“Yeah, I know. It’s like a warrior in a rick shaw going skiing. How do you think I passed first grade? I was the only kid in my school who knew what a rickshaw was.”
We both laughed, and I felt better when I’d hung up. Maybe Mr. Contreras was right. Maybe I did need to be more like my cousin, learn to charm the socks off rocks.
The next day, I resolutely put the whole Gadsden case out of my head. Lotty and I were having our weekly dinner that night. I arrived a bit late, since a job had taken me to the DuPage County Court-house, and the traffic back to the city was typically sludgelike. When Lotty let me into her apartment, I was surprised to hear voices in the background. She hadn’t told me anyone else was coming.
Max Loewenthal was on the balcony that looked across Lake Shore Drive to Lake Michigan. He and Karen Lennon were both holding wineglasses. She was laughing at something he was saying.
“Ah, Victoria!” Max came forward to kiss me. We hadn’t seen each other since my return from Italy. “How good it is to see you again, and looking so very refreshed from your trip.”
That was typical of Max. I looked about as refreshed as a month-old jar of dandelions. He poured wine for me—Lotty doesn’t drink, except for the occasional medicinal brandy, but Max keeps part of his important cellar at her apartment. We chatted over the Echézeau, while Lotty heated up some duck she’d bought at a carry-out place near the hospital.
Max knows Italy well. Over dinner, we talked about the wines of Torgiano, and the Piero frescoes in Arezzo. When I described the stage in Siena where my mother had trained and sung, Lotty and Max got into a side argument about the production of Don Carlos they’d seen there in 1958.
Finally, over coffee, Max came to the point. “I saw Karen this afternoon at an ethics committee meeting, and when she told me she needed to see you I asked Lotty to include her tonight.”
“Not that I object, but I’m not hard to reach. Or has Miss Ella asked you to slip me some poison?”
Karen had drunk her share of the heavy burgundy, and she giggled with more hilarity than my comment merited. “I guess you and she had kind of a quarrel yesterday morning.”
“You could say that. She’s annoyed with me for trying to find one of her son’s friends, and I’m annoyed with her for hampering the investigation and keeping me away from her sister.”
“I think Miss Claudia would like to talk to you, if she can get the words out clearly enough for you to understand. She had her own fight with her sister after you spoke to her, and it had something to do with that friend of Lamont’s. That’s why I wanted to see you as soon as possible, to talk to you about him.”
“You’ve run into Steve Sawyer?” I couldn’t disguise my surprise.
“No. But one of my projects is serving on the Committee to End the Death Penalty, and the chair, she’s a Dominican nun named Frankie—Frances—Kerrigan. She may know something.”
“I didn’t think he got the death sentence, but maybe he was executed, and they didn’t keep a record.” Maybe that was why Curtis Rivers was so furious.
Karen shook her head. “No, no. Today’s my day for racing around Chicago doing good works—death penalty this morning, hospital ethics this afternoon. I had just come from seeing Miss Ella, so she was on top of my mind. And while we were waiting for the rest of the group to arrive, I told Frankie how frustrated I felt, having sicced you on the case, and how it was impossible to figure out what was going on with Miss Ella. Well, Frankie asked a few questions, the way people do to be polite if they see you’re troubled, but when she realized it had to do with that civil rights time she got really interested. It turns out she was in Marquette Park the day the girl was killed, the one Steve Sawyer was arrested for murdering.”
“What?” I was startled into sloshing coffee over Lotty’s linen napkins.
“Yes, Frankie had really bucked the tide of the South Side. Her family lived in Gage Park, and her father was furious when she got interested in the civil rights movement. But her mother kind of quietly supported her. That’s when Frankie found her vocation as a nun. They were so brave, those sisters. They still are, actually. She lives and works at something called the Mighty Waters Freedom Center.”
“Harmony Newsome,” I interjected, trying to steer her back on course.
“Sorry, right. Frankie had been in Selma with Ella Baker, and she was marching with King and the others in Chicago. And she was with Harmony Newsome when Newsome was killed. Isn’t that incredible?”
“It’s extraordinary. Did she . . . What did she . . . the killer . . . Did she see . . .”
“I don’t know what she knows about it. All she told me was that Steve Sawyer’s arrest had always troubled her, and she’d like to talk to you.”
I bombarded Karen with questions: why had the arrest troubled the nun, had she seen the actual murder, had she stayed in touch with Sawyer?