Hardball (6 page)

“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.”

7

BAD BOY LAMONT??

I SCOWLED AT THE DASHBOARD. DID CURTIS RIVERS KNOW something about Lamont that he didn’t want to tell me? Or was it just that the gleam had worn off my winning smile? Even when I was fresh out of law school in the Public Defender’s Office, I hadn’t been able to “use my assets,” as my supervisor put it, not too subtly urging me to show cleavage and smirk my way into the good graces of judges and cops. Still, I thought I had been considerate and caring, as well as responsible in what I said, and all those other Girl Scout things in talking to Rivers. He hadn’t needed to stiff me quite so hard.

I hadn’t had high hopes when I started this investigation, but somehow I didn’t expect to hit so many dead ends this fast. Pastor Hebert, who lived with his daughter in Pullman, five miles farther down the Ryan from Fit for Your Hoof, was the last person on my list. Given his questionable mental state, I didn’t expect to learn anything startling, but it would wrap up this part of the inquiry. I could go to Miss Ella tomorrow and tell her she either needed to give me more background or end the investigation.

I turned on the ignition but phoned Pastor Hebert’s daughter before taking off. I started to explain who I was, but she already knew. Whoever I had spoken to at the Saving Word Gospel Church this morning had been on the phone to Rose Hebert within seconds. Rose supposed I could come down now, although what anyone could tell me after all this time she couldn’t imagine.

“You never know,” I said with determined cheerfulness.

As I pulled away from the curb, the leashes in Fit for Your Hoof ’s window display twitched. Someone was watching me. But what did that prove? Rivers knew something about Lamont. Or he didn’t trust a white woman on the black South Side. Just as I thought. I floored the Mustang so abruptly it fishtailed into a pothole. That would definitely be the last straw if I broke an axle or blew a tire down here.

I couldn’t go fast very far, anyway. It was five-thirty, the heart of the evening rush. The line at the entrance ramp to the Ryan took six lights to clear. Traffic stayed bumper to bumper until I oozed off again at 111th Street.

As soon as I left the expressway, I entered a quiet, orderly world that doesn’t quite belong to Chicago. Pullman’s quiet, tree-lined streets, with their Federal-style row houses painted in greens and reds, stand in sharp contrast to the broken-down tenements just to the north and east.

Maybe its feeling of separateness from the big city is because Pullman started as a company town, a monument to railway magnate George Pullman’s ego. The inventor built everything—company stores, houses for his managers, tenements for his workers—who staged a bloody strike over the prices Pullman charged in his stores, coupled with the fact that his houses cost more than they could ever dream of paying. Pullman finally had to give up on his town, but most of the houses remain. They’d been built from bricks made of the durable Lake Calumet clay, which is so highly prized that thieves have dismantled whole garages, if the owners are away, and carted off the bricks for resale elsewhere in the city.

As I continued west, I saw the Hotel Florence on my right. Its turrets and spires had made it seem like a fairy-tale castle when I was little. It’s been closed for decades now, but my parents used to eat there to mark special occasions. I stopped, looking at the blank windows, remembering the family lunch on my tenth birthday, right before the city exploded in riots from one end to another. My mother tried to enforce a gay party atmosphere, but none of her attempts at charm or conversation could override my aunt Marie’s sour racist harangues.

I hadn’t wanted to include Marie, but Gabriella said I couldn’t invite Boom-Boom without his parents. Afterward, back in our tiny South Chicago living room, I shouted at my mother that it served her right that Aunt Marie had ruined the party. My father jumped up from the TV, where he was watching the Cubs, grabbed my arm, and hustled me out back.

“Victoria, every day I have to go out on the streets and face people who think their anger counts more than anyone else’s feelings or needs. I don’t want to see that anger on your face, or listen to it in your voice, especially not when you talk to your mother.”

My father never scolded me, and for him to do so on my birthday . . . I burst into tears, I created a scene, but he stood by, his arms crossed on his chest. No special treatment for me. I had to calm myself down, apologize to my mother.

The memory still burned in me, my dad’s injustice to me on my birthday. The force of the forty-year-old emotion embarrassed me. Staring blindly at the hotel, it dawned on me for the first time that his anger hadn’t been solely about me but his fears about what lay ahead. Catholic parishioners defying the cardinal’s pleas for charity and peace, taking to the streets with every kind of homemade missile—Aunt Marie’s own priest, Father Gribac, essentially inciting his parish to riot—my dad probably was frightened about Gabriella’s and my safety. That tenth birthday was the last time Tony was home in the middle of the day for two months.

A horn sounded loudly behind me. I moved forward, threading my way through a patchwork of short, dead-end streets to Langley, where Rose Hebert lived. Knots of commuters were walking home from the train station, most attached to their cellphones. One man was mowing his tiny lawn, while across the street a woman was washing her front windows. Where the street ended at 114th, a clutch of girls was jumping double Dutch. Beyond them, boys were playing baseball in a rubble-filled vacant lot. The girls slid their eyes my way—
Strange white woman on the block
—but didn’t interrupt the rhythm of their ropes.

The Heberts lived in one of the original Pullman homes, flat front to the street, red brick with black arches over the windows that looked like surprised eyebrows. Rose Hebert answered the door almost as soon as I rang the bell. She was a tired woman about ten years my senior, her close-cut hair full of gray, her muscular shoulders slumped inside a thin, lavender-print dress.

“I told Father you were coming, but I’m not sure he understood me,” she said by way of greeting. “It’s so hard to believe Sister Ella finally decided to look for Lamont that I called over to Lionsgate Manor to ask her if it was true. People try so many scams against the elderly these days. You have to be careful all the time.”

It didn’t seem like a belligerent comment, just the notion at the front of her mind.

“I am a licensed investigator.” I pulled out my identification, but Ms. Hebert didn’t look at it. “Miss Ella got my name from the pastor at Lionsgate, Karen Lennon, maybe you’ve met her. Miss Ella told me she was hiring me for her sister’s sake more than her own.”

“Poor Sister Claudia,” Rose Hebert murmured. “It’s hard to see her like she is now. She was so lively and graceful as a young woman. Daddy was always having to remind her about modest Christian deportment, but my friends and I, we secretly copied how she dressed and how she walked.”

“Miss Ella didn’t want me visiting her sister, but it sounds as though you’ve seen Miss Claudia since her stroke?”

“Yes, oh yes. I drive the van on Sundays and collect our people who can’t walk to church anymore, so I bring Sister Ella and some of the other folks from Lionsgate. And I try to visit with Sister Claudia, but she’s so weak, I can’t tell if she even knows who I am some days, so strangers are hard on her.” Ms. Hebert was blocking the doorway to the house. Loud voices drifted down the dark hall.

I tried to peer behind her. “And your father? Is he strong enough that I can talk to him?”

“Oh. Yes, of course, that’s why you’re here . . . But my father, he isn’t easy . . . You mustn’t mind . . . He’s not always . . .” She kept murmuring flustered comments as she backed away from the door and let me into the house.

A table at the entrance was piled with papers. As I walked past, I saw church bulletins mixed with bills and magazines—sort of like my own entryway except for the bulletins. We followed the loud voices to the living room. They came from a television, where a minister was exhorting us to send him money for letting us know how very sinful we are. The light from the screen flickered on the bald head of a man in a wheelchair. He didn’t turn his head when we came in nor move when his daughter took the controls from his fingers and pressed the MUTE button.

“Daddy, this lady here is the one I told you about, the one Sister Ella and Sister Claudia sent. They want her to find Lamont.”

I knelt next to the chair and put my hand next to his on the armrest. “I’m V. I. Warshawski, Pastor Hebert. I’m trying to find people who knew Lamont, people who might know what happened to him.”

A thread of saliva dribbled from the side of his mouth. “ Lamont. Trouble.”

“He means Lamont was a troubled young man,” Rose said softly.

“Made.” The pastor mouthed the word with difficulty.

“Daddy, he didn’t make trouble,” Rose cried. “He had good reason to be angry, when you think of the terrible injustices we suffer.”

Pastor Hebert tried to speak but only produced a kind of gargling. Finally he choked out the word, “Snake.”

“Snake?” I repeated doubtfully, wondering if he meant Lamont was a snake in the grass.

“He didn’t belong to the Anacondas, Daddy! He helped them protect Dr. King!”

Father and daughter had clearly had this argument many times. His face didn’t move, but her lips were trembling, as if she were six, not sixty, and finding it hard to stand up to an unyielding parent.

I sat back on my heels. Lamont Gadsden with the Anacondas—no wonder Miss Ella hadn’t approved of her son’s friends. In their day, they’d been as notorious as the El Rukns. Weapons, murder, drugs, prostitution: whatever crime was happening in a broad swatch of the South Side, they could claim credit for it. In my three years with the Public Defender’s Office, maybe thirty percent of my clients had run with the Anacondas. I’d even drawn their chief once, when Johnny Merton couldn’t come up with cash one weekend for his own high-priced mouth.

Merton had been furious that he had to rely on an inexperienced PD. He’d tried to intimidate me into crumpling in his presence. “You the new snake charmer, girl? You don’t have the talent to charm Johnny Merton.”

He’d grown coarser in his insults when I refused to flinch. I was green, but I’d grown up in the steel mills. I might not be willing to sidetrack a judge with my cleavage, but I knew about insults and in timidation. I’d kept my legal pad in front of me, writing down everything Merton said, and when he paused for breath I’d say, “Let me read your comments back to you, Mr. Merton, and you tell me if this is what you want me to present to Judge McManus.”

If Lamont Gadsden had been an Anaconda, anything could have happened to him. They didn’t like members walking away from the gang. Leaving meant you left an ear behind as a token: no one will hear you on the street now when you call for help.

I looked up at Hebert’s unblinking eyes. “What I really am hoping, Pastor, is that you can give me some names, people who knew Lamont, anyone he might have been in touch with after he walked out of Miss Ella’s house in 1967. Or if you know anyone, Ms. Hebert. I’ve been to see Curtis Rivers, and he didn’t have anything to say.”

Again came the gargling sound, and then the words choked out with difficulty. “Dead bury dead.”

“Do you know he’s dead or are you just hoping no one will stir an old pot?” I asked.

He didn’t say anything.

“When did you yourself last see Lamont Gadsden, Pastor?”

He gasped, taking in air. Still without moving his head, he said, “Stopped church. Said hell bound. No heed. Baptized, no listening.”

“Yes, you baptized him. We took him into Christ’s body together, all of us. So how could you say he was hell bound? And why should he talk to you when that was all you would say to him?”

“Drugs. Never listen me, daughter, but drugs. Saw. Know. You, woman, no pants.”

With an effort, he moved his hand to the television control and turned the sound back on. The preacher in the glass box was revealing the true meaning of Paul’s letter to the Romans.

“No pants?” I asked Rose, pushing myself to my feet. My thighs were sore from squatting.

“He doesn’t approve—our church doesn’t approve—of women wearing men’s clothes,” she said listlessly.

In Bible pictures, men are always wearing robes. I wondered if that meant women at Saving Word couldn’t wear bathrobes, but I decided it wouldn’t help my inquiry if I asked. Instead, I followed Rose back along the narrow hall to the front door.

I stopped next to the paper-covered table. “Do you think your father knows something about Lamont that he’d have told me if I’d worn a dress?”

She looked down the hall, as if the old man could hear us over the televised preacher. “He’s convinced Lamont sold drugs for the Anacondas, but I never thought so.”

“You said Lamont was angry over the injustices in your lives. What did he do about them or how did he show he was angry?”

“He was part of the group that helped look after Dr. King. You know, during the marches that summer.” She eyed me doubtfully, wondering if I came from one of the white South Side families who created the need for a protective force.

I squinted, trying to remember what I knew about the history of the summer. “Didn’t the gangs declare a truce, a moratorium against fighting among themselves?”

She was still eyeing me warily, but she nodded. “Johnny Merton from the Anacondas and Fred Hampton from the Panthers and them, they all met with Dr. King and Al Raby to discuss strategy. My father, he felt our church didn’t belong in the streets. He didn’t like it when Lamont and some of his friends took part.”

“Curtis Rivers.” I said his name involuntarily, thinking about his hostility when I was in his shop this afternoon.

“Curtis was there. Some of the other boys from the neighborhood. And Lamont. They all belonged to Saving Word, and my father denounced them from the pulpit because they wouldn’t listen to his authority.”

“But it was six months later that Lamont disappeared. It’s hard to think that was connected with the marches.” Something in her face made me add, “When did you last see him yourself?”