The chess players were sitting at their board. The balding man with the paunch was still wearing his Machinists T-shirt; the skinny, darker one had on an outsize lumberjack’s shirt. Curtis Rivers stood behind the counter watching them play, a toothpick jutting at a jaunty angle from his mouth.
The Sun-Times was on the counter. My cousin’s picture had made the front page. HAVE YOU SEEN ME? the screamer headline read. The radio was still tuned to NPR. It was Worldview time in Chicago. The men had been talking, but when they looked up and saw me, the room became so quiet that even Jerome MacDonald seemed to sink to a whisper.
“You’re not welcome here,” Rivers said.
“Gosh, and you’ve been so subtle up to now I never would have guessed. Tell me about Steve Sawyer.”
“I’ll tell you all I’ve said before, which is you’ve got a hell of a nerve to come here and ask about him.”
“He changed his name legally to Kimathi, didn’t he, before the trial? But Lamont never went that far. He was Lumumba only to the inner Anaconda circle.”
Rivers shifted the toothpick from one side of his mouth to the other but didn’t speak. I saw a red handbag on one of the ropes made of the kind of leather that I love, a soft, supple calfskin.
“At his trial, Kimathi-Steve was expecting Lamont to show up with some pictures, wasn’t he? And Lamont never arrived.” I stuck up an arm and unclipped the bag.
“Ask your daddy about that, Ms. Detective. Oh, right, your daddy is dead. Pretty convenient, isn’t it?”
I looked inside the handbag. There was a zip compartment where you could put your wallet and a pocket that would just hold your cellphone. I was not going to lose my temper. And I wasn’t going to start yelling about my father.
“You remember George Dornick, of course, since you remember Tony Warshawski,” I said, still peering into the bag.
The cold eyes on the far side of the counter didn’t give anything away.
“And you’ve seen the news that my cousin is missing.” I paused again but still got no response.
Rivers picked up the Sun-Times. “Cute blond white girl, of course it’s big news. I’m sure the cops can find some black man to implicate before the day is done.”
The chess players were watching me as if I were some complicated move on their board. I looked up from the handbag at Rivers.
“They already have.”
Rivers turned off the radio. The quiet became absolute. I found a price tag tucked into an outside compartment: five hundred thirty dollars. A bag like this would be triple that at a downtown store. I put it over my shoulder and went to inspect myself in a narrow strip of mirror behind the ropes.
“Johnny.” I continued to study my silhouette.
“Man’s in Stateville. Hard to see how he could be out grabbing white chicks off the street.”
“They figure he still has a lot of friends around town who’d do a favor for him. They’re going to try to pressure him through his daughter.” I turned around, not in a hurry, and leaned against the mirror.
“His daughter?” Rivers frowned. “What can they do to her? What I hear, she may not be proud of him. But she doesn’t pretend she doesn’t know him.”
“I don’t know what they will do, but I’ll tell you what they can do. Plant evidence that she’s trafficking drugs for him. Plant computer files that show she’s dipping into private funds at the law firm where she works.” I fiddled with the opening on the bag, a clever little tongue in hard leather that slipped into a catch.
When the whistle sounded and the loudspeaker announced “Welcome to Chicago,” we all jumped. I had my hand inside my tuck holster; Rivers had his under the counter. A woman parted the ropes, bringing in a pair of high heels that needed new soles. Rivers bantered with her but kept an eye on me.
When the whistle blew as she left, he said, “They hurt Dayo, Johnny will get revenge one way or another. That won’t make him confess to snatching your cousin.”
“Here’s how I see it. Either my cousin is dead or she’s bolted, and they don’t know where she’s run. If she’s dead, if they killed her, first they make Johnny crazy by screwing with his kid and then they get a Stateville snitch to claim he heard Johnny confess to putting a contract out on Petra-on my cousin-because he’s still mad at me for various reasons.”
It was painful to talk casually about Petra in such a way, clinical, detached, as if she were a movie script I was reading. The really hard sentence came next.
“They say they’ll put the rap on Kimathi. They’ll say he killed Petra as payback.” I braced myself in case Rivers or his friends came after me.
“And, by God, he would be in his rights to.” Curtis Rivers’s voice was soft with a menace that chilled my bones.
“Why?”
“Why?” Rivers spat at me. “What, is he supposed to be just one more Jesus-loving nigger, getting tortured but saying ‘I forgive them all because hate curdles the soul’? He doesn’t forgive you, and I don’t forgive you.”
“I’m not asking you to forgive me, but I would very much like to know what I did to earn this anger.” I had dug my fingers into the soft calfskin of the bag I was still holding in an effort to keep the trembling in my legs out of my voice and hands.
“You would like to know! As if you don’t-”
“Mr. Rivers, we had this conversation two months ago. I was ten years old when Harmony Newsome was murdered. All I know about the story is from reading newspapers, reading the trial transcript, and from a brief conversation with Sister Frances, which was cut short by her murder.”
“And you were conveniently at her side when she died.”
“I held her in my arms as her hair burned.” My voice did tremble at that. “I have raw wounds on my scalp and arms and chest and nightmares that don’t go away.”
“And so does Kimathi have those nightmares.”
“Tell me what happened, Mr. Rivers.”
The chess players had been silent, almost motionless, during our interchange, but the machinist said, “You got to tell her, Curtis. You were out of bounds just now over Sister Frankie. Ms. Detective here never caused Frankie’s death, and you know it.”
The lumberjack nodded in agreement. Rivers scowled at his friends but went into the back of the shop. I heard the deep rumble of his voice and frightened cries from Kimathi. More rumbling, fewer cries, and Rivers came back out with Kimathi clutching his arm.
“This woman here, her daddy was Officer Warshawski. Tell her what happened when they came for you.”
“She’s going to take away my nature,” Kimathi whispered.
“There’s three of us here, we’re bigger than she is, she can’t cut you or hurt you. And you are safe at night, she can’t break in through all my gates.”
I held out my hands, empty hands. “I can’t hurt you, Mr. Kimathi.”
“It was all on account of Harmony’s death, the way the police reacted to Harmony’s death, I mean,” the machinist said softly. “The city didn’t care about Harmony. But Harmony’s brother did. Saul was sixteen; he was proud of his sister, and her death was almost a mortal blow to him. Until Sister Frankie persuaded him that they could use the lessons of the movement as a call for justice in Harmony’s death. Saul and Frankie, they started holding a vigil outside the police station every Sunday. They got TV crews down, they got the papers to write it up. Cops knew they had to pick up someone or the South Side would blow up all over again. So they picked on Kimathi here.”
Kimathi was trembling, looking at his feet.
“Tell her what happened. ‘Officer Warshawski came and picked me up in his squad car,’ ” Rivers prompted.
“He pick me up, he take me to the station,” Kimathi whispered, his eyes large, flicking a glance up at me.
I kept my hands open in front of me. My heart was pounding so hard that the pulses in my neck were choking me.
“I was surprised. I didn’t know I killed Harmony. She so sweet, so pretty, so special. Too special for me. I t
ell that to the officer, and he say, ‘Save your story for the detectives and the lawyers, son, I’m just the man with the warrant for your arrest.’ And then he say, like they do, ‘You have the right to remain silent,’ and all that stuff.”
“And then?” My mouth was dry, and the words came out in a harsh squawk.
“The detectives come in. They laugh. I’m the party… I’m the death of the party to them, a big joke. They tell me I kill Harmony. They tell me confess, make it all easy, only I didn’t remember killing her. Now I can’t remember, one way or another. The demons, they come and claw at me day and night… Maybe the demons kill Harmony. Maybe the demons say, ‘Kimathi, you a devil, too. You in the gang. Just like pastor always said, you a child of the devil, you bound for hell. Go ahead, kill that sweet girl for all us demons.’ ”
“You never killed a soul in your life, Kimathi,” Rivers said. “Those detectives messed up your body and messed up your mind. You tell this white girl how they did.”
“They chain me up.” He was so ashamed at the memory that he looked at the floor. Tears seeped from the corners of his eyes. “They chain me, they call me nigger. They say I the song-and-dance man, dance for them. They put me on the radiator. They burn the skin off my butt, it bleed. They laugh. They say I singing for them. Then they put electricity on my manhood, they run a current. They say, ‘This nigger boy a good dancer.’ They laugh. They tell me next they gon’ cut off my manhood. So I tell them the words they want to hear, that I kill Harmony, that blessed child of Jesus.”
I felt tears spilling from my own eyes and a revulsion so strong it doubled me over.
“Yes, a pretty story, white girl, isn’t it?” Rivers said.
“And Tony Warshawski?” I managed to whisper.
“He come in the room, two times, maybe more… I’m hurting too bad to count.”
“And what did he do?”
“He tell them to stop. But they tell him, ‘Don’t act like Jesus Christ on the dashboard, Warshawski. This for your brother.’ ”
41
ROUSTING AN UNCLE
MY LEGS GAVE WAY, AND I FOUND MYSELF SITTING ON THE floor. Curtis Rivers looked down at me without pity, but I didn’t want any. “This for your brother”… “This for Peter.” Tony watched Alito and Dornick chain a man to a boiling radiator, watched them run a current through his genitals. My daddy-my wise and good and loving father… My hands were wet. I thought I would see blood when I looked at them, Steve Sawyer’s blood, the blood of every prisoner my father had watched in Dornick’s or Alito’s custody, but it was only tears and snot.
I don’t know how long I sat looking at the dust on the cracked linoleum, watching a spider crawl along the baseboard. I wanted to lie down on that floor and sleep away the rest of my time on the planet. After I’d found Petra, after I’d found Lamont, maybe I could curl up and die.
“This for Peter.” The Christmas Eve conversation I had remembered after seeing Alito came back to me again, my father saying, “You got your promotion. That’s enough, isn’t it?” and Alito replying, “You want to see him in prison?”
At last, I pushed myself up to a standing position again. My shoulders ached.
My father had been tense all fall after the summer of riots. I didn’t remember anything about the demonstrations that Harmony’s brother had organized with Sister Frankie, but they would have been outside my dad’s station. I could picture the tension inside the station, the Mayor’s Office putting heat on them, demanding an immediate arrest.
So the State’s Attorney’s Office organized a frame: get one of the Anacondas; they’re all guilty of something. Who knows why they picked on Sawyer or who put his name in play. Larry Alito? My mind flinched at the idea of naming my father. Arnie Coleman played along as the public defender conveniently assigned to the case. You choose the guy most eager for favors, most likely to play your game.
In Cook County, it didn’t take a genius, or even very much money, to persuade the head of the criminal defenders unit to give you a weak link. After all, by the time I was with the PD, and Coleman had moved into the number one chair, I saw him do it over and over. My coworkers and I knew money was changing hands. We just never knew how much.
I took a shuddering breath and looked at the four men. I needed to be a professional in this situation, which meant I had to pull myself together. I might not have another chance to talk to Kimathi.
“Mr. Kimathi… If I can, I’ll find the person who really did kill Harmony Newsome. But I’m afraid that means I need to ask you a few more questions.”
Kimathi swallowed convulsively and edged behind Curtis.
“At the trial, Mr. Kimathi, what did you mean when you said Lumumba had your picture?”
“That’s right, Lumumba has my picture.”
“But what picture?” I asked.
“He told Johnny. Johnny promised, and then no one came, they all left me. They all afraid the demons coming for them. I covered with demons.” He suddenly thrust his head under my face, bending over and skewing his body so that he looked at me sideways, his tongue sticking out like a Mayan mask. “See my demons? See how they crawling on me?”
I willed myself not to back away. “Those aren’t your demons, Mr. Kimathi. They belong to the detectives who tortured you. You tell those demons to go away, to go home where they belong.”
“Oh, they mine, they been living with me a long time. Pastor Hebert, he told me… he told me I’m bound for hell, hanging out with Johnny and Lumumba instead of coming to church. The demons, Pastor sent them to remind me every day.”
It was close to unbearable, talking to him, but I managed to keep my voice from cracking. “What about the pictures? What pictures did Lumumba have?”
Kimathi pulled his head upright and looked at Curtis, his brow wrinkled in worry. “Lumumba said he had a picture of who killed Harmony, but did I kill her? Did he have my picture?”
“You never killed her, Kimathi,” the machinist said. “And the white girl is right about the demons. They’re not yours. Send them to the person who owns them.”
As Kimathi spoke, I realized that was what my house-and-office wreckers had been hunting: the picture that showed who killed Harmony Newsome. That’s why Petra wanted to see my childhood homes, to see if Tony had taken that vital piece of evidence away, a picture that proved who killed Harmony. Would it be his brother in the frame? Would Tony go that far, out of loyalty to his family, and steal evidence and hide it at home?
“What happened to Lumumba?” I felt as though I were splitting in two, between the emotions pounding inside me and my calm investigator’s voice asking questions.
Curtis shook his head. “Johnny knows. It happened during the blizzard, that much I can tell you.”
“You were at the Waltz Right Inn the night before the storm,” I said.
Rivers nodded fractionally. “Lamont came in with Johnny, like Sister Rose said. They went off into the back room, talked between themselves, then came out, joined the party. Lamont took off about two a.m. And that was the last time we saw him.”
“Johnny went with him?”
“No. And they weren’t fighting. Believe me, if Johnny had wanted to put a hit out on Lamont, we all would have known. But we were scared about what was happening to Steve… to Kimathi. I think Johnny and Lamont were talking about that, talking about whatever pictures Lamont said he had.”
“You think Lamont is dead?”
“I’m sure Lamont is dead,” Curtis said. “Brother didn’t have anyplace to hide that we didn’t know about. Miss Ella, she had family in Louisiana. They would have taken him. But we still would have heard. If anyone knows what happened to Lamont, it’s Johnny. I thought Johnny had seen a demon himself, when the snow cleared and we all crawled out again. After that storm, he would never let anyone mention Lamont’s name on the street around him.”
I squeezed my forehead with my hand. “What can I possibly offer Johnny Merton that would get him to talk to me? He wants the Innoc
ence Project working for him, but frankly-”
“He’s not innocent of what they sent him down for, but he never killed Lamont Gadsden.”
I fished in the handbag, looking for a tissue, before remembering the bag belonged to the shop. The machinist chess player pulled a handkerchief out of his pocket and let me wipe my face and hands. All four of us knew what I could offer Johnny Merton: proof of who really killed Harmony, proof of who killed Lamont and where his body rested.
Kimathi telling his story, me collapsing in the face of it, that had shifted the relationships in the room. Rivers and his friends weren’t on my side, exactly, but I was no longer an enemy. I guess you could say I was on probation.
I looked at the soiled handkerchief. “I’ll wash this and get it back to you, but I have a lot to do first. A lot of ground to cover and not much time. You need to get Kimathi out of here. George Dornick knows where he is, and it would be pathetically easy for them to break in here. Kimathi has to go someplace where no one would think to look. And you have to make double and triple sure that no one is on your back when you move him. They’re sophisticated, and they have a lot of money to throw around.”
Rivers said, “I have a shotgun, and I was in Vietnam. I can look after-”
“No, you can’t. Dornick has firepower that makes Hamburger Hill look like a pie-throwing contest.”
“Listen to her, Curtis,” the lumberjack said softly. “She’s telling you for Kimathi’s sake. No time for ego-tripping here, brother.”
The machinist nodded. “We’ll take him away right now. You want him, Ms. Detective, you ask Curtis. Less you know, the better.”
He turned to Kimathi and began talking to him, cajoling him. Kimathi didn’t want to leave without Curtis. I thought I might start screaming. I wanted him out-now!-before Dornick or anyone else showed up here.
I parted the ropes to leave and realized I was still holding the red handbag. I returned and put it on the counter. “This bag has attached itself to me, Mr. Rivers… And I see, anyway, that I’ve stained it… I lost all my cards and whatnot in the fire, but, if you put it away for me, I’ll pay for it when I get the cash together.”
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