I wanted to know how Curtis and Merton communicated. I wanted to know if secretly, after all, Curtis was a high-ranking Anaconda. But something in his face told me I’d better not push my luck.
I got Yeoman to organize an emergency visit to Stateville for me and met with Johnny in the dingy lawyers’ room one last time. I’d brought one of my photo books with me and laid it between us on the scarred deal table.
“These are the pictures Lamont took,” I said. “I guess Curtis told you I found the negatives?”
Merton nodded.
“He showed them to you the night before he disappeared, didn’t he?”
Merton nodded again, shut his eyes, took a breath: another one getting ready to jump off the high dive for me, or at least for Lamont and Miss Claudia.
“My man came to me at the Waltz Right Inn, just like Rose Hebert told you. He had a set of these prints here, and he wanted to go to that piece of shit representing Steve, show him that some white boy killed Harmony and some cop pocketed the evidence. We talked it over, him and me. We knew what went on at the Racine Avenue station. We knew the risk he was running going in there at all, but we agreed he’d better speak up. But I told him to take prints in, don’t let them have the negatives. If they destroy those, there’s nothing left.
“So off he went the morning the big snow started. And the day after it ended later, when you could go outside again, there he was, in my backyard, dead. His ears had been cut off, but he’d been killed before that.”
“His ears!” I said. “So, Dornick and Alito killed him. Or someone at the station did. And they planted his body on you. And if you called the cops, everyone would agree that it was an Anaconda hit. Dornick would say Lamont had turned state’s evidence against you and that you’d murdered him in revenge.”
Johnny gave a sour smile. “You’re not so stupid after all, are you, white girl?”
“I have my moments,” I said drily. “What did you do?”
“I took Lamont inside with me and sat with him all day—sweating blood, you’d better believe—thinking every second that the cops were going to come tear my door down. I wouldn’t let my wife or my little girl in. I made up a big lie, a big story, and it cost me my marriage. My wife, she thought I had some other woman in there with me. She left in a hurry, went to her own mama’s. I guess because of the storm, all the cops were on emergency duty. Not even that shitbag Dornick could come around to check on me and Lamont for three days.
“A big warehouse blew down on Stony the day before the snow. As soon as it got dark, I carried my brother down the stairs. I got my little girl’s sled and pulled my man along, wrapped in blankets. Three miles, that was, hard walking, scared every five minutes some damned cop would stop me.
“Don’t you ever repeat that out loud, white girl, that the Hammer was terrified.” He gave a mirthless bark of laughter and flexed his arms so that the snakes rippled under my nose.
“Anyway, I dug through the snow, buried him in the foundation of that place on Stony. No one ever looked in there after the storm. I sat by the newsman every day at three when the early edition hit the stands, looking, but they just built right on top of my boy. They never looked, they never found him. Day three, up comes that shit Alito, merry as can be, acting on a tip that I had drugs on the premises. They had a warrant and they searched high and low, but you’d better believe the crib was clean. I scrubbed that place from window to floor—and more than once, too—and I had Curtis there to watch they didn’t plant nothing. My only joy was knowing they were going crazy, trying to find out what happened to the body. They were pissed as hell that the place was clean, but they finally took off. For months, Alito would stop by, or sometimes Dornick, now and again. But after a while, it all died down . . . all died down until you came along, nosing into it.”
“When I looked at the pictures, it seemed to me you might have saved Dr. King’s life.” I opened the photo book at the shot that showed the tattooed arm shoving King’s head down.
Merton’s mouth set in a bitter line. “I saved him for some white punk to put a bullet in two years later, that’s all. And what did it cost? Miss Harmony died, took a lot of light out of the South Side when that baseball hit her in the eye. Steve—Kimathi, he calls himself now—they rearranged his privates and his brain for him. And they killed my man Lamont. That’s a high price my homeys paid for one little shove of my arm.”
“Your daughter might like to know,” I ventured.
The anger that was always smoldering behind his eyes lightened slightly. “Yeah, take the tale to Dayo. Let her know—how did you put it?—I ‘had my moments,’ too.”