I narrowed my eyes at him. “The pleasure of knowing I don’t have to try to make you look good to a judge again.”
That silenced him. I hoped he was remembering the time I represented him all those years back. In our meetings, after showering me with the barrage of insults that had become his second skin, he had raged against the rampant racism of the courts, the cops, the economy. I somehow persuaded him to tone it down, to speak civilly to the judge and opposing counsel, and, in the end, we got an aggravated assault charge reduced to a sentence for battery.
“I read through your file over the weekend. I expect the cops could have got you anytime they wanted you for the rackets, but they were waiting for you to make a big mistake and do it in front of a guy with a wire.”
He smacked the table with his palm. “You think I’m admitting to anything in front of you, bitch, you are so wrong!”
I pulled Suite Fran?aise from my briefcase and started to read. After watching me in mounting fury, Johnny suddenly gave a bark of a laugh. “Right. Ms. Detective, I should have said.”
“Close enough.” I closed the novel but didn’t put it away. “I’m looking for an old pal of yours. Lamont Gadsden.”
The ugly look, never far from his face, came back full bore. “And what do you want to frame him for, Ms. Detective?”
“I’m the wrong kind of detective for that, Mr. Merton. I only want to find the guy.”
“So someone else can stick him in here next to me?” His face was mean, but he knew the prison system: he spoke in a jailhouse whisper.
“Is there a reason he should be? Was he complicit in one of those murders they booked you for?”
“They booked me but never proved anything. No evidence but a high-wire act, and that acrobat ain’t soaring too high these days.”
The man who’d fingered Johnny for three gang-related slayings had been Johnny’s second-in-command at the Anacondas. He’d been found dead in an alley the day Johnny’s trial started, as I’d read in the Herald-Star ’s account of the trial. They’d never arrested anyone for the man’s murder, although his ears were missing, the telltale sign of an Anaconda who’d been abandoned by the gang.
“Booked you and convicted you. I’m sure Greg Yeoman did his best, but you didn’t give him a whole lot to go on with, did you?” I paused for a beat, let him smolder anew over his adjutant who’d flipped for the state. “Lamont Gadsden. His mother is old, the aunt who doted on him is dying. They want a chance to see him before they pass.”
“Ella Gadsden? Don’t make me start to cry, Detective. There is no guard in this prison—hell, no guard in this whole system—as hard as that pious lady. Only person who can match her is that reverend of hers.”
“What about Miss Claudia? She’s having trouble holding her head up, has trouble even forming words. She wants to see Lamont again.”
He folded his arms in front of him in a deliberate gesture of disrespect. “I remember those two sisters, and Miss Claudia was always a ray of sunshine on South Morgan. But I don’t remember any Lamont.”
“He was with the Anacondas during Freedom Summer, helping look after Dr. King in the park.”
“His ma tell you that? No disrespect to an upstanding pillar like Ella Gadsden, but maybe her memory ain’t what it once was. She must be somewhere near a hundred years old.”
“Eighty-six, and I don’t think there’s a thing wrong with her mind.”
Johnny laid his arms on the table so that the coiled snakes were under my eyes. “I am the Anaconda, and if I say I never saw any Lamont Gadsden then he wasn’t with us, Freedom Summer or not.”
His menace was palpable, but I couldn’t understand why he would be disowning one of his homeys. “Funny, other people remember him well. So well, in fact, that they remember seeing you go into the Waltz Right Inn with him the night before the big snow. The last night anyone saw him alive.”
The words hung between us for a long moment before he said, “Lot of people went through those doors, girl, hard for me to remember who I might have seen forty years ago. But I’ll ask around. Maybe some of the brothers have a better memory than me.”
“And while you’re asking around, see if any of them remember Steve Sawyer, too.”
He laughed, if that’s what you could call the raw and raucous sound. “I heard you were asking for Steve Sawyer. It’s funny, damned funny, Detective Warshawski, that you of all people don’t know where that brother ended up.”
I looked at him with so much bewilderment that he laughed again, then signaled to the guard. “Time’s up, white girl. Come again sometime. I always enjoy the chance to shoot the shit about the old days.”
13