“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
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.