Hardball (3 page)

My lips tightened. “I
sometimes
do pro bono work but not on missing persons, especially not a person who’s been missing for a long time. How long has it been, anyway, that the Salvation Army balked at searching?”

“I don’t know the details.” Karen Lennon looked at her hands. She wasn’t a skilled liar. She knew, and she thought I wouldn’t take the case if she told me. “Anyway, Miss Ella can explain it to you better than me. Her life’s been so hard, and it would ease the last stage of her journey if she saw someone was willing to help her out.”

“Someone will have to come up with money for my fee,” I said firmly. “Even if I don’t charge my full rate, which is a hundred fifty an hour, I cannot afford to pour time and money down a sinkhole in this economy. Does Lionsgate Manor have any kind of discretionary funds you can draw on?”

My old friend Lotty Herschel is the leading perinatologist at Beth Israel. We were having dinner later this evening. I could ask her, both about Karen Lennon and this Lionsgate Manor and whether Beth Israel might cough up money for a good cause. If it was, in fact, a good cause.

“Maybe if you have a conversation with Miss Ella, you can steer her toward a place she could afford.” Karen sidestepped my suggestion. “What harm can one meeting do you?”

4

HELLUVA CLIENT

OVER DINNER WITH LOTTY, I TOLD HER ABOUT MY RESCUE of Elton and Karen Lennon’s appearance in my life.

“Max knows more about the hospital’s subsidiaries and their staffs than I do,” she said when I asked what she knew about Karen Lennon and Lionsgate.

Max Loewenthal, Lotty’s longtime friend and lover, was executive director of Beth Israel Hospital and on the board of their holding company. Lotty called me the next day with his response. “Lennon sits on Beth Israel’s ethics committee. Max says she’s very young, but he thinks she has good judgment. As for your other question, do we have a discretionary fund, we have all kinds of odd funds for odd purposes but none to pay for private detectives to find the missing children of residents in our facilities. You’ll have to decide on your own what to do about that, my dear.”

I could have—should have—let Karen Lennon and her old ladies lie, but, after all, Lennon had stepped in to help with Elton. Three days later, when I found a free hole in my schedule, I drove out Roosevelt Road, past the gargantuan buildings the South Side hospital behe moths were erecting, to Lionsgate’s tired manor. It was a fifteen-story building, with a locked ward on the top two floors for Alzheimer’s and dementia patients, and a variety of apartments and nursing wards underneath. What a grim way to live, knowing the elevator might one day loft you skyward and only bring you down again in a box.

The security guard at the entrance directed me to Karen Lennon’s office. The place was so labyrinthine that I got lost a couple of times and had to stop for directions. At least everyone I asked seemed to know who the chaplain was, which meant she was doing a good job of covering her parish.

Lionsgate Manor was clean, but its last overhaul lay a long way in the past. The paint on the walls was chipped, and you could see where walkers and canes had pounded dents in the cracked linoleum flooring. Only a few hall lights were burned out or missing, but management used the lowest wattage possible, so even on a bright summer day the air was a dingy green, making me feel as though I were at the bottom of a dirty ocean.

When I finally reached Lennon’s office, she was talking to an older woman, a staff member, but she finished the conversation quickly and got up to escort me to Ella Gadsden’s apartment.

I mentioned Max Loewenthal’s name to the chaplain as we rode the elevator, and her face brightened. “So many executive directors are too focused on profit. Max remembers that the hospital only exists because it has a mission to care for human suffering.”

We got off on the ninth floor. Lennon led me briskly down the hall. As we went, the pastor warned me that Miss Ella’s manner could seem brusque. “Don’t let that put you off. She’s been through a lot, as I said at your office, and she puts on a tough veneer for protection.”

Karen Lennon knocked on the apartment door. After several minutes, after we heard the heavy thumping of someone who walked with a cane and the scrape of locks being undone, the door opened.

Miss Ella was a tall woman, and, despite the cane, she held herself ramrod straight. Home alone in the middle of the afternoon, she still wore stockings and a severely cut navy dress.

“This is Ms. Warshawski, Miss Ella. She’s here to talk with you about your son.”

Miss Ella inclined her head a fraction of an inch but ignored my outstretched hand.

“Call and let me know how you get on.” Karen Lennon let the comment float between Miss Ella and me. After a few questions about “Miss Claudia’s” condition, the chaplain trotted back down the hall.

I got off to a rocky start as soon as I walked in. The room was tiny and crammed with the mementos of Miss Ella’s life—tables and shelves stuffed with Hummel figurines, china vases, glass animals, a large bronze head of Martin Luther King, Jr.. I knocked against a teetery table and rattled a tableau of china gazelles and zebras. Nothing fell, but Miss Ella muttered “Hmmpf,” adding, “Bull in a china shop,” in a loud undervoice. Only a small round table near the kitchenette was free of breakables, but it held Miss Ella’s workbasket, an enormous wicker affair that sprouted knitting needles like porcupine quills.

Martin Luther King, Jr.’s and Barack Obama’s portraits hung on either side of the wall-mounted television, framed religious texts stood among the figurines.
“During your times of suffering and trial, when you see only one set of footprints, it was then I carried you,”
I read, and
“Try to live each day He sends / To serve my gracious Master’s ends.”

The messages seemed incongruous with Miss Ella’s bitter mouth and harsh tone, but maybe when she was home alone she was softer, more malleable. She motioned me to a wooden chair next to the porcupine quills and pulled up a second hard chair to face me. When I tried to help her, she gave me a look that could have slit upholstery and told me to sit.

The first few minutes, she only offered the briefest answers to my questions:

I hear you’re looking for your son.

Yes.

What is his name?

Lamont Emmanuel Gadsden.

How old is he?

Sixty-one.

“When did you last see him, Ms. Gadsden?”

“January twenty-fifth, 1967.”

I was startled into silence. No wonder Karen Lennon hadn’t wanted to tell me. That was more than a long time to be missing. It was two lifetimes.

Finally I asked if Miss Ella had looked for him at the time he went missing. She nodded grimly but didn’t volunteer anything further.

I tried not to sigh out loud. “How did you search for him then?”

“We talked to his friends. They said he just disappeared.” Her jaws clamped shut, but she pried them open after a moment to add, “I didn’t approve of those friends. It was a hard job to go to them, and they weren’t respectful, but I don’t think they were lying.”

“And you filed a missing persons report in 1967?”

“We went to the police.” She pronounced the word to emphasize the first syllable:
poh-
leese. “There we were, two Christians in our Sunday best, and they treated us like we were darkies in a minstrel show.”

“My dad was a cop,” I blurted out.

“What’s that supposed to mean?” Miss Ella’s jaws worked around her false teeth, as if they were cud. “That the police are fine, honest men who stand up and say, ‘Yes, ma’am,’ when a black woman comes into the station looking for help?”

“No, ma’am, of course not,” I said quietly. “I suppose I thought you should know up front, in case you found out later and thought I was hiding something from you.”

Miss Ella’s lips tightened into well-rehearsed lines of bitterness. Not that she didn’t have reason: I could imagine the scene, the South Side district station in 1967, when crude racial slurs were part of life and most of the cops were white. But my dad hadn’t been like that. It always gets my hackles up when people dismiss all cops as pigs or brutes. Still, it’s not a good policy to argue with the client.

“You say ‘we.’ Was that you and your husband?”

“My sister and me. She came to live with me after my husband passed, when Lamont was thirteen, and I’ve always said that was when Lamont started to stray—she indulged the boy so much that he lost his sense of direction. But that’s water over the dam. My sister is ill now, too ill to live long, and it’s a wish dear to her to know what happened to Lamont. That’s the only reason I’m opening that box after all this time. Pastor Karen said you come highly recommended.” Nothing in Miss Ella’s voice betrayed that she placed any confidence in Karen Lennon’s words.

“Very kind of her. Did she tell you about my fee structure?”

Miss Ella pushed herself to her feet. She moved slowly through the maze of furniture to a sideboard. With an audible groan, she bent to open a door and pulled out a small lockbox. She extracted a key from a chain around her neck and unlocked the box.

“My sister’s life insurance. It has a face value of ten thousand dollars. When she passes, I will pay you out of what doesn’t get spent on her funeral. Unless, of course, you find Lamont. Then the money is his to do with what he wishes.”

She held the policy out for me to read the declarations page. Ajax Insurance had issued it to Claudia Marie Ardenne. Lamont Emmanuel Gadsden was her legatee and Ella Anastasia Ardenne Gadsden his successor. It was a horrible moment, the sense of being a ghoul waiting to feast on her sister’s remains. I almost turned around and walked out, but something in my prospective client’s face made me think she was hoping for such a reaction, or at least hoping to make me uncomfortable enough to waive my fee.

I pulled out a notebook and started taking down such skimpy details as she could offer: the name of the pastor at her church when Lamont was a child. His high school physics teacher, who thought Lamont had promise and ought to go to college.

“What about his friends?” I asked. “The ones you didn’t approve of?”

“I don’t remember their names. It’s been forty years.”

“You know how it is, Miss Ella, these things sometimes come back to us in the middle of the night.” I smiled limpidly to show that I knew she was lying. “In case they do, you can write them down and call me. And the day you last saw him, what was he doing, where was he going?”

“It was at the dinner table. He didn’t often come home at dinner-time, but there he was, eating bean soup and reading the paper. We got an evening paper then, and he was reading through it while my sister and I were talking. And suddenly he flung down the paper and headed for the door without a by-your-leave.

“‘Is that what you do? Eat and not even say thank you for the meal?’” I asked. Claudia always thought I was too harsh with Lamont, but I didn’t see why a boy couldn’t learn manners in this life. He didn’t have a job, and there Claudia and I were, me screwing parts together at the phone plant, Claudia cleaning up after spoiled white folks, and Lamont thinking we lived to wait on him!”

She paused, breathing hard, reliving the resentments that hadn’t eased for being forty years old. “So that night, when I said what I said, he kissed his fingers to me and passed some sarcastic comment on the ‘delightful repast’ before going out the door, just wearing that thin jacket, the kind all those hotshot boys sported in those days. The next day was the big storm, you know. When he didn’t come home, I thought he must have taken shelter somewhere. That jacket wasn’t enough to carry him through a blizzard.”

Oh yes, the big storm of ’sixty-seven. I’d been ten then, and it seemed like a winter fairyland to me. Two feet of snow fell; drifts rose to the height of buildings. The blizzard briefly covered the yellow stains that the steel mills left on our car and house, painting everything a dazzling white. For adults, it had been a nightmare. My dad was stuck at the station for the better part of two days while my mother and I struggled to clean the walks and get to a grocery store. Of course, the mills didn’t shut down, and within a day the mounds of snow looked dirty, old, dreary.

“It was only later we got worried.” Miss Ella’s harsh voice brought me back to her living room. “Later, when we could get out and about, and, by then, we couldn’t find anyone who had seen him.”

It was when I asked for a photograph that Miss Ella seemed startled. I was surprised, actually, that among all the framed slogans and pictures of Dr. King, Malcolm X, and other black leaders, that I hadn’t seen any family pictures at all.

“Why do you need one?”

“If I’m going to look for him, I need to know what he looked like forty years ago. I can scan it and age it, see what he might look like at sixty.”

Miss Ella returned to the sideboard and fumbled inside for a photo album. She looked through it slowly and finally took out a shot of a young black man in yellow graduation robes. His hair was cropped close to his head in the style of those pre-Afro days. He stared seriously at the camera, his eyes hard and bleak.

“That was when he graduated high school. Even though he’d started down a wrong road, I made him stay in school until he was done. The rest are all just baby pictures and such. I want this back, and I want it back in the same condition it is today.”

I slipped it into a plastic sleeve and put it in a file folder. I told her I’d return it at the end of the week, after I’d made some copies and preliminary inquiries.

“But I don’t want your sister to imagine this will be easy. I never guarantee results. And, in this case, we may end up with too many dead ends for you to want to continue.”

“But you expect me to pay you even if you don’t find him.”

I smiled brightly. “Just as your pastor expects to be paid even if she can’t save your soul.”

She eyed me narrowly. “And how will I know you’re not cheating her? My sister, I mean? And me?”

I nodded. She had a right to know. “I’ll give you a written report. You, or Pastor Karen, can do some spot-checking to see if I’ve done what I claim I did. But until you give me the names of your son’s friends, there’s very little I can do.”

When I left a minute later, I heard all the bolts on the door snap shut in reverse order. I stood in the hallway, already depressed by the inquiry.

IN THE DETECTIVE’S ABSENCE I

“HI, MISS ELLA. YOUR SISTER SPENT AN HOUR IN HER chair today. We’re going to see if she can get to her feet tomorrow,” the nurse’s aide said brightly. “Have you come to give her her supper? She’s tired after working so hard on her therapies today.”

Miss Ella nodded but didn’t answer. Claudia, the family beauty: it was harsh to see her like this. Was it a judgment on them, Claudia lying in bed, hardly able to move or talk, wearing diapers like a great big baby? Pastor Hebert would have said so, but Pastor Karen didn’t agree. Pastor Karen said God wasn’t an angry old man handing out punishments like an overseer or a prison warden.

“But it feels like it, Lord,” Miss Ella murmured, not realizing she had spoken aloud until the aide said, “What was that, Miss Ella?”

It seemed to happen more and more these days, that she spoke out loud without realizing it. Not a crime, or even a sin, just a nuisance, one of the many of growing old.