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

by Sara Paretsky

  “You don’t know enough about hockey to tell me anything.”

  “Exactly. And you don’t know enough about the law, and evidence, and how to uncover secrets to tell me what to do.”

  Her small vivid face bunched up into a gargoyle grimace, but she finally gave a reluctant nod, a reluctant promise to do as I’d asked.

  I ran down the back stairs. Mr. Contreras’s kitchen light was on. I owed it to him to explain what was going on, even though conversations with him are never short. He’d seen the story, of course, and was appropriately indignant.

  “Bernie is up in arms, and thinks we ought to be out shooting or at least whacking people. I don’t want her going to South Chicago. It’s gang territory and she has no street smarts, only ice smarts. Can you waylay her, get her involved with the dogs, the garden, keep her from doing something that will get her hurt?”

  “I never been able to keep you from getting hurt, doll,” the old man said, truculent, “no matter what I say or do. Talking to my tomatoes gets me better results.”

  I felt my cheeks flame, but meekly said he was right. “But she’s seventeen, she’s been left in my care.”

  “And what are you going to get up to?” he demanded.

  “Exactly what I said to Bernie, and what I promised both Lotty and my lawyer. Looking for information, nothing physical, I promise.”

  I kissed his cheek, told the dogs they could swim when I got home tonight, and jogged down the alley so I could come to my car from behind. One of the reporters had been enterprising enough to find the Mustang. He was facing my apartment and I startled him when I unlocked the car and jumped in. He tried to hold on to the door, but I was maneuvering out of the parking space and he had to let go.

  I might have been a worm slithering away from the early birds, but my reward was the morning rush hour. Lake Shore Drive at this hour is pretty much a parking lot. It may be the most beautiful parking lot in the world, with the waves on nearby Lake Michigan dancing and preening in the sunlight, but it was still slow and tedious going.

  I was early enough to find street parking three blocks from the County building and took the stairs up to the records room, where I paid twenty dollars for a chance to look at the microform. It didn’t include the trial transcript—those are expensive. Only the lawyers involved in a trial order up copies, so if Stella’s lawyer hadn’t done so, there was no transcript available. I did find a list of the exhibits used at the trial, and the names of both the state’s attorney and the defense counsel. Stella had been represented by a Joel Previn.

  CALLING TIME

  Previn is one of those names you think is common, maybe because of André and Dory, but there aren’t very many of them. I’d only ever heard of one in Chicago: Ira.

  Ira Previn’s about ninety now and at least according to local lore, still goes into court once or twice a month. He’d been a legend as a labor and civil rights lawyer in my childhood, when he battled the Daley Machine from his storefront practice on the South Side. He’d taken on the Steelworkers over racial discrimination, gone after the fast-food industry for wage discrimination, supported equal pay for women and African-American janitors at City Hall. The fact that he’d lost many of his battles didn’t make him any less heroic, at least not to me.

  I looked up Joel. Sure enough, he was Ira’s son. He was about my age, had attended Swarthmore College, then Kent Marshall School of Law. Never married. Lived in an apartment in the Jackson Park Highlands in the same building as Ira, worked out of Ira’s office. They must be a tight-knit family. Joel would have handled Stella’s defense when he was new to the bar; surely he’d remember one of his first cases.

  Traffic had eased by the time I finished at the County building: I made the run from Buckingham Fountain to Seventy-first Street in twelve minutes. The route led past the South Shore Cultural Center. It’s run now by the park district, which can barely afford to maintain the main building, but when I was growing up, it was an exclusive country club with guards at the gates and horses stabled near the private beach. In those days, Jews were banned from membership along with African-Americans, even though the club sat smack in the middle of what used to be a vibrant Jewish community.

  The South Shore Club could handle living cheek by jowl with Jews, but the arrival of African-Americans had been too much for everyone: white Chicagoans looking in fear at black neighbors had fled to the suburbs like a pack of jackals smelling a lion. The Catholics mostly bolted westward while Jews ran north. Only Ira stayed on.

  Previn’s office was on Jeffery, in a building like the one with the fancy shops of my childhood: little stores on the street level, two floors of apartments overhead. I didn’t see the entrance at first and passed two bars, “Flo’s Clothes, All Dresses $10 or Under,” and five storefronts for rent before I found it tucked between a fried fish outlet and a wig shop.

  It looked as though Previn maintained his own cleaning crew: the bottles and fast-food detritus on the sidewalk stopped where his office started. The sign on the window, Previn & Previn, Attorneys at Law, had been painted recently; a phone number and a website were both listed underneath.

  The Previns weren’t blind to the risks of the area: white circles indicating an alarm system were mounted on the windows. They had installed a security camera in the doorway. Its red eye took me in when I rang the bell. After a long moment, a buzzer sounded, an old-fashioned noise like a school fire bell. I pulled the door open.

  An African-American woman who seemed eighty or ninety herself was alone in the small room. Under the low-hanging fluorescent lamps, her face showed a network of lines, like the cracked patina of an ancient oriental vase. She wore a severely tailored suit, which might have come from France. Certainly not from Flo’s. The pearls in her ears looked real.

  “What can we do for you here?” Her voice quavered slightly with age, but the assessing look she gave me, taking in everything from my faded jeans to my expensive boots, was shrewd.

  “My name is V. I. Warshawski. I’m a private investigator and I was hoping to speak to Mr. Joel Previn about a woman he represented some years ago.”

  “Is he expecting you? He had an early meeting outside the office.”

  I looked at my watch. Nine-thirty. I said I could wait half an hour.

  “He doesn’t—I don’t know what time he might get here. Tell me what you want; I’m familiar with most of the cases the office handles.”

  “Stella Guzzo. She—”

  “Oh, yes.” The woman’s face took on an expression I couldn’t interpret, sadness, maybe, or wariness. “She murdered her daughter. I remember it well.”

  “Hnnh. Stella Guzzo. What kind of business are you doing with her?”

  I turned, startled. Ira Previn had come into the room through a door behind me. Age had shrunk him. His missing inches had settled around his midriff, which looked like the mound in the middle of the boa constrictor that ate the elephant. His face and hands were covered with dark age spots, but his voice was still deep and authoritative.

  I repeated my name.

  “Hnnh. Warshawski. You connected to the hockey player?”

  “His cousin,” I said. “His goalie when he was ten and couldn’t get on a rink. His executor when he died.”

  “Eunice, did you already look at her ID?”

  I took out my wallet and showed them my PI and driver’s licenses. Ira looked at them, grunted again and moved to a desk on the far side of the room. His gait was uneven: it was hard for him to move his right leg, but he frowned at Eunice when she reached for a cane propped against her desk. When he was seated in the old-fashioned swivel chair, he took his time getting settled—patting his forehead with a handkerchief, refolding the cloth and putting it back in his breast pocket, lining up a couple of pencils next to a legal pad. These were his courtroom strategies, buying him time, annoying opposing counsel, but they’d probably become seco
nd nature now.

  “Saw your cousin play a few times, back in the old Stadium, when your eardrums could burst from the sound. So you were his goalie. And now you think you need to block shots aimed at him after death.”

  I couldn’t help smiling at the metaphor. “Something like that, sir.”

  “And what are you planning on doing?”

  “That depends on what kind of information I can get about Stella Guzzo’s trial. I’m thinking she invented the story about my cousin when she was doing time, but if I could see the transcript, there might be something to suggest she’d already thought about it when she was arrested.”

  Doing time, what a strange expression. You and time behind bars, you’re suspended in time, or passing time. Time is doing things to you, not you to it.

  Eunice and Ira exchanged looks. They were a team with a lot of years of shorthand between them. Eunice said, “If you’re thinking of suing Joel for malpractice, the statute of limitations—”

  “No, ma’am!” It hadn’t occurred to me, but of course, that was one reason a stranger might be nosing around the case. “I’m trying to figure out why Stella Guzzo is making this preposterous claim. She’s saying Annie—her daughter—kept a diary that she only stumbled on now, long after the murder. I find it hard to believe it’s genuine, but I wondered if she said anything to Mr. Joel Previn at the time. About Annie and my cousin, or Annie and a diary, or another possible suspect.”

  “Did your cousin in fact date her?”

  “Not as far as I know.”

  “Either Stella Guzzo has evidence, or she has an animus,” Previn pronounced. “Which is it?”

  I shrugged. “It could be both, but it’s definitely an animus. Annie adored my mother. Most people did, but to Annie, Gabriella represented, oh, sanity, I guess. And a window to a larger world. Stella Guzzo decided that my mother was deliberately undermining her authority as a parent. She responded with some vile statements, so I can’t say I’ve ever been a fan.”

  What Stella had said was that Gabriella used the secret sexual arts of Jewish women to seduce her husband, Mateo. We got chapter and verse on this from my aunt Marie, Boom-Boom’s mother, who was one of Stella’s cronies. Marie loved conflict, and she was at perpetual loggerheads with my mother. Gabriella, Italian, Jewish, a singer, was way too exotic for the sulfurous air of South Chicago. Marie was happy to report Stella’s insults to us when she and Uncle Bernard came over for Sunday dinner.

  “Mateo never would have thought about music for the girl if the Jewish whore hadn’t gone to work on him. Me, I’ve worn the same dress to Mass for six years running, but the Jew bats those big eyes and he shells out money we don’t have so the girl can pretend to study music. He doesn’t think about me, his own wife, let alone Frankie, who’s the one with the future in this house. Frankie could play in the big leagues, that’s what Mr. Scanlon told us. No, it’s what the whore wants; Mateo takes bread from my mouth so she can buy those fancy Italian shoes.”

  “My mama doesn’t buy fancy shoes,” I started to say at one meal, but Gabriella hushed me in Italian.

  “Carissima, your aunt is a pipe carrying water in two directions. Don’t pour into it at this end; it will only bring satisfaction to Signora Guzzo if she thinks her spiteful words bother us.”

  What really enraged Stella Guzzo wasn’t the waste of money on something as frivolous as music, but the way Annie began quoting my mother on every conceivable subject.

  “Mrs. Warshawski says the sky is bigger than what we see in South Chicago and we girls should go where we can see the stars at night. Mrs. Warshawski tells Victoria if she gets a bad grade from laziness that’s more of a sin than saying a lie, because being lazy is acting a lie. Mrs. Warshawski says smoking hurts the heart but dishonesty kills it, she says—” until Stella smacked her and said if she heard Gabriella Warshawski’s name one more time, she wasn’t going to be responsible for what happened next.

  “We all knew Ms. Guzzo’s temper,” I said to Ira and Eunice. “The fact that you remember her, remember the case after all this time, makes me wonder if something special went on at the trial.”

  Ira and Eunice looked at each other again: Should we trust her?

  Ira made an impatient gesture, but he said, “We didn’t want Joel to take the case. We didn’t think he had enough experience, certainly not for criminal law. It was hard on him, it took a toll.”

  “Why did you let him do it, then, instead of handling it yourself?” I asked.

  Eunice shook her head. “Joel wasn’t working here—we thought he should have wider experience, and if he’d been here, he’d have always been in Ira’s shadow. Joel started with Mandel & McClelland, doing general law. The girl, Anne Guzzo, worked as a file clerk there part-time. Making money to help pay for college, if I remember correctly. When she was killed, Mr. Mandel felt responsible, felt they should do something.”

  “And that something included providing her mother with a defense attorney?” I was puzzled, not to say incredulous, but I tried to keep my tone one of polite inquiry.

  “It’s a tight-knit neighborhood, or it was. You should know that, having grown up there.”

  “Yes, but—”

  “Mr. McClelland went to the same church as the Guzzo family,” Eunice said. “He thought, at least I believe he thought, that the murder, including the mother’s defense, was the community’s business. Ms. Guzzo couldn’t afford an attorney, and he probably believed that even someone as inexperienced as Joel would be better for her than an overworked, underprepared public defender.”

  There was a scrabbling at the lock as she was speaking. Joel Previn came in before she finished.

  “And of course, we all know how wrong he was,” Joel said. “Why are we rehashing my earliest failure? There are so many others, more recent, that would be worth recounting.”

  MINOR LEAGUE

  Joel Previn was taller than his father, but he had the same heavy cheeks. On Ira they were sagging, like kangaroo pouches, but Joel’s were still upright, pushing his eyes up so that he almost had to squint. The likeness between father and son was remarkable, but so was the resemblance to his mother: Joel had Eunice’s high round forehead, her short flat nose, her biscuit-colored skin. What belonged to Joel alone was the unhealthy beading of sweat across his face. His appointment outside the office had been with a bottle.

  I walked over to him, holding out my hand and introducing myself. He ignored the hand. I felt foolish, as one does.

  “Did you know Stella Guzzo had been released from prison?” I asked.

  Joel looked from Eunice to Ira, not the silent signals his parents shared, but as if he were seeking guidance. If they’d sent him to another law firm to keep him out from under Ira’s shadow, the strategy hadn’t worked well.

  “I knew, yes,” he said. “Her parole officer told me, in case Stella wanted any legal advice.”

  “Did she?”

  “Not from me. Why would she? I’m the guy who couldn’t keep her out of prison in the first place.” He had his father’s baritone, too, but in him the undertone held a whine.

  “So would you be surprised to learn she’s thinking about trying to get exonerated?”

  “Am I on the stand here? Do I know, am I surprised, do I care? No, no and no.”

  “I know it was a long time ago, Mr. Previn, but I’m wondering what she said during the trial to help with her defense.”

  “She was impossible,” Joel cried. “I wasn’t the right attorney for her. Like my mother said, I was too inexperienced, not even for the crime so much as for working with someone like her. Annie, her daughter, she was nothing like that. When Mr. McClelland and Mr. Mandel asked me to handle the defense, I didn’t want to: Annie was so special, she kept the whole office bright, and I didn’t want to work for anyone who’d killed her, but I never in a million years imagined how different her mother would be f
rom her.”

  “I grew up with Annie,” I said. “I know she wanted to get away from South Chicago, get away from all the fighting that went on in her home. And I know Stella used to beat her children, but back when you were prepping her for the trial, did she ever suggest that someone else killed Annie?”

  “She said it must have been an intruder, but she also told me she’d hit Annie that night. She claimed it was self-defense. Would you have believed that? She said Annie came at her with a knife, which I couldn’t credit. Little Annie attacking someone with a knife? And Stella was twice her size. I did my best, but Stella already told everyone she’d had to hit Annie, to protect herself. But she also said that Annie was still alive when she left for her bingo game, so someone else must have come to the house while she was at Saint Eloy’s.”

  “Was there any sign of forced entry?”

  “It was so long ago,” Joel said. “I don’t remember all the police evidence. Dad would, of course, if it had been his case. And if he hadn’t been tied up with some big federal suit, he’d have been in court and made sure I asked all the right questions. Or leapt up and asked them himself.”

  “Joel, please,” Eunice said. “Please don’t bring all that up now. We know it was an impossible situation, one which we should have tried to stop—”

  “What difference does it make now? Mr. Mandel, Dad—the two of them tutted about it at shul. Mr. Mandel and Mr. McClelland both said— Oh, never mind what they both said. In the end, we all agreed I’d be happier elsewhere. Mr. Mandel sent me to a downtown firm as an associate, but after a few years we all once more agreed I’d be happier elsewhere. Ira feels the same way, but there’s no other elsewhere for me these days.”

  Ira held up a hand, not trying to stop his son, trying to ward off the pain of the words.