He lived in a yellow split-level shoehorned onto a tiny lot, his neighbors as close as they would have been on the South Side of Chicago. But here, he was just a few steps from the water.
As I’d sat in the tollway traffic, I’d tried to come up with a strategy for getting Alito to talk to me. At one of my PI training seminars, we’d reviewed “techniques for conducting a successful interview.” Get your subject to think you’re on his side. Don’t be confrontational. Establish some common ground that he has to assent to. “So, Larry, did you torture Steve Sawyer?” would not be a good opening gambit. Instead, try, “So, Larry, let’s agree that it was a necessary and good thing to torture Steve Sawyer.”
Alito’s wife answered the door. She was about her husband’s age, somewhere in her sixties, in khaki cargo pants, with faded red curls that reminded me a little of the aging Gwen Verdon. She didn’t smile or greet me with any warmth, but she didn’t slam the door in my face, either. When I explained that I was the daughter of one of her husband’s old partners on the force and hoped Detective Alito and I could talk, her expression lightened minimally.
“Larry just got back from golf. He’s showering. He’ll be down in a minute or two. I’m making supper right now…”
The sentence trailed away vaguely, as if she were afraid I might want to be fed. I assured her that I didn’t need food, or even very much time. Should I wait in my car? That galvanized her into inviting me to come out back, where she was getting ready to put burgers on the grill.
The cramped family room made me think of Miss Ella. Like her home, this one was filled with small china figurines. Ms. Alito seemed to collect angels and kittens rather than African jungle creatures, but everything was clean and carefully arranged, down to little dishes of play milk in front of the kittens. I felt my scalp twitch. There was a sense of desperation in the displays. Still, as I trailed after her through the family room to the kitchen, I made appropriate noises about charm and so on.
“It’s small, of course, but it’s just Larry and me. We have the one son, but he lives in Michigan, and, when he comes to visit, we just put the grandkids in bunk beds on the sunporch. You sit out here on the deck, and I’ll go tell Larry you’re here.”
I walked to the railing and looked around. Lake Catherine was at the end of the road, about thirty yards south of the Alito place. You could just glimpse the gleam of sun on water through the willows and bushes that grew around the shore. The neighbors to the north were grilling; the lots here were so small that the hamburgers and chicken legs were practically under my nose. Despite the chili dog, I was still hungry. I wanted to jump over the fence and grab a drumstick.
A man’s voice came clearly through the open window above me. “You didn’t even get her name? Sheesh, Hazel, don’t you ever think?”
“Oh, for heaven’s sake, Larry, you think every person you meet is going to scam you.”
“And you didn’t find out what she wants?”
“You gotta pay extra if you want me to be your secretary, Mr. Alito.” Hazel’s voice was part sarcasm, part seduction, a disturbing window into their relationship.
Alito grumbled, but the conversation faded, and, a moment or two later, he joined me on the deck. He was fresh from the shower, his thinning hair still dark with water, but his eyes were almost as red as his sunburned nose. He was carrying a can of beer. From the smell of his breath as he came up to me, it was his fifth or sixth of the afternoon.
“Detective Alito, I’m V. I. Warshawski, Tony Warshawski’s daughter.”
“That a fact.” He looked at me without enthusiasm.
“Fact,” I said brightly. “I found a picture of your old slow-pitch team the other night. My dad played first, I think… Is that right?”