Karen held up her hands, protesting. “Ask Frankie. I don’t know any of that stuff.”
Max laughed. “Victoria, I seldom actually see you at work, but now I understand why you are so attached to that large dog of yours: you are very like a retriever trying to flush a rabbit, you know.”
I joined in the general laughter, and in Lotty’s effort to turn the conversation in a different direction. Max brought out a bottle of Armagnac, and even Lotty drank a little. We lingered late, unwilling to give up the warmth around Lotty’s table, unwilling to go back to the world of coldness, of homelessness, of desperation, where Karen and I both worked.
As we rode the elevator down, Karen brought me abruptly back to that world.
“I checked with the SRO where I found a room for your homeless friend. He didn’t show up, and I wondered about that. It wasn’t easy finding a place. Low-income housing is disappearing faster than the rain forests.”
“It was good of you to go out of your way, but he seems to be a guy who’s so allergic to other people that he’d rather take his chances on the street.”
We had reached her car. As she got in, I commented on how packed her life was, her work at Lionsgate, with the homeless, the death penalty. “What do you ever do to relax?”
“What do you do?” she said pertly. “Except for your Italian trip, it sounds like you’re at it morning, noon, and night.”
I laughed it off. But as I walked the two blocks farther to my own car, I had to agree, I wasn’t living much of a life these days.
12
MEETING THE HAMMER IN THE TANK
THE FIRST THING I DID IN THE MORNING WAS TO CALL THE Mighty Waters Freedom Center and ask for Sister Frances. The woman who answered said Sister wasn’t in the center that day but gave me her cellphone number.
“She’s out of town, trying to find housing for the families of some of the immigrants who were arrested in Iowa last week. They can’t find enough homes for them over there.”
I dialed Sister Frances’s cellphone and wasn’t surprised to get her voice mail. I left as concise a message as I could: Private detective, Steve Sawyer’s trial. If she remembered any details after all these years, would she call me.
Marilyn Klimpton arrived from the temporary agency. I spent most of the rest of the day working with her on my files and creating a list of key clients. If one of them called, Marilyn needed to find me and get me a message at once.
Late in the day, I heard from Sister Frances. She wasn’t sure when she’d be back in Chicago, she said, but she’d arrange to meet me as soon as she returned.
When I pressed her to tell me about Steve Sawyer, she said she wasn’t sure that what she knew would be useful to me. “I didn’t know him, and I was so shocked, so overwhelmed, when Harmony collapsed, I wasn’t thinking at all. It wasn’t until much later that I started to try to remember details about the march, and what I do remember is too . . . too . . . insubstantial. If I try to talk about it now, I’m afraid it will all evaporate. Let’s wait until we can meet face-to-face.”
That was frustrating as well as disappointing: I should have realized that if Sister Frances had seen who killed Harmony Newsome, she would have spoken up forty years ago. I had to put the Lamont search on a back burner where the flame was just about ready to go out. I had to wait, anyway, for the trial transcript, for a chance to see Miss Claudia. In a bitter irony, Johnny Merton was beginning to look like my last hope.
Because nothing happens fast in Stateville, I was surprised that my visit to Merton happened ahead of the transcript and seeing Sister Frances. Inmate letters typically sit in bags for weeks, sometimes months, waiting for someone to get around to sorting them. When Johnny’s lawyer Greg Yeoman called me a scant ten days after I sent my letter to Johnny with the news that the old gang leader would see me, I knew the Hammer still had plenty of influence.
My visit to Stateville was scheduled for the day before Brian Krumas’s big shindig on Navy Pier. Before driving to Joliet, I took Mr. Contreras to his safe-deposit box in his old neighborhood so he could pick up his medals.
Even though he was keyed up almost beyond bearing, talking nonstop about the fundraiser, what he thought I should wear, whether he should call Max Loewenthal to borrow a dinner jacket, Mr. Contreras took time to warn me—again—against getting involved with Johnny Merton.
“He’s got a lawyer, you said so yourself. Let the lawyer ask him your questions. If those black friends of his ain’t talking to you, there’s a good bet Merton won’t, either. Would you trust some black detective who came around asking questions about your childhood friends?”