Hardball

by Sara Paretsky

  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.

  12

  MEETING THE HAMMER IN THE TANK

  THE FIRST THING I DID IN THE MORNING WAS TO CALL THE Mighty Waters Freedom Center and ask for Sister Frances. The woman who answered said Sister wasn’t in the center that day but gave me her cellphone number.

  “She’s out of town, trying to find housing for the families of some of the immigrants who were arrested in Iowa last week. They can’t find enough homes for them over there.”

  I dialed Sister Frances’s cellphone and wasn’t surprised to get her voice mail. I left as concise a message as I could: Private detective, Steve Sawyer’s trial. If she remembered any details after all these years, would she call me.

  Marilyn Klimpton arrived from the temporary a
gency. I spent most of the rest of the day working with her on my files and creating a list of key clients. If one of them called, Marilyn needed to find me and get me a message at once.

  Late in the day, I heard from Sister Frances. She wasn’t sure when she’d be back in Chicago, she said, but she’d arrange to meet me as soon as she returned.

  When I pressed her to tell me about Steve Sawyer, she said she wasn’t sure that what she knew would be useful to me. “I didn’t know him, and I was so shocked, so overwhelmed, when Harmony collapsed, I wasn’t thinking at all. It wasn’t until much later that I started to try to remember details about the march, and what I do remember is too… too… insubstantial. If I try to talk about it now, I’m afraid it will all evaporate. Let’s wait until we can meet face-to-face.”

  That was frustrating as well as disappointing: I should have realized that if Sister Frances had seen who killed Harmony Newsome, she would have spoken up forty years ago. I had to put the Lamont search on a back burner where the flame was just about ready to go out. I had to wait, anyway, for the trial transcript, for a chance to see Miss Claudia. In a bitter irony, Johnny Merton was beginning to look like my last hope.

  Because nothing happens fast in Stateville, I was surprised that my visit to Merton happened ahead of the transcript and seeing Sister Frances. Inmate letters typically sit in bags for weeks, sometimes months, waiting for someone to get around to sorting them. When Johnny’s lawyer Greg Yeoman called me a scant ten days after I sent my letter to Johnny with the news that the old gang leader would see me, I knew the Hammer still had plenty of influence.

  My visit to Stateville was scheduled for the day before Brian Krumas’s big shindig on Navy Pier. Before driving to Joliet, I took Mr. Contreras to his safe-deposit box in his old neighborhood so he could pick up his medals.

  Even though he was keyed up almost beyond bearing, talking nonstop about the fundraiser, what he thought I should wear, whether he should call Max Loewenthal to borrow a dinner jacket, Mr. Contreras took time to warn me-again-against getting involved with Johnny Merton.

  “He’s got a lawyer, you said so yourself. Let the lawyer ask him your questions. If those black friends of his ain’t talking to you, there’s a good bet Merton won’t, either. Would you trust some black detective who came around asking questions about your childhood friends?”

  It wasn’t our first go-round on the topic. “I hope I’d have enough sense and skill to evaluate their sincerity and skill. And not judge them or any person on their race.”

  “Yeah, well, if you have to have a dish perfect before you eat it, you’re always going to starve to death, cookie, and that’s a fact. It’s pretty darned hard for the rest of us to be perfect enough for you.”

  I was just perfect enough not to tell him he could get himself to Petra’s damned fundraiser. At the bank, I waited in the lobby while he went to his safe-deposit box. He returned, glowing with justifiable pride over his collection: a Bronze Star, a Purple Heart, his Good Conduct Medal with stars, and his ETO medal, also with stars. I left him polishing them while I drove west to the Big House.

  It wasn’t even as though I wanted to visit Johnny, certainly not that I wanted to go to Stateville. I had been locked up once myself. It had almost killed me, and the helplessness and pain from those two months still haunt my nightmares. Prison is one endless round of violations of every human boundary-your mail, your time alone, your time with others. All these are invaded. Someone listens to your phone calls. Toilets and showers are open to any prurient guard. And your body itself is constantly violated, you being powerless to protest the frequent strip searches.

  As I left the interstate for Route 53, my stomach twisted so hard that I doubled over at the wheel and had to pull off the road. I knew I would be searched, and that was the problem. I kept telling myself that it was impersonal. Too many people-civilians, lawyers, guards-had smuggled in weapons and drugs to exempt anyone from a thorough inspection of person and property. But the thought of willingly submitting to it turned me so cold I was shaking. I switched on the heater despite the warmth of the July day. Gradually I calmed down enough that I could drive through the gates.

  I showed the sentry my letter from Greg Yeoman announcing me as part of Johnny Merton’s legal team. I showed my letter from the warden authorizing my visit this afternoon. The guard did a thorough inspection of my car, including the old towels I keep in the backseat for the dogs.

  When I passed through the three sets of razor wire, the electronic security, and the body search, I felt myself shriveling, disappearing into a numb place so I couldn’t feel pain. I was panting when the search was finished and I was escorted into the lawyers’ holding pen.

  Like everything at Stateville, the room was old and poorly lit. The sagging deal table where I was going to meet Merton might have been manufactured in 1925, the year the prison opened. Stateville consists of a series of circular cellblocks, with a guard station in the middle of each. Guards, in theory, can see all the cells without the prisoners being able to tell if they’re observed.

  As it stands today, the lighting in Stateville is so bad that no one can see much of anything. Many of the inmates spend days in the dark. Pigeons fly through their cells and along the corridors, getting in easily through the cracks in the windows and walls, but, like many of the humans, never finding their way out again.

  Because of staff shortages, the men are essentially in a Supermax facility, allowed out briefly once a day, often going weeks without getting to use the exercise yard. Their starchy meals are slapped through the bars at them. I guessed that’s why Johnny agreed so readily to let me be part of his legal team. Even if the state wouldn’t let him use a gym or a library, they had to let him see his lawyer.

  I’d been in the meeting room more than an hour before the locks scraped back. A guard came in with Johnny in cuffs and seated him at the scarred table. He left us alone for a minute, then returned with two Styrofoam cups of coffee. Johnny clearly had clout! The guard stepped to the corner of the room, supposedly out of earshot.

  “So, little white girl lawyer couldn’t take the heat at Twenty-sixth and California.” Johnny gave me an evil grin. “Had to jump to the pig side of the fence, huh?”

  “Good to see you again, too, after all this time, Mr. Merton.” I sat down across from him.

  Actually, seeing Johnny was a shock. He was almost bald, and what remained of his close-cropped hair was white. He had once been lean and lithe, as supple as his anaconda namesake, but the loss of exercise and increase of heavy food had weighed him down. Only the anger behind the tearing in his bloodshot eyes was familiar. That, and the coiled snakes tattooed on his arms.

  “And what brilliant new insights are you bringing to my legal team, little white girl?”

  I narrowed my eyes at him. “The pleasure of knowing I don’t have to try to make you look good to a judge again.”

  That silenced him. I hoped he was remembering the time I represented him all those years back. In our meetings, after showering me with the barrage of insults that had become his second skin, he had raged against the rampant racism of the courts, the cops, the economy. I somehow persuaded him to tone it down, to speak civilly to the judge and opposing counsel, and, in the end, we got an aggravated assault charge reduced to a sentence for battery.

  “I read through your file over the weekend. I expect the cops could have got you anytime they wanted you for the rackets, but they were waiting for you to make a big mistake and do it in front of a guy with a wire.”

  He smacked the table with his palm. “You think I’m admitting to anything in front of you, bitch, you are so wrong!”

  I pulled Suite Française from my briefcase and started to read. After watching me in mounting fury, Johnny suddenly gave a bark of a laugh. “Right. Ms. Detective, I should have said.”

  “Close enough.” I closed the novel but didn’t put it away. “I’m looking for an old pal of yours. Lamont Gadsden.”

  The ugly l
ook, never far from his face, came back full bore. “And what do you want to frame him for, Ms. Detective?”

  “I’m the wrong kind of detective for that, Mr. Merton. I only want to find the guy.”

  “So someone else can stick him in here next to me?” His face was mean, but he knew the prison system: he spoke in a jailhouse whisper.

  “Is there a reason he should be? Was he complicit in one of those murders they booked you for?”

  “They booked me but never proved anything. No evidence but a high-wire act, and that acrobat ain’t soaring too high these days.”

  The man who’d fingered Johnny for three gang-related slayings had been Johnny’s second-in-command at the Anacondas. He’d been found dead in an alley the day Johnny’s trial started, as I’d read in the Herald-Star ’s account of the trial. They’d never arrested anyone for the man’s murder, although his ears were missing, the telltale sign of an Anaconda who’d been abandoned by the gang.

  “Booked you and convicted you. I’m sure Greg Yeoman did his best, but you didn’t give him a whole lot to go on with, did you?” I paused for a beat, let him smolder anew over his adjutant who’d flipped for the state. “Lamont Gadsden. His mother is old, the aunt who doted on him is dying. They want a chance to see him before they pass.”

  “Ella Gadsden? Don’t make me start to cry, Detective. There is no guard in this prison-hell, no guard in this whole system-as hard as that pious lady. Only person who can match her is that reverend of hers.”

  “What about Miss Claudia? She’s having trouble holding her head up, has trouble even forming words. She wants to see Lamont again.”

  He folded his arms in front of him in a deliberate gesture of disrespect. “I remember those two sisters, and Miss Claudia was always a ray of sunshine on South Morgan. But I don’t remember any Lamont.”