“You’re just like your tight-assed bitch of a mother, acting like she was the Madonna and all the saints poured into one—”

“Call me any name you like, you two-bit bully, but do not insult Gabriella.” My hands on my hips, my face close to his. He backed away.

The silence lingered between us. Peter was fidgeting, worried about what I knew, what I might say. But I was weary, of him, of fighting, of myself. And when I finally spoke again, it took an effort to go through the motions.

“You went to Marquette Park in 1966, but you didn’t kill Harmony Newsome and you don’t know who did. But you sent Petra out looking for the evidence just in case it came back to bite you. Only it’s bitten Petra instead. Take it from there … Tell me how you’re protecting her.”

His face was white underneath the stubble. “Don’t preach at me. You’re the one who got Petey in trouble in the first place, introducing her to gangbangers and taking her to slums.”

“No, no, no.” My hands were over my ears, trying to stop the barrage of lies. “She wheedled me until I took her to see all the different houses you and Grandma Warshawski and Tony had lived in. I thought at the time Petra was behaving strangely, especially her wanting to see where everyone stored their stuff. I tried to get her to tell me why, and she wouldn’t. But of course she wanted to see if, by any chance, Tony had left behind that photograph!”

“You’re making this shit up to cover your own butt,” my uncle said.

“Peter, someone ID’d Petra, ID’d her standing on Houston Avenue while thugs threw a smoke bomb into the house and ransacked it. What did you have her doing?”

“People make mistakes all the time when they’re asked to ID someone. Petra wasn’t there. You might have bought off a witness—”

“To get my own cousin in trouble? Or for any reason whatsoever?” I wanted to pick him up and bang his head against the concrete barricade above us.

“Do you understand, I am crazy with worry. I will say or do anything to see Petra doesn’t get hurt. And if that means accusing you—of anything—I’ll do it.”

“You know they’ll never let Petra walk away from this,” I said. “When they find her, they’ll dump her body someplace where they can implicate one of Johnny Merton’s boys. They’d like it to be Steve Sawyer, of course, as Dornick suggested in Strangwell’s office yesterday. Dude’s already gone down once instead of you, why not twice?”

“Dornick told me back then that Sawyer was a killer, he and Merton both,” Peter burst out. “Sawyer was just going to prison for a different murder than the one he actually did.”