Hardball

I hoped I wasn’t pushing my luck, assuming that my pastor’s landline was open. After all, she was co

My clients were more squeamish. I spent almost an hour persuading two law firms to stay with me. A third wouldn’t return my calls, and I didn’t blame them. Until I could come out of hiding, I was a pretty sorry excuse for an investigator.

Bernardo, the big orange cat, appeared and decided I was better than no company at all. He began following me, winding in between my legs, so that I had to be careful not to trip over him. He jumped up onto the table next to the sofa bed while I was stripping the sheets off it and converting it back to a sofa and started sniffing my Smith & Wesson.

When I snatched the gun out of the way, he began exploring Miss Claudia’s Bible. My attention was on the gun, checking the safety and putting it in my tuck holster, so I didn’t see his leap, just Miss Claudia’s Bible flying off the table.

“Bernardo!” I cried. “That book took a beating last night. It doesn’t need you throwing it around. We’re holding it in trust.”

The spine, which had cracked during the flight through the laundry, split completely with the fall. I didn’t want to try to tape it together, which would damage the fragile leather, but I could put a rubber band around it and leave it at Karen’s until I had time to glue it properly.

The fall had opened the binding along the spine and pulled the leather away from the front cover. It was when I started to press the leather around the edges of the buckram cover boards underneath to hold the leather in place, that I saw the negatives poking out from beneath the endpaper. I sucked in a breath and sat down slowly, as if I were balancing a crate of eggs on my head.

I carefully peeled the endpaper back completely. There, between the buckram and the paper, were two strips of negatives inside a folded sheet of onionskin. I risked putting my battery back in my cellphone long enough to use the camera, shooting the strips the way I found them in the Bible under the endpaper, then shooting my own fingertips pulling them out. Each strip had twelve exposures on it. On the onionskin wrapping, in faded block letters, Lamont Gadsden had printed PICTURES TAKEN IN MARQUETTE PARK, AUGUST 6, 1966.

I held the negatives up to the table lamp, but it wasn’t possible to make them out. I’d have to find someone with dependable skills and a real darkroom, not an ordinary photo shop. The Cheviot Labs, a forensic engineering lab I use, was the only place I could think of. They were in the northwest suburbs, which meant risking a trip down near Lionsgate to pick up my car. It was better for me to gamble on being spotted than for me to entrust the negatives to a messenger.

I called Karen, who was just finishing her meeting, and told her I was going to pick up Morrell’s car. “I’ve found something that I need to get to a lab. I’m going to leave it at your place while I fetch the car because I can’t afford to be found with it on me. I’ll write down what you should do with it in case I don’t make it back here.”

“Vic, is this about Lamont? If it is, it was me who started you on this journey. I’m going with you to the end. I’ll be home in fifteen minutes. Wait for me in the alley.”

I didn’t put up even a token argument. I was glad to have my personal pastor take charge. I wrapped the negatives back in their onionskin, then slipped them between the pages of a copy of Harper’s.

I watched for Karen through the kitchen window, and, as soon as her turquoise Corolla appeared, I ran down the back stairs. While she drove, I told her about the pictures that Steve Sawyer-Kimathi had thought would clear him in court forty years ago.

She nodded and pushed harder on the accelerator. We reached the Cheviot Labs industrial park a little before eleven. I had called my contact in the company, Sanford Rieff, from Karen’s cell while we were en route. Sanford brought Cheviot’s photography expert out to the lobby with him, introduced him as Theo, and hurried back to a meeting of his own.

Theo, dressed in black as behooved a would-be auteur, spoke in a rumbly Slavic accent. He had crooked teeth, and a silver pentacle in his left ear, but he handled the negatives carefully, slipping them out of the brittle onionskin Lamont had wrapped around them and into a plastic sleeve.

“These pictures may provide evidence of a murder,” I said. “One that took place forty years ago. And they’re going to be needed as part of a trial, so do your best. They’re all that remains in the way of evidence, so please-”

“Don’t screw up? I understand.” Theo smiled reassuringly. “These come from Instamatic camera, my own first camera, a used one I found on black market in Odessa. I treat as my own.”

He had me watch as he logged the negatives into a database: the number of strips, the number of frames, my name with the date and time I’d brought them in. “Okay? We have cafeteria, we have park, make yourselves comfortable. Maybe one hour, maybe two.”

I was too restless to sit in their lunchroom. Karen came outside with me but stopped at a bench to make calls of her own while I walked around the perimeter of a little lake. The Canada geese, who’ve become the scourge of the northern United States, were out in force, drilling peg holes in the ground and leaving unappetizing deposits behind them. I skirted the soiled path and went into a small woods. I kept trying not to look at my watch, but I couldn’t bear walking too far from the Cheviot building.

Finally, a little after one, Theo came to find us, beaming like an obstetrician who’s about to a

There had been twenty-four black-and-white negatives in the Bible, but Theo had multiplied them into over a hundred prints, each with several different exposures, some cropped to focus on individual faces. Theo had clipped most to light tables around a conference table. Some were blown up and attached to the walls.

“That’s Lamont, with Joh

Their faces were solemn but joyful, getting ready for a big adventure. Lamont didn’t appear in any of the other pictures. It had been his camera, after all. He had several shots from the begi

“That might be a collector’s item,” I whispered to Karen. “When this is all over, Miss Ella might sell it, get a little comfort for herself.”

We moved on to look at Harmony Newsome’s ardent young face. She was arm in arm with a solemn-eyed nun.

“Frankie,” Karen murmured.

Lamont had also photographed rictuses of hate in the crowd. He’d gotten one of the vilest of the racist signs-BURN THEM LIKE THEY DID THE JEWS-that littered the park, and he’d caught a can of pop just as it exploded in a cop’s face. Onlookers, their faces indistinct, seemed to be cheering.

As the violence increased, the pictures began to get blurry-there had been too much crowd motion for an unsteady hand with a little Kodak-but almost every frame told some recognizable piece of the story. We looked at a man throwing something, both the missile and the man indistinct. In separate prints, Theo had done as good a close-up of both as he could. The missile remained a blur, but the man’s face might be identifiable.