I let myself into Mr. Contreras’s kitchen to collect Mitch and ran over to the lake with him and Peppy. Mr. Contreras was puttering around his kitchen when we got back, but I turned down breakfast. I wanted to get a head start on Lamont Gadsden. I had a full calendar this afternoon, including a job for my most important client, the one whose fees would pay for those Lario boots and a few other expensive unnecessities.
A forty-year-old trail is a cold one, and Miss Ella hadn’t given me much in the way of bread crumbs to follow. In my office, I ran through the databases that make the modern detective’s life so easy these days. Lamont Gadsden hadn’t changed his name, at least not since those records were automated. As Lamont Gadsden, he didn’t own a car in any of the fifty states. He wasn’t being sued for child support or alimony. No department of corrections housed him.
I turned to other work and was in the middle of a report for another client when Karen Lennon called. She had visited Miss Ella this morning.
“We talked for a bit, and she finally was able to remember the names of some of the people who knew her son.”
It was a meager list, but it was better than nothing. Miss Ella had provided the names of Lamont’s high school physics teacher and a Pastor Hebert from her church. Karen Lennon had somehow persuaded Miss Ella to divulge the names of three of her son’s adolescent friends. Interrogation is all about knowing how to ask your question so the subject will answer. Karen Lennon clearly had a touch with Miss Ella that I lacked.
“What about my talking to Miss Claudia?”
The pastor hesitated. “I think it would be a good idea, if she starts feeling a little stronger. She’s been pretty frail the last few weeks, and strangers would be hard on her. And Miss Ella holds Miss Claudia’s power of attorney, so that may be an obstacle as well.”
When we’d hung up, I did a search on the list of people who’d known Lamont. Four of the five men were still alive, which wasn’t as big a help as the optimistic detective needs. One of the friends from Lamont’s youth had died of pancreatic cancer when he was thirty-seven. A second friend had disappeared as thoroughly as Lamont himself. The physics teacher had retired to Mississippi fifteen years ago, and Pastor Hebert, at ninety-three, apparently wasn’t quite the ball of fire he’d been in his prime. “Oh, Pastor Hebert, such a shame,” the woman who returned the message I left on his church’s answering machine said. “The Holy Spirit inhabited that man’s body.”
I asked if he was dead.
“No, no, he’s still with us, but not quite with us, if you understand. He brought me to Jesus, me and my two boys and my sisters, and we need that saintly man’s saving voice here now. But the Lord does as He will in His own time, and we must pray to Jesus, pray for Pastor Hebert’s healing, and pray for a prophet to lead us out of our wilderness.”
“Yes, ma’am,” I said weakly.
I called the physics teacher, who remembered Lamont but hadn’t seen him since his high school graduation. “He was a bright boy, a good student. I wanted him to go on to college, but he’d turned into such an angry young man, you couldn’t talk to him about anything in the white man’s world anymore. I suggested Howard or Grambling, but he still wouldn’t listen. I didn’t even know he’d disappeared.”
The teacher promised to call if he heard anything, which was as likely as seeing the Cubs in the World Series. That left me with a man named Curtis Rivers, who still lived in West Englewood, a few blocks from where he and Lamont Gadsden had grown up. Like the other people on Miss Ella’s list, Rivers had done very little that showed up on the Web: he didn’t vote, he hadn’t been in prison or run for public office, I couldn’t tell if he’d ever been married. But he did own Fit for Your Hoof, a shoe-repair shop on Seventieth Place just west of Ashland.
It wasn’t until mid-afternoon that I had time to go to Rivers’s shop. I spent the bulk of the day cleaning up my job for Darraugh Graham. I was tracing the engineering credentials of a woman Darraugh wanted to head his aerospace division, and my inquiry took me to Northwest ern University’s engineering school.
When I finished my queries—learning, sadly, that Darraugh’s candidate looked too good to be true because she was too good to be true—my feeling of unreality intensified. I seem to be finding more and more job candidates these days who don’t care what lies they tell. Maybe politicians and television have so blurred the lines between entertainment and truth that people think no one knows or cares about the difference between a clever story and real experience.