The next day, I resolutely put the whole Gadsden case out of my head. Lotty and I were having our weekly dinner that night. I arrived a bit late, since a job had taken me to the DuPage County Court-house, and the traffic back to the city was typically sludgelike. When Lotty let me into her apartment, I was surprised to hear voices in the background. She hadn’t told me anyone else was coming.

Max Loewenthal was on the balcony that looked across Lake Shore Drive to Lake Michigan. He and Karen Lennon were both holding wineglasses. She was laughing at something he was saying.

“Ah, Victoria!” Max came forward to kiss me. We hadn’t seen each other since my return from Italy. “How good it is to see you again, and looking so very refreshed from your trip.”

That was typical of Max. I looked about as refreshed as a month-old jar of dandelions. He poured wine for me-Lotty doesn’t drink, except for the occasional medicinal brandy, but Max keeps part of his important cellar at her apartment. We chatted over the Echézeau, while Lotty heated up some duck she’d bought at a carry-out place near the hospital.

Max knows Italy well. Over dinner, we talked about the wines of Torgiano, and the Piero frescoes in Arezzo. When I described the stage in Siena where my mother had trained and sung, Lotty and Max got into a side argument about the production of Don Carlos they’d seen there in 1958.

Finally, over coffee, Max came to the point. “I saw Karen this afternoon at an ethics committee meeting, and when she told me she needed to see you I asked Lotty to include her tonight.”

“Not that I object, but I’m not hard to reach. Or has Miss Ella asked you to slip me some poison?”

Karen had drunk her share of the heavy burgundy, and she giggled with more hilarity than my comment merited. “I guess you and she had kind of a quarrel yesterday morning.”

“You could say that. She’s annoyed with me for trying to find one of her son’s friends, and I’m annoyed with her for hampering the investigation and keeping me away from her sister.”

“I think Miss Claudia would like to talk to you, if she can get the words out clearly enough for you to understand. She had her own fight with her sister after you spoke to her, and it had something to do with that friend of Lamont’s. That’s why I wanted to see you as soon as possible, to talk to you about him.”

“You’ve run into Steve Sawyer?” I couldn’t disguise my surprise.

“No. But one of my projects is serving on the Committee to End the Death Penalty, and the chair, she’s a Dominican nun named Frankie-Frances-Kerrigan. She may know something.”

“I didn’t think he got the death sentence, but maybe he was executed, and they didn’t keep a record.” Maybe that was why Curtis Rivers was so furious.

Karen shook her head. “No, no. Today’s my day for racing around Chicago doing good works-death penalty this morning, hospital ethics this afternoon. I had just come from seeing Miss Ella, so she was on top of my mind. And while we were waiting for the rest of the group to arrive, I told Frankie how frustrated I felt, having sicced you on the case, and how it was impossible to figure out what was going on with Miss Ella. Well, Frankie asked a few questions, the way people do to be polite if they see you’re troubled, but when she realized it had to do with that civil rights time she got really interested. It turns out she was in Marquette Park the day the girl was killed, the one Steve Sawyer was arrested for murdering.”

“What?” I was startled into sloshing coffee over Lotty’s linen napkins.

“Yes, Frankie had really bucked the tide of the South Side. Her family lived in Gage Park, and her father was furious when she got interested in the civil rights movement. But her mother kind of quietly supported her. That’s when Frankie found her vocation as a nun. They were so brave, those sisters. They still are, actually. She lives and works at something called the Mighty Waters Freedom Center.”

“Harmony Newsome,” I interjected, trying to steer her back on course.

“Sorry, right. Frankie had been in Selma with Ella Baker, and she was marching with King and the others in Chicago. And she was with Harmony Newsome when Newsome was killed. Isn’t that incredible?”

“It’s extraordinary. Did she… What did she… the killer… Did she see…”

“I don’t know what she knows about it. All she told me was that Steve Sawyer’s arrest had always troubled her, and she’d like to talk to you.”

I bombarded Karen with questions: why had the arrest troubled the nun, had she seen the actual murder, had she stayed in touch with Sawyer?

Karen held up her hands, protesting. “Ask Frankie. I don’t know any of that stuff.”

Max laughed. “Victoria, I seldom actually see you at work, but now I understand why you are so attached to that large dog of yours: you are very like a retriever trying to flush a rabbit, you know.”

I joined in the general laughter, and in Lotty’s effort to turn the conversation in a different direction. Max brought out a bottle of Armagnac, and even Lotty drank a little. We lingered late, unwilling to give up the warmth around Lotty’s table, unwilling to go back to the world of coldness, of homelessness, of desperation, where Karen and I both worked.

As we rode the elevator down, Karen brought me abruptly back to that world.

“I checked with the SRO where I found a room for your homeless friend. He didn’t show up, and I wondered about that. It wasn’t easy finding a place. Low-income housing is disappearing faster than the rain forests.”

“It was good of you to go out of your way, but he seems to be a guy who’s so allergic to other people that he’d rather take his chances on the street.”

We had reached her car. As she got in, I commented on how packed her life was, her work at Lionsgate, with the homeless, the death penalty. “What do you ever do to relax?”

“What do you do?” she said pertly. “Except for your Italian trip, it sounds like you’re at it morning, noon, and night.”

I laughed it off. But as I walked the two blocks farther to my own car, I had to agree, I wasn’t living much of a life these days.

THE FIRST THING I DID IN THE MORNING WAS TO CALL THE Mighty Waters Freedom Center and ask for Sister Frances. The woman who answered said Sister wasn’t in the center that day but gave me her cellphone number.

“She’s out of town, trying to find housing for the families of some of the immigrants who were arrested in Iowa last week. They can’t find enough homes for them over there.”

I dialed Sister Frances’s cellphone and wasn’t surprised to get her voice mail. I left as concise a message as I could: Private detective, Steve Sawyer’s trial. If she remembered any details after all these years, would she call me.

Marilyn Klimpton arrived from the temporary agency. I spent most of the rest of the day working with her on my files and creating a list of key clients. If one of them called, Marilyn needed to find me and get me a message at once.

Late in the day, I heard from Sister Frances. She wasn’t sure when she’d be back in Chicago, she said, but she’d arrange to meet me as soon as she returned.

When I pressed her to tell me about Steve Sawyer, she said she wasn’t sure that what she knew would be useful to me. “I didn’t know him, and I was so shocked, so overwhelmed, when Harmony collapsed, I wasn’t thinking at all. It wasn’t until much later that I started to try to remember details about the march, and what I do remember is too… too… insubstantial. If I try to talk about it now, I’m afraid it will all evaporate. Let’s wait until we can meet face-to-face.”

That was frustrating as well as disappointing: I should have realized that if Sister Frances had seen who killed Harmony Newsome, she would have spoken up forty years ago. I had to put the Lamont search on a back burner where the flame was just about ready to go out. I had to wait, anyway, for the trial transcript, for a chance to see Miss Claudia. In a bitter irony, Johnny Merton was beginning to look like my last hope.