This was a side of Merton I’d never known about. By the time I’d been facing him in that dreary bull pen at Twenty-sixth and California, he’d moved a long way from community organizer. The only organizing he did by then was where and how to separate small businesses from their money or his opponents from their body parts.

On the other hand, in 1967 he was already head of a powerful street gang. Maybe he’d just been spinning the reporter a line. A lot of white progressives had found street gangs glamorous or hip in the sixties. A lot of white reporters wanted the swagger that being on the inside with a black gangbanger would bring.

“The Man sees us as the threat to law and order on the streets of this city, but we weren’t the ones throwing bricks at Martin Luther King, were we? So how come it’s the brothers who are behind bars, not the white boys who turned cars over and such? You put Steve Sawyer up for murdering Harmony Newsome on no evidence whatever, no witness, no nothing. The sister went down in Marquette Park protecting Dr. King. And then they want to know why we aren’t grinning and tap-dancing for them. What if it was a white boy killed her in the middle of those riots? They were the ones with the weapons, but they are not the ones in jail!”

The Star inserted a picture of Harmony Newsome in her high school prom dress, her hair carefully straightened so that it hung to her bare shoulders in a slight bob.

It wasn’t the photograph that startled me into sloshing my contraband cappuccino all over my jeans. It was the caption: TRIAL BEGINS TODAY FOR STEVE SAWYER, ARRESTED IN THE MURDER OF HARMONY NEWSOME.

The sidebar explained that Sawyer’s trial was the culmination of months of protest by friends and family of the dead woman: they had held a prayer vigil outside the Area 1 police station since her murder the previous August. Sawyer had been arrested at New Year’s, which meant the trial was being rushed through like a bullet train.

I sat back in my chair, trying to figure it all out. Steve Sawyer. That must be, or at least might be, Lamont Gadsden’s missing boyhood friend. I read through all the papers and finally found a small paragraph in the Herald-Star. On January 30th, Steve Sawyer was convicted of Harmony Newsome’s murder. No other details were given. Nothing about weapon or motive and certainly no mention of Lamont Gadsden.

I did a cursory search for John Does. There’d been a good few deaths because of the snowstorm, but even though I skimmed all the papers through the end of April I didn’t find any reports of unaccounted bodies.