I smiled through thin lips. “You might not jump to conclusions if you listened more closely. I didn’t say Ms. Hebert was in the bar. I said she saw you enter it. Just as she’d watched Lamont and the Hammer a few minutes earlier. Wishing she could be part of everyone else’s good time.”
Rivers shifted a pair of shears from hand to hand, measuring me. At least he was thinking over what I said. “I wouldn’t dispute a lady’s word, especially not a lady as sanctified as Miss Rose. But I went to the Waltz Right Inn a lot in those days, and I saw Lamont there more nights than not. The night before the big snow doesn’t stand out in my mind, Ms. Investigator.”
“Is it Johnny Merton you’re afraid of? I don’t blame you. He scares me, too. Between him and Ella Gadsden, I don’t know which makes me more nervous.”
“Maybe you scare easier than me, and maybe there’s a reason for that.”
“What about Steve Sawyer? I know now he was convicted of murder, but he’s disappeared, too. There’s no record of him in the Department of Corrections. Is he the person you’re trying to protect?”
“How dare you! How dare you, bitch, come in here and flaunt him at me!”
My jaw dropped. “All I know about him is that he’s vanished as completely as Lamont Gadsden.”
“You wish. You wish, don’t you? Get out of here before I land these scissors inside you.”
The rage in his face was heart-stopping. I parted the handbag-laden ropes, trying to walk naturally, trying not to let the shaking in my legs show. I’d forgotten the train whistle. Its blast made me stumble as I opened the outer door.
A woman passed me at the door, holding a scuffed pair of pumps. “Noise always gets to me, too.”
I tried to smile, but Rivers’s fury made my mouth wobble. I drove slowly to my office, staying off the Ryan: I wasn’t steady enough to deal with semis roaring around me.
11
NOTHING LIKE ECHéZEAU FOR RELAXING
AT MY OFFICE, I FOUND PETRA HAD WRITTEN THANK YOU in big Magic Marker capitals on a piece of paper with a giant cookie from the coffee shop across the street taped to it. The ingenuous message made me feel marginally better, although I gave the cookie to Elton, who was outside again.
I also found a message from my temporary agency saying they had a Marilyn Klimpton available who met all my requirements including familiarity with legal databases. She’d start in the morning. That was a mercy.
Still, the only thing that would really make me feel better was to understand why Rivers was so furious with me. I spent the rest of the day trying to find out more about both him and Sawyer. My first search had been superficial. Now I went deeper into databases that cost more money. I couldn’t charge these to Miss Ella, but I needed to learn what lay behind Rivers’s rage.
Nothing came back to link either man to me. Rivers had served in the army from May 1967 through July 1969, with his year in Vietnam sandwiched in near the beginning. He’d been married; his wife died three years ago. They hadn’t had any children. He had a sister and two brothers, both living in the Chicago area; I put their phone numbers in my case file. Rivers had never been arrested, and none of his siblings had ties to any of the people whose arrests I’d made possible, at least not in the last six years. Amy Blount had created a database of all the people I’d dealt with during that time, so it was easy to cross-check his name and address against my recent cases.
When I’d exhausted the Net, I dragged out the boxes I’d brought with me from my three years with the public defender. Of course, most of the material had stayed in their offices at Twenty-sixth and California, but my own notes and records still made a tidy pile when I’d emptied them onto my big worktable. I couldn’t possibly check all those old cases, but I did pull out my files on Johnny Merton. Curtis’s name never came up. Neither did Steve Sawyer’s.
I called a friend of mine who had connections to the State’s Attorney’s Office and asked if they could locate the trial transcript for Sawyer’s trial. And, yes, I knew what it would cost me to get a copy and, yes, I would pay for it.
I slid all the papers back into their boxes and tried to turn my attention to other jobs. I was wrapping things up for the day when my friend at the SA’s office called back.
“No record of a Steve Sawyer in 1966 or ’67, but things were a little sloppy back then. Any hints on the exact trial date?”
I looked through the notes I’d made at the university library. “The vic’s name was Harmony Newsome, but I don’t know the trial date.”
He promised to have another look in the morning. Right after he hung up, my cousin Petra phoned.
“Vic, you were a lifesaver to let me use your computer! Did you get your cookie? Do you remember you and Uncle Sal are coming to Brian’s big fundraiser next week? I need to get names on a list since the president might come.”
“Yes, indeed, your uncle Sal is counting the minutes. You spell Warshawski W ... A . . .”