Hardball

11

AT MY OFFICE, I FOUND PETRA HAD WRITTEN THANK YOU in big Magic Marker capitals on a piece of paper with a giant cookie from the coffee shop across the street taped to it. The ingenuous message made me feel marginally better, although I gave the cookie to Elton, who was outside again.

I also found a message from my temporary agency saying they had a Marilyn Klimpton available who met all my requirements including familiarity with legal databases. She’d start in the morning. That was a mercy.

Still, the only thing that would really make me feel better was to understand why Rivers was so furious with me. I spent the rest of the day trying to find out more about both him and Sawyer. My first search had been superficial. Now I went deeper into databases that cost more money. I couldn’t charge these to Miss Ella, but I needed to learn what lay behind Rivers’s rage.

Nothing came back to link either man to me. Rivers had served in the army from May 1967 through July 1969, with his year in Vietnam sandwiched in near the beginning. He’d been married; his wife died three years ago. They hadn’t had any children. He had a sister and two brothers, both living in the Chicago area; I put their phone numbers in my case file. Rivers had never been arrested, and none of his siblings had ties to any of the people whose arrests I’d made possible, at least not in the last six years. Amy Blount had created a database of all the people I’d dealt with during that time, so it was easy to cross-check his name and address against my recent cases.

When I’d exhausted the Net, I dragged out the boxes I’d brought with me from my three years with the public defender. Of course, most of the material had stayed in their offices at Twenty-sixth and California, but my own notes and records still made a tidy pile when I’d emptied them onto my big worktable. I couldn’t possibly check all those old cases, but I did pull out my files on Johnny Merton. Curtis’s name never came up. Neither did Steve Sawyer’s.

I called a friend of mine who had connections to the State’s Attorney’s Office and asked if they could locate the trial transcript for Sawyer’s trial. And, yes, I knew what it would cost me to get a copy and, yes, I would pay for it.

I slid all the papers back into their boxes and tried to turn my attention to other jobs. I was wrapping things up for the day when my friend at the SA’s office called back.

“No record of a Steve Sawyer in 1966 or ’67, but things were a little sloppy back then. Any hints on the exact trial date?”

I looked through the notes I’d made at the university library. “The vic’s name was Harmony Newsome, but I don’t know the trial date.”

He promised to have another look in the morning. Right after he hung up, my cousin Petra phoned.

“Vic, you were a lifesaver to let me use your computer! Did you get your cookie? Do you remember you and Uncle Sal are coming to Brian’s big fundraiser next week? I need to get names on a list since the president might come.”

“Yes, indeed, your uncle Sal is counting the minutes. You spell Warshawski W… A…”

“Yeah, I know. It’s like a warrior in a rickshaw going skiing. How do you think I passed first grade? I was the only kid in my school who knew what a rickshaw was.”

We both laughed, and I felt better when I’d hung up. Maybe Mr. Contreras was right. Maybe I did need to be more like my cousin, learn to charm the socks off rocks.

The next day, I resolutely put the whole Gadsden case out of my head. Lotty and I were having our weekly dinner that night. I arrived a bit late, since a job had taken me to the DuPage County Court-house, and the traffic back to the city was typically sludgelike. When Lotty let me into her apartment, I was surprised to hear voices in the background. She hadn’t told me anyone else was coming.

Max Loewenthal was on the balcony that looked across Lake Shore Drive to Lake Michigan. He and Karen Lennon were both holding wineglasses. She was laughing at something he was saying.

“Ah, Victoria!” Max came forward to kiss me. We hadn’t seen each other since my return from Italy. “How good it is to see you again, and looking so very refreshed from your trip.”

That was typical of Max. I looked about as refreshed as a month-old jar of dandelions. He poured wine for me-Lotty doesn’t drink, except for the occasional medicinal brandy, but Max keeps part of his important cellar at her apartment. We chatted over the Echézeau, while Lotty heated up some duck she’d bought at a carry-out place near the hospital.

Max knows Italy well. Over dinner, we talked about the wines of Torgiano, and the Piero frescoes in Arezzo. When I described the stage in Siena where my mother had trained and sung, Lotty and Max got into a side argument about the production of Don Carlos they’d seen there in 1958.

Finally, over coffee, Max came to the point. “I saw Karen this afternoon at an ethics committee meeting, and when she told me she needed to see you I asked Lotty to include her tonight.”

“Not that I object, but I’m not hard to reach. Or has Miss Ella asked you to slip me some poison?”

Karen had drunk her share of the heavy burgundy, and she giggled with more hilarity than my comment merited. “I guess you and she had kind of a quarrel yesterday morning.”

“You could say that. She’s annoyed with me for trying to find one of her son’s friends, and I’m annoyed with her for hampering the investigation and keeping me away from her sister.”

“I think Miss Claudia would like to talk to you, if she can get the words out clearly enough for you to understand. She had her own fight with her sister after you spoke to her, and it had something to do with that friend of Lamont’s. That’s why I wanted to see you as soon as possible, to talk to you about him.”

“You’ve run into Steve Sawyer?” I couldn’t disguise my surprise.

“No. But one of my projects is serving on the Committee to End the Death Penalty, and the chair, she’s a Dominican nun named Frankie-Frances-Kerrigan. She may know something.”

“I didn’t think he got the death sentence, but maybe he was executed, and they didn’t keep a record.” Maybe that was why Curtis Rivers was so furious.

Karen shook her head. “No, no. Today’s my day for racing around Chicago doing good works-death penalty this morning, hospital ethics this afternoon. I had just come from seeing Miss Ella, so she was on top of my mind. And while we were waiting for the rest of the group to arrive, I told Frankie how frustrated I felt, having sicced you on the case, and how it was impossible to figure out what was going on with Miss Ella. Well, Frankie asked a few questions, the way people do to be polite if they see you’re troubled, but when she realized it had to do with that civil rights time she got really interested. It turns out she was in Marquette Park the day the girl was killed, the one Steve Sawyer was arrested for murdering.”

“What?” I was startled into sloshing coffee over Lotty’s linen napkins.

“Yes, Frankie had really bucked the tide of the South Side. Her family lived in Gage Park, and her father was furious when she got interested in the civil rights movement. But her mother kind of quietly supported her. That’s when Frankie found her vocation as a nun. They were so brave, those sisters. They still are, actually. She lives and works at something called the Mighty Waters Freedom Center.”

“Harmony Newsome,” I interjected, trying to steer her back on course.

“Sorry, right. Frankie had been in Selma with Ella Baker, and she was marching with King and the others in Chicago. And she was with Harmony Newsome when Newsome was killed. Isn’t that incredible?”

“It’s extraordinary. Did she… What did she… the killer… Did she see…”

“I don’t know what she knows about it. All she told me was that Steve Sawyer’s arrest had always troubled her, and she’d like to talk to you.”

I bombarded Karen with questions: why had the arrest troubled the nun, had she seen the actual murder, had she stayed in touch with Sawyer?

Karen held up her hands, protesting. “Ask Frankie. I don’t know any of that stuff.”

Max laughed. “Victoria, I seldom actually see you at work, but now I understand why you are so attached to that large dog of yours: you are very like a retriever trying to flush a rabbit, you know.”

I joined in the general laughter, and in Lotty’s effort to turn the conversation in a different direction. Max brought out a bottle of Armagnac, and even Lotty drank a little. We lingered late, unwilling to give up the warmth around Lotty’s table, unwilling to go back to the world of coldness, of homelessness, of desperation, where Karen and I both worked.

As we rode the elevator down, Karen brought me abruptly back to that world.

“I checked with the SRO where I found a room for your homeless friend. He didn’t show up, and I wondered about that. It wasn’t easy finding a place. Low-income housing is disappearing faster than the rain forests.”

“It was good of you to go out of your way, but he seems to be a guy who’s so allergic to other people that he’d rather take his chances on the street.”

We had reached her car. As she got in, I commented on how packed her life was, her work at Lionsgate, with the homeless, the death penalty. “What do you ever do to relax?”

“What do you do?” she said pertly. “Except for your Italian trip, it sounds like you’re at it morning, noon, and night.”

I laughed it off. But as I walked the two blocks farther to my own car, I had to agree, I wasn’t living much of a life these days.