The first few minutes, she only offered the briefest answers to my questions:
I hear you’re looking for your son.
Yes.
What is his name?
Lamont Emmanuel Gadsden.
How old is he?
Sixty-one.
“When did you last see him, Ms. Gadsden?”
“January twenty-fifth, 1967.”
I was startled into silence. No wonder Karen Lennon hadn’t wanted to tell me. That was more than a long time to be missing. It was two lifetimes.
Finally I asked if Miss Ella had looked for him at the time he went missing. She nodded grimly but didn’t volunteer anything further.
I tried not to sigh out loud. “How did you search for him then?”
“We talked to his friends. They said he just disappeared.” Her jaws clamped shut, but she pried them open after a moment to add, “I didn’t approve of those friends. It was a hard job to go to them, and they weren’t respectful, but I don’t think they were lying.”
“And you filed a missing persons report in 1967?”
“We went to the police.” She pronounced the word to emphasize the first syllable: poh-leese. “There we were, two Christians in our Sunday best, and they treated us like we were darkies in a minstrel show.”
“My dad was a cop,” I blurted out.
“What’s that supposed to mean?” Miss Ella’s jaws worked around her false teeth, as if they were cud. “That the police are fine, honest men who stand up and say, ‘Yes, ma’am,’ when a black woman comes into the station looking for help?”
“No, ma’am, of course not,” I said quietly. “I suppose I thought you should know up front, in case you found out later and thought I was hiding something from you.”
Miss Ella’s lips tightened into well-rehearsed lines of bitterness. Not that she didn’t have reason: I could imagine the scene, the South Side district station in 1967, when crude racial slurs were part of life and most of the cops were white. But my dad hadn’t been like that. It always gets my hackles up when people dismiss all cops as pigs or brutes. Still, it’s not a good policy to argue with the client.
“You say ‘we.’ Was that you and your husband?”
“My sister and me. She came to live with me after my husband passed, when Lamont was thirteen, and I’ve always said that was when Lamont started to stray-she indulged the boy so much that he lost his sense of direction. But that’s water over the dam. My sister is ill now, too ill to live long, and it’s a wish dear to her to know what happened to Lamont. That’s the only reason I’m opening that box after all this time. Pastor Karen said you come highly recommended.” Nothing in Miss Ella’s voice betrayed that she placed any confidence in Karen Lennon’s words.
“Very kind of her. Did she tell you about my fee structure?”
Miss Ella pushed herself to her feet. She moved slowly through the maze of furniture to a sideboard. With an audible groan, she bent to open a door and pulled out a small lockbox. She extracted a key from a chain around her neck and unlocked the box.
“My sister’s life insurance. It has a face value of ten thousand dollars. When she passes, I will pay you out of what doesn’t get spent on her funeral. Unless, of course, you find Lamont. Then the money is his to do with what he wishes.”
She held the policy out for me to read the declarations page. Ajax Insurance had issued it to Claudia Marie Ardenne. Lamont Emmanuel Gadsden was her legatee and Ella Anastasia Ardenne Gadsden his successor. It was a horrible moment, the sense of being a ghoul waiting to feast on her sister’s remains. I almost turned around and walked out, but something in my prospective client’s face made me think she was hoping for such a reaction, or at least hoping to make me uncomfortable enough to waive my fee.
I pulled out a notebook and started taking down such skimpy details as she could offer: the name of the pastor at her church when Lamont was a child. His high school physics teacher, who thought Lamont had promise and ought to go to college.
“What about his friends?” I asked. “The ones you didn’t approve of?”
“I don’t remember their names. It’s been forty years.”
“You know how it is, Miss Ella, these things sometimes come back to us in the middle of the night.” I smiled limpidly to show that I knew she was lying. “In case they do, you can write them down and call me. And the day you last saw him, what was he doing, where was he going?”
“It was at the dinner table. He didn’t often come home at dinner-time, but there he was, eating bean soup and reading the paper. We got an evening paper then, and he was reading through it while my sister and I were talking. And suddenly he flung down the paper and headed for the door without a by-your-leave.
“‘Is that what you do? Eat and not even say thank you for the meal?’” I asked. Claudia always thought I was too harsh with Lamont, but I didn’t see why a boy couldn’t learn manners in this life. He didn’t have a job, and there Claudia and I were, me screwing parts together at the phone plant, Claudia cleaning up after spoiled white folks, and Lamont thinking we lived to wait on him!”
She paused, breathing hard, reliving the resentments that hadn’t eased for being forty years old. “So that night, when I said what I said, he kissed his fingers to me and passed some sarcastic comment on the ‘delightful repast’ before going out the door, just wearing that thin jacket, the kind all those hotshot boys sported in those days. The next day was the big storm, you know. When he didn’t come home, I thought he must have taken shelter somewhere. That jacket wasn’t enough to carry him through a blizzard.”
Oh yes, the big storm of ’sixty-seven. I’d been ten then, and it seemed like a winter fairyland to me. Two feet of snow fell; drifts rose to the height of buildings. The blizzard briefly covered the yellow stains that the steel mills left on our car and house, painting everything a dazzling white. For adults, it had been a nightmare. My dad was stuck at the station for the better part of two days while my mother and I struggled to clean the walks and get to a grocery store. Of course, the mills didn’t shut down, and within a day the mounds of snow looked dirty, old, dreary.
“It was only later we got worried.” Miss Ella’s harsh voice brought me back to her living room. “Later, when we could get out and about, and, by then, we couldn’t find anyone who had seen him.”
It was when I asked for a photograph that Miss Ella seemed startled. I was surprised, actually, that among all the framed slogans and pictures of Dr. King, Malcolm X, and other black leaders, that I hadn’t seen any family pictures at all.
“Why do you need one?”
“If I’m going to look for him, I need to know what he looked like forty years ago. I can scan it and age it, see what he might look like at sixty.”
Miss Ella returned to the sideboard and fumbled inside for a photo album. She looked through it slowly and finally took out a shot of a young black man in yellow graduation robes. His hair was cropped close to his head in the style of those pre-Afro days. He stared seriously at the camera, his eyes hard and bleak.
“That was when he graduated high school. Even though he’d started down a wrong road, I made him stay in school until he was done. The rest are all just baby pictures and such. I want this back, and I want it back in the same condition it is today.”
I slipped it into a plastic sleeve and put it in a file folder. I told her I’d return it at the end of the week, after I’d made some copies and preliminary inquiries.
“But I don’t want your sister to imagine this will be easy. I never guarantee results. And, in this case, we may end up with too many dead ends for you to want to continue.”