Hardball (8 page)

“I did, but not till later. At first, when I didn’t see him around, I thought Lamont was avoiding me. I thought God was punishing me. I was so confused in my head, I couldn’t decide if God was punishing me for not going off with Lamont when he asked me that past September or if He was punishing me for letting Lamont touch me.” She gave an embarrassed snort of laughter.

“I finally asked Curtis Rivers, but that wasn’t until maybe a month or six weeks went by, and he was just as puzzled as me.”

“Was Curtis Rivers with the Anacondas, too?” I asked.

“I never did know for sure who was, who wasn’t. I was the preacher’s kid, I was the stuck-up girl, they didn’t talk to me the way they did the other girls in the neighborhood. I don’t think Curtis was—he shipped out to Vietnam, anyway, round about May of ’sixty-seven—he was just the boy everyone trusted. Gang, straight, whatever . . . Curtis, he didn’t play sides. Should have been him I broke my heart over, not a no-good street boy like Lamont.” She laughed again, less bitterly this time.

“So is Miss Ella right? Was Lamont dealing drugs?”

“Not the way she meant. I mean, she makes it sound like the South Side was floating on Lamont Gadsden’s heroin sales. But she’s like my daddy: you move a quarter inch off the straight and narrow, you’re Satan’s child for sure. And after Lamont disappeared, Sister Ella, she carried on as if nothing had happened. Just held herself straighter, if any back not made out of cast iron could be held so straight. But Sister Claudia, Lamont’s going just about broke her heart.”

“Miss Ella says she and Miss Claudia went to the police. Did you ever hear anything about that?”

“Oh, they went. But the cops, they were so ugly. It was like they did this work they hated, looking after Dr. King that summer—1966, I mean—and then couldn’t wait to take it out on any black person who crossed their path. I went with Sister Ella and Claudia to the station house, and the way those cops acted, you’d think those two women had shot the president. Pigs? My, yes, they were pigs.”

I felt the jolt that the insult always gave me.

“You think there’s any hope, any chance, you might find him?” She spoke in a soft, shy voice, as if afraid I might mock her deepest feelings.

I wanted to tell her something heartening, hope filled, something that would put life back in her voice. I wanted to spread some honey out for her, but I could only tell the truth, the fact that I thought Lamont Gadsden was either dead or so deeply hidden that no one would ever find him unless he chose to come forward himself.

“I’ll talk to Johnny Merton,” I found myself promising. “It’s been forty years, but maybe Johnny remembers what they talked about.”

“Don’t use my name,” she begged. “If Daddy hears about it, or the ladies at church . . .”

“You don’t have to go home to him, you know,” I said quietly. “Even now it’s not too late for you to start your own life. I have the phone number for—”

“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.

Sitting in the library this morning, I looked at my fingers, and regret twisted my intestines the way it uselessly does. I could be a decent pianist today—never gifted but competent—if I had acceded to my mother’s wishes that I study music more seriously. Why had I fought so against practicing? My mother adored me, and I had loved her fiercely back. Why would I not do this thing that was so important to her? Could it be that I’d been jealous of music? Who could possibly compete with Mozart, my rival for her affections?
“Mi tradì quell’alma ingrata,”
Donna Elvira’s aria about jealousy and betrayal in
Don Giovanni,
had been one of Gabriella’s favorites.

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.