The aide brought over a glass of apple juice, and I held it for Miss Claudia to drink. “Will Rose know his name?”
Miss Claudia smiled gratefully on the left side of her face. “As’ ’Ose. Love ’Mont.”
Yes, Rose Hebert had loved Lamont. “Do you know any of Lamont’s other friends?”
Claudia slowly shook her head.
I let her rest for a minute or two, then asked if she remembered Harmony Newsome. Claudia’s good eye brightened, and she struggled to tell me about Harmony and the neighborhood. I couldn’t make out much of her garbled syllables except that Harmony’s father had been a lawyer. I think Miss Claudia was telling me he had money, he could afford to send Harmony to college, but I wasn’t sure.
When I got to Harmony’s death and reminded Miss Claudia that Steve Sawyer had been convicted of her murder, I brought up what George Dornick had said. “Do you think Lamont told the police that Steve Sawyer killed Harmony Newsome?”
“Not ’Mont, no. ’Teve friend, baby, school, friend. ’Mont good boy. Not hell, good boy.” Tears leaked from her good eye again.
“See what you’ve done?” Miss Ella said with a kind of grim satisfaction. “My sister can’t help you. You need to leave, Miss Detective, and stop bothering us.”
Before I could voice my anger—she hired me, it wasn’t my idea to ride out to Stateville or get insulted by Curtis Rivers in the last few weeks—Miss Claudia said, “No, Ella. Find ’Mont, you.” She tapped my hand with her own good one. “’Mont ’Conda not. Friend Johnny, yes, ’Conda not. Leave, give—” She stumbled over the word and finally picked up the Bible and showed it to me. The markers fell out again.
“ ’ Mont . . . Ella give ’Mont ’Ible, he give me. Leave, see Johnny, he say, ‘Keep, keep safe, keep safe.’” She squeezed her eyes shut and struggled to speak. “I keep. ’Mont come, I give.”
“The night he left home, he told you he was going to see Johnny?”
“ ’ Es,” she managed to say.
“Then he gave you his Bible and told you to keep it safe for him, that he would take it back from you when he came home again,” I translated.
She smiled in relief that I had understood her but didn’t try to speak again. I picked up the markers and tucked them into the Bible. Before I gave it back, I turned the well-worn pages, looking to see if Lamont had left anything.
“I’ll do my best for you, Miss Claudia,” I promised.
She squeezed my fingers again with her weak left hand. When she smiled, I could see what a beautiful woman she’d been before her stroke. Miss Ella was frowning more deeply than ever, but I felt better about the case when I left. Not because I had any better ideas, but because I understood now how much it meant to Miss Claudia that I find her nephew.
I felt a little less optimistic after talking to Rose Hebert that night. She didn’t know what Miss Claudia meant, that Steve Sawyer wasn’t Lamont’s friend’s name. “Of course his name was Steve. Maybe he called himself Steven to be formal, but I don’t know what else Miss Claudia had in mind.”
24
FIRE IN THE NUNNERY
AT SIX MONDAY EVENING, I RANG THE BELL TO SISTER Frankie’s apartment on the fringes of Uptown. She lived in a square box, the kind of characterless building that went up in the sixties, with metal-framed windows set level against the tan brick walls so that you didn’t even have a ledge to hold a window box. The Mighty Waters Freedom Center had offices on the ground floor. The rest of the building seemed to be private apartments, some with nuns; F. Kerrigan, OP, and C. Zabinska, BVM, for instance. From the other names, and the discarded toys I could see in the entryway, it seemed that a number of families lived here, too.
The building sat flush with the walk, without even a token patch of grass in front. No one looking at the cracks in the bricks or the open windows where fans tried to stir an evening breeze to life would accuse the sisters of violating any vows of poverty.
After a minute, I rang the bell again. The lock would have been easy to undo with a credit card, but I leaned against the door and watched the street while I waited. Someone had opened a hydrant on the far corner, and kids, mostly boys, were racing in and out of the jet of water. Couples embraced, at bus stops or in alcoves. A woman whose matchstick legs stuck out in front of her like Raggedy Ann’s was sitting on the bus stop bench beating her thigh with a shaky fist, muttering, “You can’t tell me that, you can’t tell me that.” In the alley, kids were lighting firecrackers: the Fourth was only a week away.
It had been a full day, and if I hadn’t been so impatient to hear what Sister Frances could remember of her day in Marquette Park forty years ago I would have gone home for an early supper and bed.