Hardball

“You never know,” I said with determined cheerfulness.

As I pulled away from the curb, the leashes in Fit for Your Hoof ’s window display twitched. Someone was watching me. But what did that prove? Rivers knew something about Lamont. Or he didn’t trust a white woman on the black South Side. Just as I thought. I floored the Mustang so abruptly it fishtailed into a pothole. That would definitely be the last straw if I broke an axle or blew a tire down here.

I couldn’t go fast very far, anyway. It was five-thirty, the heart of the evening rush. The line at the entrance ramp to the Ryan took six lights to clear. Traffic stayed bumper to bumper until I oozed off again at 111th Street.

As soon as I left the expressway, I entered a quiet, orderly world that doesn’t quite belong to Chicago. Pullman’s quiet, tree-lined streets, with their Federal-style row houses painted in greens and reds, stand in sharp contrast to the broken-down tenements just to the north and east.

Maybe its feeling of separateness from the big city is because Pullman started as a company town, a monument to railway magnate George Pullman’s ego. The inventor built everything-company stores, houses for his managers, tenements for his workers-who staged a bloody strike over the prices Pullman charged in his stores, coupled with the fact that his houses cost more than they could ever dream of paying. Pullman finally had to give up on his town, but most of the houses remain. They’d been built from bricks made of the durable Lake Calumet clay, which is so highly prized that thieves have dismantled whole garages, if the owners are away, and carted off the bricks for resale elsewhere in the city.

As I continued west, I saw the Hotel Florence on my right. Its turrets and spires had made it seem like a fairy-tale castle when I was little. It’s been closed for decades now, but my parents used to eat there to mark special occasions. I stopped, looking at the blank windows, remembering the family lunch on my tenth birthday, right before the city exploded in riots from one end to another. My mother tried to enforce a gay party atmosphere, but none of her attempts at charm or conversation could override my aunt Marie’s sour racist harangues.

I hadn’t wanted to include Marie, but Gabriella said I couldn’t invite Boom-Boom without his parents. Afterward, back in our tiny South Chicago living room, I shouted at my mother that it served her right that Aunt Marie had ruined the party. My father jumped up from the TV, where he was watching the Cubs, grabbed my arm, and hustled me out back.

“Victoria, every day I have to go out on the streets and face people who think their anger counts more than anyone else’s feelings or needs. I don’t want to see that anger on your face, or listen to it in your voice, especially not when you talk to your mother.”

My father never scolded me, and for him to do so on my birthday… I burst into tears, I created a scene, but he stood by, his arms crossed on his chest. No special treatment for me. I had to calm myself down, apologize to my mother.

The memory still burned in me, my dad’s injustice to me on my birthday. The force of the forty-year-old emotion embarrassed me. Staring blindly at the hotel, it dawned on me for the first time that his anger hadn’t been solely about me but his fears about what lay ahead. Catholic parishioners defying the cardinal’s pleas for charity and peace, taking to the streets with every kind of homemade missile-Aunt Marie’s own priest, Father Gribac, essentially inciting his parish to riot-my dad probably was frightened about Gabriella’s and my safety. That tenth birthday was the last time Tony was home in the middle of the day for two months.

A horn sounded loudly behind me. I moved forward, threading my way through a patchwork of short, dead-end streets to Langley, where Rose Hebert lived. Knots of commuters were walking home from the train station, most attached to their cellphones. One man was mowing his tiny lawn, while across the street a woman was washing her front windows. Where the street ended at 114th, a clutch of girls was jumping double Dutch. Beyond them, boys were playing baseball in a rubble-filled vacant lot. The girls slid their eyes my way-Strange white woman on the block-but didn’t interrupt the rhythm of their ropes.

The Heberts lived in one of the original Pullman homes, flat front to the street, red brick with black arches over the windows that looked like surprised eyebrows. Rose Hebert answered the door almost as soon as I rang the bell. She was a tired woman about ten years my senior, her close-cut hair full of gray, her muscular shoulders slumped inside a thin, lavender-print dress.

“I told Father you were coming, but I’m not sure he understood me,” she said by way of greeting. “It’s so hard to believe Sister Ella finally decided to look for Lamont that I called over to Lionsgate Manor to ask her if it was true. People try so many scams against the elderly these days. You have to be careful all the time.”

It didn’t seem like a belligerent comment, just the notion at the front of her mind.

“I am a licensed investigator.” I pulled out my identification, but Ms. Hebert didn’t look at it. “Miss Ella got my name from the pastor at Lionsgate, Karen Le

“Poor Sister Claudia,” Rose Hebert murmured. “It’s hard to see her like she is now. She was so lively and graceful as a young woman. Daddy was always having to remind her about modest Christian deportment, but my friends and I, we secretly copied how she dressed and how she walked.”

“Miss Ella didn’t want me visiting her sister, but it sounds as though you’ve seen Miss Claudia since her stroke?”

“Yes, oh yes. I drive the van on Sundays and collect our people who can’t walk to church anymore, so I bring Sister Ella and some of the other folks from Lionsgate. And I try to visit with Sister Claudia, but she’s so weak, I can’t tell if she even knows who I am some days, so strangers are hard on her.” Ms. Hebert was blocking the doorway to the house. Loud voices drifted down the dark hall.

I tried to peer behind her. “And your father? Is he strong enough that I can talk to him?”

“Oh. Yes, of course, that’s why you’re here… But my father, he isn’t easy… You mustn’t mind… He’s not always…” She kept murmuring flustered comments as she backed away from the door and let me into the house.

A table at the entrance was piled with papers. As I walked past, I saw church bulletins mixed with bills and magazines-sort of like my own entryway except for the bulletins. We followed the loud voices to the living room. They came from a television, where a minister was exhorting us to send him money for letting us know how very sinful we are. The light from the screen flickered on the bald head of a man in a wheelchair. He didn’t turn his head when we came in nor move when his daughter took the controls from his fingers and pressed the MUTE button.

“Daddy, this lady here is the one I told you about, the one Sister Ella and Sister Claudia sent. They want her to find Lamont.”

I knelt next to the chair and put my hand next to his on the armrest. “I’m V. I. Warshawski, Pastor Hebert. I’m trying to find people who knew Lamont, people who might know what happened to him.”

A thread of saliva dribbled from the side of his mouth. “ Lamont. Trouble.”

“He means Lamont was a troubled young man,” Rose said softly.

“Made.” The pastor mouthed the word with difficulty.

“Daddy, he didn’t make trouble,” Rose cried. “He had good reason to be angry, when you think of the terrible injustices we suffer.”

Pastor Hebert tried to speak but only produced a kind of gargling. Finally he choked out the word, “Snake.”

“Snake?” I repeated doubtfully, wondering if he meant Lamont was a snake in the grass.