The memory still burned in me, my dad’s injustice to me on my birthday. The force of the forty-year-old emotion embarrassed me. Staring blindly at the hotel, it dawned on me for the first time that his anger hadn’t been solely about me but his fears about what lay ahead. Catholic parishioners defying the cardinal’s pleas for charity and peace, taking to the streets with every kind of homemade missile—Aunt Marie’s own priest, Father Gribac, essentially inciting his parish to riot—my dad probably was frightened about Gabriella’s and my safety. That tenth birthday was the last time Tony was home in the middle of the day for two months.
A horn sounded loudly behind me. I moved forward, threading my way through a patchwork of short, dead-end streets to Langley, where Rose Hebert lived. Knots of commuters were walking home from the train station, most attached to their cellphones. One man was mowing his tiny lawn, while across the street a woman was washing her front windows. Where the street ended at 114th, a clutch of girls was jumping double Dutch. Beyond them, boys were playing baseball in a rubble-filled vacant lot. The girls slid their eyes my way—Strange white woman on the block—but didn’t interrupt the rhythm of their ropes.
The Heberts lived in one of the original Pullman homes, flat front to the street, red brick with black arches over the windows that looked like surprised eyebrows. Rose Hebert answered the door almost as soon as I rang the bell. She was a tired woman about ten years my senior, her close-cut hair full of gray, her muscular shoulders slumped inside a thin, lavender-print dress.
“I told Father you were coming, but I’m not sure he understood me,” she said by way of greeting. “It’s so hard to believe Sister Ella finally decided to look for Lamont that I called over to Lionsgate Manor to ask her if it was true. People try so many scams against the elderly these days. You have to be careful all the time.”
It didn’t seem like a belligerent comment, just the notion at the front of her mind.
“I am a licensed investigator.” I pulled out my identification, but Ms. Hebert didn’t look at it. “Miss Ella got my name from the pastor at Lionsgate, Karen Lennon, maybe you’ve met her. Miss Ella told me she was hiring me for her sister’s sake more than her own.”
“Poor Sister Claudia,” Rose Hebert murmured. “It’s hard to see her like she is now. She was so lively and graceful as a young woman. Daddy was always having to remind her about modest Christian deportment, but my friends and I, we secretly copied how she dressed and how she walked.”
“Miss Ella didn’t want me visiting her sister, but it sounds as though you’ve seen Miss Claudia since her stroke?”
“Yes, oh yes. I drive the van on Sundays and collect our people who can’t walk to church anymore, so I bring Sister Ella and some of the other folks from Lionsgate. And I try to visit with Sister Claudia, but she’s so weak, I can’t tell if she even knows who I am some days, so strangers are hard on her.” Ms. Hebert was blocking the doorway to the house. Loud voices drifted down the dark hall.
I tried to peer behind her. “And your father? Is he strong enough that I can talk to him?”
“Oh. Yes, of course, that’s why you’re here . . . But my father, he isn’t easy . . . You mustn’t mind . . . He’s not always . . .” She kept murmuring flustered comments as she backed away from the door and let me into the house.
A table at the entrance was piled with papers. As I walked past, I saw church bulletins mixed with bills and magazines—sort of like my own entryway except for the bulletins. We followed the loud voices to the living room. They came from a television, where a minister was exhorting us to send him money for letting us know how very sinful we are. The light from the screen flickered on the bald head of a man in a wheelchair. He didn’t turn his head when we came in nor move when his daughter took the controls from his fingers and pressed the MUTE button.
“Daddy, this lady here is the one I told you about, the one Sister Ella and Sister Claudia sent. They want her to find Lamont.”
I knelt next to the chair and put my hand next to his on the armrest. “I’m V. I. Warshawski, Pastor Hebert. I’m trying to find people who knew Lamont, people who might know what happened to him.”
A thread of saliva dribbled from the side of his mouth. “ Lamont. Trouble.”
“He means Lamont was a troubled young man,” Rose said softly.
“Made.” The pastor mouthed the word with difficulty.
“Daddy, he didn’t make trouble,” Rose cried. “He had good reason to be angry, when you think of the terrible injustices we suffer.”
Pastor Hebert tried to speak but only produced a kind of gargling. Finally he choked out the word, “Snake.”
“Snake?” I repeated doubtfully, wondering if he meant Lamont was a snake in the grass.
“He didn’t belong to the Anacondas, Daddy! He helped them protect Dr. King!”