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

by Sara Paretsky

  “Ira does business with Scanlon and with Nina Quarles?” I asked.

  “Quarles doesn’t practice, she just spends the profits. But why shouldn’t we buy our insurance from Scanlon? He’s loyal to the neighborhood, after all, and so is Ira. Scanlon sends Ira some legal business now and then.”

  “Most of the people I talk to think Mr. Mandel got you to represent Stella to taunt you. Is that how you felt?”

  Next to me, Bernie was quivering with impatience, wanting to leap in with advice about going for the ankles or whacking people under the chin. I put a restraining hand on her arm.

  Joel took another handful of ice out of the cup. His eyes flickered to the door—this was painful, he wanted to get away from me to the Pot of Gold. I felt as though I were on Spike Hurlihey’s side, bullying him, and I didn’t like it.

  “What about Mandel himself? Nothing anyone is saying makes it possible for me to understand why he would take on Stella’s defense. Annie was his pet, she was the office pet, for that matter—”

  “Not everyone felt that way,” Joel said. “She teased Spike and he didn’t like it.”

  “Teased him how?”

  “Spike passed the bar, but that’s because his dad was the Tenth Ward committeeman, he was tight with the mayor’s family, they pulled a few strings in Springfield after Spike failed the first two times. Word processing was just starting when I worked there, and guys like Spike or Mandel couldn’t type—they’d dictate their mail, so Annie picked up legal ideas from typing everyone’s letters and briefs and so on. She’d give Spike back his letters with paragraphs circled in red and write next to them, ‘I don’t think this is what the statute says. Want me to change it before you send it out?’”

  My eyes widened. Hurlihey’s temper was the stuff of legends down in the legislature. Annie must have been brave, or foolhardy, or convinced that Mandel would protect her. Maybe all three.

  “You think Hurlihey pushed Mandel to defend Stella because Annie got under his skin?”

  Joel reddened but didn’t say anything.

  “Did you have a theory at the time?”

  “It wasn’t my job to have theories. It isn’t my job to have them now. It’s my job to finish this motion before Ira gets back and shakes his head like a mournful cow over how I can’t get the least thing done in his absence!”

  “Right. We’ll get out of your way.” I got to my feet. “Is there anyone who worked in that office, I mean besides Spike Hurlihey, who’s still around?”

  “Besides Thelma, you mean?”

  “Thelma Kalvin?” I echoed, incredulous.

  “She was the full-time secretary. She was another one who didn’t like Annie because Annie muscled her out of the way of working personally for Mr. Mandel. Annie got twice as much done in the three hours a day she put in after school as Thelma did all week long, so of course the partners started giving Annie their dictation. Thelma ended up working for me and Spike and the other associates, and her nose was so out of joint she wouldn’t type for me because she knew I was close to Annie.”

  “I talked to Thelma after I left here last week, and she claimed she didn’t remember ever hearing about the Guzzos,” I snapped.

  “Don’t shout at me,” Joel said. “I don’t know why she’d lie, except no one in that office ever told the truth. It was the perfect place for Spike to start his illustrious career. He bullies everyone in Springfield, but he got his start right here on the South Side.”

  I was heading to the door when another question occurred to me. “What about Boris Nabiyev? Was he a client when you worked at Mandel?”

  Joel snarled that he’d never heard the name. “I have to work if you don’t.” He turned back to his computer, his wide back a wall of silence.

  BLOOD SPORT

  When we reached the street, Bernie made a face. “He’s a creep. Did you see his hands? Big soft paws, no muscles in them. Can you imagine him touching you? He was in love with that murdered girl, wasn’t he? Do I really look like her? Is that why you brought me down here, to see what it would make him do?”

  “No, cara. I brought you because I didn’t want you roaming around the city with nothing to do. And yes, he was in love with Annie Guzzo, or infatuated, anyway. Which is why you made him think of her. Have you ever been in love, or had someone you were close to die?”

  “Not really. There was a boy last year, but really, it was over before it began.”

  “What, you went for his ankles?”

  She started a hot protest, then realized I was teasing her. “It was infatuation. I thought he was in love with me but really, it was my answers on the maths exams. Why?”

  “You see the beloved object everywhere,” I said. “The man I married—there was a time when my heart turned over every time I thought I saw him on the street. Even more, though, there are still days when I think my mother has passed me and I turn—and it’s a stranger and for a second I’m in raw mourning once again.”

  Bernie shifted uncomfortably. “Anyway, this Joel, he was lying. And you let him.”

  “What should I have done?”

  “Made him tell the truth.”

  “I don’t have any way to do that, at least not yet.”

  “Threaten him, tell him you’ll follow him day and night until he shows you the diary.”

  “I don’t think he has the diary.”

  “Because he said so? But all he did was lie!”

  A Lincoln Town Car pulled up in front of the building. The driver held the back door open and a walking stick emerged, was planted in the road, followed by brown wool trousers that ended in orthotic shoes. Another moment, and the top of Ira’s head appeared over the car. The driver followed him around the car to the sidewalk, but didn’t try to take his arm. Ira straightened his lapels, adjusted his bow tie and nodded to the driver.

  “See you Monday morning, Mr. Previn,” the driver said.

  When Ira spotted me, his heavy cheeks contracted, turning his eyes into puffy slits. “What are you doing here, young woman? I thought Judge Grigsby told you there was nothing in that old case.”

  I guess to a ninety-year-old man fifty looks young. “That’s what everyone says, but I’m like the cat in that old song: no matter how many times the ship goes down or the rocket blows up, I keep coming back.”

  “This is beginning to look like harassment. I can have an order of protection issued.”

  “Of course you can. You can join Stella Guzzo behind a barrier, trembling at my footsteps.”

  Ira scowled.

  “It’s this pesky business about why Sol Mandel undertook Stella’s defense, and why he insisted Joel do the heavy lifting,” I said. “Rory Scanlon said it was to put some backbone into your son. There was a lot of bullying in that office, and it’s not—”

  “Joel couldn’t take the heat. He never could take the heat. His mother and I believe in public schools, but we ended up sending him to a private school because he didn’t know how to stand up to boys who taunted him.

  “You don’t give in to them, I told him this time and again. If I’d been that sensitive I’d have crumpled the first time I went up against the Machine. A few schoolyard insults, they were nothing compared to the threats and hang-up calls I’ve gotten my whole life.”

  His cheeks puffed out and in like the bellows of an old pedal organ. “His mother and I, we wanted him to be proud of the life we were making. We marched in Selma, we marched in Marquette Park, and instead of being thrilled at making history, all he wanted to do was ‘fit in.’ As if a boy like him could ever fit in!”

  I felt my mouth twist in disdain and tried to straighten it. It was hard to listen to one of my own heroes talk so contemptuously about his only child.

  “I can’t see how forcing him to defend Stella would have given him a deep and abiding respect for principles of social justice. Why not g
et him involved in some of your own work—weren’t you acting on behalf of Guatemalan asylum seekers back then?”

  Ira leaned heavily on his cane. “Mandel & McClelland didn’t do that kind of law, and Eunice and I agreed that Joel would wither if we tried bringing him into our firm. In the end, we had to, of course, because he couldn’t make it anywhere else. I can’t retire, not the way men who live to my age usually do, because—”

  “Because you’d miss the applause you get for showing up in court and tying witnesses into knots.”

  I hadn’t seen Joel come out of the office. Ira said, “How dare you, sir? That’s—”

  Joel cut him off again. He’d apparently overheard most of our conversation, because he added to me, “If you really want to know how I ended up defending Stella, Mandel and McClelland liked to pit their associates against each other. Genteel blood sport, no physical blows exchanged. We’d meet in the conference room, go around the table, everyone got thirty seconds to pitch how they saw the case. Then we’d all leap on the pitch and tear it to shreds, trying to score points with the partners. I got good at shredding, but not as good as Spike. Mr. McClelland liked Spike, he took him to the downtown office where he started making the connections that carried Spike to Springfield. And so Mr. McClelland would feed Spike the good cases before we ever got to the conference room.”

  “That’s the voice of envy and insecurity speaking,” Ira puffed. “You imagine because you couldn’t—”

  “I don’t have a good imagination, as you’ve kindly told me many times. A big case came into the office, the kind of thing we hardly ever had a crack at, a class-action case involving the women at the local Buy-Smart warehouse. I stayed late to work on my pitch.” Joel’s lip curled into a sneer. “I didn’t talk to you about it—I thought if I could make the winning pitch without your help it would prove to you that I wasn’t a loser and a whiner and a crybaby and a drunk and whatever other epithets you like to use about me.”

  An elderly woman came up the street, using a cane herself. She stopped to greet Ira, reminded him they had an appointment.

  “Let Ms. Murchison into the office, Joel,” Ira rasped, “and let’s not hear more of this nonsense.”

  “Ms. Murchison, go inside and make yourself comfortable. Ira will be in soon.”

  Joel spoke to the older woman with unexpected gentleness, took her arm while he unlocked the door. Once she was inside, he stood with his back against the door, facing his father, who was stumping up the walk toward him. Bernie was silent, her vivid face turning from father to son, her brow puckered with trouble at their argument. I put a comforting arm around her.

  “This isn’t nonsense,” Joel said. “This is something you haven’t wanted to hear all these years, but you can hear it now. Your friend Sol, he wasn’t a nice man, and neither was his partner. You can say all you want about South Chicago being a hard place, and lawyers needing to be tough to stand up to the grime and corruption, but those two enjoyed seeing associates like me humiliated. They wouldn’t get their hands dirty themselves, but they liked having someone like Spike on board to make it a fun game for them!”

  “That’s—that’s such a perverted version of the lives of two good men,” Ira puffed. “You couldn’t handle the job and so someone else had to be in the wrong, never you! You’ve been like that since a child. I golfed with Sol Mandel a hundred times, we were on the board of Har HaShem together—”

  “I know. He was a saint and I have a dibbuk in me,” Joel said. “You said you don’t believe McClelland fed Spike, but I’m telling you, I witnessed it. Pay attention. Stand up straight and listen.”

  That seemed to be a repetition of words he’d heard from his father more than once; Ira turned red, but subsided.

  “The night I stayed late putting together an argument for the Buy-Smart women, Spike was working late, too. Every now and then he’d make some crude crack about how even if I got the case, I’d be a fool in the courtroom—fall over my feet because I was too fat to see them, or get a mistrial for making a pass at the judge—like you, Spike and Mandel and the others assumed I was queer and they loved to rub it in. By and by, McClelland came in. He went to his office and Spike, giving me this shit-eating grin, went in with him. McClelland’s office shared a wall with the women’s toilet, but Annie and Thelma, they were the only two women on staff and neither of them was in, so I went in and heard their whole conversation through the grate.”

  “Sneaking into the women’s toilet, no, not even that was beneath you,” Ira said.

  “I heard McClelland feed Spike his presentation,” Joel shouted. “I heard that, and then I got to be part of the process of watching Spike win the chance to take the case to trial. Which he lost, even with McClelland in the second chair, and then I realized, after he ran for office and became our state rep, that Spike wanted to lose the case. Buy-Smart gave him campaign contributions. The whole thing was a fucking racket.

  “And that’s what happened with Stella. We all had to make our case, and I didn’t want to take part. Was I a crybaby? A queer crybaby, not big enough to play in the big leagues? Didn’t I know about Gideon v. Wainwright? Stella might be an unpleasant defendant, but she deserved counsel. This was how lawyers proved themselves, but if I wanted to sit in a corner and masturbate over Annie instead of pulling my weight in the firm—apparently I could be queer and in love with Annie at the same time! And so on it went and so of course, whiny crybaby that I am, I caved under the pressure. Not like you: you would have stood up to Spike and Mandel and McClelland like you did to Richie Daley and the Machine when they came after you. Just like you did to George Wallace in Selma. But not me. And now, by God, I am going to have a drink, and fuck you, Ira Previn. Fuck you and fuck all those like you.”

  IT AIN’T BEANBAG

  “That was terrible,” Bernie said when we were back in the car.

  “Yes, I’m sorry you heard all that. It’s the bad part about my job—trying to find out what happened tears scabs off wounds and you see people at their rawest.”

  “But who was right? Joel is a crybaby, like his father says. Maybe he was wrong about the people he used to work for?”

  “I don’t think so. For one thing, I don’t know Spike Hurlihey personally, but I know how he operates, running the House of Representatives in Illinois. He does bully people and pressure people, and force them to give him money if they want to do business in the state.”

  “What was this machine that the father stood up to?”

  I tried to give Bernie a one-paragraph primer on Illinois politics and power. “Politics is a way dirtier game than hockey.”

  “Hockey isn’t dirty!”

  “Enforcers?” I quizzed her. “Trying to whack people in the ankles to get them out of your way?”

  “Oh, that—it’s what you have to do if you want to win.”

  “Maybe you’ll become a U.S. citizen after you finish with Northwestern: you’d be perfect in a state legislature. Congress, for that matter. Money changes hands, and sometimes there’s physical violence, too. Like the first Mayor Daley—he had goons who went around breaking windows on people’s cars or houses if they put up posters for candidates running against him. Death threats—I’m sure Ira wasn’t exaggerating when he said he got those. But the biggest thing is having to give a lot of money to politicians if you want to do business, or have laws passed in your favor. It’s a terrible system. And it sounds as though Spike Hurlihey got his training in a nice nest of vipers.”

  “Hockey is definitely not so dirty as that. And it’s easier to understand. Does anything the crybaby said make you know if he was lying about Uncle Boom-Boom and the diary?”

  “He made me know about someone else who was lying, or at least holding back on the truth. I want to talk to her while I’m still south, but I can drop you at the Metra station to catch a train back to the Loop.”

  Bernie elected to ride o
ver to Ninetieth and Commercial with me, to Rory Scanlon’s building, where Thelma Kalvin held the fort for the Paris-shopping Nina Quarles.

  It was nearly the end of the business day when we pulled up in front of Scanlon’s building and Thelma Kalvin was not happy to see us.

  “We’re about to close the office. If you make an appointment for later in the month we will find a way to fit you in.”

  “We won’t take much of your time,” I said, perching on the edge of her desk. “This young woman is a connection of my cousin Boom-Boom, by the way, and she’s concerned about the slander against him.”

  “I told you before that I admired his playing but that I don’t know anything about the accusations brought against him by that woman who murdered her daughter.”

  “That’s an interesting phrase, isn’t it? ‘That woman who murdered her daughter.’ You don’t remember the meeting in which the partners decided that Joel Previn would represent Stella Guzzo? You worked here then, Annie Guzzo put your nose out of joint. I’d think her and her mother’s names would have stuck in your head even after all this time.”

  I spoke loudly enough for people at the other desks to hear. Except for two people on the phone, everyone stopped what they were doing to watch, including a young couple consulting a man at a desk near the windows. The couple, who’d been arguing softly with each other when I came in, stopped their bickering to watch me.

  “It was painful, so painful that I suppressed the names,” Thelma said. “If you’d ever worked with—”

  “Lame,” I said, looking at Bernie. “Would you agree, a pretty lame excuse?”

  Bernie was startled, but she picked up the cue and nodded. “For Uncle Boom-Boom I expect a good lie, a creative one that is interesting to hear.”

  “So you chose not to talk to me about Stella and Annie or Spike Hurlihey or how the partners liked to pit the associates against each other. Is that a practice that Nina Quarles has continued? Oh, right. She doesn’t really work here, just spends the profits. Which must be considerable to send her on shopping sprees to Europe. Who were the other associates in the firm at the time?”