Hardball

by Sara Paretsky

  51

  GABRIELLA’S VOICE RETURNED

  IN THE WEEKS BEFORE MISS CLAUDIA DIED, I WAS RACING the clock, hoping to find out what happened to Lamont. The day I took my aunt to Fit for Your Hoof, Curtis told me he’d persuaded Johnny to talk to me.

  “He needs to get it off his chest and tell someone, and I told him he owed it to Miss Claudia. She needs to know. She loved that boy. Now, Miss Ella, if Lamont had gone on, like our physics teacher wanted, been a college professor with degrees after his name, she’d still have labeled him a failure. But Miss Claudia was pure love down to her bones. She deserves to hear, and I’ve made sure Johnny’ll tell you.”

  I wanted to know how Curtis and Merton communicated. I wanted to know if secretly, after all, Curtis was a high-ranking Anaconda. But something in his face told me I’d better not push my luck.

  I got Yeoman to organize an emergency visit to Stateville for me and met with Johnny in the dingy lawyers’ room one last time. I’d brought one of my photo books with me and laid it between us on the scarred deal table.

  “These are the pictures Lamont took,” I said. “I guess Curtis told you I found the negatives?”

  Merton nodded.

  “He showed them to you the night before he disappeared, didn’t he?”

  Merton nodded again, shut his eyes, took a breath: another one getting ready to jump off the high dive for me, or at least for Lamont and Miss Claudia.

  “My man came to me at the Waltz Right Inn, just like Rose Hebert told you. He had a set of these prints here, and he wanted to go to that piece of shit representing Steve, show him that some white boy killed Harmony and some cop pocketed the evidence. We talked it over, him and me. We knew what went on at the Racine Avenue station. We knew the risk he was running going in there at all, but we agreed he’d better speak up. But I told him to take prints in, don’t let them have the negatives. If they destroy those, there’s nothing left.

  “So off he went the morning the big snow started. And the day after it ended later, when you could go outside again, there he was, in my backyard, dead. His ears had been cut off, but he’d been killed before that.”

  “His ears!” I said. “So, Dornick and Alito killed him. Or someone at the station did. And they planted his body on you. And if you called the cops, everyone would agree that it was an Anaconda hit. Dornick would say Lamont had turned state’s evidence against you and that you’d murdered him in revenge.”

  Johnny gave a sour smile. “You’re not so stupid after all, are you, white girl?”

  “I have my moments,” I said drily. “What did you do?”

  “I took Lamont inside with me and sat with him all day-sweating blood, you’d better believe-thinking every second that the cops were going to come tear my door down. I wouldn’t let my wife or my little girl in. I made up a big lie, a big story, and it cost me my marriage. My wife, she thought I had some other woman in there with me. She left in a hurry, went to her own mama’s. I guess because of the storm, all the cops were on emergency duty. Not even that shitbag Dornick could come around to check on me and Lamont for three days.

  “A big warehouse blew down on Stony the day before the snow. As soon as it got dark, I carried my brother down the stairs. I got my little girl’s sled and pulled my man along, wrapped in blankets. Three miles, that was, hard walking, scared every five minutes some damned cop would stop me.

  “Don’t you ever repeat that out loud, white girl, that the Hammer was terrified.” He gave a mirthless bark of laughter and flexed his arms so that the snakes rippled under my nose.

  “Anyway, I dug through the snow, buried him in the foundation of that place on Stony. No one ever looked in there after the storm. I sat by the newsman every day at three when the early edition hit the stands, looking, but they just built right on top of my boy. They never looked, they never found him. Day three, up comes that shit Alito, merry as can be, acting on a tip that I had drugs on the premises. They had a warrant and they searched high and low, but you’d better believe the crib was clean. I scrubbed that place from window to floor-and more than once, too-and I had Curtis there to watch they didn’t plant nothing. My only joy was knowing they were going crazy, trying to find out what happened to the body. They were pissed as hell that the place was clean, but they finally took off. For months, Alito would stop by, or sometimes Dornick, now and again. But after a while, it all died down… all died down until you came along, nosing into it.”

  “When I looked at the pictures, it seemed to me you might have saved Dr. King’s life.” I opened the photo book at the shot that showed the tattooed arm shoving King’s head down.

  Merton’s mouth set in a bitter line. “I saved him for some white punk to put a bullet in two years later, that’s all. And what did it cost? Miss Harmony died, took a lot of light out of the South Side when that baseball hit her in the eye. Steve-Kimathi, he calls himself now-they rearranged his privates and his brain for him. And they killed my man Lamont. That’s a high price my homeys paid for one little shove of my arm.”

  “Your daughter might like to know,” I ventured.

  The anger that was always smoldering behind his eyes lightened slightly. “Yeah, take the tale to Dayo. Let her know-how did you put it?-I ‘had my moments,’ too.”

  Against all protocol, I leaned across the table and squeezed his hand where the tongue of the snake licked his knuckles.

  When I got back to the city, I took the story to Bobby. But he said he had enough going on without digging under a building on Stony Island looking for one more dead gangbanger. “Even if Lamont Gadsden’s there, even if we find him, what am I going to do about it? It’ll be Merton’s word against Dornick’s, and even if for one day out of my entire forty years on the force I am willing to believe a gang scum over a cop, I’d never sell the state’s attorney on it. Dornick has plenty on his plate. Let it ride, Vicki. Let it ride.”

  I let it ride. But I did cash in some old chips of my own with the state. I didn’t try to get Johnny’s sentence reduced-he was in prison for serious and well-documented crimes-but I did see that he was transferred to a less punitive part of the system. And I let Dayo see the photos, let her see her father had saved Martin Luther King’s life that hot August day forty years ago.

  I was also able to tell the story to Miss Ella and to Miss Claudia before she died. Miss Ella seemed almost sorry that I’d found her son. It took away one of her pleasures, the pleasure of complaining that I was taking her money and not delivering. But Miss Claudia, in one of her final lucid moments, told her sister to be ashamed of herself.

  “Hate and bitterness, always wrong, Ella. Always wrong. Lamont with Jesus. I know it, I know in my heart. White girl, you did good job. Hard, I know. Hurt, burn, beaten, you stay working. I know, Pastor Karen tell me all. Good, good girl.” She pressed my fingers as hard as she could and then lay back against her pillows.

  At first, I thought she’d fallen asleep. But she was just mustering her strength, this time to tell us she wanted Pastor Karen to preach at her funeral. And when Ella harrumphed about women being silent in church, Claudia said, “Men kill Lamont. Men hurt world, do war, do torture. Pastor Karen preach.”

  That was the last time she spoke. She died two days later without ever regaining consciousness again. After the funeral, after the supper in the church hall with everyone’s favorite casserole, and ham, and the black-eyed peas with chitterlings that Miss Claudia so loved, Max and Lotty took me away with them for a long weekend in the country.

  The day after I got back, Jake Thibaut knocked at my door. I’d seen him a few times just passing on the stairs, him liking to joke about whether I needed him to get a clarinet case or something to carry my body around, but we hadn’t really talked.

  This evening, he had a CD in his hand. “Those tapes you gave me-your mother singing-I had them professionally mastered for you. She had an amazing voice. I’m privileged that I got to hear it.”

  I had forgotten about the tapes, in the c
haos I’d been living in. Now I put the CD in my stereo. As Gabriella’s voice, that golden bell, filled my home, I felt so overcome with all the grief and loss of the last forty years that I could hardly bear to listen.

  “Forse un giorno il cielo ancora / Sentirà pietà di me.”

  (One day, perhaps, Heaven again / will feel pity for me.)

  I played it over and over while Jake stood awkwardly by. At one point, he disappeared, but then returned moments later with his bass. He played the aria through, first in company, then in counterpoint, with my mother’s voice. After that, it seemed natural to bring out her red wineglasses and toast her memory, and exchange our life stories, and, finally, to lie together on the living room rug while Mozart and my mother filled the room.

  Sara Paretsky

  ***

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