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

by Sara Paretsky

  “Did you keep a transcript of the trial?” I asked.

  “No. When I left Mandel & McClelland, they kept all my files.” He looked at Eunice. “Someone wants to rent 206. I came back to get a lease.”

  “Someone you met at the Pot of Gold? Can I talk to them first?” Her eyes were pleading with him not to have a tantrum, but he went to a filing cabinet, pulled out a couple of forms and slammed out of the office, saying he was tired of being treated like a mental incompetent.

  I followed him quickly—the pain in his mother’s face was hard to take. Joel was disappearing into a tavern half a block up the street.

  The Pot of Gold was a small room, with a narrow bar running its length, a couple of minute tables squeezed against the wall, the requisite TV hung in the middle where people could sort of see it. It was tuned this morning to a rerun of an old Notre Dame football game.

  Joel was sliding onto a stool when I walked in. Three other people were in the room, a heavy woman tending the bar and two men, seated on adjacent stools near the back. They were older. Every now and then one of them would say something, the other would respond, then they’d relapse into silence.

  Joel looked up when I sat next to him, but his expression wasn’t welcoming. “You can tell my mother that the rental prospect took off before I could show him the lease. She doesn’t need to guard the assets any longer.”

  “I’m not interested in that. I’m curious about how Stella behaved at the trial.”

  “It was a long time ago. I don’t remember.” He signaled to the heavyset woman, who came over with a bottle of vodka. She looked at me questioningly, but I shook my head.

  “She’s like one of those unstable chemical reactions they teach you about in school. You have to keep her behind a bulletproof shield so you don’t get acid in your eyes when she explodes,” I said. “At least, that’s the way she seemed when I was a kid. When I saw her last week, she slugged me. Even though she’s eighty, she would have killed me if she’d connected just right. I could believe she murdered Annie in a fit of rage. Did you ever think of pleading insanity?”

  “I did, but the priest and Mr. McClelland jumped on me like I was a cockroach on the bathroom floor. But, Christ, she was so fucking out of control that Judge Grigsby kept cautioning me. It wasn’t the worst thing that happened to me, just one of the bad ones. He said if I couldn’t control my client’s behavior in court, he’d have to fine me.”

  “You can’t tell a judge your client is uncontrollable,” I agreed. “How did you handle it?”

  “I talked it over with Mr. Mandel and Mr. McClelland, and Mr. McClelland got the priest at Saint Eloy’s to talk to her. Old man, mean guy, but Stella thought he walked on water. I guess that did the trick.”

  “Why did you agree to represent her?”

  “You had to be there. The partners decided. Probably because they knew it was a losing case and they wanted the biggest loser in the practice to have it on his record, not one of the go-getters.”

  “Who were the go-getters?” I asked, more to move him away from his bout of self-flagellation than because I cared.

  “Connor Hurlihey was there.”

  “Spike Hurlihey?” I said, my eyes widening.

  “Yeah. He was one of the East Side boys, he was a pet of old Mr. McClelland. He rode up, I rode down.”

  Connor “Spike” Hurlihey. Speaker of the Illinois House. Maybe the most powerful man in the Land of Lincoln, although of course in the pit where Illinois vipers writhe and hiss, it’s kind of hard to tell the top snake. I knew his district was south, but I’d always assumed it was the south suburbs, Flossmoor or Olympia Fields. I didn’t realize he’d grown up across the Calumet River from me.

  “You and Hurlihey get along?”

  Joel gulped down his drink and held up his glass to the bartender. “Hurlihey was three years older than me. When I was in fifth grade and he was in eighth, he used to give me wedgies in the hallway. The teachers looked the other way, the other kids laughed because he was a popular bully, and I was a mixed-race kid in a neighborhood with a low tolerance for difference. I begged my parents to send me to a different school and they finally did for ninth grade, but neither of us forgot the other.

  “When I joined Mandel & McClelland, he started saying things to Annie: he knew I admired her, and he was pretending to draw her attention to that, but really he was using it as a way to make fun of me.”

  It’s depressing how often school bullies become successful CEOs or politicians. “Annie was an ardent soul. I can understand why you responded to her.”

  “Ardent. That describes her. She was ambitious, she wanted to leave South Chicago, but she was sweet. She was the smartest girl in her school, probably the smartest person in the firm, but she never complained if one of the lawyers dumped a stack of photocopying on her at the end of the day. She’d stand at the Xerox machine with her history book propped up on the shelf, reading while she fed documents in. In those days I thought I was ambitious, too.”

  “Did you believe Stella when she said Annie had attacked her?”

  He fidgeted with his glass. “I went over there one night, on the spur of the moment, I wanted to see if Annie would go to a show with me. She and her mother were shouting at each other, they didn’t even hear the doorbell.”

  “It was a family that fought and shouted a lot,” I said. “When Stella’s brothers would come over with their wives and kids, my dad couldn’t even hear the game on the radio and there was an alley between us. When old Mrs. Jokich—Stella’s neighbor—was dying, the family had to call the cops to shut up the braying at the Guzzo place.”

  Stella was sure it was my dad who’d called the district station, and nothing could convince her otherwise. That was probably why she was squawking now that Tony had suppressed evidence during her trial—she could carry a grudge until the grudge took on a life of its own and carried on without her.

  I put my card on the bar next to Joel. “Even if you’re fifty, you can make other choices, change directions. Your parents don’t own you.”

  “Spare me the pep talk. I’ve had plenty and they make my head hurt.”

  “Maybe, but I’m betting it’s all that vodka before lunch.”

  I walked back to my car, which had a sporty orange envelope under the windshield wiper. My second in a week, and I couldn’t expense Frank, not without crossing the line Freeman had warned me against.

  I hadn’t noticed the pay-to-park sign. The cash-strapped city was handing out sixty-five-dollar fines even on the city’s more derelict streets. I guess it meant someone had a job in this dismal economy, but somehow that thought didn’t cheer me.

  I couldn’t understand why Mandel & McClelland had agreed to assign someone from the firm to represent Annie’s killer, and why that someone had been Joel, young, green, obviously with a crush on the victim. They should have left Stella to the public defender. I’d been one, I’d worked hard. Like all Cook County PD’s, my caseload had been too big, but I still gave each client careful attention—by working the long hours that made my husband scowl and complain during the fourteen months of our marriage.

  It occurred to me that if Stella had drawn a PD, it might have been me being cautioned by Judge Grigsby. I laughed, picturing Stella’s horror if I’d been assigned to her defense.

  The other side of the question was the client side—why had Stella let Joel represent her? She didn’t suffer ordinary people gladly; she’d have eviscerated an inexperienced young man. Or maybe the shock of Annie’s death and her own arrest had silenced her.

  None of the story made any sense. Maybe Mandel or McClelland was still alive and could recall what had gone through their heads at the time.

  I remembered Mr. Mandel. When I was in middle school, he used to give our graduation speeches. Every year we heard the same rambling reminiscence about his arriving as a poor immigrant and mak
ing his way through law school while working the swing shift for Wisconsin Steel. Only in America. My mother sat next to me, making sure I at least looked at the stage, even if I wasn’t paying attention to the words.

  I pulled out my iPad and looked up Mandel & McClelland. Their office had been in the Navral Building, which wasn’t standing any longer. There’d been an obituary for Mr. Mandel some seven years back. He was survived by one daughter, four grandchildren and three great-grandchildren. If any of them were lawyers, they did it someplace else—the firm of Mandel & McClelland had also vanished, although I didn’t see any stories about McClelland’s retirement or death. Where would the client files be if both building and practice were gone?

  I made a face at myself and went back to Ira Previn’s office. Eunice and Ira were huddled over a document when she buzzed me in, but they put it down and looked at me expectantly. When I asked if Mandel had sold the practice they seemed disappointed—they must have watched me follow Joel to the Pot of Gold and hoped I would perform a miracle of some kind.

  “I don’t know why you want to dig around in this, Ms. Warshawski,” Ira rumbled at me. “The Guzzo woman can’t harm your cousin, she can’t prove anything. And I don’t think she can harm Joel, either.”

  “But you know who bought the firm?”

  Eunice said, “Please, if you’re determined to get involved in this, promise me you won’t drag Joel in with you. He— Stella Guzzo’s trial destroyed him.”

  I looked at her helplessly. “If something about Stella and the trial destroyed him, he’s already involved. I can only promise not to drag him in unless there’s a truly compelling reason for it.”

  Eunice looked at Ira. He nodded slowly, his pouchy cheeks quivering with the movement.

  “Very well, but—”

  “Neesie, she can learn another way. Just tell her.”

  “Nina Quarles.” The words were almost unintelligible, Eunice’s lips were so tightly compressed.

  BALK

  Nina Quarles, Attorney, had her office on Commercial Avenue, just a couple of miles from Ira’s. The building was a converted three-flat at the corner of Eighty-ninth Street, and looked like one of the few on the street to be fully occupied. The top story was home to the South Side Youth Empowerment Foundation: Say, Yes! while the ground level held the insurance office of Rory Scanlon, Auto, Homeowners, Life, Health, Pension. Sandwiched between was the office of Nina Quarles, Attorney, boasting three lawyers and a bail bondsman.

  When you’re a child, all adults seem both old and fixed in time, so I didn’t know if Rory Scanlon was still alive, or if the torch had been passed. Either way, the business was clearly a success. Looking through the street windows, I saw that the computers were new, the desks in good shape. Five people were talking into their headsets, smiling the way you do so the person at the other end feels your energy and wants to buy from you.

  My parents bought their insurance through the Patrolmen’s Union, so I’d never been to Scanlon’s office, but he was such a lively presence in the neighborhood that everyone knew him. He’d been a fixer, the kind of guy you went to if you were going to be evicted or had your gas turned off. He turned out for community events, underwrote the Little League team that Frank Guzzo used to play on. When Boom-Boom made his home-ice debut with the Hawks, Scanlon got the CTA to send buses to ferry the neighborhood from Ninetieth and Commercial to the old Stadium.

  My dad had driven up in his own car. One of the few times he took police privilege, he brought me and my uncle Bernie through the streets with his lights flashing, parking right next to the main entrance. He hadn’t gone to the party Scanlon sponsored at Rafters afterward.

  “Too old for drunken crowds, Tori. And don’t you need to be studying?”

  I’d been surprised—his usual concern about my work was that I kept at it too hard. He was worried, too, about leaving me on my own, which he also never did—at least not out loud.

  “Boom-Boom’s signed on for a rough life, but I don’t want that for you, and you know your mama didn’t want it, either.”

  My mama wouldn’t have wanted a lot of the things I choose to do. Maybe if she’d lived, I wouldn’t keep tempting fate by skating so close to the edge. Perhaps my recklessness was what destroyed my brief marriage. Or perhaps it was because Richard Yarborough had been a money-obsessed bore.

  I went into Scanlon’s building, and looked up a flight of steep stairs. A sign in Spanish and English said there was an elevator behind the stairs. A security camera, the tiny modern kind that is almost invisible to the thief in a hurry, had been installed high on the stairwell wall. Another was set in the lintel above Nina Quarles’s door. It glowed red when I approached, presumably taking my picture. I must have looked honest and sincere: the lock clicked open before I rang the bell.

  The walls of the original apartment had been removed to create a long room that stretched from the windows overlooking Commercial Avenue to the alley behind. It wasn’t divided into cubicles, but the desks were far enough apart that people could have private conversations if they kept their voices down. Two doors stood open along the north wall, showing private offices beyond in what probably used to be bedrooms. A third door at the back provided the staff with a toilet.

  As in Scanlon’s office, the staff here were hard at it on the phones. Most of them were middle-aged and solidly built, a few wrinkles, hair turning gray—not the lean, workout-obsessed youth that might repel people like the elderly couple conferring in the near corner with a man in a rumpled suit.

  I looked around but didn’t see any sign of Nina Quarles. I was on my way to the offices, to see if that’s where she was, when a woman came up behind me and asked what I needed. She was about my age, tall, angular, wearing a shapeless cardigan over beige slacks and spiked heels, which put her about three inches over my head.

  “V. I. Warshawski,” I said, putting out a hand.

  The angular woman’s eyes widened. “Warshawski? There was something about Boom-Boom Warshawski on the news this morning.”

  “Yes, I’m his cousin.”

  She said the usual things: she’d grown up on the East Side, she adored Boom-Boom, his death had been a terrible tragedy. In the middle of the outpouring I was able to get her name, Thelma Kalvin.

  “What can we do for you?” Kalvin asked.

  “I don’t know if you paid attention to the whole story, but my cousin was in the news today because someone is trying to link him to Annie Guzzo’s death.”

  Thelma shook her head. “If the name is supposed to mean something to me, it doesn’t. I’m sorry we can’t help you.”

  “Stella Guzzo was convicted of killing her daughter Annie a number of years ago,” I said. “Nina Quarles bought this practice from Mandel & McClelland, the firm that handled Stella’s defense. If Ms. Quarles kept files of old Mandel cases, I’d like to read Stella’s trial transcript.”

  Thelma shook her head. “Nina doesn’t actually practice here. Our lawyers mostly work on job or property issues—a lot of this community got slammed in the mortgage crisis. And we have a criminal defender. But there isn’t room to store old case files here—they’re in a facility down in Indiana. Anyway, I doubt Nina would let you look at confidential files.”

  “It’s not a confidential document,” I said, trying to keep frustration out of my voice. “Just a rare one. I want to see if Stella Guzzo made any effort to blame my cousin for her daughter’s death during her trial. I also would love to know why Mandel & McClelland took on the defense—Annie Guzzo worked for them. Why would they defend her killer, even if the killer was her mother?”

  Thelma began saying that Mr. Zapateca would be available at two. I was startled, then realized she was talking to her device; she wore one of those clips that look like a beetle is trying to burrow into your ear.

  When she finished she said there was nothing she could do to help, she hadn’t be
en part of Mandel & McClelland—another interruption for the beetle, this time about Ludo’s bail hearing—no one remembered that far back, and no, I couldn’t talk to Nina Quarles—“Sorry, not you, Mrs. Bialo, talking to someone in the office, please hold for one minute”—because Nina was in Paris.

  The beetle had her full attention at this point. I stifled the impulse to yank it out of her ear and stalked out of the office, unreasonably annoyed. What had I really expected, after all?

  The elderly couple who’d been with the guy in the rumpled suit were leaving as well. I held the door for them and put my ill temper to one side to offer an arm down the stairs—although the woman held herself erect, the man was bent over and walked with a slow shuffle.

  “There is an elevator,” I suggested when they insisted they were fine on their own.

  “It’s out of order, but they say climbing stairs is good for the heart,” the woman said brightly.

  “We can’t afford to get dependent on anyone, young lady,” the man said. “Especially since we have to pay the lawyer bill now on top of everything else. Sounds as though you got the lady at the front desk kind of upset.”

  “Hard to know why,” I said. “I was just asking a few questions. You buy your insurance here?”

  “Oh, yes. The lawyer sends you down to the agency, and they give you a special rate if you’re a customer with the lawyer. And then, if you need a lawyer, the insurance man sends you up here. That’s why we were here, we were hoping to cash in our life insurance now that we need extra help. But the fine print, that’s what always does you in, isn’t it.” He pronounced the word as IN-surance.

  I walked down in front of them, slowly, in case the couple changed their minds about wanting help. They were murmuring softly to each other. When we got to the front entryway, they stopped beside the inner door to Scanlon Insurance.

  “We heard you asking about Stella Guzzo,” the woman said.

  “Do you know her?” I tried to sound casual.