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

by Sara Paretsky

  “When Sebastian was in school, we didn’t have any money.” Viola spoke to the floor in a whisper. “He worked in the bursar’s office and—and he borrowed money from the accounts to pay his bills.”

  “Was he expelled?” I asked when she came to a complete halt.

  “They found out right away. I guess Sebastian didn’t really know what he was doing, so he didn’t know how to cover his trail.”

  “Embezzling is hard to conceal,” I agreed, “especially for a beginner.”

  “It wasn’t embezzling,” she said reproachfully. “It was borrowing. He was going to pay them back, only they found out about it too soon.”

  “How was he going to pay them back?” I tried to keep the impatience out of my voice. “By borrowing from someone else?”

  “No, he thought—he knew someone who’d made a huge amount of money playing online poker and Sebastian got him to show him the system he used. Only he lost, it was like thirty thousand dollars in twenty minutes. I was watching, it was terrifying—he kept thinking he’d start winning. He only stopped because I turned off his computer. We didn’t know what to do, so I went to Uncle Jerry.”

  “Jerry had money?”

  “He said he could get the money but we’d have to pay him back and of course we agreed, but we didn’t know—it was so expensive! The interest, we could barely keep up, even with us both working. I can’t really date anyone, seriously, I mean—if some guy gets interested in me I break it off so I won’t have to explain about the money. I can’t even take a real vacation: all our money goes to Uncle Jerry!”

  I wondered if she had any idea how good a motive for murder she was giving herself, but I didn’t suggest it. “How long has this been going on?”

  “Seven years now. It’s like—the thirty thousand Sebastian lost, plus the twelve thousand he borrowed from the school accounts, we’ve paid that much three times already but we still keep owing Uncle Jerry.”

  So Jerry had juice connections. “Your brother got to graduate from IIT?”

  “Yes, thank goodness, at least the school let him pay back what he borrowed. He was on probation for his last two years, but they didn’t put anything bad on his transcript. Only that’s how the money to Uncle Jerry got so huge, because we could only make small payments when Sebastian was still in school and Uncle Jerry said the interest was like really expensive because none of us could get credit from a regular bank. I started working full-time as soon as I saw how much it was. I take classes at night, like my mom, but I’ve never been able to finish my degree. As soon as Sebastian gets full-time work, I’ll quit my job and go back to school, but construction these days, it’s hard.”

  “You’re a good sister,” I said.

  She flushed. “We’re all each other has.”

  “You couldn’t persuade your uncle to let you off the hook? If you’ve already paid him, what? A hundred and twenty grand? That should have been enough.”

  “That’s what Sebastian and I kept telling him. That’s what we were arguing about in church the day you saw me there. Sebastian—he’s afraid they’re going to let him go at the place he’s working and we can’t keep those payments up. You saw how Uncle Jerry acted. But then a few days later he said he could make it all go away if Sebastian would do him a favor.”

  “And the favor was what?”

  Viola looked at me with large unhappy eyes. “I don’t know. Sebastian wouldn’t tell me, but I know he didn’t want to do it, he and Uncle Jerry fought over it, I heard them, Sebastian saying if he got caught he’d never be able to work as an engineer again, and Uncle Jerry saying did he want to get out from under a rock or not. When they saw I’d come in, they stopped talking. After Uncle Jerry left, I begged Sebastian to tell me, but he said it was better if I didn’t know, he caused the problem, he’d solve the problem. And then he left, and it was the last time I saw him.”

  “Do you live together?”

  Viola nodded. “It was how we could save a little money, not having to pay rent separately, you know.”

  “Why are you here?”

  Viola twisted the tissue so tightly that it tore, shedding confetti onto her jeans and the floor. “On TV they said you were one of Chicago’s best investigators. Not with the police. I thought you could find Sebastian.”

  “It would be better if you went to the police,” I said. “They have the resources—”

  “No, no, no! I keep telling you, no police. If I had to tell them what I told you, they’d think Sebastian was a criminal, and they’d arrest him.”

  “The statute of limitations on his embezzling has expired,” I said. “They won’t arrest him, unless what he was doing for Jerry was criminal. Are you sure you don’t know what your uncle asked him to do?”

  “I don’t,” she wailed, “but, you know, the way Sebastian said I was better off not knowing . . .”

  “Who did your uncle work for? Did you meet the people who gave him the money for Sebastian’s rescue?”

  “He didn’t like us to be around him,” Viola said. “Like, we knew he lived in Lansing, but we were never supposed to visit him. We’d meet him once a month at Saint Eloy’s to pay him; he volunteers there. Volunteered.”

  I didn’t try to tell her Jerry got paid for his church work, but pulled out my cell phone and showed her the picture I’d taken.

  Viola didn’t recognize the gravel-faced man. “I keep telling you, we hardly ever saw Uncle Jerry. He said he didn’t want to talk to me in public, he didn’t want people tracking him, but I’m so desperate about Sebastian, I kept trying to phone Uncle Jerry, but he wouldn’t answer—I guess he saw my name on the caller ID. And now he’s dead, and what if the same people are after Sebastian? I have to find him. Can you do it? If he gets—if someone—I’ll never be able to go on without him.”

  I didn’t like this, not one little bit. If Fugher had arranged a juice loan for his nephew, he had ties to some of the scariest people in Chicago. The way he’d been killed meant he for sure had the wrong kind of enemies. As for Sebastian, missing for almost a week after signing on to one of Uncle Jerry’s projects, he was almost certainly dead, as well. Remember Nancy Reagan: Just Say No.

  “I charge one hundred dollars an hour,” I heard myself saying instead.

  Viola looked at me in astonishment. “I told you, we don’t have any money.”

  “You’ll have more money now that your uncle is dead,” I said bracingly. “Anyway, either you sign a contract and agree to my fee, or we shake hands forever.”

  SHORT RELIEF

  We both froze at what sounded like a cavalry regiment on the stairs—Viola because she was afraid of who might be coming, me because I knew who was coming. Viola scuttled down the hall toward the kitchen. I stayed in my chair. Bernie burst into the apartment, the dogs pushing past her to run over to me. We’d been separated for ten hours and the reunion was noisy and heartfelt. Mr. Contreras, who is ninety, trudged slowly up behind them.

  “Doll, we was worrying about you. Bernie said she let some strange lady in and when we didn’t hear anything—and then your clothes in the front hall—”

  Bernie was seventeen. She imagined disrobing as the result of uncontrolled passion. Mr. Contreras thought it meant I’d been abducted.

  “She’s a potential client. Viola,” I called, “come on back. These are my neighbors.”

  Viola returned to the living room, looking suspiciously at Mr. Contreras, the dogs, and even at Bernie, who had let her into the apartment in the first place.

  “If you want me to work for you, come to my office, not my home, and we’ll sign a contract and you can give me an advance against expenses. You have to go now; I’m out of time.”

  Viola didn’t want to leave by the front way, in case the people who’d killed Uncle Jerry had tracked her down here. That made me think she knew Fugher’s killers, but she denied it vigorously, star
ting to cry again. I’d run out of patience with her; I got Bernie to take her down the back stairs and out through the gate in the alley.

  “What’s she want you to do?” Mr. Contreras asked.

  When I told him, he expostulated that I didn’t need the Mob on my case.

  “No quarrel here,” I agreed. “Hopefully, finding her brother won’t mean tangling with the Mob.”

  “You turn it over to Captain Mallory,” Mr. Contreras said. “This is police business.”

  “What’s police business?” Jake came in through the open front door. “V.I., have you been mud wrestling, and you didn’t get me a ticket?”

  “I’m going to make my filthy clothes an art installation,” I announced. “People will fill out a survey on what the clothes mean to them and I’ll guess their age, sex and sexual fantasies. Like, who thinks mud wrestling first instead of, I don’t know—”

  “Alligator wrestling,” Jake suggested.

  “Way sexier,” I agreed.

  “Can you be ready to leave in twenty minutes? In something not covered with mud or alligator skin?”

  One of Jake’s students was playing a concert in a small venue off the Loop. Bernie, back from escorting Viola, followed me into my bedroom while I changed into going-out clothes. Living with a teenager means kissing any privacy farewell.

  “What have you found out about this Stella woman’s attack on Uncle Boom-Boom?”

  I was pulling a silver top over my head, which gave me time to organize my thoughts: I didn’t want to expose myself to a barrage of Bernie’s urgent questions by saying I’d gotten bogged down in all the family relations involved and couldn’t make sense of any of them.

  “I think the diary is a cover-up for something else,” I said, when I’d adjusted the sleeves and draped a scarf across my shoulders. “What I don’t understand is why the Guzzos tried to drag me into their drama in the first place.”

  “So you’re going to let them get away with attacking him?”

  “I didn’t say that, Bernie. The attack is a smokescreen. And I have to ask myself whether it’s the best use of time and energy, my two scarcest resources, to figure it out.”

  “You mean you’ve given up trying to prove this diary c’est de la scrape.” She waved her hands around, trying to think of the English word. “Phony.”

  “Right now, Stella is the only person who admits to seeing the diary—her son and his wife both say they never had a look at it. The TV stations only had a typed transcript that the lawyer gave them; no one has seen the actual diary. It is pretty hard to hunt for something if it doesn’t actually exist.”

  “Did you ask the priest? I thought you said she gave it to the priest.”

  “If the diary exists, she might have given it to him. The first time I talked to him, he said she didn’t trust him because he was Mexican, but now he’s eyeing me with suspicion—that’s the only thing that makes me think it’s possible that he has it, or at least he’s seen it.”

  “Then go in and look for it!” Bernie urged. “I know you can, Papa has told me how you are like a cat burglar when you want to be. Or have you gotten old and slow and stodgy?”

  “You nailed it. I am old and slow and stodgy.”

  “So you’ll go to work for this woman Viola, who seems like the dreariest person in Chicago, instead of looking after Uncle Boom-Boom?”

  So much for avoiding a barrage. “No, cara, but I work for a living. I’m not one of those amateur detectives who can live off my bond interest while I dabble in investigations. So don’t ride me, okay? What are you up to tonight?”

  She muttered that she was going out with some of the kids she’d met at the coffee shop. And yes, she huffed: she had my cell phone if anything went awry, yes, she’d be home by midnight, but would I be here to check?

  “No, but your uncle Sal will. And he won’t go to bed until you’re in; he worries about you. And if he’s worried he’ll call me and then I’ll come after you with long rakes and red bats.”

  Bernie’s vivid face puckered into a grimace, but she wasn’t sullen by nature; she let me give her a farewell hug, and promised to remember her curfew. And to call if she got stuck someplace where she needed a ride home. What made me uneasy were the little mischief lights dancing in her eyes when I said good-bye.

  Jake’s student’s group played a modern repertoire well, finishing with a Ned Rorem requiem that was particularly effective. We had a good meal afterward on Chicago’s Restaurant Row, but I was still uneasy about Bernie and cut the evening short to make sure she came home.

  “Never figured you for a helicopter aunt, V.I.,” Jake said.

  “Now you know two new things about me,” I said. “Alligator wrestling and helicoptering. Bernie’s pushing on me to break into the church. Pierre—her dad—has fed her stories about Boom-Boom’s exploits, and some of mine, her whole life. I wouldn’t put it past her to think she could show me up by going to Saint Eloy’s and doing it herself.”

  Bernie arrived a few minutes after that, though, and I decided I’d been imagining the mischief in her eyes. Even so, I spent the night in my own place, but she was still asleep in the living room when I got up the next morning.

  I ran the dogs, dropped Bernie at her coffee bar and drove down to my own office, where I went resolutely to work. I’d been behaving lately like one of those independently wealthy dilettantes who detected as a hobby. I finished three reports, and made a security study for a bookstore whose inventory was evaporating.

  I sent out bills, including one to Frank Guzzo, amounting to $1,567.18 including expenses. I sent it, with a copy of the contract Frank had signed, to my lawyer and asked that it be delivered to Frank Guzzo—I couldn’t mail it myself because of the order of protection. I didn’t expect to collect, but it wouldn’t do for him to imagine I hadn’t been keeping track.

  It wasn’t until I broke for lunch that I had time to read the day’s news. The buzz about Boom-Boom’s putative bio had vanished, mercifully, but Mr. Villard, who’d supplied the photos I’d seen last week, had a little paragraph—there’d been a break-in at his Evanston mansion last night when he was having dinner with friends in the city.

  The rest of the paper was the usual round of mudslides, children murdered in civil wars in Africa and Syria, children murdered in gang wars in Chicago and Detroit. Disease, famine, the whole Apocalypse was there. I put away the news and listened to a concert through my earphones.

  Around the middle of the afternoon, Viola Mesaline appeared. I was surprised—I hadn’t really expected to see her again. She was shaking and her eyes were red, grief or maybe lack of sleep.

  “I’m scared,” she announced. “Someone’s been in Sebastian’s and my apartment.”

  I took her into the cubicle set aside for clients. It’s kind of like a psychiatrist’s office—couch, box of tissues, water cooler in the corner, a discreet recording device in case the client later disputes what she or he told me.

  “At work today, everyone was talking about Uncle Jerry. I mean, his death was all over the news, and people were talking like it was a horror movie, not someone’s life. I couldn’t take it because I couldn’t say, shut up, you’re talking about my uncle, you know? So I told my boss I was really sick and needed to go home, and she could tell I looked bad, so she signed me out. And when I got home, someone had been in there. They’d pulled open drawers. It was so scary and—and disgusting. I found one of my bras on the floor, and then Sebastian’s room, it was a mess, they’d pulled out all his DVDs and hadn’t put them back.”

  “Did you call the police?”

  “And have them all over me about Sebastian and Uncle Jerry? Why do you want to get me in trouble? Why aren’t you on my side?”

  “I’m not on anybody’s side,” I said. “I’m trying to understand what happened. Could it have been ordinary burglars—I mean, did they take any of the obvio
us stuff?”

  “Like computers?” She paused. “I’m not sure. Sebastian’s laptop wasn’t there, but I hadn’t looked before. He could have taken it with him when he left.”

  She got an A for that observation—more objectivity than I’d expected from her. “Anything else?”

  “The TV is old, so a burglar wouldn’t take that anyway. And I don’t have a computer, I just have my tablet and my phone and I had those with me.”

  “If it wasn’t burglars, what would they have been looking for?”

  “Stuff about Uncle Jerry, don’t you see? What Sebastian was doing for him!”

  “And you still say you have no idea what that was?”

  She shook her head, tears forming on the red-crusted rims of her eyes. “Won’t you please start looking for him?”

  I went back to my desk and printed out a copy of my standard contract. “Read it before you sign it: it makes a number of financial demands on you, and it is binding in court.”

  She read it, she argued about the expenses and the advance, she reminded me she didn’t have any family or anyone but her brother to fall back on.

  “I still think the police are a better option for you than me,” I said, taking the contract back from her.

  That made her pull out her wallet and give me her bank card. The card went through without a whimper, despite my hope for a message saying “insufficient funds.”

  HIGH AND OUTSIDE

  I went early to the Virejas Tower site. This was the project that Sebastian had been working on at the time he disappeared, Viola had told me. I wore my heavy boots and my parka: the construction site was near Navy Pier, just off Lake Shore Drive, and the wind blowing across Lake Michigan would be cold up on the exposed deck.

  Even though I got to the main gate before seven, a crew was already on-site. I put on my hard hat and asked the guard at the gate to direct me to the project manager.

  Viola had tried to argue me out of going to the job site, out of a free-flowing fear that she couldn’t or wouldn’t parse for me. My second client in a month who’d persuaded me to go to work based on the flimsiest of incomprehensible stories. I was beginning to wonder if I had “sucker” embroidered on my forehead, or maybe in my brain.