Taste of Life

by Sara Paretsky

  Father Gielczowski, the priest at St. Eloy’s, had testified for Stella: she was a good woman, a dedicated mother. She didn’t spare the rod, but that was what made her a good mother; she didn’t tolerate the rudeness a lot of modern women let their children get away with.

  Priests usually play well with Chicago juries, but not this time. Stella was built on massive lines, not fat, but big, like the figurehead of a Viking ship. Frank took after her, but Annie was small, like their father. The state’s attorney showed pictures of Annie’s battered face, and the family photos where she looked like a dark little elf next to her mother’s broad-shouldered five-ten.

  Instead of manslaughter, the state went for second-degree homicide, and got it. I didn’t remember the trial clearly, but I don’t think the jury deliberated longer than half a day. Stella drew the full two dimes, with a little extra thrown in to punish her for her belligerent attitude in court.

  I never would be a Stella fan, but the thought of her alone in a decrepit South Chicago bungalow was disturbing. “Is she there by herself?” I asked Frank. “It’s hard dealing with the outside world when you’ve been away from it so long. Besides that, South Chicago is a war zone these days, between the Kings, and the Insane Latin Dragons and about five other big gangs.”

  He fiddled with a chrome paperweight on my desk. “I told Ma it wasn’t safe, but where else was she going to go? Betty didn’t want her living with us. It didn’t seem right, turning my own mother away after all she’s been through, but, you know, she’s not the easiest person to have around. Ma said she knew when she wasn’t wanted. Besides, she insisted on returning to the old place. It’s hers, she says, it’s what she knows.”

  Frank dropped the paperweight. It bounced onto the floor where it dented one of the boards. We watched it roll under my worktable.

  “That isn’t why you came up here today, is it, Frank?” I asked. “You’re not imagining I’ll baby-sit Stella, I hope.”

  He picked up a stapler and started opening it and snapping it shut. Staples began falling onto the desktop and floor. I took it from him and set it down, out of his reach.

  “What is it, Frank?”

  He walked to the door, not trying to leave, just trying to pull words together. He walked around in a circle and came back.

  “Tori, don’t get mad, but Ma thinks—Ma says—she thinks—she says—”

  I waited while he fumbled for words.

  “Ma is sure she was framed.”

  “Yeah, that doesn’t surprise me.”

  “You know she was?” His face lightened.

  “No, Frank. But I believe she wants to rewrite the story of her life. She always set herself up as the most moral, pious woman in South Chicago, then she does time, can’t face the women she used to look down on. Of course she has to change the past so she’s the martyr, not the villain.”

  He pounded his thighs in frustration. “She could have been framed, it could have happened. I never believed she would have hit Annie hard enough to hurt her.”

  “I am not going to spend time and energy trying to prove your mother’s innocence.” My mouth set in a tight line.

  “Did I ask you to do that? Did I? That isn’t what I want.” He sucked in a deep breath. “She can’t afford a lawyer, a real lawyer, I mean, not a public defender, and—”

  “And you thought of me?” I was so angry I jumped to my feet. “I don’t know what the gossip about me is in South Chicago, but I did not become Bill Gates when I moved away. And even if I did, why would I help your mother? She always thought Gabriella was some kind of whore, that she cast a spell over your dad and then stole Annie. Stella liked to say I was a bad apple falling close to a rotten tree, or words to that effect.”

  “I—I know she said all that stuff. I’m not asking you to be her lawyer. But you could ask questions, you’re a detective, and people know you, they’d trust you the way they wouldn’t trust a cop.”

  By now his face was so scarlet that I feared he’d have a stroke on the spot.

  “Even if I wanted to do this, which I don’t, I don’t know the neighborhood anymore. I’ve been away as long as Stella has. Longer.”

  He came over to me, gripping my arms. “Tori, please. She went to, well, to a lawyer, who told her there wasn’t any evidence.”

  I pulled away. “Of course there isn’t. If she’d had any evidence when Annie died, she could have used it at her trial.”

  “Tori, come on, you know what it’s like, you go to court, it’s all confusing, she never pled guilty but the lawyer, he was inexperienced, he didn’t know how to run the case.”

  Frank was right: a trial is bewildering for inexperienced defendants. I didn’t like Stella, but I could imagine how unbalanced she must have felt. She’d never been to court, not even to fight a traffic ticket. She wouldn’t have known the first thing about how evidence is presented, how everything you say on the stand, or before you ever get to trial, is taken apart and put together again in a way you’d never recognize.

  “Even so, I am not wasting time and energy on problems Stella brought on herself.”

  “Can’t you let go of that old grudge? Ma’s had a hard life. Dad died in the mill, she had to fight the company for his workers’ comp, then Annie died—”

  “Frank, listen to yourself. She murdered Annie. And she had to fight the company for the comp claim because she started spreading rumors that your father committed suicide. Don’t you remember what Stella did at Gabriella’s funeral? She marched in on the middle of the service and dragged Annie out, yelling that Gabriella was a whore. I do not feel sorry for your mother. I will never feel sorry for your mother.”

  Frank grabbed my hands. “Tori, that’s why I thought—hoped—don’t you remember, that was the night—Annie was that upset, I never saw her like that, when Ma dragged her home—if someone told me Ma or Annie, one would kill the other, I would have thought Annie for sure, after your ma’s funeral. But I—don’t you remember?”

  My mother’s funeral was a blur in my mind. My father and I, uncomfortable in our dress-up clothes. The pallbearers—my uncle Bernie; Bobby Mallory, my dad’s closest friend on the force; other cops, all in their dress uniforms; a police chaplain, since my unreligious mother hadn’t known a rabbi. Gabriella had been a wisp by the time she died; her coffin couldn’t have taken six big men to lift it.

  Mr. Fortieri, my mother’s vocal coach, fought back tears, twisting a silk handkerchief over and over, but Eileen Mallory wept openly. I could feel the tightness again in my throat—I had vowed I wouldn’t cry, not in front of my aunt Marie. Annie Guzzo’s sobs had angered me. What right had she to cry for Gabriella?

  And then Stella roared in, beside herself. Mouth flecked white with spit, or was that a detail I was adding? At home that night I’d sat alone in the dark in my attic room, staring at the street, unable to move, leaving my dad to deal with his drunk sister Elena and the stream of neighbors, of cops, of my mother’s piano and voice students. And then—

  Frank had appeared at the top of the steep flight of stairs, come to say how sorry he was, for my loss, for his mother’s behavior. In the dark, sick with loss, tired of the adult world on the ground floor, I’d found a comfort in his embrace. Our teenage fumblings with clothes and bodies, neither of us knowing what we were doing, somehow that got me through the first hard weeks of Gabriella’s death.

  I squeezed Frank’s fingers and gently removed my hands. “I remember. You were very kind.”

  “So will you do this, Tori? Will you go back to South Chicago and ask some questions? See if there’s something that didn’t come out at the trial?”

  Past the naked, unbearable pleading in his face, I could see him as he’d been at seventeen, athletically slender, red-gold curls covering his forehead. I’d brushed them out of his eyes and seen the lump and bruise on his forehead. I got it sliding into second, he’d said quic
kly, scarlet with shame, pushing my hand away.

  My mouth twisted. “One free hour, Frank. I’ll ask questions for sixty minutes. After that—you’ll have to pay like any other client.”

  [In the middle of asking questions for Frank, VI encounters a man named Jerry Fugher. Two days later, she’s startled to see on the news that his body has been found in one of the mountains of petroleum coke—pet coke—along Chicago’s south side waterfront.]

  • • •

  I started coughing and sneezing before I actually saw the pet coke mound. When I turned at the next bend, I found myself at the locked gates leading to the Guisar slip. A guard station was at the entrance but the guard wouldn’t talk to me, just waved a hand at me to go away.

  I backed away and followed the fence where it skirted the river and the train tracks. Signs along the fence warned that the area was under high security, but not all the slips had guardhouses. I found a set of gates with just enough leeway in the chains that I could wriggle through. I now had rust stains on my red knit shirt, but there is no gain without some pain, at least not in my life.

  The potholes were filled with water from last night’s rain. The surface was that purple-greeny color you get when your transmission fluid leaks all over the street.

  I came at the coke mound from the back. A police van for the forensic techs was parked on the lip and a crew in hazmat suits seemed to be taking the top of the mountain apart. I moved around to the water side of the coke. I wasn’t sure what I was hoping to find, since the techs were going over the area, but I was trying to imagine how Jerry Fugher’s body got to where it had ended up.

  I peered over the edge of the dock. Besides the usual waterfront garbage—bottles and cans, remains of McDonald’s and Popeye’s, tampons and Pampers—pieces of drywall, two-by-fours, a car fender, Styrofoam cups, swirled around. The Cubs would be in the World Series before anyone sorted through this muck for clues about Fugher’s death.

  I edged my way along the narrow strip between the coke mound and the water, pulling my knit top up to cover my nose and mouth. Even so, the dust made my eyes water. I was sneezing violently when a hand grabbed me roughly by the shoulder.

  “Who the hell are you and how did you get out here? You some goddam reporter?” A man in a hard hat and orange safety vest, his skin like tanned leather from life in the great outdoors, had appeared behind me.

  “Nope. I’m a goddam detective. You with the police?”

  “I’m with Guisar and I’m tired of strangers on my slip. I want to see your badge.”

  I pulled out the laminated copy of my license. “I’m private.”

  “Then you sure as hell have no business out here. How’d you get past the front gate without a pass or a hard hat?”

  “Just lucky, I guess.”

  He frog-marched me around to the front of the mound, where his crew were sitting on overturned barrels or leaning against their earth-moving machines, watching the forensic teams at work.

  A silver Jeep Patriot pulled up, splashing mud on my jeans. The driver, a guy around fifty with a marine haircut, lowered his window.

  “Jarvis, what the hell you doing sticking dead bodies out here on the dock? You let a game of hide-and-seek get out of hand?”

  He was grinning widely and the Guisar man smiled in turn, but perfunctorily. “Bagby—you saw the news?—it was—”

  “Awful. I know,” Bagby cut him off. “Shouldn’t make a joke out of it. Did you find out who the dead man was?”

  “The cops just learned. Guy named Jerry Fugher. They say he did odd jobs around the neighborhood, but what he was doing here on the docks, no one knows.”

  “Who’s the talent?” Bagby asked, jerking his head at me.

  “I’m trying to find out. The lady got in here without a pass. I don’t know how she got past the main gate, but I’ll have a talk—”

  “You look like you walked up the tracks,” Bagby said to me, taking in my mud-spattered clothes. “Whatever you want must be pretty important. What can we do for you, Ms.— Uh?”

  “Warshawski,” I said.

  “The hockey player?” Bagby asked.

  “I’m retired. These days I’m an investigator.”

  Bagby looked startled, then threw back his head and guffawed. “I earned that. You’re related to Boom-Boom Warshawski?”

  “Cousin.” I smiled: two can play nice. “I’m the person who ID’d Jerry Fugher for the police. I understand he worked for you?”

  Bagby shook his head. “If you told the cops that, they knew before I did. Never heard of the guy.”

  I pulled out my cell phone and showed him the picture of Fugher getting into one of his trucks.

  Bagby took the phone from me and frowned over the picture. “The shot’s too blurry to make out their faces that well, but he looks a hell of a lot like Danny DeVito. I recognize the truck, though, damn it. Some SOB is going to be collecting unemployment before the day is over, letting a stranger drive one of our trucks. Huge legal exposure to that. Forward that photo to me, okay? I can read the plate; that’ll tell me who was supposed to be driving that morning.”

  “I gave the photo to your daughter on Friday. I’m surprised she hasn’t shown it to you.”

  He shook his head, mock sadness. “Delphina! If the guy had looked like Justin Bieber instead of Danny DeVito, she’d have tracked him down by now instead of letting it go completely out of her head.”

  I smiled, mock understanding. “She must have your dispatcher wrapped around her finger for him to forget, as well.”

  He gave me another appraising look, but dropped the subject, saying he’d give me a ride out to the road. “Save you schlepping all the way back on foot.”

  “I’ll stay out here, see what the cops turn up.”

  “She can’t stay here,” the Guisar man said to Bagby. “She doesn’t have a pass or a hard hat, she’s not with the city. Drive her out.”

  Drive me out. It sounded as though I was a demon possessing a pig.

  “Yeah, sorry about that, Ms. Warshawski, but Jarvis is right. No pass, no hard hat, no visit.”

  I gave in with as much grace as I could muster, stopping at the squad cars to see if I knew anyone on duty. No luck. Jarvis, who’d followed me, lecturing me on how I was trespassing, started sneezing mid-sentence. I kept my top pulled over my nose.

  Bagby honked. “Warshawski! Train’s leaving the station.”

  I climbed into his front seat and looked mournfully at my clothes. My running shoes were caked with mud, my socks were soaked through, and my almost-new jeans had a long tear up one leg—I must have caught it on a piece of wire when I was sliding through the fence.

  “This guy Fugher must be something special if you wrecked your wardrobe to look at his burial plot. How’d you know him? He part of one of your private investigations?” Bagby asked.

  “And that would be your business because . . . ?”

  Bagby grinned, but he kept his eyes on the road, swerving around the biggest potholes. “Just making conversation. Although if he was driving one of my trucks, I guess I’d better find out what he was up to. Every now and then a cargo does go missing.”

  “You know Frank Guzzo?” I asked.

  “Is this a trick question? Of course I know Guzzo. He’s been with the company forever. Don’t tell me you thought he’d be on Guisar’s dock back there.”

  “Just making conversation,” I said primly. “When Frank tried out for the Cubs, Bagby’s gave him time off to get in shape.”

  “That was my old man, may he rest in peace. Heart attack seven years ago.” We were at the outer gate, which swung open for the Patriot. Bagby stuck his head out the window to hallo at the guard.

  “This lady got lost out here, found her way to the Guisar slip. Ask Security to check the fences, make sure you don’t have any holes. You don’t want anyone el
se wandering in here after dark and dying in the coal dust.”

  “You know he died in the pet coke?” I asked. “I didn’t think the ME had even started an autopsy.”

  “Figure of speech,” Bagby said sharply. “Are you always this literal-minded?”

  “Usually. People say what they actually mean more often than not. Lieutenant Rawlings at the Fourth District—you know him, right?—only told me a couple of hours ago that they thought Fugher was alive when he went into the coke.”

  Bagby grinned again, his mask of good nature back in place. “In that case, I’ll check with Rawlings. You know how to get home from here?”

  I thought about making a smart remark, something Chandler-like or Bunyanesque, like “I am home here,” or “Here I have no earthly home,” but I only said, “Oh, yeah,” and started the long trek back.

  About the Author

  Sara Paretsky is the author of twenty books, including her renowned V. I. Warshawski novels. Her many awards include the Cartier Diamond Dagger Lifetime Achievement Award from the British Crime Writers’ Association and the 2011 Mystery Writers of America’s Grand Master Award. She lives in Chicago.

  What’s next on

  your reading list?

  Discover your next

  great read!

  * * *

  Get personalized book picks and up-to-date news about this author.

  Sign up now.