I did a cursory search for John Does. There’d been a good few deaths because of the snowstorm, but even though I skimmed all the papers through the end of April I didn’t find any reports of unaccounted bodies.
As I put the boxes back on their shelves, I kept wondering about Miss Ella. She must have known Steve Sawyer had been convicted of murder when she told Karen to give me his name yesterday. Why hadn’t she included that information? What was going on with her and her hostility to this search that she herself had initiated? But I had looked for Steve Sawyer along with Lamont in Department of Corrections databases around the country and hadn’t found either name. Did that mean that Lamont, too, was actually doing time somewhere?
I hurried past students whose faces were puffy from lack of sleep, pinched with anxiety over exams or jobs or love. In the sunken garden behind the library, I could see a gray-haired woman throwing a ball for her dog. They seemed to be the only happy creatures on the campus.
When I was a student, the war in Vietnam was just winding down. Students with pinched faces were often worrying about the draft, but it didn’t seem like today’s kids cared much about their own war eight thousand miles away. The thought gave me another idea about Lamont Gadsden. Maybe he’d forgotten to tell his mother he’d been drafted. His bones might be rotting in a jungle in Southeast Asia.
I detoured to Lionsgate Manor before going to my office. Miss Ella opened the door the length of the chain bolt but didn’t invite me in. I asked her about Steve Sawyer.
“You knew he’d been sent to prison when you gave his name to Pastor Karen, didn’t you?”
“Don’t take that tone with me, young woman. You wanted the names of Lamont’s friends, and I told you I didn’t approve of them. Now you see why.”
It was an effort not to scream at the client. “What about Lamont? Is he in prison, too?”
“If I knew where he was, I wouldn’t have asked you to look for him.”
We went back and forth for a few more fruitless minutes. She didn’t know where Steve Sawyer was now or she wouldn’t admit to knowing, I couldn’t tell. I finally left, cursing her and Pastor Karen—and myself, for agreeing to get involved in their quagmire.
Still, just to cross every t, I called the Pentagon when I got to my office to see if they had any record of Lamont. I wasn’t expecting any information, so I was surprised when the woman on the other end said Lamont had been called up and told to report to his local draft board in April 1967. He was still officially absent without leave.
“You didn’t try to find him, did you?” I asked.
“Oh, honey, I wasn’t even born then,” the Pentagon’s public-affairs woman said, “but I expect, from what I’ve read, that they guessed he was one of ten thousand boys hiding out, either in Canada or somewhere deep inside his own neighborhood. Unless they crossed the legal system somewhere, applying for a driver’s license or a loan, or if someone turned them in, we never saw them.”
Which left me back where I’d started, with zero information. Actually, that wasn’t true: I had Johnny the Hammer to add to the mix. And I knew what had happened to Steve Sawyer—at least, until January 30, 1967.
IN THE DETECTIVE’S ABSENCE II
“THE DETECTIVE LADY WAS HERE AGAIN TODAY.” ELLA held her sister’s left hand, pressing it to make sure Claudia was listening to her. “White girl. I think I told you that.”
The gnarled fingers pressed against Ella’s own hard palm. Yes, I’m listening to you. Yes, you told me she’s white.
“She’s pretty much used up all the money I agreed to, finding out nothing.”
The left side of Claudia’s mouth trembled, and tears slid down her face. Since the stroke, she cried easily. Claudia had always been emotional. “Such a warm person,” was everyone’s favorite description, making Ella feel colder, more bitter against the world at large. Claudia had never been a crier, though. She’d learned early in life, like Ella had herself, that tears were a luxury for babies and the rich. Her heart might break over a dead sparrow in the road, but she wouldn’t cry her eyes out.
Now, though, you had to watch what you said. And sometimes Ella felt herself slipping back in time, back to when she was five and Claudia was the darling baby of the block, those soft brown curls, that winning smile, so cooed over in church that Ella would steal Claudia’s dolly or slap her when Mama was off at work and Granny Georgette wasn’t looking. Pure meanness. She knew it then and she knew it now. But sometimes you got tired of always being the responsible one.
“Everything all right here?”