Sara Paretsky - Hardball

She gave another husky laugh. “Look at that! I dropped them on my way out. I was so late, I guess I grabbed them with my coffee and my phone and didn’t see they weren’t in my hand when I left. Oh, Vic, you are a genius. Thank you, thank you, thank you. What can I do for you? Would you like a free invite to our fundraiser out on Navy Pier? It’s twenty-five hundred a head. Brian’s going to be there. Wouldn’t you love to meet him? The president may stop in, although we’ve been told not to count on it. We’ve rented the whole east end of the pier, it’ll be so cool. And, Uncle Sal, you should come, too.”

I’ve been to too many fundraisers for my heart to skip a beat at the prospect, but the invitation thrilled Mr. Contreras. An inside seat at a high-end event: it would raise his prestige at his weekly trips to the lodge, where his old union buddies meet to shoot pool along with the breeze.

“Do I need a tuxedo or something?” the old man worried as we turned to leave.

“Wear your overalls and your union badge. Krumas probably wants to look like he’s the people’s candidate,” I advised.

“Vic! Don’t be so cynical,” Petra scolded. “Although, do you have a union badge, Uncle Sal?”

“No, but I got me a Bronze Star, you know, from getting nicked at Anzio.”

Her eyes shone. “Oh, wear your medals, that’ll be so fab. I’ll come over and trim your hair. Kelsey and me, we got pretty good with the shears, primping each other in Africa.”

As we drove home, Mr. Contreras chuckled to himself. “She’s quite a gal, your cousin. She could charm the socks off a rock. You could learn a thing or two from her, you know.”

“Like how to charm socks off a rock?” My memory from this afternoon, my old supervisor telling me to “flash my assets,” came to mind. “You think I’m too surly?”

“Wouldn’t hurt you to smile more at people. You know what they say, doll: you catch more flies with honey.”

“Assuming you want a whole bunch of flies filling up the place.” I waited while he opened the front door, then took the dogs for a final skip around the block.

Would Petra have charmed Curtis Rivers’s socks off, gotten him to tell her all he knew about Lamont Gadsden? I tried to imagine myself skipping into Fit for Your Hoof, a jolly laugh bubbling out of my throat. It was easier to imagine myself tap-dancing backward in high heels.

I poured a glass of whisky and watched a few innings of the Cubs- San Francisco game. Pitching, the perennial Cubs weakness, reared its ugly head again. I went to bed with the good guys down by three runs in the fifth.

I was in the middle of a terrifying dream, Petra laughing heartily as a swarm of flies crawled down my cleavage, when the phone rescued me. I sat up, heart pounding from the horrific image, and grabbed the phone.

“Is this the detective?”

It was a woman, her voice soft and deep, but in my groggy state I couldn’t place it. I looked at the clock: it was three in the morning.

“I’m sorry if I woke you, but I’ve been thinking and thinking about Lamont. If I let it go another day, maybe I won’t have the nerve to pick up the phone a second time.”

“Rose Hebert.” I said her name aloud as I realized who she was. “Yes, what about Lamont?”

A pause, a sucking in of breath, preparing for the high dive. “I saw him that night.”

“Which night?” I leaned back against the headboard, knees drawn up to my chin, trying to wake up.

“When he left home. January twenty-fifth.”

“You mean Lamont came to you after he left his mother’s house?”

“He didn’t come to me.” She was speaking hurriedly. Behind her, I could hear the sounds of the hospital, the incessant pages, an ambulance siren. “I was… I was out after church. Wednesday night, you know, midweek church. Daddy was meeting with the deacons after the service, so I left alone. I went for a walk. It was so warm, you remember?”

The record heat for January before the big snow began. Everyone who lived through it still marvels at it.

“I went looking for Lamont. I was so confused, I wanted to see him. And I was pretending it was church business, pretending in my head, the way you do, that I wanted him to come to the youth group and tell us what it was like to work near Dr. King, although Daddy didn’t approve of churches getting involved in social action.”

She drew a shuddering breath, half a sob, then whispered, “I just needed to see him, try to get him to touch me again, the way he had that summer. But, like I said, I was pretending I had some bigger, purer reason.”

Once she’d let her shameful memory out, her breathing came more easily, and her voice returned to a deeper pitch. “I found him, or, anyway, I saw him, at the corner of Sixty-third and Morgan. He was with Johnny Merton, going into the Waltz Right Inn-you know, the old blues joint there? It’s been gone twenty years now, but, back then, it was the center of entertainment in my part of town. Not for me, not for Pastor Hebert’s girl, but for all the kids I went to high school with-”

“So what were Johnny and Lamont doing?” I asked when she broke off.

“Oh, I couldn’t follow them! Daddy would have heard faster than you can spit! I just sat across the street, watching the door, watching kids I’d known my whole life passing in and out. Wednesday was church night, but it was also jam night. Alberta Hunter came sometimes, Tampa Red, all the big names, along with guys starting out. You don’t know how much I wanted to be there, instead of at church.” The phone vibrated from the passion in her voice.

“Did you see them come out again, Johnny Merton and Lamont?”

“Daddy found me before Lamont came out. I was sitting across the street in my coat, even though it was still warm. I couldn’t go outdoors in January without my winter coat, not in my family. I remember thinking how stupid it was, sixty degrees and me in that heavy wool thing, and then Daddy came along. He hit me, told me what a common girl I was, what a sinner, what a bringer of shame, to Jesus and to him, lingering outside a bar like a street girl.”

The words tumbled out like water from a fire hydrant, spraying me with their force.

“The next day was the snow. I went on down to school in the morning, even though my face was all purple and swollen from where Daddy hit me. And I was so thankful for the blizzard. I had to spend two nights there at the college, sleeping on the floor with all the other girls. It was the only time in my life where I got to be just one of the girls. White girls, black girls, we all just lay there in the dark, talking about our families and our boyfriends, and I even acted like Lamont was my boy… Well, anyway, when the snow ended and I got back home, Lamont was gone. No one ever saw him again, not that I knew. And I couldn’t go to Johnny Merton. Someone would have told Daddy, and I couldn’t take another-”

Another beating, I filled in silently when she clipped off the sentence. “Did you ask any of Lamont’s friends about him? Anyone who might have known why he was talking to Merton?”

“I did, but not till later. At first, when I didn’t see him around, I thought Lamont was avoiding me. I thought God was punishing me. I was so confused in my head, I couldn’t decide if God was punishing me for not going off with Lamont when he asked me that past September or if He was punishing me for letting Lamont touch me.” She gave an embarrassed snort of laughter.

“I finally asked Curtis Rivers, but that wasn’t until maybe a month or six weeks went by, and he was just as puzzled as me.”

“Was Curtis Rivers with the Anacondas, too?” I asked.

“I never did know for sure who was, who wasn’t. I was the preacher’s kid, I was the stuck-up girl, they didn’t talk to me the way they did the other girls in the neighborhood. I don’t think Curtis was-he shipped out to Vietnam, anyway, round about May of ’sixty-seven-he was just the boy everyone trusted. Gang, straight, whatever… Curtis, he didn’t play sides. Should have been him I broke my heart over, not a no-good street boy like Lamont.” She laughed again, less bitterly this time.