Brush Back (V.I. Warshawski Novels Book 17)

by Sara Paretsky

“Eight,” she snapped. “And we all worked our fingers to the bone. Me, especially, keeping house for my father and my brothers after Ma passed. Not like these wetbacks, wouldn’t know a job if it jumped out of the beer bottle and waved a paycheck under their noses.”

  “It was a little easier to find work when the mills were running,” I said. “No one’s ever replaced those eighteen thousand jobs.”

  She glowered at me, but decided I was too big for her to throw out. She shut the door with a bang and turned one of three dead bolts. “That’s not my fault. If they wanted to work—”

  “I know. They could sell appliances at Goldblatt’s or work for one of the doctors in the Navral Building.”

  “Neither of those even exists anymore, Miss Smartmouth.”

  “Yeah, kind of my point, Stella.”

  The entryway was so small that we were touching each other. I went into the living room. I moved automatically, not because I’d spent a lot of time there—even when Frank and I were dating, we always met someplace else—but because the layout was identical to my childhood home.

  The house wasn’t as run-down inside as out, which was probably true for much of the neighborhood. Keep yourself looking too poor to rob. The floors were clean, the flat-screen TV was new, and so were the two armchairs that faced it.

  “What do you want?” Stella rasped.

  She’d kept her height even after all the years of bad diet and poor exercise. Her hair had gone that iron shade of gray that makes the face beneath it look hard—or harder, in her case—but her eyes were still a bright blue, like the sky over the lake as I’d driven south, and her arm muscles remained firm. She must have been attractive when she was young, in an athletic kind of way. In a different era she might have become a sports star herself.

  “Frank asked me to talk to you.”

  “That’s a flat-out lie.”

  “He came up to my office yesterday. He says—”

  “Oh, so we have an office now, do we, Miss Hoity-Toity. Frank drives a truck, but you have an office. Frank would have an office, too, if you hadn’t destroyed his chances.”

  “Me? Please. You bullied Frank into breaking up with me thirty years ago. Don’t tell me that made him so depressed he stopped trying to make a success out of life.”

  “No one ever got depressed when they got the Warshawskis out of their lives, but your family, they lived to bring mine down. Your whore of a mother broke up my marriage—”

  “I thought Mr. Guzzo was still married to you when he died,” I objected. “Had he divorced you? Is that why USX tried to deny the comp claim?”

  She swung an arm back, a reflexive urge to hit me. I took her wrist, not hard, just firm.

  “Beating people up is what got you into trouble to begin with. You’re not going to hit me, Stella, so calm down.”

  “Don’t you tell me what to do or not to do. I didn’t take shit from guards and wardens and bitches of drug dealers all those years to come home and take it from a Warshawski.”

  She had a point. I perched on the arm of one of the easy chairs. “Let’s leave Gabriella and Mateo out of the discussion. They’ve both been dead a lot of years and can’t defend themselves. Tell me what I did to ruin Frank’s chances.”

  “Not just you, your whole family.” Her lips were tight, but I didn’t like the way her eyes looked, too much white showing around the irises. “You Warshawskis always had to be number one, and when it looked like Frank had the same chance that Bernard got, you ruined it.”

  “What?” I was genuinely baffled. “My uncle never had any special chances; he worked the docks his whole life. If Frank had wanted a job there instead of—”

  “Shut up, numbskull,” Stella spat at me. “Young Bernard. You couldn’t stand—”

  “Oh, you mean Boom-Boom. Frank didn’t play hockey, but if he had, Boom-Boom would have welcomed him like a brother.”

  “Of course Frank didn’t play hockey.”

  Stella’s exasperation was turning her skin a mottled red. She probably looked like this the night she killed Annie. I kept my weight forward, so that I could jump out of her way if her rage got the better of her—she might be close to eighty now but she still looked strong.

  “Baseball. He was going to have his chance, they promised it, they promised he’d be at Wrigley Field where the top brass could see him, but it fell apart. That’s because you Warshawskis didn’t want it to happen. You’ve tormented us for as long as I’ve lived here. Your mother seduced my husband. Your cousin didn’t want Frank to have the same success as he got, your father”—she gave the word a horrible sarcastic inflection—“could have helped me, but he couldn’t be bothered to lift a finger. Little Annie was a saint or something to him and he figured he’d get his own back.”

  “No, Stella. You’re making this up. There is no evidence, there’s no conspiracy, there’s only you, hating my mother and wanting to blame her for your troubles.”

  She lunged at me so suddenly that I fell off the armchair to get out of her way. She tried to kick me but hit the chair instead. I scuttled backward on my butt and got to my feet as she lunged again.

  I shoved the armchair into her path. “No, Stella, I told you no hitting. Frank said you want an exoneration. Are you going to tell the lawyer that Boom-Boom blocked Frank’s chances to play baseball and this made you so angry you killed Annie?”

  “I didn’t kill my girl,” she panted. “It was an intruder. When I left the house to go to the bingo, Annie was alive. Everyone thought she was so sweet, they should have heard what she was saying. If she died with those words in her mouth she’s been burning in hell for it.”

  Even across the armchair I could smell her sweat: bath soap and talcum mixed with the rankness of the hatred coursing through her.

  “Why didn’t you bring that up at the trial?”

  “I told that useless baby they gave me as a lawyer. I told him it was an intruder, but he didn’t know enough about the law to use it. Or maybe Boom-Boom bought him off. He had plenty of money, all those endorsements, all those girls going flat on their backs for him. Maybe Annie did, too. I told her she was going to turn out just like your mother, and she had the gall to say that was her prayer! No wonder I hit her! Anyone would have, but I didn’t kill her. That was someone else, maybe your cousin, that’s why your father buried the evidence. Your cousin came to the house and murdered Annie while I was at church, praying for her soul!”

  I edged around the chair and headed from the room. “If this is what you believe, you need a psychiatrist, not an exoneration lawyer. Don’t ever repeat any of this in public, or I will sue you faster than you can spit.”

  She jumped across the room and socked me. I ducked in time to take the blow on my shoulder, not my throat, and ran to the door. I had the dead bolt undone and was outside a nanosecond before she caught up to me.

  She stood in the doorway, screaming, “People have been playing games with me my whole life, making fun, but I don’t take that shit anymore. You watch out, Missy, you watch your step.”

  The punks on the curb stared, mouths agape. No wonder Stella was safe in the middle of Insane Dragon territory.

  OUT AT THE PLATE

  I was shaking when I got back to my car. I should have listened to Jake and stayed far away from here. The dogs jumped up, whining and nuzzling me, responding to my distress, but what I wanted was my mother. She’d lived across the alley from Stella all those years, but the ugly words never seemed to bring her down. She worried about me and my father, but not what an unhappy, unhinged woman might be saying or thinking.

  I saw the curtains twitch in the Guzzo front room. No point in letting Stella think she’d upset me.

  My route north took me past St. Eloy’s, the church where Stella and my aunt Marie and hundreds of steelworkers used to worship—Eloy was the patron of metalworkers. On an impulse, I pulled over
to the curb and got out.

  I’d gone to funerals here as a child. The foul air we all breathed, the smoking all the men and most of the women did, and the unforgiving heavy machinery created a lot of orphans.

  It was a plate rolling machine that had killed Annie and Frank Guzzo’s father. Mateo Guzzo’s foot slipped, or a gear on the machine slipped, or Mateo couldn’t take another hour of life under Stella’s rule, local gossip provided a number of versions of his death. When the company heard the stories, they went with the suicide version so they wouldn’t have to pay workers’ comp to his widow. The union fought, some kind of compromise was reached, but as Stella had remembered the story, it was my family that tried to block her comp payment.

  The old priest, Father Gielczowski, had ruled his parish with an iron fist. He’d set up one of the infamous block clubs, an effort started by a priest named Lawlor to keep Chicago’s South Side parishes all-white. Gielczowski and my mother had had some memorable clashes, particularly because he wanted me baptized. Gabriella, who’d grown up in a country where Jews could be declared unfit parents for failing to baptize their children, had been scathing in her responses:

  “A god who cares more about a little water on the head than my daughter’s character is not a deity I want her to spend eternity with.”

  On my way up the walk to the office door, I stopped in front of the statue of St. Eloy. Steelworkers had created it out of scrap, so that it looked like a daring avant-garde piece of sculpture. I took a picture to show my lease-mate, who mauls big pieces of metal into giant abstractions of her own.

  “You don’t have a good track record down here, you know, Eloy,” I said to the statue. “Mateo Guzzo is dead, along with his daughter, and so are the steel mills. Even your church building is falling to bits. What do you have to say about that?”

  The metal eyes stared at me, unblinking. Like everyone else around me, the saint knew secrets I couldn’t fathom.

  It was a heavy brick Victorian complex, church, rectory, school, convent. I knew the school was still active—Frank had told me his kid was playing baseball for the high school team, and anyway, I could hear children’s voices drifting faintly from the playgrounds on the far side of the building.

  As I walked up to St. Eloy’s side door, I wondered what I’d say to Father Gielczowski, but of course he was long gone. The man in the church office was younger, darker, more muscular.

  Unlike Gielczowski, who always roamed the neighborhood in a cassock, this man was on a ladder in jeans and a T-shirt, spackling a hole in the ceiling. He didn’t interrupt his work to look at me, just grunted that he’d be finished in a few minutes, to have a seat.

  The hole in the ceiling wasn’t the only damage in the room, but it was the worst, exposing part of the lath near the windows, and spidering down from there in a series of large cracks. I figured the Spackle would hold for a month, or until the next big storm sent water into the building. The room should be gutted, probably the whole building, and fresh plumbing and wiring put in before anyone tried repairs, but I didn’t imagine the archdiocese put South Chicago parishes high on its budget list.

  Father Gielczowski’s picture was on the wall facing the windows, along with the other priests who’d served the parish. Their names, German, Polish, Serbian, Italian, reflected the waves of immigrants who’d come to the South Side to work the mills. The current incumbent was Umberto Cardenal. I imagined addressing him if he was made head of the archdiocese: Cardinal Cardenal.

  The desk, which was as battle-scarred as the walls, sat near the windows where Father Cardenal was working. I moved the visitor’s chair across the room, since chunks of plaster were dropping almost faster than the priest could fill in the hole.

  When he finally climbed down, a gray sheen covered his face, glued on by his sweat, and the tone in which he asked what I wanted was barely civil.

  “I don’t mind waiting if you want to wash up,” I offered. “I can even put the ladder away if you tell me where it goes.”

  The lines around his mouth relaxed. “I look that bad, do I?” He opened a closet door and studied his face in a small mirror hanging inside. “Yes, this face would do for the Day of the Dead, but perhaps not for church business. The ladder goes in the utility storage room next to the parish meeting hall.”

  I went with him to the hallway, but he headed toward the rectory, waving a vague arm to his left. I opened doors but didn’t see a meeting hall or a utility closet. At one point I found myself in the side aisle of the church, where a young woman was clutching the arm of a short squat man. He looked so much like Danny DeVito, down to the wings of wild hair flying away from his bald head, that I couldn’t help staring.

  “Uncle Jerry, please! We just can’t do it anymore.”

  He shoved her roughly away. “You should have thought of that when—” He caught sight of me. “Who are you and what do you want?” Even his husky voice sounded like DeVito’s.

  “Utility closet, the one where this ladder belongs.”

  “In case you didn’t notice, this is the church, not a closet.” He turned back to the woman. “Get out of here before you get me in trouble.”

  “Are you okay?” I asked the niece.

  “She’s fine. She’s leaving because she’s on her lunch hour and she can’t afford to get fired.”

  The niece wiped her eyes with her sleeve and started down the aisle to the front entrance.

  I followed her. “Do you need help?”

  She turned to look at her uncle, shook her head at me and kept going. I put the ladder down and went after her, but she pushed me away.

  “Don’t bother me. I can’t afford—it was a mistake—I just thought—never mind.”

  I pulled out a card. “If you change your mind, give me a call. If he’s hurting you, I can get you to a safe place.”

  She shook her head again, but at least she pocketed the card. When I turned back up the aisle for the ladder, Uncle Jerry had disappeared through one of the many side doors that littered the building. He’d left behind his old voltmeter, the pre-digital kind. In a spirit of malice, I carried it with me. When I finally stumbled on the utility room, I put the meter on a shelf behind the ladder. Let him spend an hour or two hunting for it.

  When I got back to the church office, Cardenal was at his desk, wearing a clean T-shirt, his face scrubbed shiny. He was working at his computer, but he stopped when I carried the visitor’s chair to its original spot.

  “What is it you need so badly that you are willing to lug around building equipment?” he asked.

  I couldn’t help smiling. “Help with one of your parishioners.”

  “And you are not one of them. I recognize most people who come to Mass more than twice a year, but you I don’t remember seeing.”

  “You wouldn’t: I moved away from this neighborhood a long time ago.” I explained who I was.

  “Frank Guzzo asked me to make some inquiries on his mother’s behalf,” I added. “She’s always been volatile, and now she seems even more so, but—you know she was in prison for a good long stretch, right? For the murder of her daughter?”

  “The gossip has been here, ever since Mrs. Guzzo showed up at Mass two months ago,” Cardenal admitted.

  “I just spent half an hour with her, and I am worn out and confused. She says she’s looking for an exoneration, but it sounded as though what she really wants is to pin her daughter’s murder on my family.”

  Cardenal raised an eyebrow. “Does your family have a vendetta against her?”

  I smiled sadly. “Stella used to spread the word around the neighborhood that my mother was seducing her husband. And then, when Mateo Guzzo sent Annie to my mother for piano lessons, Stella became furious with envy, thinking my mother was undermining her with her own child. I was startled when I saw her just now to find out she still is obsessed with the idea. Only she’s added my cousin Boom
-Boom to the mix—Boom-Boom Warshawski; he’s dead now, but he used to play with the Blackhawks. Stella ranted at me that Boom-Boom had destroyed Frank’s chance to have a baseball career, that he seduced Annie, then killed her.”

  Cardenal thought it over. “I don’t know your family or hers, so I can’t evaluate who is right or wrong or if there even is a right or a wrong. What is it you think I can help you with?”

  I hesitated. “Being in prison is hard, and Stella was in for a long time. I don’t know if she really thinks there’s some missing evidence that might exonerate her, or if she spent her time in Logan twisting events to make them my family’s fault. Do you have any idea what is actually going on with her?”

  Cardenal pulled at the flesh under his chin. “I’ve been here two years and some of the old Eastern European women still don’t trust me: Can a Mexican really administer the Sacrament? Some even take a bus all the way to Saint Florian’s to hear the Mass in Polish. Mrs. Guzzo, she at least comes to Mass here, but she hasn’t wanted to confide in me. Not that I could repeat a confidential statement, of course,” he added hastily.

  “Of course,” I agreed. “What about a nonconfidential statement? I’m wondering what she said when she arrived at the bingo game the night she killed her daughter. Or why Father Gielczowski thought he should testify for her at her trial. Do you know if he’s still in the Chicago area?”

  Cardenal shook his head. “He has advanced dementia, from what I’ve heard. The Polish ladies visit him sometimes and come back sad because he doesn’t know them.”

  Gielczowski with dementia. What a horrible punishment, even for someone as hurtful as he had been. “Would he have written something down? Notes for his testimony at her trial, something like that?”

  “If he made notes for trial testimony they’d be in his private journals, not here.” He held up a hand as I started to ask. “No, I don’t know if he even kept a personal diary, or who has it if he did. Parish records are about money and meetings.”

  “Can I look at the meetings the night that Annie Guzzo died?”