Karen Lennon had called around noon to thank me for visiting Miss Claudia. “Miss Ella is angry, but I’m glad you didn’t wait for me to give the green light. Miss Claudia feels much more at peace now. I think she’s ready to die, knowing that you are committed to finding her nephew.”
That statement had alarmed me: I realized Miss Claudia was frail when I saw her, but I hadn’t been imagining her as close to death.
Lennon tried to reassure me. “The doctor says she’s stable, but, with strokes, that can change rapidly, too. But after meeting you, and feeling reassured that you’re taking her seriously, that could make her feel less stress, so it could help her get stronger.”
When we hung up, I felt a renewed stab of urgency in the search for Lamont, but I didn’t know what I could be doing. With a sort of helplessness, I put in a second request to see Johnny Merton out in Stateville. Perhaps by the time the visit came through, I could think of some quid pro quo that would make the head snake speak to me. “Parseltongue, that’s what I need,” I murmured out loud as I brushed my teeth. A language for communicating with snakes.
The door suddenly opened behind me. “Detective? I’m Frankie Kerrigan. Sorry to keep you waiting. We were having a short meeting on our Iowa refugees.”
Frankie Kerrigan was a thin, wiry woman, around seventy, with curly gray hair that had once been red. Her face and arms were freckled and sunburned. She wore a T-shirt and jeans. Her only badge of office was a plain wooden cross on a thin chain.
She seemed to realize I was searching her for signs of nun-ness, because she flashed a smile, and said, “When I have to talk to a judge, I put on a veil and a skirt, but, here at home, I get to wear jeans. Come on up, Detective.”
I followed her into the hall. “You know I’m a private investigator, right, not a cop?”
“Yes, I remember that. I didn’t know how you like to be addressed.”
“Most people call me Vic.”
The hallway was a jumble of strollers and bicycles, like any urban building. Unlike most, the halls and stairwell were scrubbed clean; I could smell the disinfectant as I trotted up the stairs after her. The Virgin of Guadalupe sat in a niche at the turn in the landing. At the top of the first flight, a weeping Jesus looked at me from a foot-high cross.
“How was Iowa?” I asked while she unlocked her own front door.
“Depressing. Five hundred families broken up by these ridiculous raids, women and children left homeless, the business that employed them shut down for loss of workers. We’re doing our best. But the judicial atmosphere these days is so punitive, our best is pretty futile.”
She ushered me into a front room that was furnished simply but with warmth: bright throws on the daybed and two chairs, bookcases built of a light wood and filled floor to ceiling. A small fan sat in one open window. In the other window, she’d built a shelf to hold a plant erful of red and orange flowers.
She brought tea—“Hot tea is the best thing to drink in hot weather, I’ve always believed”—but didn’t waste time with other preliminaries.
“I can’t tell you how happy I am that someone is revisiting Harmony’s murder. She was an amazing young woman. I met her when I went to Atlanta to work with Ella Baker, and Harmony was one of the SNCC volunteers there. She was a student at Spelman. But she was from Chicago and came back here at the end of the spring semester to do organizing. She’d already been arrested three times in the South, during sit-ins and trying to register voters. That gave her a kind of glamour and credibility with young people in her neighborhood.”
She picked up a photograph from a small desk. “I found this after you called last week. Harmony’s mother gave it to me after the funeral. And when we started the Freedom Center, we named it in Harmony’s honor, after her favorite Bible verse.”
The old eight-by-ten showed the young woman whose face I’d seen in the Herald-Star story, but more alert, more attractive, than in the old file photo. She was standing next to SNCC founder Ella Baker. Both women were smiling, but with a kind of fundamental seriousness that made you feel the importance of their mission. The picture had been inscribed, “Let justice pour down like waters.”
I handed back the picture. “I hope you realize that I’m not revisiting her death but trying to find Steve Sawyer, the man who was convicted of killing her. You said on the phone you hadn’t been happy with the verdict.”