“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.”
9
UNCOVERING HISTORY
AFTER SHE HUNG UP, I TRIED TO GO BACK TO SLEEP, BUT the conversation had been too unsettling. I lay on the bed, my body so rigid I couldn’t even keep my eyes closed. I walked out to the living room and sat cross-legged in my armchair. Peppy, who was spending the night in my apartment, got up from her post by the front door to join me.
Rose Hebert and Petra, both adult women, referred to their fathers as “Daddy.” When Daddy’s in your head, he’s the biggest thing there. He doesn’t have a first name, or a smaller identity like “my dad.” You think everyone knows who Daddy is. Did that mean my uncle was himself a bullying presence in Petra’s life or just that she was still very young?
Rose Hebert certainly wasn’t young. Maybe she never had been. I could see her, nineteen years old, sitting in the shadows outside the Waltz Right Inn, wanting to be part of the group having fun, longing for love. And spending the rest of her life with Daddy, who beat her purple when he thought she was sinning. She never mentioned her mother. When had Pastor Hebert’s wife stopped being part of the equation?
The bigger question, at least for the job I’d agreed to do, dealt with Johnny the Hammer. Lamont Gadsden, last seen entering a blues bar in Johnny’s company the night of January 25. Had he crossed Johnny on some drug deal? A fight, a death-killed by Johnny or some hand-picked Anaconda deputy-and then the blizzard, a wonderful cover for any traces of where Lamont had been shot or stabbed.
“Curtis Rivers was at that bar, too,” I told Peppy. “Why did he stiff me today?”
She thumped her tail softly. I sifted her silky ears with my fingers.
“You never knew Johnny Merton, which makes you a lucky girl. He’d have cut off your beautiful tail for earmuffs as soon as look at you. But could he scare Curtis Rivers so badly that the man won’t talk to me forty years later?”
I could imagine the Waltz Right Inn that January night. Open-mike night, local blues greats stopping by, hilarity running high because of the boon of summer in January, everyone happy but the preacher’s daughter, sweating in her heavy wool coat. And Lamont Gadsden, who’d left his mother’s dinner table to talk to the Hammer.
Over the sound of Alberta Hunter at the piano, Rivers overhears Lamont and Merton. The phone call later that night, or week, the Hammer to Rivers: If you say word one about what you know, you’ll follow Lamont into the river, or quarry, or wherever Lamont Gadsden’s body has landed.
I could imagine it, but that didn’t mean it happened. And, anyway, what hold could Merton have on Curtis Rivers that would keep Rivers silent after all this time? Besides, Rivers didn’t strike me as a guy who would faint just because the bogeyman was rattling a chain.
I made a face. Pastor Hebert, Hammer Merton, the enforcers of West Englewood. Both of them beat their followers for infractions against a code only they were entitled to define.
Come to think of it, I’d never checked to see if there were unidentified dead bodies lying around after the big snow. It was close to five now, and the library at my old school wouldn’t open for another three hours. I went back to bed. Peppy followed me and curled her soft gold body against my side. She fell instantly into the sweet dreams of the virtuous, but at six I was still lying there, eyelids scratchy from missing sleep, churning over my past encounters with Johnny Merton.
He had scared me when I was with the Public Defender’s, even though I was supposed to be on his side. It was because of him I’d gotten an unlisted phone number:
“You don’t do your best for me on this rap, bitch, I’ll make sure your mama won’t recognize your face when they pull you out of the water.”
“Is that why you don’t have any LaSalle Street lawyers left, Mr. Merton? Are they all in the Chicago River wearing cement booties?”
I’d been amazed at the time that I could utter those words without my voice quavering, but I’d had to clutch my legal pad to control the trembling in my hands. Even now, the memory of the Hammer’s venom could keep me from sleeping. Maybe he could have intimidated Rivers, at that.
I sat up. If I wasn’t going to sleep, I might as well get going. I let Peppy out the back door and stood on the small porch, stretching my ham-strings and shoulders, while my stovetop espresso maker heated up.
The midsummer sky was already a deep blue. I drank a coffee, collected Mitch from Mr. Contreras’s kitchen-he’d been whining behind the door, indignant at being locked inside while Peppy got to play-and ran the dogs to the lake. The water was still so cold, I gasped when I jumped in, but I swam with them to the first buoy. Maybe if I got my blood flowing fast enough, I’d feel as though I’d spent eight hours asleep.
It didn’t exactly work: I was still gritty-eyed and grumpy as I drove south. But I reached the University of Chicago library just as the doors opened. I’d picked up a cappuccino and a croissant at one of the little neighborhood coffee bars and, against all library etiquette, smuggled them into the microform room.
I pulled reels for all the major Chicago newspapers. In 1967, there had been eight dailies, morning and evening editions of four different papers. I started with the Daily News, my dad’s paper. He liked Royko.
January 25, 1967, the day before the big snow. It’s strange how little you remember of events you lived through yourself. Scrolling through the pages, I wasn’t surprised that I didn’t know the national news: LBJ’s war budget; the student protests at Berkeley, which California governor Reagan denounced as a Communist plot against America; or even newly elected Senator Charles Percy’s wife’s miniskirt. I’d been in fifth grade, and that stuff sailed completely past me.
It was the local news that surprised me. I’d completely forgotten the tornadoes that swept the South Side the day before the big snow, the big storms Rose Hebert had mentioned.
The winds had blown over a half-constructed building at Eighty-seventh and Stony, three miles from my childhood home. A cop had been killed at the scene. I stared at photos of the rubble. Cinder blocks filled the streets, looking like Legos thrown on the living-room floor by a bad-tempered child. A VW bug was buried up to its windows in the debris. And then, the next day, twenty-six inches of snow fell, covering the debris, the mills, the roads, all of Chicago, burying the living as well as the dead.
My memory of the storm wasn’t the tornadoes, nor even the dead cop-although every cop’s death was an occasion of anxiety for my mother and me-but Gabriella waiting outside for me when school ended. My mother never walked me home from school, and I was scared when I saw her, scared that something had happened to my dad.
That she was worried about the snow seemed funny to me. A blizzard blowing five- and even ten-foot drifts was exhilarating, a game, not cause for alarm. But after a year of riots and protests, where she had sat up night after night waiting for Tony to come home, me sometimes watching from the top of the attic stairs, sometimes joining her at the kitchen table, whenever she did something out of the ordinary I thought first of my father.
“Tu e Bernardo, spericolati e testardi tutti e dui voi!” she said to me in Italian, seizing my mittened hand. “Both of you reckless and head-strong! If I don’t stop you, you will get lost in this blizzard. You will do something impossibly dangerous that will cost you your life and forever break my heart.”
“I’m not a baby! Don’t treat me like one in front of my friends.” I shouted at her in English, yanking my hand away.
It upset her when I didn’t answer in Italian. In my anger, I wanted to hurt her feelings. The truth was, I’d been planning on finding Boom-Boom-Bernardo-who went to Catholic school. We wanted to see if the Calumet River had frozen enough for skating. Being caught out made me sullen, even more so when Gabriella made me play the piano for an hour when we got home.
So lost was I in my memories that I sang the first line out loud and then blushed as everyone in the reading room turned to stare at me. I sank down in my chair and stared fixedly at the screen in front of me.
I looked at reports of homicides starting on January 26 and moving forward to the end of February-they got more play forty years ago when the numbers were smaller-but I didn’t see any unidentified bodies. I looked for car accidents and studied gang activity.
The Daily News had interviewed members of the Blackstone Rangers, who felt they were the legitimate voice of the black South Side. They were going to do all this good for the community, they told the paper: day care, schools, health care. I made a face in the dark reading room. The gang had started some of their grand projects, but, in the end, all they did was sell drugs and run protection and prostitution rackets.
I turned to the Herald-Star and read the same homicide reports there, saw the same pictures of the city up to its rail girders in snow. A week after the News talked to the Rangers, the Herald-Star played catch-up, running a feature on the Avalon Anacondas.
I sat up straighter, my fatigue forgotten, as I began reading about Johnny the Hammer. In the Herald-Star, he described some of the work the Anacondas had performed during the riot-filled summer of ’sixty-six.
I looked at the clock. Reading about Johnny Merton couldn’t be charged to Miss Ella’s account. I read all five articles in the Star’s series: a day inside the projects at Sixtieth and Racine, a day at a clinic that Merton said the Anacondas had started, pictures of the Hammer feeding his own eight-month-old daughter.
“The police are labeling the Anacondas as a criminal gang, and for what? For starting a school milk program for black children? For opening a health clinic at Fifty-ninth and Morgan when there’s been nothing in our neighborhood for fifty years? For organizing our people to vote, and getting us a real candidate for alderman in the Sixteenth Ward?”
This was a side of Merton I’d never known about. By the time I’d been facing him in that dreary bull pen at Twenty-sixth and California, he’d moved a long way from community organizer. The only organizing he did by then was where and how to separate small businesses from their money or his opponents from their body parts.
On the other hand, in 1967 he was already head of a powerful street gang. Maybe he’d just been spinning the reporter a line. A lot of white progressives had found street gangs glamorous or hip in the sixties. A lot of white reporters wanted the swagger that being on the inside with a black gangbanger would bring.
“The Man sees us as the threat to law and order on the streets of this city, but we weren’t the ones throwing bricks at Martin Luther King, were we? So how come it’s the brothers who are behind bars, not the white boys who turned cars over and such? You put Steve Sawyer up for murdering Harmony Newsome on no evidence whatever, no witness, no nothing. The sister went down in Marquette Park protecting Dr. King. And then they want to know why we aren’t grinning and tap-dancing for them. What if it was a white boy killed her in the middle of those riots? They were the ones with the weapons, but they are not the ones in jail!”
The Star inserted a picture of Harmony Newsome in her high school prom dress, her hair carefully straightened so that it hung to her bare shoulders in a slight bob.
It wasn’t the photograph that startled me into sloshing my contraband cappuccino all over my jeans. It was the caption: TRIAL BEGINS TODAY FOR STEVE SAWYER, ARRESTED IN THE MURDER OF HARMONY NEWSOME.
The sidebar explained that Sawyer’s trial was the culmination of months of protest by friends and family of the dead woman: they had held a prayer vigil outside the Area 1 police station since her murder the previous August. Sawyer had been arrested at New Year’s, which meant the trial was being rushed through like a bullet train.
I sat back in my chair, trying to figure it all out. Steve Sawyer. That must be, or at least might be, Lamont Gadsden’s missing boyhood friend. I read through all the papers and finally found a small paragraph in the Herald-Star. On January 30th, Steve Sawyer was convicted of Harmony Newsome’s murder. No other details were given. Nothing about weapon or motive and certainly no mention of Lamont Gadsden.
I did a cursory search for John Does. There’d been a good few deaths because of the snowstorm, but even though I skimmed all the papers through the end of April I didn’t find any reports of unaccounted bodies.
As I put the boxes back on their shelves, I kept wondering about Miss Ella. She must have known Steve Sawyer had been convicted of murder when she told Karen to give me his name yesterday. Why hadn’t she included that information? What was going on with her and her hostility to this search that she herself had initiated? But I had looked for Steve Sawyer along with Lamont in Department of Corrections databases around the country and hadn’t found either name. Did that mean that Lamont, too, was actually doing time somewhere?
I hurried past students whose faces were puffy from lack of sleep, pinched with anxiety over exams or jobs or love. In the sunken garden behind the library, I could see a gray-haired woman throwing a ball for her dog. They seemed to be the only happy creatures on the campus.
When I was a student, the war in Vietnam was just winding down. Students with pinched faces were often worrying about the draft, but it didn’t seem like today’s kids cared much about their own war eight thousand miles away. The thought gave me another idea about Lamont Gadsden. Maybe he’d forgotten to tell his mother he’d been drafted. His bones might be rotting in a jungle in Southeast Asia.
I detoured to Lionsgate Manor before going to my office. Miss Ella opened the door the length of the chain bolt but didn’t invite me in. I asked her about Steve Sawyer.
“You knew he’d been sent to prison when you gave his name to Pastor Karen, didn’t you?”
“Don’t take that tone with me, young woman. You wanted the names of Lamont’s friends, and I told you I didn’t approve of them. Now you see why.”
It was an effort not to scream at the client. “What about Lamont? Is he in prison, too?”
“If I knew where he was, I wouldn’t have asked you to look for him.”
We went back and forth for a few more fruitless minutes. She didn’t know where Steve Sawyer was now or she wouldn’t admit to knowing, I couldn’t tell. I finally left, cursing her and Pastor Karen-and myself, for agreeing to get involved in their quagmire.
Still, just to cross every t, I called the Pentagon when I got to my office to see if they had any record of Lamont. I wasn’t expecting any information, so I was surprised when the woman on the other end said Lamont had been called up and told to report to his local draft board in April 1967. He was still officially absent without leave.
“You didn’t try to find him, did you?” I asked.
“Oh, honey, I wasn’t even born then,” the Pentagon’s public-affairs woman said, “but I expect, from what I’ve read, that they guessed he was one of ten thousand boys hiding out, either in Canada or somewhere deep inside his own neighborhood. Unless they crossed the legal system somewhere, applying for a driver’s license or a loan, or if someone turned them in, we never saw them.”
Which left me back where I’d started, with zero information. Actually, that wasn’t true: I had Johnny the Hammer to add to the mix. And I knew what had happened to Steve Sawyer-at least, until January 30, 1967.
IN THE DETECTIVE’S ABSENCE I
I
“THE DETECTIVE LADY WAS HERE AGAIN TODAY.” ELLA held her sister’s left hand, pressing it to make sure Claudia was listening to her. “White girl. I think I told you that.”
The gnarled fingers pressed against Ella’s own hard palm. Yes, I’m listening to you. Yes, you told me she’s white.
“She’s pretty much used up all the money I agreed to, finding out nothing.”
The left side of Claudia’s mouth trembled, and tears slid down her face. Since the stroke, she cried easily. Claudia had always been emotional. “Such a warm person,” was everyone’s favorite description, making Ella feel colder, more bitter against the world at large. Claudia had never been a crier, though. She’d learned early in life, like Ella had herself, that tears were a luxury for babies and the rich. Her heart might break over a dead sparrow in the road, but she wouldn’t cry her eyes out.
Now, though, you had to watch what you said. And sometimes Ella felt herself slipping back in time, back to when she was five and Claudia was the darling baby of the block, those soft brown curls, that winning smile, so cooed over in church that Ella would steal Claudia’s dolly or slap her when Mama was off at work and Granny Georgette wasn’t looking. Pure meanness. She knew it then and she knew it now. But sometimes you got tired of always being the responsible one.
“Everything all right here?”
One of the nurse’s aides had bustled over. The sisters were out on the sunporch, a kind of enclosed roof garden that held plants and a tiny fountain. The dog that some well-meaning do-gooder brought during the week was drinking from the fountain, to the delight of several of the other stroke patients, but Ella wouldn’t let them bring it around Claudia when she was there. She couldn’t abide dogs. Cats, either. Why feed and spoil some animal when children were going to bed hungry?
She looked coldly at the aide. “If I need help, I’ll let you know.”
The aide, black herself, stared pertly back at Ella. “Your sister needs her eyes wiped. That’s something you could learn to do for her, Miss Ella, if you don’t want me here. But, since I am here, I’m happy to oblige.”
Hardball Page 8