“Was that Lamont Gadsden by any chance? He’s the man I’m trying to find.”
A funny look crossed Dornick’s face, the expression Boom-Boom used to assume when he was deciding whether to dare me to do something really insane, like jump off the breakwater into Lake Calumet.
“What the heck, Vic, it’s been all this time. Yes, Gadsden finally turned Sawyer in. We’d been leaning on him for a name, and I guess he and Sawyer were good friends in the Anacondas. You’re not trying to suggest that Sawyer didn’t do it, are you?”
“I’m just trying to find Lamont Gadsden for his mother. You don’t know what became of him, do you? He disappeared the night before the big snow.”
Dornick shook his head. “We wondered, too. We wondered if Hammer Merton found out Lamont was a flipper and had him put away, because we never saw Lamont again. We checked with Hammer, but you know yourself how tough he is to talk to. What do you want with Sawyer?”
“I’m hoping he can tell me something about Lamont. But I’m meeting with a nun from the Mighty Waters Freedom Center. She was with Harmony Newsome when Newsome was killed, and she does have some doubts about whether Sawyer was the murderer.”
Dornick laughed. “Oh, the sisters. The ones who didn’t try to beat our balls off at school look at the world through such rosy glasses. Or they imagine they can be another Sister Helen Prejean, even get hard-asses like me to oppose the death penalty.”
Nina came in. The meeting was over. Dornick ushered me out with a renewed assurance that “Tony’s gal” was always welcome at Mountain Hawk. “And you tell your nun that I’m darned sure we sent the right guy to Pontiac.”
“There isn’t any record of Steve Sawyer in the Department of Corrections,” I said as Dornick turned to go back to his office. “Are you sure it was Pontiac?”
Dornick paused in the doorway. “It might have been Stateville. Not every detail sticks, this far from the trial, and your dad probably could have told you, or Bobby, that we cops don’t follow our perps once they’re sentenced.”
I made appropriate sounds of gratitude for his time. “There’s one last thing, George, and it’s very hard for me to bring up. One reason I’m having trouble on the street with my search is, the guys who grew up with Gadsden and Sawyer think Sawyer was roughed up pretty bad during the arrest.”
Dornick turned again, hands on his hips, eyes bright with anger. “They always say that, Vic. You should know from your time in the PD’s Office, they always bleat about excessive force. We operated by the book, and I mean we dotted every i. We had too much riding on the arrest. And don’t you go dragging Tony’s name through the mud on this. He was the best, Tony Warshawski, and those scumbags were fucking lucky to have him bring them in.”
That was the end of the interview, but his reassurance lingered with me all day, gave me more confidence, as I did a document search at the county archives, as I organized a freelancer I work with to do surveillance at a warehouse in Mokena in the southwest suburbs. On my way back to the city, I toyed with the idea of signing up with Mountain Hawk Security. It would be great to be part of a big operation where someone else went to Mokena.
Dornick had been right about a lot of things, most especially his appreciation of my dad. I’d liked him. So why had I come away with an uneasy feeling, as if something he’d said had triggered not an alarm—that was too extreme—but a warning?
I was sure, in the kind of operation Mountain Hawk Security conducted, that all meetings were secretly recorded. If I could get a copy of the disc Nina made of my conversation, then maybe I’d be able to figure out what was bugging me. I laughed, picturing myself scaling the green glass tower, cutting a square out of one of the windows on the forty-eighth floor, disabling Mountain Hawk’s security measures.
Movie heroes have it so easy. Clint Eastwood would pull out his Magnum and blow people away. “Make my day,” he says, taking out someone’s brains, and we all cheer. Soon the survivors are so nervous, they tell him everything. In life, when you’re scared or being tortured, you’ll say whatever the terrorist wants to hear.
Like Steve Sawyer, coming into court disoriented, confessing to Harmony Newsome’s murder. At that thought, my foot came off the gas, and I slowed so unthinkingly that a van behind me honked furiously. I held up a placatory hand and pulled off at the next exit.
I sat at the curb at the end of the ramp and tried to think. Lamont had flipped on Sawyer—Dornick said that—and Johnny had been furious and killed him, or Curtis killed him for Johnny, and they’d disposed of the body.