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

by Sara Paretsky

  On my way back to my car I stopped at the faucet on the outside of his house and ran water over my running shoes: I didn’t want to trail cockroach eggs into my own car or home.

  When I got back to my office, I opened a case file for the Mesaline twins. There wasn’t much to enter, but I’d learned three things this morning: Sebastian Mesaline wasn’t a hardworking employee. He was a Cubs fan. I’d also learned Nabiyev’s name, and that he had a job at Sturlese Cement. Four things.

  I spread out the wadded-up papers I’d taken from Sebastian’s gym bag at the Virejas site. Aliana, the young engineer who’d opened the locker for me, was right: Sebastian was careful with money. The receipts were for sandwiches, pizza slices, candy bars, all from grocery stores or drugstores, where prepared food is cheaper. He’d bought a CTA pass, a monthly gym pass. I entered the name of the gym into his file—it might be worth checking to see if he’d left anything behind in a locker there.

  And then there was the paper that didn’t relate to any purchases, the paper with “11 P.M., 131” scrawled on the back. The front was a receipt for toothpaste; he’d bought it April 6, two days before he was last seen. He’d written down where he was supposed to meet someone, that was my best guess.

  A room number in a hotel, maybe. Or a location in the Virejas building that didn’t mean anything to Aliana. Sebastian had come in early his last day, he’d been doing something at the computers—he could have been checking the specs for where to find 131. A junction box, an equipment unloading site. They’d poured the tenth floor the day Sebastian disappeared, the project manager had told me. Maybe Sebastian really was buried there.

  I’d told Uncle Jerry’s landlord to call the Fourth District if Nabiyev came around. I should call them myself to tell them I’d seen him with Uncle Jerry outside Wrigley Field. I didn’t know his first name, I realized.

  He didn’t exist in any of my databases, which was usually true of high-profile celebrities, but true, too, of people trying to avoid any profile at all. Such as hitmen.

  The chatty hoist operator had made it clear that everyone at the Virejas site knew I was a detective. It doesn’t take a detective to find me: Viola Mesaline had tracked me down at home two days ago, and my office is advertised online. I didn’t like a putative hitman knowing more about me than I did about him.

  I took a burn phone out of my electronics drawer and dialed Sturlese Cement. Spoke from the back of my mouth, where the tone gets garbled and rougher, and said I was looking for Nebisch.

  “For who?” the receptionist asked.

  “Guy didn’t tell me his first name. Nebisch, he called himself. Supposed to meet me at the Virejas job site.”

  “Nabiyev, do you mean? It’s Boris. I’ll page him for you. What’s your name?”

  “Fugher,” I said, hanging up. I taped Nabiyev’s name to the back of the phone so I’d remember to use a different one if I tried to call Sturlese Cement again.

  Cement, like trucking, is a good Mob front. You moved all over the metro area, and if you were in fact a hitman, you had a ready-made place to bury the body. On NCIS or White Collar, I’d forcefully persuade a reluctant judge to issue a search warrant and then persuade my equally reluctant boss to give me access to a portable X-ray machine, and then I’d find Sebastian’s body and make an arrest—after a near-death escape from Nabiyev, whom I’d overpower despite his bigger size and more massive gun power. I wished I were a TV detective.

  This being real life, I tore off a big sheet of newsprint and started writing down the names of people I’d been talking to this past week. I made up two columns, one for people connected to the Guzzo inquiry, the other to the Mesaline investigation.

  Judge Grigsby. Rafe Zukos, the rabbi’s son. Joel and Ira and Eunice Previn. Mandel & McClelland, now gone, but they’d handled Stella Guzzo’s defense. Rory Scanlon, who was going to get young Frankie into an elite baseball program. Trucker Vince Bagby, his daughter Delphina. Betty and Stella and Frank Guzzo.

  I made a separate list for the Mesaline twins. Uncle Jerry, Boris Nabiyev, Father Cardenal.

  I pinned the newsprint to the wall next to my desk. It was interesting that both sets of people had a link to St. Eloy’s. Perhaps Father Cardenal was masterminding a crime ring to raise money for building repairs.

  Assumption: whoever killed Jerry Fugher (Boris Nabiyev?) had broken into Sebastian and Viola’s apartment. Unless, of course, it was Sebastian who had killed Jerry. I knew I was only buying trouble with the cops down the road by not going to Conrad now.

  I slapped the desktop in frustration. I had to find a way to work more effectively. It was as if I were trying to move through tar pits, my feet leaden, my brain petrified. I went across the street to my expensive coffee bar—maybe a cortado would unglue my brain.

  While I drank it, I called Viola. “I went to your uncle’s apartment. Someone had tossed it, probably the same people who ransacked your place yesterday. What could they have been looking for?”

  “I don’t know, how could I know? Did someone follow you there? How do you know they aren’t listening in on your calls?”

  “Right,” I said. “Moving on, your brother had written ‘eleven P.M., one thirty-one’ on a scrap of paper that he left in his gym bag at work. Any thoughts on where one thirty-one is? The other engineers didn’t think it referred to anything at the job site.”

  Viola couldn’t help with that, either. We hung up in mutual frustration.

  As I was putting my papers and iPad back into my briefcase, I glanced out the window: Bernie Fouchard was across the street, ringing the bell to my building. Tessa was working today; before I could get outside, Bernie had gone inside.

  I crossed Milwaukee Avenue at a trot and found Bernie in Tessa’s studio, demanding to know where I was.

  “Bernie! Aren’t you supposed to be at work?”

  She flung up her hands. “I quit that job. They wanted me there at six in the morning to start heating up boilers, which is an insane hour to be out of bed.”

  Tessa was wiping her face and arms with a heavy towel: sculpting is physically taxing work. “Can you two take the conversation across the hall? I need to get into the shower.”

  I stopped to look at the work in progress. Granite this time, not steel. Shoulders emerging from an unformed base. “Rising or sinking?” I asked Tessa.

  “Depends on your perspective,” Tessa said. “The client is a firm that works on climate change strategies—they wanted something that could be either hope or despair.”

  It reminded me uncomfortably of my tar pits. I took Bernie across the hall to my office.

  “I suppose quitting looks better on your résumé than getting fired. What will you do now? Go back to Quebec?”

  “The coach for the peewee hockey team where I volunteer, she works for a program that does sports with girls in schools. She thinks maybe I can get a job with them, at least until my summer training camp starts in July.”

  “That would be great, if your parents agree—I thought you were only coming for a few weeks to check out the city.”

  Bernie gave an impish grin. “Oh, Northwestern’s camp is near the city; I’m sure I’ll sign with them—I love the coach there, I love being where Uncle Boom-Boom and my papa played, so maybe I’ll only go back to Quebec for my high school graduation.”

  “If your parents agree, and if we can find a place for you to stay on the Northwestern campus,” I said firmly. “You can’t live with me long-term.”

  Bernie caught sight of the newsprint full of names I’d created earlier. “These are all the people you are working on now?” She frowned. “I see this ostie de folle, this Madame Guzzo, is on your wall, but who are these others, these Nabiyevs and Mesalines? What do they have to do with Uncle Boom-Boom?”

  “They’re part of a different case.”

  “Ah, so you are not abandoning Uncle Boom-Boom. This V
iola, she maybe will show you how to silence the Medea woman.” Bernie nodded sagely.

  “Maybe,” I agreed. “There’s someone I need to talk to again. Come down to the South Side with me—maybe you’ll think of something that hasn’t occurred to me.”

  DEAD BALL

  Joel was alone in the Previn law office when we got there, an unexpected bonus. He was hunched over a computer with a super-size soft drink nearby. He buzzed us in, but his greeting was surly.

  “Ira’s in court and Eunice is at the hairdresser if you were expecting to talk to them.”

  “Nope. You’re the man I was looking for.”

  “What do you want? Who’s the girl? Is she supposed to make me think of Annie and confess crimes I never committed?”

  Bernie as Annie Guzzo’s double? Except for being small and dark, they didn’t look much alike. However, if Joel was obsessed with Annie, every small dark young woman might make him think he was seeing her.

  “This is Bernadine Fouchard; Joel Previn. Joel is a lawyer, Bernadine is a hockey player. She’s my godchild: I inherited her from my cousin when he died.”

  “Oh, hockey.” If I’d introduced her as a toilet cleaner he couldn’t have been more contemptuous. “Of course. That cousin of yours played.”

  “He had his moments,” I said. “What uncommitted crimes will Bernadine make you confess?”

  His skin turned a muddy color. “None. It was a figure of speech. I assume you know what those are.”

  Bernie was frowning at me, wanting me to fight, but I said, “I talked to Betty Guzzo the other day—Annie’s sister-in-law.”

  “I know who she is. She hated Annie.”

  “How do you know that?”

  “Annie liked to talk to me. I was the only person in that office who thought there was more to life than sports and getting drunk.”

  “What did Annie tell you about Betty?”

  “She couldn’t wait to leave Chicago, leave all the small-minded people like her sister-in-law behind. Betty and Stella didn’t get along, but they both liked to beat up on Annie. Annie came in one afternoon after school with a big bruise on her face and on her shoulder. Some women, they try to cover up bruises with makeup or scarves or whatever, but Annie wanted the whole world to know what her family was doing to her.”

  “And she said Betty had done this?” I asked.

  “First Betty, then Stella. She’d tried to talk to her sister-in-law about contraception, that she didn’t need to keep having one baby after another, and Betty punched her in the mouth, then called up Stella and told her, so when Annie got home she got a double whammy from her mother. Next they got that priest to preach a special sermon on the hellfires waiting for girls who used contraception, and unmarried girls who had sex. Annie walked out in the middle of the sermon and when Stella got back from church, she hit her again.”

  “And this Annie didn’t fight back? She didn’t kill them?” Bernie interjected, trembling with anger.

  “Her mother was eight inches taller and a hundred pounds heavier,” Joel said. “If you’d ever been beaten up by bullies, you’d understand how hard it is to fight back.”

  “You go for the ankles,” Bernie said fiercely. “Me, I know this because I am small, too, smaller than girls who play half as well as I do. If Annie didn’t know that, then it was not Uncle Boom-Boom who was sleeping with her: he would have taught her.”

  I couldn’t help smiling, but Joel had hunched himself deeper over his computer, his biscuit-colored skin an ugly shade of umber, as if Bernie was criticizing him for not standing up to the bullies in grammar school.

  “Your logic is impeccable, babe,” I said to Bernie, “but I’m not sure a jury would buy it. Not unless you could make sure they were all Blackhawks fans.”

  “But Uncle Boom-Boom isn’t on trial! It’s that salope, the ostie de folle, who should be on trial for lying about him.”

  “Maybe,” I said. “Let’s go back to the trial that actually took place. I can’t find a transcript so I don’t know what you said in Stella’s defense. But what did she say to you, to her lawyer?”

  “Just what I said in court,” Joel said. “Stop harassing me! I can’t turn the past into something that you or anyone else wants it to be.”

  I ignored that. “Until I talked to Betty, I was completely convinced of Stella’s guilt. I thought it was her delusions about her own probity that made her think she could get a post-sentencing exoneration. But the other day, when I stopped to watch her son play baseball, when Betty threatened me, she made me think for the first time that Stella might not have been guilty, or at least, not the only guilty party. Stella beat Annie, but maybe Betty finished the job while Stella was at bingo.”

  “This is game playing,” Joel said, sullen. “If you’d been there at the time, you’d know Stella was off the rails. She didn’t care about anyone else enough to protect them. She never even talked about Betty.”

  “Stella wouldn’t protect Betty, but she might protect Frank,” I said. “It’s barely possible she wore the jacket for his sake, to keep his children’s mother out of prison. Now, Stella’s done her time, Betty won’t have more kids, and the ones she does have are almost grown. As soon as Frankie gets his shot at baseball camp, Stella can name names. I’m betting she will.”

  “Wore the jacket?” Bernie said. “Whose jacket?”

  “Mob talk, sweetie. Means she confessed to a crime she didn’t commit.”

  “No one would do that!” Bernie was scornful.

  “You’re wrong: people do it all the time, usually because they feel confused and helpless when they’re interrogated.”

  “Stella never confessed,” Joel protested.

  “And she didn’t say one word that implied she had a theory about who actually did kill Annie?”

  “I don’t remember!” Joel shouted. “It was twenty-five years ago.”

  He took a long swallow from the soda cup. It isn’t really true that vodka is odorless, it just doesn’t smell as noticeably as scotch or rum.

  “Betty went through Annie’s things while Stella was in prison, looking for a secret stash. Stella had already taken two thousand dollars from Annie and Betty hoped there’d be more. She also took Annie’s lingerie, even though she thought it was the kind of underwear that sends you to hell.”

  I could picture the greed on Betty’s face, the justification: she was a whore, I’m righteous, I should have these pretty things. They wouldn’t have fit—even twenty-five years ago, Betty wasn’t the elfin creature her sister-in-law had been. I had a skin-crawling fantasy of her hiding them, taking them out to play with, and started speaking to cover my discomfort.

  “If there’d been a diary in Annie’s bra drawer, Betty would have seen it. No, the diary and the implication of Boom-Boom only appeared when Stella started talking about exoneration.”

  Joel put the cup down halfway to his mouth. “You’re saying someone planted a made-up diary to shut Stella up?”

  “No one can shut Stella up; you told me not even Judge Grigsby’s warnings kept her from outbursts in court. No, someone wanted to divert attention from Stella’s exoneration claim.”

  “This Betty?” Bernie asked.

  “Betty isn’t imaginative enough to make up a diary. Someone else is pulling those strings behind the scenes.” I eyed Joel thoughtfully: he was smart, even if he was drunk, smart enough to seem more belligerent than he was. “You’re sure Stella hasn’t been consulting you?”

  “I keep telling you, her opinion of me was lower than, I don’t know, Ira’s and Sol Mandel’s put together. She wouldn’t come to me for a glass of water if she was dying in the desert.” The metaphor made him tilt his head back and drain the cup.

  “Mr. Mandel went along with the bullying in his office, I gather—the way Spike Hurlihey taunted you, for instance. What about Mr. McClelland? No one ever me
ntions him.”

  “McClelland? He wined and dined politicians and got them to throw a few alewives our way. He and Mandel figured out how to get rich in a poor neighborhood, but they needed bigger clients, downtown clients, the kind that can pull strings for you. McClelland worked that angle.”

  “The Loop office.” I remembered Thelma Kalvin, the manager at Nina Quarles’s law office, mentioning it. “The downtown connections; they were something that Nina Quarles bought from Mandel & McClelland when she took over the South Chicago practice?”

  Joel hunched a shoulder. “I suppose. I stopped paying attention to their business a long time ago. Anyway, McClelland wasn’t in the office very often, but when he was, he laughed and clapped along with the rest of the audience over how Hurlihey and his clique talked to me. Only Annie . . .”

  “Only Annie didn’t laugh?”

  “I helped her with her college applications,” Joel muttered. “She needed to stand out, going up against all those prep school graduates. I helped her write her essays, then I helped her write a song. Her piano playing, she was technically good, but she didn’t have the—the passion to stand out in a crowd, so we thought if she could be a composer . . .” His voice trailed away again.

  My brows went up: Joel did have an interest beyond sports and drinking. “Do you still write music?” I asked.

  His round cheeks bunched up so high his eyes disappeared. “I fail at everything I touch. My music was derivative, Ira knew enough to tell me that.”

  I couldn’t think of any suitable response and even Bernie looked daunted. Joel took the plastic cover off his cup and dug out a handful of ice, which he crunched noisily.

  “What about Rory Scanlon?” I finally asked. “The firm is in his building now and there’s a sort of revolving door between the insurance and the legal part of the operations. Was that true in your time, too?”

  “Come on, you know the South Side, everyone’s got a finger in everyone’s business,” Joel said. “McClelland and Scanlon both worshipped at Saint Eloy’s. Sol Mandel and my parents belonged to Temple Har HaShem. They pray together, then they get out of the pews and do business with each other.”