Hardball

18

ROSE ANSWERED THE DOOR IN ANOTHER SOBER DRESS, this one a navy dotted Swiss. She looked at me with a flicker of eagerness.

“Have you learned something about Lamont?”

It was painful to tell her no, to watch the dull, heavy expression settle on her face again. “I need some advice or insight-something like that-into Johnny Merton or Curtis Rivers.”

She gave a self-derisive bark of laughter. “I don’t know enough about life or those two men to have insights into their minds.”

“You’re selling yourself short, Ms. Hebert,” I said gently. “I don’t have news for you, but I’ve been to see both men, and I’ve talked to people who knew Steve Sawyer. There’s been a suggestion that Lamont might have flipped on Steve, might have led the police to Steve Sawyer, might have said Sawyer was Harmony Newsome’s murderer.”

“Oh no! I… Oh-”

The house bell had begun to ring behind her, and she turned fearfully away from me. “He wants to know who’s at the door, what’s keeping me so long.”

I grabbed her wrist and led her down the shallow stone steps. “Maybe he’s ninety-three, but he’s not too old to learn how to cope with frustration. Where can we sit where you’ll be comfortable?”

She looked back at the house but finally muttered that there was a coffee shop on Langley where she often stopped for breakfast on her way home from the hospital. We drove over to the Pullman Workers Diner in my Mustang, where the waitresses greeted Rose by name and looked at me with frank curiosity. Rose ordered coffee and blueberry pie. I had a slice of rhubarb to keep her company.

“I don’t even know where to start,” she murmured when we’d been served. “It’s all so wrong. Steve, Harmony, I don’t believe that. But even if he did kill her, Lamont-oh, he and Steve were best friends growing up-Lamont would never have turned him in to the police.”

“Did Harmony live in your neighborhood?”

“She and her family, they were up the street from us, but they went to a Baptist church that Daddy said wasn’t a true church. And they were rich. Mr. Newsome, he was a lawyer. And Harmony’s brother, he went off to law school and became a professor out east someplace. Harmony was in college down in Atlanta. She got involved in the civil rights movement down there, and, when she came home for summer vacations, she talked it up in her church’s youth group. She talked at a lot of the churches in our neighborhood, but not at Daddy’s church, because he thinks women don’t belong speaking up in church, like it says in Saint Paul. And, besides, he doesn’t think church people belong marching on the streets. We belong in the pews.”

She bent over her coffee, stirring it as fiercely as if it were her father, or her own life, she were attacking. “I shouldn’t say this, but I was so jealous of Harmony. She was so pretty. She got to go to a fancy college, Spelman, while I had to scrimp to put together money for nursing school. And, then, the boys were all spellbound by her. When I first heard she was dead, I was glad.”

I reached across the table and pressed her free hand. “You didn’t kill her by being jealous of her, you know.”

She looked up briefly, her face contorted in pain. “All the boys followed her around, even the ones who went to our church, which is why I never could believe Lamont really cared about me. I figured he thought I’d be an easy mark, big old ugly girl like me no one else wanted. If he couldn’t have Harmony, he’d make do with me. But I don’t think any of the boys would have killed her, not out of jealousy like they claimed Steve did. She never went out with him, never went out with any local boys. Far as I knew, she was in love with the movement, not with any boy, not even some college boy in Atlanta with her same background.”

“Were Steve and Lamont at the Marquette Park march?”

“Daddy ordered everyone in our church to stay away, but Lamont and Steve, they ignored him. Johnny Merton, he’d taken part in the deal the gangs made with Dr. King, that they wouldn’t fight that summer, and, in exchange, they provided protection along the march routes.”

She sucked in a breath, remembering, and continued very softly. “Oh, Daddy was angry. He hated having his authority crossed. When Steve and Lamont did what Johnny wanted, not what their own pastor said, he read them out of the congregation. It was a terrible, terrible Sunday, and after church Daddy told me my own soul was in danger if I ever even spoke to Lamont Gadsden again. Even so, if I had to go to the store or something, I’d take a route that led me past his home, or Carver’s Lounge, where he and the other Anacondas shot pool…” Her voice trailed away.

This morning, George Dornick told me Lamont had been the person who fingered Steve Sawyer for him and Alito. I remembered the funny look he’d given me when I’d asked. Maybe it had really been Pastor Hebert, furious with his two parishioners, wanting to get the police to take care of them for him?

“How angry was your father with Steve and Lamont?” I asked Rose abruptly. “Could he have turned them in to the police?”

“What a terrible suggestion! How dare you even think a thing like that!” She pushed her chair away from the table. “Daddy is the holiest man on the South Side!”

Like Tony had been the best cop on the South Side? Were we daughters always like this, always ready to leap to our fathers’ defense even against the evidence?

I looked into her flushed face. “Ms. Hebert, I apologize for speaking so bluntly. I shouldn’t have said the first thought that came into my mind. You say you don’t believe Lamont was a police informant, and certainly not your father. Who, then?”

She twisted her fingers together. “Does it have to be one or the other?”

“No. It could be someone I haven’t even heard of, some two-bit player in the Anacondas. But I went over to Stateville to see Johnny, and he’s pretending he never heard of Lamont. That makes me think, well, I’m sorry to give you the harsh unedited workings of my mind again, but-”

“You think Johnny murdered Lamont? I wondered, too, when he disappeared… But it’s hard for me to see a reason… Unless Lamont snitched out Steve… Yes, that could be a reason… But…” Her words twisted around with as much agitation as her fingers.

“Oh, that Johnny Merton, there’s nothing I wouldn’t believe of him. And yet, he set up a clinic in our neighborhood. He made the government give our children the same milk they handed out in the white schools. He looked after his little girl like she was the crown jewel. Dayo, that was what Johnny called her. And that made Daddy mad all over again because it was African. It means ‘joy arrives.’ ”

She gave an unhappy bark of laughter. “My daddy would have looked at me and said, ‘Joy departs,’ so why am I standing up for him?”

“Where was your mother when you were growing up?” I asked.

“Mama died when I was eight. My granny, she took me in for a while, but her heart was bad. And, anyway, Daddy wanted me home where he could keep an eye on me.”

I paid for the pie and the coffee and drove Rose back to her home. During the short ride, she tried cleaning her face with a tissue. She couldn’t face her father looking distressed.

“He’ll think it’s about sex. At my age, with my life, he’s still sure I’m off having sex with strange men.”

“Go for it,” I said mischievously, pulling up in front of her house. “It’s not too late, you know.”

She looked at me, startled, almost afraid. “You are a very strange woman. Where would I even find a man who’d look twice at me?”

As she got out of the car, I remembered a final question. “Do you know where Steve Sawyer is now? I think Curtis Rivers and Merton both do, and they won’t say.”

She shook her head slowly. “He was in prison a long time. I know Curtis, he visited Steve. But I heard, maybe he even died there. Don’t be thinking Curtis would tell me. He doesn’t like me any more than, well, he seems to like you. He thinks I was always carrying tales back to Daddy when we were in high school. He can’t forgive that.”

She hesitated, then leaned back into the car. “You’re a good listener, and I appreciate that. I’m grateful.”

“That’s good. I’m glad.” I was a good listener because I needed her to tell me things, a thought which embarrassed me enough that I added, “You can always give me a call, you know, and talk to me again.”

She walked heavily up the steps, her shoulders stooped. No one would look at you with love, or even lust, if you were so bowed over, but she didn’t need me to tell her that.

I turned around and headed back to the expressway. By now, it was the height of the afternoon rush, and the Ryan was about as express as a turtle with corns. I was stalled on the overpass above the Sanitary Canal when my cellphone rang. I figured the risks of talking while driving didn’t extend to talking while parking, but I did almost hit the car in front of me when the woman at the other end said she was Judge Coleman’s secretary and could I hold for him.

“Judge! Thanks for returning my call. I’d like to stop by to ask you about one of your old clients.”

“We can do this by phone. I told you the other night to leave Johnny Merton alone.”

I ground my teeth. “Not the Hammer. One of your first clients, Judge, when you were a new-minted PD. Remember the Steve Sawyer trial?”

He didn’t say anything.

“Harmony Newsome’s murder. Do you remember her?”

He turned so quiet that I thought at first the connection had gone. Someone behind me honked. A gap of four feet had opened in front of me. I scooted forward, glancing at the oily surface of the canal. The day was hot and humid, and the water looked as though every person murdered in Cook County in the last century had rotted in it.

The judge suddenly spoke again. “Why this interest in ancient history, Warshawski?”

I thought my answer over carefully. If I’d been able to meet with Coleman in person, transcript in hand, I would have tried to ask about all the gaps in the record-why he didn’t try to find out the name of the snitch, why he let the obvious collusion between the cops and the state’s attorney go by unchallenged-but, on the phone, I didn’t have any way of pressuring him.

“Steve Sawyer’s name keeps coming up in a missing-persons search I’m doing, but he’s disappeared as well. In fact, there’s no record of him at all after his trial. I’m hoping you have your old notes. I’m trying to find which prison he was sent to.”

“That trial was forty years ago, Warshawski. I remember it, my first high-profile case.” He laughed thinly across the airwaves. “I learned a lot from that trial, but I couldn’t possibly keep track of all the lowlifes who went through Twenty-sixth and California during my time there.”

I was finally on the farside of the canal. “Of course not, Judge, but the transcript did raise a number of interesting procedural questions.”

“Why did you read the transcript?” he demanded.

Of all the questions he might have asked, that was the oddest. “Looking for traces of Steve Sawyer, Judge. It was exciting to see your name there. Mine, too. My dad was the cop they sent to make the collar.”

Cellphones don’t give you good reception, but I thought I heard a quick intake of breath, almost a gasp. “You have questions about the trial, ask your father.”

“He’s been dead for years, Judge, and I’m not a big believer in séances.”

“You were a smart-ass know-it-all when you worked in the courts, Warshawski, and it doesn’t sound to me like you’ve changed any. I don’t owe you a damned thing, but I’m still going to tell you for your own good to leave all that old history in the archives. Merton, Newsome, the boy who killed her, leave it alone.”

He cut the connection before I could thank him. Just as well. I couldn’t have kept the savagery out of my voice much longer.