Dornick laughed. “Behind a can? Make it more like a case … One of the reasons I wanted to leave the police. Larry Alito was not a good boy to partner with, I’ll tell you that between you, me, and the kitchen sink. No one could forget the Newsome case. It was so high-profile, the mayor was calling me personally. The dead girl was a really important person in the civil rights movement. We couldn’t afford a black eye as a city, not after the way the riots had played on national TV the summer before.”

“You didn’t have any doubt that you arrested the right man?”

Dornick shook his head. “We had a good snitch on that one. Not a jailhouse snitch, a guy who was undercover for us in the Anacondas.”

“Was that Lamont Gadsden by any chance? He’s the man I’m trying to find.”

A funny look crossed Dornick’s face, the expression Boom-Boom used to assume when he was deciding whether to dare me to do something really insane, like jump off the breakwater into Lake Calumet.

“What the heck, Vic, it’s been all this time. Yes, Gadsden finally turned Sawyer in. We’d been leaning on him for a name, and I guess he and Sawyer were good friends in the Anacondas. You’re not trying to suggest that Sawyer didn’t do it, are you?”

“I’m just trying to find Lamont Gadsden for his mother. You don’t know what became of him, do you? He disappeared the night before the big snow.”

Dornick shook his head. “We wondered, too. We wondered if Hammer Merton found out Lamont was a flipper and had him put away, because we never saw Lamont again. We checked with Hammer, but you know yourself how tough he is to talk to. What do you want with Sawyer?”

“I’m hoping he can tell me something about Lamont. But I’m meeting with a nun from the Mighty Waters Freedom Center. She was with Harmony Newsome when Newsome was killed, and she does have some doubts about whether Sawyer was the murderer.”

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?”