Hardball

6

I WOKE NEXT MORNING AT FIVE. I WAS OVER MY JET LAG, but, since getting back, I couldn’t seem to sleep normally. I made an espresso and went out on the little back porch with Peppy, who’d spent the night with me. The sky was bright with the midsummer sunrise. Ten days ago, I’d been watching the sun rise over the Umbrian hills with Morrell, yet both he and Italy felt so remote that they didn’t seem to have been part of my life at all.

The back door on the apartment next to mine opened, and my new neighbor emerged. The unit had stood empty for several months. Mr. Contreras told me a man who played in a band had bought it while I was away, and that the medical resident on the ground floor had worried about whether he would keep everyone up all night with loud music.

He was dressed in the quintessential artist’s costume: faded black T-shirt and jeans. He went to the railing to look at the little gardens. The Korean family on the second floor and Mr. Contreras both grew a few vegetables; the rest of us didn’t have the time or patience for yard work.

Peppy went over to greet him, and I got up to haul her away. Not everyone is as eager to see her as she is to see them.

“It’s okay.” He scratched her ears. “I’m Jake Thibaut. I don’t think you were here when I moved in.”

“V. I. Warshawski. I was in Europe, and can’t seem to adjust to the time change. I’m not usually up this early.”

“I’m definitely not up this early. I just got in from Portland on the red-eye.”

I asked if his band had been playing out there, and he made an odd face. “It’s a chamber music group, but I guess you could call it a band. We were touring the West Coast.”

I laughed and told him what I’d heard from Mr. Contreras.

“Poor Dr. Dankin. She worries so much about the noise I make that I’m tempted sometimes to park my bass outside her front door and serenade her. Of course, your dogs and your criminal associates worry her most.”

“My most criminal associate is this gal’s son,” I said, petting Peppy. Close up, I could see he was older than I’d first thought, perhaps in his forties.

I offered him an espresso, but he shook his head. “I have students in five hours. I need to try to sleep.”

I let myself into Mr. Contreras’s kitchen to collect Mitch and ran over to the lake with him and Peppy. Mr. Contreras was puttering around his kitchen when we got back, but I turned down breakfast. I wanted to get a head start on Lamont Gadsden. I had a full calendar this afternoon, including a job for my most important client, the one whose fees would pay for those Lario boots and a few other expensive unnecessities.

A forty-year-old trail is a cold one, and Miss Ella hadn’t given me much in the way of bread crumbs to follow. In my office, I ran through the databases that make the modern detective’s life so easy these days. Lamont Gadsden hadn’t changed his name, at least not since those records were automated. As Lamont Gadsden, he didn’t own a car in any of the fifty states. He wasn’t being sued for child support or alimony. No department of corrections housed him.

I turned to other work and was in the middle of a report for another client when Karen Lennon called. She had visited Miss Ella this morning.

“We talked for a bit, and she finally was able to remember the names of some of the people who knew her son.”

It was a meager list, but it was better than nothing. Miss Ella had provided the names of Lamont’s high school physics teacher and a Pastor Hebert from her church. Karen Lennon had somehow persuaded Miss Ella to divulge the names of three of her son’s adolescent friends. Interrogation is all about knowing how to ask your question so the subject will answer. Karen Lennon clearly had a touch with Miss Ella that I lacked.

“What about my talking to Miss Claudia?”

The pastor hesitated. “I think it would be a good idea, if she starts feeling a little stronger. She’s been pretty frail the last few weeks, and strangers would be hard on her. And Miss Ella holds Miss Claudia’s power of attorney, so that may be an obstacle as well.”

When we’d hung up, I did a search on the list of people who’d known Lamont. Four of the five men were still alive, which wasn’t as big a help as the optimistic detective needs. One of the friends from Lamont’s youth had died of pancreatic cancer when he was thirty-seven. A second friend had disappeared as thoroughly as Lamont himself. The physics teacher had retired to Mississippi fifteen years ago, and Pastor Hebert, at ninety-three, apparently wasn’t quite the ball of fire he’d been in his prime. “Oh, Pastor Hebert, such a shame,” the woman who returned the message I left on his church’s answering machine said. “The Holy Spirit inhabited that man’s body.”

I asked if he was dead.

“No, no, he’s still with us, but not quite with us, if you understand. He brought me to Jesus, me and my two boys and my sisters, and we need that saintly man’s saving voice here now. But the Lord does as He will in His own time, and we must pray to Jesus, pray for Pastor Hebert’s healing, and pray for a prophet to lead us out of our wilderness.”

“Yes, ma’am,” I said weakly.

I called the physics teacher, who remembered Lamont but hadn’t seen him since his high school graduation. “He was a bright boy, a good student. I wanted him to go on to college, but he’d turned into such an angry young man, you couldn’t talk to him about anything in the white man’s world anymore. I suggested Howard or Grambling, but he still wouldn’t listen. I didn’t even know he’d disappeared.”

The teacher promised to call if he heard anything, which was as likely as seeing the Cubs in the World Series. That left me with a man named Curtis Rivers, who still lived in West Englewood, a few blocks from where he and Lamont Gadsden had grown up. Like the other people on Miss Ella’s list, Rivers had done very little that showed up on the Web: he didn’t vote, he hadn’t been in prison or run for public office, I couldn’t tell if he’d ever been married. But he did own Fit for Your Hoof, a shoe-repair shop on Seventieth Place just west of Ashland.

It wasn’t until mid-afternoon that I had time to go to Rivers’s shop. I spent the bulk of the day cleaning up my job for Darraugh Graham. I was tracing the engineering credentials of a woman Darraugh wanted to head his aerospace division, and my inquiry took me to Northwest ern University’s engineering school.

When I finished my queries-learning, sadly, that Darraugh’s candidate looked too good to be true because she was too good to be true-my feeling of unreality intensified. I seem to be finding more and more job candidates these days who don’t care what lies they tell. Maybe politicians and television have so blurred the lines between entertainment and truth that people think no one knows or cares about the difference between a clever story and real experience.

On a summer day, with the lake in the background and the trees around the fake-Gothic buildings a greeny gold, the campus itself didn’t look quite real. I walked down to the water, tempted to join the students who were lounging on the beach behind the engineering building and lose myself in the dreamworld.

My cellphone rang: Darraugh’s personal assistant. I sighed and returned to reality, and told Caroline that Darraugh would have to start a new search, that I’d give him full details from a landline. The call broke my mood. I knew it was time to devote myself to Miss Ella and her son. Prickly, unpleasant woman, with her grim forty-year-old past, I didn’t want to touch her problems. But I’d agreed to work for her, and that meant she deserved my best efforts, no matter what I thought.

I could hear my mother standing behind me while I practiced the piano: “Yes, I know you resent this, Victoria, but you make it harder for yourself by refusing to put your best work into it. Engage with the music. It needs you, even if you don’t think you need it.”

I pulled back onto Lake Shore Drive, whipping around the curves, ignoring the lake. I exited downtown and crossed the Loop to pick up the southbound Dan Ryan Expressway. I hate the Ryan, not just because of the traffic, although there isn’t an hour of the night or day when all fourteen lanes aren’t heavy with trucks and cars. I hate the way it was built, and everything about how it got built.

The road is dug deep into the earth. All you see as you drive are high concrete walls. They’re full of cracks with ragweed and crabgrass poking through. If you look up, you get a glimpse of scraggly trees and the occasional run-down tire warehouse or apartment building. Since money for the expressway came from the cronyism in the Democratic machine, they called it Dan Ryan, after the chairman of the Cook County Board who anted up the bucks for it in 1960.

When I left the Ryan at Seventy-first Street, I got an even more depressing look at reality, if that’s what it was. Too many of the houses in West Englewood leaned drunkenly away from their foundations. Too many of them had sheets or cardboard filling in for missing windowpanes, and most of the doors would give way to a brisk kick. Vacant lots, filled with urban flotsam and overgrown with weeds, were almost as common as the houses. The only food stores were the kind that prey on the urban poor, hiding a little high-priced, rotting produce behind the shelves of liquor and chips.

Few people were on the streets. I passed a woman clutching an overgrown toddler under one arm, a plastic shopping bag under the other. A couple of men perched on the curb at the corner of Ashland were passing a paper bag from hand to hand. A radio on the sidewalk behind them blared loudly enough to shake my Mustang while I waited for the light to change.

When I pulled up across the street from Fit for Your Hoof, I sat for a minute, trying to dispel the depression I’d let build in me during the drive. A man was sweeping the sidewalk, talking loudly to himself. When he realized I was watching the store, he shook his broom at me, yelling something unintelligible, before scooting backward, crab-like, into the shop. He almost collided with a woman carrying a scuffed pair of white nurse’s shoes by the heels who was leaving the shop, but he circled around her in the nick of time.

I stopped to look in the window, where Rivers was displaying goods to “Help your feet / Feel pretty neat / When they hit that concrete.” Toe pads, arch supports, gel inserts. Above them hung a clotheslineful of dog leashes and collars, and, on the shelves at the back, bright headbands, sashes, handbags, and even a little cache of toys. The tidy, cheery window did its own work for change in a hard world.

When I opened the door, I found myself in a thicket of leather. Ropes hanging from the ceiling displayed more purses, briefcases, harnesses, berets, even work boots and cowboy boots. Behind the ropes, a radio was tuned to Talk of the Nation, and I could hear the whine of a belt sander. When I pushed the ropes apart, a steam whistle blew, and a voice cried, “Welcome to Chicago.”

I stopped, startled. Two men in front of a chessboard looked up at me and laughed. The counter was behind them. A man working on a pair of shoes, his back to the room, didn’t turn around but kept sanding the edges on a new heel. I didn’t see the man who’d flourished his broom at me.

“Whistle always makes people jump when they don’t know it’s coming,” one of the chess players said. He was a balding man with a paunch that pressed against an old T-shirt with the Machinists Union logo on it.

“You lost?” His partner was skinnier and older, with skin the color of dusty ebony.

“Often. I’m looking for Curtis Rivers.”

The man behind the counter picked up the second shoe, still not looking at me.

“IRS or paternity suit?” the first chess player said. The savage tone underlying the jokey comment was directed at me, not the man at the belt sander. What are you doing down here, anyway?

“My father isn’t present, but he’s accounted for,” I said. “Ditto my children. Miss Ella Gadsden is the reason I’m looking for him.”

The sander fell silent. The only noise in the room came from a woman on the radio asking how consumers could ever be sure they were buying clothes made in a factory that respected the workers.

The chess players didn’t seem to know Miss Ella’s name, but the man behind the counter finally turned around. He placed the shoe he was working on, an old brown Florsheim, in the middle of the counter and leaned over to look at me.

“That’s a name I haven’t heard for a while,” he said, “but I don’t think I’ve heard yours at all.”

“V. I. Warshawski. I’m a private investigator. Miss Ella hired me to look for Lamont Gadsden. She said Curtis Rivers was one of his friends.”

Another long pause, before the man behind the counter said, “We knew each other, a long time back. Miss Ella, what, is she grief struck after all these years? She rented out his bedroom five months after he left. Didn’t seem as though she was expecting to see him again.”

“Did you know her sister, too? Miss Claudia? I haven’t met her. She’s very ill, they tell me. But I understand it’s Miss Claudia who actually wants to find him.”

“You got some kind of identification, Ms. Investigator?” Curtis Rivers asked.

I showed him the laminated copy of my license.

“Warshawski. Warshawski. Now, why do I know that name?”

“Hockey?” I suggested. “A lot of people remember my cousin Boom-Boom.”

All three men laughed at that, as if the idea of hockey itself was a joke.

“A simple no would do,” I said, nettled. Boom-Boom had been more than my cousin; we’d been best friends growing up, proud of our reputation as the wildest kids in South Chicago. Besides, even though he’s been dead a dozen years now, they still talk about Boom-Boom in the same breath as Bobby Hull, in that mausoleum on Washington Street.

“Miss Ella couldn’t remember many people who might have known her son. You, Mr. Rivers. Two other friends, one dead, the other, Steve Sawyer, I can’t find.” I paused, but Rivers didn’t fill in the blank. “A science teacher. Pastor Hebert, from her church.”

“I heard he passed,” one of the chess players said.

“No, he’s living in Pullman with his daughter,” I said. “But people at the church are saying he’s not too fit mentally, so I don’t know what he can tell me.”

“And what can I tell you?” Curtis Rivers asked.

“Anything you can remember about Lamont Gadsden. Anyone else he hung out with, anyplace he talked about going, when you last saw him, what his mood was, all those things. If you know where Steve Sawyer is, you could get me out of here so I could ask him those questions.”

“And what will you do if I tell you those things?”

“Talk to more people. Try to find someone who could give me a lead on where he went when he disappeared. Do you remember the last time you saw him?”

Rivers picked up the shoe again. “It’s been a lot of years, Ms. Warshawski.”

“Miss Ella says Lamont left her house the day before the big snow of ’sixty-seven. She says that she and Miss Claudia never saw him again, but did you?”

“The day, the hour, and the minute-trust Miss Ella for that. My memories aren’t lined up in formation like that, but if anything comes to me I’ll call you.” He turned around and flipped the belt sander back on.

I laid one of my cards on the counter, put two more next to the chessboard. “If it’s any help, I’m not going to faint or run to the State’s Attorney’s Office if I hear about some old gang connections. I used to represent some Anacondas and Lions when I was with the Public Defender’s Office.”

I raised my voice to carry over the belt sander, but none of the men responded. I pushed through the display ropes to the front door, wincing when the steam whistle blew and the recording announced, “Central Station, Chicago. Leaving now for New Orleans and all stops in between, the City of New Orleans.”