Hardball

8

THAT NIGHT, OVER DINNER AT LOTTY’S, I DESCRIBED MY frustrating day. After listening to my description of Pastor Hebert, Lotty said it sounded as though he had Parkinson’s disease. “The fixed staring, trouble talking, those you often see in an advanced stage of the illness. He must be ninety, wouldn’t you guess? We don’t know enough about how to manage the disease, and these symptoms are hard to control, especially in a man who’s that old.”

“Presumably he has other problems or his daughter wouldn’t be afraid of him,” I said. “She’s sixtyish, he’s dependent on her, but she lets him run her around as if she were a robot.”

“Yes, brainwashing also leaves symptoms that are hard to manage.” Lotty gave a wry smile. “I saw Karen Lennon at a staff meeting this afternoon. She’s worried that she might have made a mistake in introducing you to her patient-her ‘client,’ I suppose I should say.”

“It’s a little late for Karen to be second-guessing herself, not when I’ve spent a day stirring the pot and getting the phone tree shaking among all the women at Pastor Hebert’s church.”

Lotty laughed. “I think that’s what has her worried. Karen’s very young. She doesn’t know how much excitement a detective can bring to a closed community.”

“She should call me, not try to get you to do it for her. But I’ll talk to her in the morning,” I grumbled.

“Don’t take her head off as well as mine,” Lotty said. “If you worked with other people all day long instead of in a hole by yourself, you’d understand how natural it was for her to talk to me during a meeting.”

“After spending a day with people who twitch when they see me coming, I’d be happier in a hole by myself. As long as it had a cappuccino machine.”

“Yes, we’ll decorate it and make it gemütlich, a cozy hole. I’ll send a courier in every day with a fresh bottle of milk and a basket of fruit and cheese.” She squeezed my hand. “You’re still in mourning for Morrell, aren’t you?”

“Not mourning, exactly.” I fiddled with the heavy silver. “More questioning myself, to be my age and not able to keep a stable relationship going. In the back of my mind, I always imagined a child, a family, at this point in my life.”

Lotty raised her brows. “I’m not criticizing you, Victoria-God knows, I have no right-but you haven’t lived like someone who wanted a child.”

“No, I’ve lived like the pepperpot my father always called me, throwing dust up the nose of any man who came close to me… Is that what you mean?”

“No, my dear. So you’re irascible, well, so am I, so are many people. But you put the community ahead of yourself. It’s a different form of the female disease, the one you just lamented in Rose Hebert. Your clients need you, the women at the shelter need you, even I need you. Men can put the community first and come home to domestic life, but women, we’re still like nuns in a way: if we have a strong vocation, it’s hard to meet our private needs.”

Her words made me feel unbearably lonely. “So I’m a noncelibate nun.” I tried to turn it into a joke, but my voice cracked. “You’ve worked things out without Max, though.”

She smiled sadly. “After many years as lonely as yours, my dear.”

The curved windows reflected the candles on her dining-room table. I watched the multiple flames the glass created. Some of the tension of the day eased out of my shoulders.

We moved the conversation to lighter topics: our planned picnic to Ravinia to hear Denyce Graves sing, Lotty’s new perinatology fellow who had cried out that she loved Jane Austen. “She was the one who went to Africa to study the monkeys, right?” Around nine, Lotty sent me home since she had an early call. She doesn’t do much surgery anymore, but she still goes early to the hospital to monitor her fellows’ work.

I checked my messages on my way home. Karen Lennon had called to say she’d stopped at the VA and given Elton Grainger the name and address of an SRO, which had rooms for homeless vets. She was a conscientious young pastor, no doubt about it.

When I got home, Mr. Contreras erupted from his apartment. “There you are, doll. I couldn’t remember your cellphone number, and you never gave it to your cousin, so we been sitting here, hoping you’d get home before midnight.”

“Vic!” Petra bounced out behind him, Mitch wrapping himself around her legs. “I feel like such an idiot, but I lost my keys and didn’t know what to do. So I thought maybe you could put me up for the night, but Uncle Sal said you could probably get into the building, that you knew how to open anything that isn’t electronic. So here I am!”

Her cellphone rang in the middle of her hearty peal of laughter. She looked at the screen, then answered it with a breathless account of her life to date, or at least her lost keys, her visit to Uncle Sal and me, and where she planned to meet everybody once she got back into her own home.

“You ever hear of a locksmith, either of you?” I bent to stroke Peppy, who was whining for attention.

“Yes, but they wanted, like, hundreds of dollars to come after hours, and I don’t have hundreds of dollars. They hardly pay me anything at the campaign, you know.” Her phone rang again, and she repeated her story.

“I thought your dad had the odd dollar lying around,” I objected when she’d hung up. “Not that you aren’t welcome to sleep on my couch tonight.”

“If Daddy finds out I’ve been this stupid, he’ll never stop lecturing me on how I’m too immature to be alone in the big bad city.”

“Didn’t Peter get you the job on Brian Krumas’s campaign?”

“Oh, he did, he did. But he expected me to live, like, in a convent, or at least share an apartment. He pulled a Vesuvius when he found out I’d rented my own place.”

She answered another call. At that point, I decided it would be easier to get her back into her own home than listen to her phone all night long. Mr. Contreras, Mitch, and Peppy announced they’d all like to see where Petra lived, too. I bundled the dogs into the Mustang. The old man was delighted to accept Petra’s invitation to ride with her in her Pathfinder.

Petra’s place was in a loft building at the tony end of Bucktown, about ten blocks from my office. Parking was at a premium, and I had to cover part of a yellow hydrant line and hope for the best.

Petra held a flashlight on her front door for me. As I knelt on the sidewalk, wiggling my picklocks inside the lock, she answered another phone call. “My cousin is, like, this detective, and she’s breaking into my building,” she shouted to anyone on Wolcott Street who might be listening. “No, really, she’s, like, NCIS or Saving Grace or something. She solves murders, she has a gun… everything!”

I took the phone from her and stuffed it into my back pocket. “Petra, darling, not while I’m out here doing something highly illegal. Any cop who’s cruising around can listen in on your frequency. And, anyway, you’re talking loudly enough for everyone on the block to hear you.”

She pouted, an exaggerated, self-spoof of a crybaby, but she held the flashlight steady until the tumblers clicked back. We climbed three flights to her place where I repeated the maneuver. In my hip pocket, her phone rang two more times before I got her front door opened. Her keys were on the floor just inside.

She gave another husky laugh. “Look at that! I dropped them on my way out. I was so late, I guess I grabbed them with my coffee and my phone and didn’t see they weren’t in my hand when I left. Oh, Vic, you are a genius. Thank you, thank you, thank you. What can I do for you? Would you like a free invite to our fundraiser out on Navy Pier? It’s twenty-five hundred a head. Brian’s going to be there. Wouldn’t you love to meet him? The president may stop in, although we’ve been told not to count on it. We’ve rented the whole east end of the pier, it’ll be so cool. And, Uncle Sal, you should come, too.”

I’ve been to too many fundraisers for my heart to skip a beat at the prospect, but the invitation thrilled Mr. Contreras. An inside seat at a high-end event: it would raise his prestige at his weekly trips to the lodge, where his old union buddies meet to shoot pool along with the breeze.

“Do I need a tuxedo or something?” the old man worried as we turned to leave.

“Wear your overalls and your union badge. Krumas probably wants to look like he’s the people’s candidate,” I advised.

“Vic! Don’t be so cynical,” Petra scolded. “Although, do you have a union badge, Uncle Sal?”

“No, but I got me a Bronze Star, you know, from getting nicked at Anzio.”

Her eyes shone. “Oh, wear your medals, that’ll be so fab. I’ll come over and trim your hair. Kelsey and me, we got pretty good with the shears, primping each other in Africa.”

As we drove home, Mr. Contreras chuckled to himself. “She’s quite a gal, your cousin. She could charm the socks off a rock. You could learn a thing or two from her, you know.”

“Like how to charm socks off a rock?” My memory from this afternoon, my old supervisor telling me to “flash my assets,” came to mind. “You think I’m too surly?”

“Wouldn’t hurt you to smile more at people. You know what they say, doll: you catch more flies with honey.”

“Assuming you want a whole bunch of flies filling up the place.” I waited while he opened the front door, then took the dogs for a final skip around the block.

Would Petra have charmed Curtis Rivers’s socks off, gotten him to tell her all he knew about Lamont Gadsden? I tried to imagine myself skipping into Fit for Your Hoof, a jolly laugh bubbling out of my throat. It was easier to imagine myself tap-dancing backward in high heels.

I poured a glass of whisky and watched a few innings of the Cubs- San Francisco game. Pitching, the perennial Cubs weakness, reared its ugly head again. I went to bed with the good guys down by three runs in the fifth.

I was in the middle of a terrifying dream, Petra laughing heartily as a swarm of flies crawled down my cleavage, when the phone rescued me. I sat up, heart pounding from the horrific image, and grabbed the phone.

“Is this the detective?”

It was a woman, her voice soft and deep, but in my groggy state I couldn’t place it. I looked at the clock: it was three in the morning.

“I’m sorry if I woke you, but I’ve been thinking and thinking about Lamont. If I let it go another day, maybe I won’t have the nerve to pick up the phone a second time.”

“Rose Hebert.” I said her name aloud as I realized who she was. “Yes, what about Lamont?”

A pause, a sucking in of breath, preparing for the high dive. “I saw him that night.”

“Which night?” I leaned back against the headboard, knees drawn up to my chin, trying to wake up.

“When he left home. January twenty-fifth.”

“You mean Lamont came to you after he left his mother’s house?”

“He didn’t come to me.” She was speaking hurriedly. Behind her, I could hear the sounds of the hospital, the incessant pages, an ambulance siren. “I was… I was out after church. Wednesday night, you know, midweek church. Daddy was meeting with the deacons after the service, so I left alone. I went for a walk. It was so warm, you remember?”

The record heat for January before the big snow began. Everyone who lived through it still marvels at it.

“I went looking for Lamont. I was so confused, I wanted to see him. And I was pretending it was church business, pretending in my head, the way you do, that I wanted him to come to the youth group and tell us what it was like to work near Dr. King, although Daddy didn’t approve of churches getting involved in social action.”

She drew a shuddering breath, half a sob, then whispered, “I just needed to see him, try to get him to touch me again, the way he had that summer. But, like I said, I was pretending I had some bigger, purer reason.”

Once she’d let her shameful memory out, her breathing came more easily, and her voice returned to a deeper pitch. “I found him, or, anyway, I saw him, at the corner of Sixty-third and Morgan. He was with Johnny Merton, going into the Waltz Right Inn-you know, the old blues joint there? It’s been gone twenty years now, but, back then, it was the center of entertainment in my part of town. Not for me, not for Pastor Hebert’s girl, but for all the kids I went to high school with-”

“So what were Johnny and Lamont doing?” I asked when she broke off.

“Oh, I couldn’t follow them! Daddy would have heard faster than you can spit! I just sat across the street, watching the door, watching kids I’d known my whole life passing in and out. Wednesday was church night, but it was also jam night. Alberta Hunter came sometimes, Tampa Red, all the big names, along with guys starting out. You don’t know how much I wanted to be there, instead of at church.” The phone vibrated from the passion in her voice.

“Did you see them come out again, Johnny Merton and Lamont?”

“Daddy found me before Lamont came out. I was sitting across the street in my coat, even though it was still warm. I couldn’t go outdoors in January without my winter coat, not in my family. I remember thinking how stupid it was, sixty degrees and me in that heavy wool thing, and then Daddy came along. He hit me, told me what a common girl I was, what a sinner, what a bringer of shame, to Jesus and to him, lingering outside a bar like a street girl.”

The words tumbled out like water from a fire hydrant, spraying me with their force.

“The next day was the snow. I went on down to school in the morning, even though my face was all purple and swollen from where Daddy hit me. And I was so thankful for the blizzard. I had to spend two nights there at the college, sleeping on the floor with all the other girls. It was the only time in my life where I got to be just one of the girls. White girls, black girls, we all just lay there in the dark, talking about our families and our boyfriends, and I even acted like Lamont was my boy… Well, anyway, when the snow ended and I got back home, Lamont was gone. No one ever saw him again, not that I knew. And I couldn’t go to Johnny Merton. Someone would have told Daddy, and I couldn’t take another-”

Another beating, I filled in silently when she clipped off the sentence. “Did you ask any of Lamont’s friends about him? Anyone who might have known why he was talking to Merton?”

“I did, but not till later. At first, when I didn’t see him around, I thought Lamont was avoiding me. I thought God was punishing me. I was so confused in my head, I couldn’t decide if God was punishing me for not going off with Lamont when he asked me that past September or if He was punishing me for letting Lamont touch me.” She gave an embarrassed snort of laughter.

“I finally asked Curtis Rivers, but that wasn’t until maybe a month or six weeks went by, and he was just as puzzled as me.”

“Was Curtis Rivers with the Anacondas, too?” I asked.

“I never did know for sure who was, who wasn’t. I was the preacher’s kid, I was the stuck-up girl, they didn’t talk to me the way they did the other girls in the neighborhood. I don’t think Curtis was-he shipped out to Vietnam, anyway, round about May of ’sixty-seven-he was just the boy everyone trusted. Gang, straight, whatever… Curtis, he didn’t play sides. Should have been him I broke my heart over, not a no-good street boy like Lamont.” She laughed again, less bitterly this time.

“So is Miss Ella right? Was Lamont dealing drugs?”

“Not the way she meant. I mean, she makes it sound like the South Side was floating on Lamont Gadsden’s heroin sales. But she’s like my daddy: you move a quarter inch off the straight and narrow, you’re Satan’s child for sure. And after Lamont disappeared, Sister Ella, she carried on as if nothing had happened. Just held herself straighter, if any back not made out of cast iron could be held so straight. But Sister Claudia, Lamont’s going just about broke her heart.”

“Miss Ella says she and Miss Claudia went to the police. Did you ever hear anything about that?”

“Oh, they went. But the cops, they were so ugly. It was like they did this work they hated, looking after Dr. King that summer-1966, I mean-and then couldn’t wait to take it out on any black person who crossed their path. I went with Sister Ella and Claudia to the station house, and the way those cops acted, you’d think those two women had shot the president. Pigs? My, yes, they were pigs.”

I felt the jolt that the insult always gave me.

“You think there’s any hope, any chance, you might find him?” She spoke in a soft, shy voice, as if afraid I might mock her deepest feelings.

I wanted to tell her something heartening, hope filled, something that would put life back in her voice. I wanted to spread some honey out for her, but I could only tell the truth, the fact that I thought Lamont Gadsden was either dead or so deeply hidden that no one would ever find him unless he chose to come forward himself.

“I’ll talk to Johnny Merton,” I found myself promising. “It’s been forty years, but maybe Johnny remembers what they talked about.”

“Don’t use my name,” she begged. “If Daddy hears about it, or the ladies at church…”

“You don’t have to go home to him, you know,” I said quietly. “Even now it’s not too late for you to start your own life. I have the phone number for-”

“Oh, once your spirit gets broke, it doesn’t matter where you lay your head at night.” Her voice had grown low again with weariness. “But if you learn anything, call me here at the hospital. My shift runs eleven to seven, Thursday through Monday.”