Make my day, one of you, make my day. Tell me what happened. I couldn’t imagine a threat or a bribe that would make either Dornick or Alito open his secret diary to me. I didn’t have an in with the state’s attorney, to offer Merton immunity or even a reduction in sentence for talking to me. And, even if I did, Merton still might not talk to me.
Maybe Judge Coleman would explain why he hadn’t called any witnesses when he’d represented—or misrepresented—Sawyer forty years ago. Maybe there had been damning evidence that he kept out of the trial. I looked up the number for the Cook County judges and called Coleman.
Naturally the judge wasn’t available for my call. A clerk said she’d be glad to take a message, in a voice that sounded like she’d be glad if she never used her telephone again. I wanted just to leave my name and number, but the clerk wouldn’t take a message unless I explained my business in some detail. I used to work for the judge, I said. I wanted to go over an old trial, one that dated to his early years in the PD’s Office. I left my number without any expectation of ever hearing from him.
I’d pulled off the road at 103rd Street. Pullman was just a few miles to the east. Maybe Rose Hebert could shed some light on all these players.
18
DUBIOUS JUDGE, FRIGHTENED WOMAN
ROSE ANSWERED THE DOOR IN ANOTHER SOBER DRESS, this one a navy dotted Swiss. She looked at me with a flicker of eagerness.
“Have you learned something about Lamont?”
It was painful to tell her no, to watch the dull, heavy expression settle on her face again. “I need some advice or insight—something like that—into Johnny Merton or Curtis Rivers.”
She gave a self-derisive bark of laughter. “I don’t know enough about life or those two men to have insights into their minds.”
“You’re selling yourself short, Ms. Hebert,” I said gently. “I don’t have news for you, but I’ve been to see both men, and I’ve talked to people who knew Steve Sawyer. There’s been a suggestion that Lamont might have flipped on Steve, might have led the police to Steve Sawyer, might have said Sawyer was Harmony Newsome’s murderer.”
“Oh no! I . . . Oh—”
The house bell had begun to ring behind her, and she turned fearfully away from me. “He wants to know who’s at the door, what’s keeping me so long.”
I grabbed her wrist and led her down the shallow stone steps. “Maybe he’s ninety-three, but he’s not too old to learn how to cope with frustration. Where can we sit where you’ll be comfortable?”
She looked back at the house but finally muttered that there was a coffee shop on Langley where she often stopped for breakfast on her way home from the hospital. We drove over to the Pullman Workers Diner in my Mustang, where the waitresses greeted Rose by name and looked at me with frank curiosity. Rose ordered coffee and blueberry pie. I had a slice of rhubarb to keep her company.
“I don’t even know where to start,” she murmured when we’d been served. “It’s all so wrong. Steve, Harmony, I don’t believe that. But even if he did kill her, Lamont—oh, he and Steve were best friends growing up—Lamont would never have turned him in to the police.”
“Did Harmony live in your neighborhood?”
“She and her family, they were up the street from us, but they went to a Baptist church that Daddy said wasn’t a true church. And they were rich. Mr. Newsome, he was a lawyer. And Harmony’s brother, he went off to law school and became a professor out east someplace. Harmony was in college down in Atlanta. She got involved in the civil rights movement down there, and, when she came home for summer vacations, she talked it up in her church’s youth group. She talked at a lot of the churches in our neighborhood, but not at Daddy’s church, because he thinks women don’t belong speaking up in church, like it says in Saint Paul. And, besides, he doesn’t think church people belong marching on the streets. We belong in the pews.”
She bent over her coffee, stirring it as fiercely as if it were her father, or her own life, she were attacking. “I shouldn’t say this, but I was so jealous of Harmony. She was so pretty. She got to go to a fancy college, Spelman, while I had to scrimp to put together money for nursing school. And, then, the boys were all spellbound by her. When I first heard she was dead, I was glad.”
I reached across the table and pressed her free hand. “You didn’t kill her by being jealous of her, you know.”
She looked up briefly, her face contorted in pain. “All the boys followed her around, even the ones who went to our church, which is why I never could believe Lamont really cared about me. I figured he thought I’d be an easy mark, big old ugly girl like me no one else wanted. If he couldn’t have Harmony, he’d make do with me. But I don’t think any of the boys would have killed her, not out of jealousy like they claimed Steve did. She never went out with him, never went out with any local boys. Far as I knew, she was in love with the movement, not with any boy, not even some college boy in Atlanta with her same background.”