I SCOWLED AT THE DASHBOARD. DID CURTIS RIVERS KNOW something about Lamont that he didn’t want to tell me? Or was it just that the gleam had worn off my winning smile? Even when I was fresh out of law school in the Public Defender’s Office, I hadn’t been able to “use my assets,” as my supervisor put it, not too subtly urging me to show cleavage and smirk my way into the good graces of judges and cops. Still, I thought I had been considerate and caring, as well as responsible in what I said, and all those other Girl Scout things in talking to Rivers. He hadn’t needed to stiff me quite so hard.
I hadn’t had high hopes when I started this investigation, but somehow I didn’t expect to hit so many dead ends this fast. Pastor Hebert, who lived with his daughter in Pullman, five miles farther down the Ryan from Fit for Your Hoof, was the last person on my list. Given his questionable mental state, I didn’t expect to learn anything startling, but it would wrap up this part of the inquiry. I could go to Miss Ella tomorrow and tell her she either needed to give me more background or end the investigation.
I turned on the ignition but phoned Pastor Hebert’s daughter before taking off. I started to explain who I was, but she already knew. Whoever I had spoken to at the Saving Word Gospel Church this morning had been on the phone to Rose Hebert within seconds. Rose supposed I could come down now, although what anyone could tell me after all this time she couldn’t imagine.
“You never know,” I said with determined cheerfulness.
As I pulled away from the curb, the leashes in Fit for Your Hoof ’s window display twitched. Someone was watching me. But what did that prove? Rivers knew something about Lamont. Or he didn’t trust a white woman on the black South Side. Just as I thought. I floored the Mustang so abruptly it fishtailed into a pothole. That would definitely be the last straw if I broke an axle or blew a tire down here.
I couldn’t go fast very far, anyway. It was five-thirty, the heart of the evening rush. The line at the entrance ramp to the Ryan took six lights to clear. Traffic stayed bumper to bumper until I oozed off again at 111th Street.
As soon as I left the expressway, I entered a quiet, orderly world that doesn’t quite belong to Chicago. Pullman’s quiet, tree-lined streets, with their Federal-style row houses painted in greens and reds, stand in sharp contrast to the broken-down tenements just to the north and east.
Maybe its feeling of separateness from the big city is because Pullman started as a company town, a monument to railway magnate George Pullman’s ego. The inventor built everything—company stores, houses for his managers, tenements for his workers—who staged a bloody strike over the prices Pullman charged in his stores, coupled with the fact that his houses cost more than they could ever dream of paying. Pullman finally had to give up on his town, but most of the houses remain. They’d been built from bricks made of the durable Lake Calumet clay, which is so highly prized that thieves have dismantled whole garages, if the owners are away, and carted off the bricks for resale elsewhere in the city.
As I continued west, I saw the Hotel Florence on my right. Its turrets and spires had made it seem like a fairy-tale castle when I was little. It’s been closed for decades now, but my parents used to eat there to mark special occasions. I stopped, looking at the blank windows, remembering the family lunch on my tenth birthday, right before the city exploded in riots from one end to another. My mother tried to enforce a gay party atmosphere, but none of her attempts at charm or conversation could override my aunt Marie’s sour racist harangues.
I hadn’t wanted to include Marie, but Gabriella said I couldn’t invite Boom-Boom without his parents. Afterward, back in our tiny South Chicago living room, I shouted at my mother that it served her right that Aunt Marie had ruined the party. My father jumped up from the TV, where he was watching the Cubs, grabbed my arm, and hustled me out back.
“Victoria, every day I have to go out on the streets and face people who think their anger counts more than anyone else’s feelings or needs. I don’t want to see that anger on your face, or listen to it in your voice, especially not when you talk to your mother.”
My father never scolded me, and for him to do so on my birthday . . . I burst into tears, I created a scene, but he stood by, his arms crossed on his chest. No special treatment for me. I had to calm myself down, apologize to my mother.