That had been right before he was tried on the charges that sent him to Stateville. Dayo had used her training to do pro bono research for her father’s defense team. She’d been unimpressed with Greg Yeoman, but he was from the old neighborhood, and Johnny could no longer afford downtown counsel.

“I don’t think my father’s a saint, but he’s not the devil everyone wants me to believe. He did all this good for the community back in the sixties, and, if the cops and the FBI hadn’t railroaded him, he might have been a community organizer instead of a gang leader. Maybe then I could have led an ordinary family life instead of suffocating with my mother and my aunties in Oklahoma.” She gave a painful smile. “Maybe he’d be president today, starting out as a community organizer.”

When I asked how often she visited Johnny, I got the feeling that the gap between what she wanted him to be and the person he’d become was too big for her to bridge easily. She mumbled that she made the trip to Joliet for Christmas and Easter, sometimes Thanksgiving.

I brought the conversation back to Lamont and Steve Sawyer to see if she’d be willing to try to talk to Johnny about them. “They’ve been missing forty years now. Your dad is the one person who might know what happened to them, but he doesn’t trust me.”

She shook her head. “I’m not doing any work for the police. Maybe my dad did some things he shouldn’t have, but he’s sixty-seven. I don’t want him dying in prison because I helped tack another twenty-five years onto his sentence.”

“Maybe his old buddies aren’t dead,” I suggested. “Or maybe if they are, he didn’t kill them but knows where their bodies are.”

She was resolute. “Enough ‘maybes’ build a whole hive of bees, and I don’t want to be part of it.”

We left it at that. The conversation sent me home depressed. The only helpful news I’d gotten today was a text message from Karen Lennon’s friend, the nun who’d been with Harmony Newsome when she died. Sister Frances wrote that she’d be back in Chicago Sunday night and asked that I meet her at her apartment on West Lawrence after supper on Monday.

On Saturday, in response to Petra’s wheedling, I got up early to take her on a tour of our family’s South Side history. We started in Back of the Yards. Nowadays, nothing is left of the massive meat-packing houses that used to cover two city miles except for one small kosher shop, which provides lamb to Muslim and Jewish butchers around the Midwest.