“Close enough.” I closed the novel but didn’t put it away. “I’m looking for an old pal of yours. Lamont Gadsden.”

The ugly look, never far from his face, came back full bore. “And what do you want to frame him for, Ms. Detective?”

“I’m the wrong kind of detective for that, Mr. Merton. I only want to find the guy.”

“So someone else can stick him in here next to me?” His face was mean, but he knew the prison system: he spoke in a jailhouse whisper.

“Is there a reason he should be? Was he complicit in one of those murders they booked you for?”

“They booked me but never proved anything. No evidence but a high-wire act, and that acrobat ain’t soaring too high these days.”

The man who’d fingered Johnny for three gang-related slayings had been Johnny’s second-in-command at the Anacondas. He’d been found dead in an alley the day Johnny’s trial started, as I’d read in the Herald-Star ’s account of the trial. They’d never arrested anyone for the man’s murder, although his ears were missing, the telltale sign of an Anaconda who’d been abandoned by the gang.

“Booked you and convicted you. I’m sure Greg Yeoman did his best, but you didn’t give him a whole lot to go on with, did you?” I paused for a beat, let him smolder anew over his adjutant who’d flipped for the state. “Lamont Gadsden. His mother is old, the aunt who doted on him is dying. They want a chance to see him before they pass.”

“Ella Gadsden? Don’t make me start to cry, Detective. There is no guard in this prison—hell, no guard in this whole system—as hard as that pious lady. Only person who can match her is that reverend of hers.”

“What about Miss Claudia? She’s having trouble holding her head up, has trouble even forming words. She wants to see Lamont again.”

He folded his arms in front of him in a deliberate gesture of disrespect. “I remember those two sisters, and Miss Claudia was always a ray of sunshine on South Morgan. But I don’t remember any Lamont.”

“He was with the Anacondas during Freedom Summer, helping look after Dr. King in the park.”

“His ma tell you that? No disrespect to an upstanding pillar like Ella Gadsden, but maybe her memory ain’t what it once was. She must be somewhere near a hundred years old.”

“Eighty-six, and I don’t think there’s a thing wrong with her mind.”

Johnny laid his arms on the table so that the coiled snakes were under my eyes. “I am the Anaconda, and if I say I never saw any Lamont Gadsden then he wasn’t with us, Freedom Summer or not.”