“A race riot, you mean. When blacks were tearing down the neighborhood.”

“Those came later. This was a white riot, your father and your uncle Harvey and about eight thousand other people screaming and yelling at Martin Luther King. The pictures show your father and your uncle Harvey in the vicinity of the murder of a black woman. They show a police officer—I’m guessing it was either George Dornick or Larry Alito—pocketing the murder weapon. Later, Dornick and Alito tortured a black man into confessing to the murder.”

“No, you’re lying! Daddy couldn’t … Uncle Harvey wouldn’t—”

I cut her off. “I know how you feel, because my father was involved, too. He watched the torture, and when he tried to stop it they threatened to send Peter to prison. So my father—my father, the best man I’ve ever known—he turned his back on the torturers to save Peter. And later he took the baseball—that Nellie Fox baseball, the murder weapon—to save your father from prison.”

“That’s not true!” Petra screamed, getting to her feet. “You’re making this up!”

“I wish I was.” I got to my feet, too, and reached under my shirt for the photo album. The light was too dim for her to make out much, but she pretended to study the pages.

“Sister Frankie was at the march with the murdered woman. She was killed to keep her from talking to me. Why do you think they sent you to her apartment to collect evidence? It was to keep someone like me from turning it over to the cops. That building is under Homeland Security surveillance because the nuns provide assistance to immigrants, but they didn’t take your picture, or Larry Alito’s, the night you two showed up, because George Dornick has good connections to Homeland Security.”

“I can’t let you publish these,” she whispered. “You mustn’t, you mustn’t.”

“Petra, forty years of wrong are sitting on us. On you and me, I mean. Forty years of wrong our own fathers did. I can’t even guess how many other men Dornick and Alito tortured. I can’t keep quiet, not to save Peter, not even to save Tony.”

“Oh, damn you,” she choked. “It’s like Uncle Sal says, you’re the only who gets to be right. The rest of us don’t count in your uni verse.”

“Damn you, too, Petra Warshawski. You’ve put my life in danger along with your own. If you’d told me all this a month ago, Sister Frankie might still be alive. How many people have to die to protect Peter?”