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

by Sara Paretsky

  Thelma’s look would have stripped the blades from a pair of ice skates. “Get out of this office now, or I’ll call the police and have you removed.”

  “Judge Grigsby, he couldn’t have been here,” I mused, “he would have recused himself from trying the case. At least, I think he would have. It’s Illinois, you never know.”

  Thelma looked at the staff and the two clients, all unabashedly eavesdropping: it didn’t look like a group of people eager to back her up. “I keep telling you to leave because we’re shutting down for the day. This isn’t a safe place for people to be after dark; I can’t keep the office open for you when you don’t have an appointment.”

  “That’s okay,” I said. “I’ll be glad to drive you home so we can finish the conversation in safety.”

  The young couple laughed, but the staff stared owlishly, waiting to see how the story would unfold. Thelma bit the tip of her index finger: she wasn’t the boss, just the office manager—she might run the place for Nina Quarles, but she couldn’t order the lawyers around.

  When Thelma didn’t make a move, I asked, “Why does everyone from you to Ira Previn to Judge Grigsby still care about Stella Guzzo? Why did the firm care about her in the first place?”

  “Everyone has a right to counsel,” Thelma said.

  “Now, that is interesting,” I said to Bernie. “Do you remember what Joel said when he was describing what the partners said when they were pressuring him to take on Stella’s defense?”

  Bernie blushed. “It was something nasty about him and Annie.”

  “That, but also they said, didn’t he remember Gideon v. Wainwright?”

  “But I don’t know what that is,” Bernie protested.

  “It was a famous lawsuit, where the Supreme Court ruled everyone has a right to counsel, even those too poor to pay for a lawyer themselves. What’s interesting is that Gideon became the party line here at Mandel & McClelland. Everyone repeated the phrase so many times: we are representing Stella Guzzo, who murdered our young clerk, because we are such noble lawyers, we believe in Gideon.”

  I continued to speak exclusively to Bernie, as if Thelma and the rest of the group weren’t in the room. “We don’t know why the partners wanted to represent Stella, but Thelma has proved that they coached the people who worked for the firm all to give the same story. It makes me wonder if someone in the firm knew more about Annie’s death than they ever let on. Thelma, for instance. She’s the office manager now, but back then she was a clerk-secretary, and Annie Guzzo muscled her out of the way. Annie was better, faster, maybe even cuter—that shouldn’t count, but apparently it did with one of the senior partners—”

  “She wasn’t better or faster, she just knew how to flirt with old Mr. Mandel!” Thelma interrupted, spots of color burning her cheeks.

  “You didn’t like her, Joel said.”

  “Joel—he was pathetic. He was in love with Annie, he would have done anything for her. She made fun of him behind his back but he was such a stupid guy he never caught on.”

  “It sounds as though the person Joel killed would have been Stella, if he’d do anything for Annie. But maybe you or Spike or Judge Grigsby told Joel that Annie made fun of him and that unhinged him to the point he beat her to death.”

  “Her mother beat her,” Thelma said. “Stella admitted it, right in court.”

  “Maybe Annie was still alive when Stella left the house. Maybe you stopped by and got into such a ferocious fight with Annie that you ended by finishing her off. After all, you were furious that she’d cheated you out of a prime job, personal secretary to the managing partner.”

  I was sounding like Hercule Poirot in a particularly ludicrous movie scene, but Thelma was so angry that she forgot she had an audience. “Stella Guzzo murdered her daughter, but I didn’t shed a single tear. Annie Guzzo almost ruined this office, this practice. She was like a little cat, purring around Mr. Mandel, until he lost all sense of decency. Giving her presents, giving her money, she was going to be a star, he’d tell me, she was going off to some fancy eastern college where she’d go on to be a dazzling light in the law, another Sandra Day O’Connor.

  “Annie’d come here after high school and go into his office. He’d lock the door and after a while she’d come out, purring and adjusting her bra straps. And the way Joel Previn looked at her! It was like working in a porn shop to come in here some days.”

  “Was she any good at her job?”

  “She could type,” Thelma said contemptuously. “Like that’s a skill no one else could muster. I suppose because she played the piano she was faster than some of us.”

  “None of this explains what really lay behind the partners’ decision to represent Stella,” I said. “Those were the days before massive budget cuts took the stuffing out of Legal Aid; Stella could have had a decent public defender, probably one who did a better job than Joel. If Annie had killed Stella, I can see how Mandel and the others would have rallied around, but why defend Stella? Mandel and McClelland must have felt culpable in some way.”

  “They thought she wouldn’t get a fair trial,” Thelma said.

  “Get off your high horse,” I said. “Tell me the truth. What was going on that made them protect Annie’s murderer?”

  “She wasn’t a saint,” Thelma shouted. “Can’t you understand that? She made Spike Hurlihey and some of the others look bad with the partners because she was always correcting their briefs. She made me look bad because she could type faster than me, because she’d let Mr. Mandel—touch her. She wasn’t smarter, she didn’t file any better or keep on top of phone calls, she just had those little fingers that moved fast. The only people who thought she was wonderful were Joel and Mr. Mandel. The rest of us were counting the days until she left town for college.”

  “It still doesn’t answer the question. I can see that you would have sympathized with Stella, though—did you persuade the partners that Stella needed help?”

  “They wouldn’t have listened to a word I had to say. Maybe Spike did, I don’t know. He was close to Mr. McClelland. What difference does it make after all this time, anyway?”

  “Anatole Szakacs is helping Stella with her exoneration claim. He’s not cheap; he must think there’s some doubt about Stella’s guilt.”

  “But she was guilty. She admitted to beating Annie. The medical examiner explained how someone can have a head injury and look perfectly fine, then start bleeding into the brain and die. We all knew Stella was guilty. I don’t know why Anatole is working for her now.”

  I got off the edge of her desk, which had been cutting into my butt in an unpleasant way. “Do you know why Stella decided to point a finger at Boom-Boom?”

  “It was in Annie’s diary,” Thelma said.

  “But it’s a lie, it’s not true,” Bernie burst out.

  “Then Annie wrote lies in her diary. Why wouldn’t she? She lied to everyone around her, why not to herself?” Thelma shrugged, her anger dying into contempt, and started locking her desk drawers.

  “Did Annie date Boom-Boom while she was working here?”

  “If Boom-Boom Warshawski had come into this office twenty-five years ago, everyone would have been talking about it. If Annie ever dated him, she kept it a secret, which she might have done if she thought it would stop the flow of money from Mr. Mandel into her hot little hands.”

  Thelma walked over to the desk where the young couple were sitting. I heard her apologize to them for letting an unruly client disrupt their meeting. She even promised not to bill them for their visit this afternoon. She wasn’t a bad person, just someone trying to stay afloat in a shark tank.

  GAMER GATE

  “Now what are you going to do about this Stella?” Bernie demanded when we were back outside.

  “Not much I can do.”

  “She told lies about Uncle Boom-Boom that reporters published all over the w
orld—you said so to Joel this afternoon. And this woman upstairs, she agreed Boom-Boom never dated Annie.”

  “No, babe: she said if Annie had dated Boom-Boom, she did it very secretively.”

  “You let this Thelma talk you out of doing anything. You believe her reasons, but they are lame, like you said upstairs. You’re making excuses for not doing, and excuses are lame.”

  When I was seventeen, everything was equally clear to me: who was right, who was wrong, no shading between the two. I patted Bernie sympathetically on the shoulder, which made her jerk angrily away. She climbed into the Mustang, slamming the door as hard as she could.

  I got into the driver’s seat, but took a moment to check my texts and e-mails before turning on the car. While I was scrolling through the messages, the young couple came out of the building and got into a Saturn whose muffler needed replacing. Their lawyer trudged up the street toward the Metra stop. A few of the other staff members emerged, but Thelma was still inside, perhaps making sure everything was locked up and tidy at the end of the day.

  A few kids came out of the building, too, and a handful of others went in, some holding baseball gloves. The youth program on the third floor was apparently having some kind of after-school event today.

  In the welter of client and personal messages was one from Murray Ryerson:

  ME completed autopsy on Fugher. He’d been badly beaten but death due to suffocation: he was alive when he went into the pet coke.

  It wasn’t a surprise, but it was still a shock. Uncle Jerry hadn’t been one of Nature’s darlings, but such a horrific end shouldn’t come to anyone.

  “What is it?” Bernie asked anxiously.

  I was starting to answer when a silver Jeep Patriot pulled up in front of us. Vince Bagby hopped out and went into the Scanlon building—not into the insurance office, which was still full of activity, despite the unsafe neighborhood and the end of business hours, but through the door that led to the law offices. Thelma still hadn’t come out, so maybe she’d summoned Vince.

  “Bernie, it’s true I’m a coward, but I want to see what that guy is up to, and I want you to stay in the car with the doors locked. If anyone tries to bother you, lean on the horn. I’ll hear you and come running.”

  “Who is he?”

  “His name is Vince Bagby and he owns a trucking company. He may be as pure and wholesome as the flowers in spring, but I saw the man who died in the coke mountain get into one of Bagby’s trucks. He was with someone whose face turned my hair white. Lock the doors.”

  I was halfway up the first flight of stairs when I heard footsteps behind me: Bernie had followed me inside.

  “I don’t want to wait in the car,” she said. “It feels too—too open.”

  “Bernie, I’ve already exposed you to more unpleasantness this afternoon than I should have. Please—”

  She shook her head, her lower lip out—half-stubborn, half-fearful. I told Bernie she could come on one condition. “If I tell you to run, you run. Understood?”

  She nodded and clutched my arm.

  At the second-floor landing I signaled to Bernie to hang back while I ducked and sidled to avoid the security camera. I listened at the law office door but didn’t hear any voices. On the other hand, the kids on the third floor were laughing and horsing around enough for the noise to come down the stairwell.

  I sidled back to the landing and took Bernie up to the third floor. The door to Say, Yes! wasn’t locked; we walked in on a kind of party in progress. A refreshment table along one wall held soft drinks and chips, but the center of action, if you could call it that, was the facing wall, where a long counter held some dozen computers and Xboxes.

  A crowd of kids, mostly boys, was breathing over the shoulders of those lucky enough to have a seat. Each machine had a large timer over it; when one dinged, the user had to give way to someone who was waiting. An older teen in a lime-green Say, Yes! T broke up arguments over those who failed to quit when their time was up, or those who’d jumped the queue. Looking around, I saw five other older boys, the monitors, I supposed, all in green T’s.

  The walls were covered with poster-sized photos. Some were of the kids in Say, Yes! shirts at different outings, others were of the neighborhood from the time I knew it, when the mills were running and Commercial Avenue was filled with shops and shoppers.

  In the back of the room, a video of a baseball game was being shown. Vince Bagby was standing there, next to Father Cardenal. As my eyes adjusted to the light and the sound, I saw Thelma Kalvin tucked into a corner with Rory Scanlon. Curiouser and curiouser.

  We threaded our way through the melee toward the baseball video. Bernie attracted a predictable number of catcalls and thinly veiled invitations to fuck. She curled her lip, flexing her wrists around an imaginary hockey stick. This kind of attention wasn’t newer to her than any other teenage girl in the Americas, but she didn’t have to like it—which earned further catcalls and a few cries of “stuck-up bitch.”

  The obscene outbursts caught Cardenal’s attention. He stiffened when he saw me, tapped Bagby’s arm.

  “The detective.” Bagby waved at me and pointed at Bernie. “Come on over. You got a kid who can play baseball?”

  “She probably can, just won’t,” I said. “She’s a demon on ice, though. Hockey.”

  “Rory’s showing the kids the baseball camp he can help get them into if their grades and skills are good enough. Right, Rory?” Vince looked around for Scanlon, saw him with Thelma and turned back to me. “I was going to say, Keep an eye on young Guzzo, but I hear you’ve already been looking him over.”

  “If he keeps playing the way he did when I saw him cover the infield gap, he’s going to make all of us proud,” I said. “He’s not here this afternoon?”

  “Young Frankie is already sold on the idea,” Vince said. “This is for the stragglers who think gang life might be more fun than sweat and blood or whatever the quote is. You wouldn’t be trying to wreck the kid’s chances, would you?”

  “Betty been talking to you? Or Big Frank? I want his boy to succeed as much as everyone else down here. Is that what Fugher and Nabiyev were doing up at Wrigley Field? Trying to persuade the Cubs head office to give Frankie a tryout?”

  Vince thought that was so hilarious that his laugh drew Scanlon’s and Thelma’s attention. When Thelma saw me, she turned an unwholesome shade of puce. I had a feeling she had run upstairs to talk to Scanlon about Bernie and me.

  “You know Vic, here?” Bagby called to them. “And—who’s the hockey player?”

  “Boom-Boom’s niece.”

  Scanlon looked surprised. “I thought Warshawski was an only child.”

  “You’re doing my family proud, Mr. Scanlon, remembering the details of my cousin’s life when you see so many young people.”

  “Boom-Boom’s life got a lot of publicity recently,” Scanlon said. “Brought it all back to mind, but of course he was exceptional enough that we all remember him. Niece have a name?”

  I didn’t want this crowd to have Bernie’s identity, but before I could speak, Bernie had already identified herself.

  “Pierre Fouchard’s daughter?” Scanlon asked. “No wonder Bagby knew you for a hockey player. When can we see you play?”

  “When the college season starts, I will be here, playing for Northwestern,” Bernie said proudly.

  “Pity I only work with middle and high school students or I’d persuade you to play baseball,” Scanlon said. “Girl like you would keep the boys on their toes.”

  Next to me, Bernie tensed, not liking Scanlon’s tone but not sure how to respond. I pulled her closer to me, team of two, you’re not alone with the creeps, my sister.

  “Did you ever figure out what Jerry Fugher and Boris were doing in one of your trucks?” I asked Bagby.

  “We fired the driver who let them con him into using it,” Bagby sai
d, his easy grin appearing and disappearing. “Our dispatcher had some concerns about him, anyway, going off-route. You have to monitor every truck every hour of the day—too easy for guys to turn themselves into couriers for drugs or crap.”

  “I’d like a word with the driver,” I said.

  “No can do,” he said. “Private company business.”

  “I’ve been hired to sort out Fugher’s death,” I said.

  “Cops don’t do a good enough job for you?” Scanlon asked.

  “You know how it is in South Chicago,” I said. “With all the new gangs moving down here in the Cabrini-Green reshuffle, the cops are stretched thin staying on top of street violence. They’ll work Fugher’s death, for sure, but an extra pair of eyes can only help.”

  “Who hired you?” Bagby asked. “I never heard Fugher had any family.”

  “You’re a quick study,” I said. “When I met you at the Guisar slip two days ago, you didn’t know who he was. Now you know him well enough never to have heard about his family.”

  The schoolboy grin disappeared again, replaced by something cold, even hostile. Bernie tensed further and Father Cardenal stepped forward, ready to come between us if we started to swing at each other.

  “We’re okay, padre,” Vince said. “I don’t like being a butt, but who does? Warshawski, you’ve been tearing up the South Side the last two weeks because Guzzo’s ma took a potshot at your cousin. Bagby Haulage isn’t just my business, it’s my name—way more personal than a rumor about a cousin. When two guys steal one of my trucks, of course I found out everything there was to know about them.”

  “So you know where to find Nabiyev,” I said.

  “I do. How about you?” Bagby’s cocky grin was back in place.

  “Yep,” I said. “Saw him this morning.”