Dornick laughed. “Oh, the sisters. The ones who didn’t try to beat our balls off at school look at the world through such rosy glasses. Or they imagine they can be another Sister Helen Prejean, even get hard-asses like me to oppose the death penalty.”

Nina came in. The meeting was over. Dornick ushered me out with a renewed assurance that “Tony’s gal” was always welcome at Mountain Hawk. “And you tell your nun that I’m darned sure we sent the right guy to Pontiac.”

“There isn’t any record of Steve Sawyer in the Department of Corrections,” I said as Dornick turned to go back to his office. “Are you sure it was Pontiac?”

Dornick paused in the doorway. “It might have been Stateville. Not every detail sticks, this far from the trial, and your dad probably could have told you, or Bobby, that we cops don’t follow our perps once they’re sentenced.”

I made appropriate sounds of gratitude for his time. “There’s one last thing, George, and it’s very hard for me to bring up. One reason I’m having trouble on the street with my search is, the guys who grew up with Gadsden and Sawyer think Sawyer was roughed up pretty bad during the arrest.”

Dornick turned again, hands on his hips, eyes bright with anger. “They always say that, Vic. You should know from your time in the PD’s Office, they always bleat about excessive force. We operated by the book, and I mean we dotted every i. We had too much riding on the arrest. And don’t you go dragging Tony’s name through the mud on this. He was the best, Tony Warshawski, and those scumbags were fucking lucky to have him bring them in.”

That was the end of the interview, but his reassurance lingered with me all day, gave me more confidence, as I did a document search at the county archives, as I organized a freelancer I work with to do surveillance at a warehouse in Mokena in the southwest suburbs. On my way back to the city, I toyed with the idea of signing up with Mountain Hawk Security. It would be great to be part of a big operation where someone else went to Mokena.

Dornick had been right about a lot of things, most especially his appreciation of my dad. I’d liked him. So why had I come away with an uneasy feeling, as if something he’d said had triggered not an alarm-that was too extreme-but a warning?

I was sure, in the kind of operation Mountain Hawk Security conducted, that all meetings were secretly recorded. If I could get a copy of the disc Nina made of my conversation, then maybe I’d be able to figure out what was bugging me. I laughed, picturing myself scaling the green glass tower, cutting a square out of one of the windows on the forty-eighth floor, disabling Mountain Hawk’s security measures.

Movie heroes have it so easy. Clint Eastwood would pull out his Magnum and blow people away. “Make my day,” he says, taking out someone’s brains, and we all cheer. Soon the survivors are so nervous, they tell him everything. In life, when you’re scared or being tortured, you’ll say whatever the terrorist wants to hear.

Like Steve Sawyer, coming into court disoriented, confessing to Harmony Newsome’s murder. At that thought, my foot came off the gas, and I slowed so unthinkingly that a van behind me honked furiously. I held up a placatory hand and pulled off at the next exit.

I sat at the curb at the end of the ramp and tried to think. Lamont had flipped on Sawyer-Dornick said that-and Johnny had been furious and killed him, or Curtis killed him for Johnny, and they’d disposed of the body.

Make my day, one of you, make my day. Tell me what happened. I couldn’t imagine a threat or a bribe that would make either Dornick or Alito open his secret diary to me. I didn’t have an in with the state’s attorney, to offer Merton immunity or even a reduction in sentence for talking to me. And, even if I did, Merton still might not talk to me.

Maybe Judge Coleman would explain why he hadn’t called any witnesses when he’d represented-or misrepresented-Sawyer forty years ago. Maybe there had been damning evidence that he kept out of the trial. I looked up the number for the Cook County judges and called Coleman.

Naturally the judge wasn’t available for my call. A clerk said she’d be glad to take a message, in a voice that sounded like she’d be glad if she never used her telephone again. I wanted just to leave my name and number, but the clerk wouldn’t take a message unless I explained my business in some detail. I used to work for the judge, I said. I wanted to go over an old trial, one that dated to his early years in the PD’s Office. I left my number without any expectation of ever hearing from him.

I’d pulled off the road at 103rd Street. Pullman was just a few miles to the east. Maybe Rose Hebert could shed some light on all these players.

ROSE ANSWERED THE DOOR IN ANOTHER SOBER DRESS, this one a navy dotted Swiss. She looked at me with a flicker of eagerness.

“Have you learned something about Lamont?”

It was painful to tell her no, to watch the dull, heavy expression settle on her face again. “I need some advice or insight-something like that-into Johnny Merton or Curtis Rivers.”

She gave a self-derisive bark of laughter. “I don’t know enough about life or those two men to have insights into their minds.”

“You’re selling yourself short, Ms. Hebert,” I said gently. “I don’t have news for you, but I’ve been to see both men, and I’ve talked to people who knew Steve Sawyer. There’s been a suggestion that Lamont might have flipped on Steve, might have led the police to Steve Sawyer, might have said Sawyer was Harmony Newsome’s murderer.”

“Oh no! I… Oh-”

The house bell had begun to ring behind her, and she turned fearfully away from me. “He wants to know who’s at the door, what’s keeping me so long.”

I grabbed her wrist and led her down the shallow stone steps. “Maybe he’s ninety-three, but he’s not too old to learn how to cope with frustration. Where can we sit where you’ll be comfortable?”

She looked back at the house but finally muttered that there was a coffee shop on Langley where she often stopped for breakfast on her way home from the hospital. We drove over to the Pullman Workers Diner in my Mustang, where the waitresses greeted Rose by name and looked at me with frank curiosity. Rose ordered coffee and blueberry pie. I had a slice of rhubarb to keep her company.

“I don’t even know where to start,” she murmured when we’d been served. “It’s all so wrong. Steve, Harmony, I don’t believe that. But even if he did kill her, Lamont-oh, he and Steve were best friends growing up-Lamont would never have turned him in to the police.”

“Did Harmony live in your neighborhood?”

“She and her family, they were up the street from us, but they went to a Baptist church that Daddy said wasn’t a true church. And they were rich. Mr. Newsome, he was a lawyer. And Harmony’s brother, he went off to law school and became a professor out east someplace. Harmony was in college down in Atlanta. She got involved in the civil rights movement down there, and, when she came home for summer vacations, she talked it up in her church’s youth group. She talked at a lot of the churches in our neighborhood, but not at Daddy’s church, because he thinks women don’t belong speaking up in church, like it says in Saint Paul. And, besides, he doesn’t think church people belong marching on the streets. We belong in the pews.”

She bent over her coffee, stirring it as fiercely as if it were her father, or her own life, she were attacking. “I shouldn’t say this, but I was so jealous of Harmony. She was so pretty. She got to go to a fancy college, Spelman, while I had to scrimp to put together money for nursing school. And, then, the boys were all spellbound by her. When I first heard she was dead, I was glad.”