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

by Sara Paretsky

  Besides his diabetes, Villard’s fingers were swollen and distorted by arthritis. Adelaide brought over a table that fitted onto the front of the easy chair and opened the box of photos for him. I pulled up a chair next to him and helped him start turning over pictures.

  They were all taken either at Wrigley Field, or were candid shots at players’ homes or on trips to away games.

  “My girl found these in the attic yesterday. I don’t really want to leave this house, so I’m having trouble concentrating on the job. My wife and I, we lived here together for forty-seven years. We raised our family here. We used to have magnificent Christmas parties—you can see here—this was the year before she died—it was so sudden, cancer of the pancreas, it came like a grand piano crashing down from the sky onto our heads—this was her last healthy year and she was in magnificent form.”

  I admired the pictures of his wife, a handsome woman in her older age, who was laughing joyously with Andre Dawson and another man—a neighbor, Villard said.

  Adelaide brought ginger tea for me, gin and tonic for Villard. We went through Christmas photos, and grandchildren photos, and finally came to the spring day that Boom-Boom and Frank had gone to Wrigley Field. The pictures I’d seen at the ballpark had all been with the would-be prospects, either in the dugout or on the field, but these were more candid shots, some in the stands or the locker room. Boom-Boom was in many of them.

  The official photos in the dugout had been in color, but this set was in black-and-white. It wasn’t my cousin’s face that made me stop and carry one to the window for more light, but the young woman in the frame. Annie Guzzo, in jeans and a man’s white shirt, grinning up at Boom-Boom from the bottom row of the bleachers, a look that dared him to chase her.

  I had forgotten what she looked like, and anyway, I’d never seen her like this, face alive with high spirits, with sexuality. I’d never seen her with my cousin, either, not like this, I mean. Maybe Boom-Boom had been in love with her. Maybe she’d been in love with him.

  She’d been seventeen the day they were at the park together. Seven months later she would be dead. I wanted to be able to go inside that picture, that day, and warn her—stop, don’t look so carefree, your mother (your sister-in-law?) is about to murder you.

  Villard saw my face. “That young lady—she’s someone you know?”

  My mouth twisted involuntarily. “Her older brother was one of the guys who came to try out that day. I didn’t realize she’d been there, too—no one ever mentioned it to me. She’s been dead a long time; it’s wrenching to see her looking so vital. She wasn’t in the dugout shots.”

  “No,” Villard said. “Family weren’t allowed in the dugout or on the field. She’d have been watching from the stands. The photographer took a liking to her, or maybe he was a fan of your cousin, because he seemed to follow the two of them around the park.”

  There were nine shots that included Annie and three more of Boom-Boom alone, two seen from behind in what looked like a narrow passageway. Villard picked these up, shaking his head over them in puzzlement.

  “I don’t know why I never noticed these before. Maybe because that was the spring my wife . . . I thought I was so tough, unbeatable, coming in to work every day, but I couldn’t pay attention to much of anything, I see now.

  “You can tell from the overhead pipes that those two kids got into one of the restricted sections of the ballpark. The bowels of Wrigley Field are unbeautiful space. You can see in this shot—too many dangling wires, unsealed conduits—it’s worse now because they’ve added more wiring for the electronics the media folks have to have, but it was bad enough back then. Maybe your cousin . . . But the photographer worked for us, he should have had enough sense to stop them.”

  “When Boom-Boom had a full head of steam he was hard to stop,” I said. “But from the looks of these, it was Annie who was leading him on a dance.”

  She’d been playing hide-and-seek, I guessed, from that daredevil grin she’d been flashing at Boom-Boom. Find me if you can, follow me if you dare. Seventeen years old, feeling her powers start to unfold. Whether she’d cared for my cousin or just been enjoying being alive didn’t matter.

  I sat back in my chair, wishing my head weren’t quite so clogged. For a week I’d been arguing with Bernie that the putative diary didn’t matter, but now it started to feel important to me again.

  Annie had flirted with the lawyers at Mandel & McClelland—maybe even had sex with Mandel. There was no sin or crime in her flirting with Boom-Boom, too, but how had he responded? Someone else—Joel Previn, or Spike Hurlihey, or Mandel himself, maybe would have gotten angry enough to threaten her with the classic male complaint: You led me on, how could you have been playing with me?

  Not Boom-Boom: my cousin would not threaten any woman for having multiple strings to her bow. Or for any other reason. Even on the ice, where he was fast and cunning, Boom-Boom did nothing out of malice.

  Mr. Villard was studying the prints, trying to figure out where Annie and Boom-Boom had been. He put them down with a rueful smile. “I haven’t been underneath those stands for years now and I don’t remember them clearly. Some of the boys used to go down there to smoke marijuana before the game—I pretended not to notice and they assumed an old fart like me wouldn’t recognize the smell.”

  “Would you let me take these home with me?” I asked. “I can scan them and get them back to you.”

  Villard laughed. “Take them, keep them. My girls want to sell all my memorabilia for charity, so if you bring them back, chances are they’ll sell these, too.”

  Adelaide brought me more tea, and a second gin for Villard, although a moment later I heard his daughter in the hall upbraiding her for encouraging his drinking—a no-no with diabetes. I lingered with him, watching the lake while Villard talked to me about his wife, his son who died in Vietnam, the baseball players he’d known and loved. I left him regretfully so that I could make my appointment with Murray.

  “When you get that book about your cousin finished, you be sure to come back and give me a copy. Get Adelaide to tell you the address where I’ll be moving.”

  I definitely had to write the wretched biography, I thought, bidding Villard a reluctant farewell. He was an attractive guy, and for a brief time I’d forgotten my wounds and my worries. I wasn’t eager to get back to them, but once in my car, my uneasiness about Bernie, myself, the whole situation returned.

  I had a text from Tim Streeter, saying that he’d connected with Bernie, who’d decided that he was cool enough to tag along for lattes with her and her friends. At least I didn’t need to fret about her for the moment.

  I stopped at my office before heading to the Golden Glow to meet Murray, since I’d left all my papers there. I had half an hour, too short for a nap, but instead of returning e-mails and phone calls, I spread the photos of Annie and my cousin out on my worktable.

  In the second of the pictures of my cousin in the hidden passageway, I thought I could make out the shadow of Annie’s face in the background. I got out a magnifying glass and she appeared more clearly, an elfin ghost with curly black hair, the outsize white shirt hanging over her jeans halfway to her knees.

  I held the glass over each of the pictures and saw one where her shirt was smudged with dirt. So, taken after she’d been in the tunnel. An obscure impulse made me try to lay them out in chronological order, starting with the first print I’d seen, with Boom-Boom looking down at her from the top of the bleachers.

  In the next one she was facing the camera full on, apparently talking to the photographer. She had a black oblong in her left hand that I’d originally assumed was a clutch purse, but under the glass it turned out to be a notebook bound in leather or plastic.

  The room seemed to heave around me. I clutched the edge of the table, waiting for the dizziness to pass. Annie had kept a diary. She cherished it so much she brought it with her on a date
to Wrigley Field.

  I put the magnifier over the notebook, but it didn’t tell me anything. Dark leather or vinyl, could be brown or black, or really any dark color. No lettering, no embossed letters proclaiming Annie Guzzo, Her Private Thoughts on Boom-Boom Warshawski and Sol Mandel.

  I went back to piecing together the rest of the collection. There were several shots whose place in the order I couldn’t figure out, but in the one where Annie’s white shirt was dirty, she no longer had the book. I studied her face for a long minute, saw the streak of dirt on her forehead and along her right forearm. Her expression was a mix of guilt and glee—she’d done something she shouldn’t have and gotten away with it.

  Whatever that book was, she’d left it somewhere in the bowels of the ballpark. What was in it that she couldn’t keep at home, but thought she could retrieve if she left it at Wrigley? She didn’t know anyone there, unless she was taking for granted that Frank would get the nod from the Cubs that he so desperately wanted.

  Boom-Boom couldn’t be bothered with things like journals and diaries; there wasn’t a hope that he’d written about the day, even if Annie’s behavior had meant something special to him. And I doubted he would have paid much attention to the book, not unless it was his, and she was teasing him by running off with it.

  I looked at it again, wondering if it might be something else, not the diary that Stella had hammered into my head. A dossier, perhaps? I put the magnifying glass down in frustration—it was impossible to make out any detail. All I could say was that it wasn’t a conventionally shaped diary or book, which was why I’d thought at first it was a clutch purse.

  That break-in at Villard’s house. My head was so thick today that I only just put that incident together with Annie.

  Thieves had taken some valuable baseball memorabilia, but they’d also stolen photographs. And they’d done it after the story appeared about my bogus biography project. Maybe it was coincidence—maybe the story told random thieves that Villard had valuable Cubs memorabilia in his home. But maybe whoever was pulling the strings in South Chicago knew Annie had taken something to the park that they wanted to make sure stayed buried there.

  I felt cold suddenly, and found a sweatshirt on a hook behind my door to wrap around my neck. “Boom-Boom, what were you involved in?” I whispered, shivering. I thought I knew him inside and out, but there was a piece of his life about which I knew nothing.

  “You didn’t kill Annie Guzzo, I know that much,” I said to his face on the table. “But what secrets died with you?”

  I pulled the pictures together and laid them between sheets of acid-free tissue paper for protection until I had time to scan them. I placed them in the wall safe in my storeroom, looked longingly at my cot, but reminded myself that duty was the stern daughter of something or other. Anyway, Murray was a good investigator, and I was definitely at a point where an extra head would be useful. For the first time in a long time, I was looking forward to seeing him, working with him.

  SUICIDE SQUEEZE

  I was shutting down my system, stowing one backup drive in the safe, the other in my briefcase, when the building front bell rang. I looked at the monitor: Conrad Rawlings, with an acolyte. I took my time, closed my safe, walked deliberately down the hall to the front door, trying to gather my energy: it is not easy to be at your witty and alert best, which you need in a police encounter, with a broken nose and a head cold.

  “Good evening, Lieutenant,” I said formally, stepping into the street and closing the door behind me.

  “I need to talk to you,” Conrad said. “Can we do it inside?”

  “Can I have a hint?” I asked. “Is this the kind of visit where you hurl abuse at me and threaten to cuff me, or is it information gathering?”

  It was hard to read Conrad’s expression in the fading light, but he told his companion to wait for him in the car. I typed in my door code and led him back to my office.

  “Wagner got you good, didn’t he,” Conrad said, inspecting my face.

  “Wagner?” I repeated.

  “How many fights you been in lately? Look in the mirror in case you’ve forgotten.”

  “Is Wagner the Dragon’s name? He hadn’t been ID’d when Bernadine Fouchard and I made our statements.”

  Conrad thumbed through his iPad. “That’s right. We didn’t know him then, but we printed him this morning when he came out of surgery. He’d been arrested a good few times and did a nickel in Joliet for assault. I need to know if you were anywhere near him today.”

  I backed away, astonished. “Any special reason you’re asking?”

  Conrad took my shoulders in his hands so he could look directly at my face. “Can you prove where you spent the day?” He spoke with an unsettling urgency.

  “What is going on?”

  “Arturo Wagner is dead.”

  I sat down hard. Not that I would shed a bucket of tears over him, but it’s hard news to handle, the news you’ve killed another person. “They told me his jaw was broken and he was concussed, but no one suggested his life was in danger.”

  “No one thought the boy was going to die. Which is why I need you to tell me how you spent your day.”

  I stared at him. “Could you please tell me what’s going on? Your bangers beat me pretty hard and I’m not up to solving riddles.”

  “Answer the question and then I’ll tell you.”

  “You know, I think I’m going to record this conversation,” I said.

  “I’m trying to keep this from being a police matter, or a state’s attorney matter, Vic.”

  “And a recording will help.” I brought my system back up and turned on the recording software before I spoke again. In the background my cell phone barked: Murray texting, wanting to know where I was. I ignored Conrad’s growl to let it keep and wrote back, Soon. Cops in my face.

  “Does the state’s attorney plan to give my name to a grand jury?” I asked Conrad.

  “Vic, please believe me—this is for your sake: tell me where you were this afternoon.”

  “He was murdered this afternoon? Not as a result of our fight?”

  Conrad nodded. “He was too doped up to answer questions this morning, but when I sent one of my guys over to the hospital this afternoon, Wagner was dead. The hospital pathologist says he was suffocated. You know Saint Raph’s—it’s almost as big a warren as County. Nurses are stretched thin, no one keeps a regular eye on the wards, and our only worry was having a violent perp there, so he was cuffed. And the state’s attorney will fry my guts if she knows I told you all this. Where were you?”

  Prisoners are always handcuffed to the bed when they’re hospitalized. It’s inhumane, makes it hard for people to recover from gunshots and other debilitating injuries, but in Arturo Wagner’s case I didn’t find myself minding too much.

  “I was videoconferencing at one-thirty; at two-thirty I was driving to Evanston. I spent the afternoon with a retired member of the Cubs front office, so it would be hard for anyone to make a case that I was forty-five miles the other way. Okay?”

  Conrad’s shoulders sagged in relief. “Thank God for that, Ms. W., thank God for that. Someone sent an anonymous message to the state’s attorney saying you had an animus on account of the Fouchard girl being related to your cousin, and that you went over to Saint Raph’s to finish off Wagner.”

  I was silent for a beat, remembering Stella. I told Conrad about her lunchtime call, ordering me to South Chicago.

  “You didn’t go?” he said. “And I can believe this?”

  “That’s my rap, isn’t it,” I agreed. “I drop everything and gallop off in all directions at once.”

  I played the voice mail for Conrad.

  “The Guzzos have been so unpredictable and so angry that I thought they might be trying to get me to violate the restraining order so they could have me arrested. Only—now it looks as thoug
h they were trying to frame me for murder. But on whose command?”

  “Don’t gallop in that direction without proof, Ms. W.,” Conrad said. “My big worry is your alibi. For safety’s sake, get me the names of the people you saw this afternoon. Sooner rather than later.”

  “I hear you, Conrad, but—killing Arturo Wagner, that was done to silence him, which means that the attack on Bernadine and me wasn’t random street violence.”

  “That isn’t the only possible reason,” Conrad objected. “They might have tried to get you down there to frame you for his murder and pull you totally out of the picture.”

  I grinned at him. “So glad we’re getting onto the same page at last, Lieutenant. Why do they need me out of the picture, and who is the ‘they’?”

  Conrad couldn’t come up with an answer.

  “Someone paid the Dragons to attack us,” I repeated. “Rory Scanlon, Vince Bagby, Thelma Kalvin, Umberto Cardenal. They were all at the youth club meeting. Any one of them could have—”

  “Don’t, Vic,” Conrad said sharply. “I’m not going to believe Father Cardenal would sic the Insane Dragons—”

  “Don’t tell me priests are above heinous behavior! That bird doesn’t fly any longer.”

  “Vic, you can’t toss this kind of accusation around, especially not in South—”

  “I know,” I interrupted again. “Bagby and Scanlon keep the neighborhood afloat. If either of them gets indicted for major criminal activities, everything from Frank Guzzo’s mortgage to the Chicago Skyway will collapse. People keep telling me that, which means everyone down there has a stake in turning a blind eye to anything those guys might be doing.”

  Conrad’s scowl was ferocious. “You’d better not be accusing me of turning a blind eye to any criminal activity on my turf, no matter how high or low the perps sit.”