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

by Sara Paretsky

  “No, I left it at Annie’s.”

  “What? The night she died?”

  He swallowed half the vodka in the glass, winced as the alcohol jolted his body.

  “Yes, the night she died,” he mumbled. “I tried to figure out what the deal was with the Say, Yes! bank statement, why she thought it was worth hanging on to, and I thought it had to do with the fact that Scanlon kept the funds downtown, in the biggest bank in the state. I started working late—Ira was so pleased, he thought I was finding a vocation for the law. He didn’t know all I had was a vocation for Annie. One night, Scanlon came over to see Mandel. I don’t know if I’m such a negligible part of the landscape he couldn’t see me, but he told Mandel they had the fund up to where they could flex some serious muscle. ‘Get your boy Hurlihey ready for the front line, Sol,’ Scanlon said. ‘I think we’re going to get us a friend in Springfield.’”

  “So they were using the Say, Yes! foundation funds to bankroll elections, or at least Hurlihey’s election?” I asked.

  Joel shrugged. “Maybe, I suppose.”

  “Why didn’t you turn them in?” Mr. Contreras asked. “They sound like a room full of crooks!”

  “Turn them in to who? Rory and Sol’s cronies?” Joel jeered. “They were players, the SA was a player, they probably all played together. Anyway, what evidence did I have? A piece of a bank statement and an ambiguous conversation. I went to Annie, instead.”

  Mr. Contreras was watching the clock in agony. He tugged on my arm, but I needed to get as much as I could from Joel if we were going to construct any kind of file that would persuade the thugs to release Bernie.

  “I knew what nights her mother played bingo over at Saint Eloy’s. I waited across the street until Stella had taken off, then I went to the door. Stella had beaten her: Annie’s lip was bloody and swollen, she had a black eye and a cut on her forehead.

  “I was so upset at seeing her all messed up that I forgot at first why I’d come. She laughed off her injuries, she wouldn’t let me take her to the hospital: she said she was going to be rid of all of us soon. I put my arms around her, I said something stupid, like, you don’t want to be rid of me, I’m the one who understands you, I helped you with your music composition that got you into Bryn Mawr. I even tried to kiss her. She put my face aside. She tried to cover up what she was feeling, but I could see the disgust in her face.” He rubbed his cheek, the spot where he could still feel her hand on him.

  “‘You’re sweet, Joel, and I appreciate your help, but I don’t like you, not like that.’” He raised his voice to a savage falsetto in imitation. “No one ever ‘liked me like that,’” he added bitterly, in his own voice.

  “I asked her if it was the jock—Warshawski—your cousin. ‘His career will be over by the time you’re thirty, he’ll get fat, too, believe me,’ I told her, but she said she wasn’t interested in love, not with any of us. ‘I’ve got a future of my own, my own life, not slaving for some man, whether he’s a lawyer or a hockey star or just a mill hand like my dad,’ she said.

  “I showed her the Continental bank statement page, and the torn-up letter. She was startled, that was one thing—I completely took her off guard. She wanted to know where I’d got them. I said we could make a team, we could take Sol and Scanlon down, I’d start my own law firm, don’t ask me to remember every crazy thing I said, ‘but I need your help,’ I told her. ‘I need to know where they’re getting the money that they’re putting into the foundation account. Is it coming out of client accounts, or is Scanlon shaking people down? Once I know that, we can take them down—I’ll go to the federal prosecutor, we won’t be dependent on some corrupt state’s attorney.’”

  He finished what was left in the glass and poured another tumbler full. “Here’s the part that will make you split your side laughing: Annie said she didn’t want to take Mandel down. ‘I won’t tell you what I know, I don’t want you hurting him. He’s my meal ticket, Joel. I didn’t get all those scholarships I bragged about. I got some, but not enough to go east, he’s paying me to go, I told him I have proof in a place so secret no one will ever find it, and he’s giving me the money to get me to Bryn Mawr. If you go snooping around, he’ll think I told on him. You’ll cost me my future.’

  “‘What about this?’ I asked her, waving the letter. ‘That’s not from Mandel.’ And she said no, she was over at your house, playing on Mrs. Warshawski’s piano, and she saw your dad take it out of the mail and read it. He looked upset, sick, I think Annie called it, then he tore it in half and threw it out. She picked it out of the trash and took it away because she realized Scanlon had written the line at the top, that ‘FYI, Law and Order Man.’”

  He looked at his feet and mumbled, “I hate to say it about her, but I think she thought she could use it to get more money.”

  So that was why Tony had been sent to cop hell, all those nights on patrol with no one at the station backing him up. Beneath my fatigue and woozy concussed brain I could feel anger starting to burn, a fury with Rory Scanlon. The stress of that assignment, on top of my mother’s death, had easily taken a decade, maybe more, from my father’s life. That’s why he wouldn’t ride the buses Scanlon hired to take the neighborhood to Boom-Boom’s debut. It’s why Scanlon made that snide remark to me about another Warshawski upholding law and order for the neighborhood.

  The clock chimed the three-quarter hour.

  “Doll,” Mr. Contreras was frantic. “We gotta get going.”

  He was right. I would sort out Scanlon when we had Bernie safe. I got up.

  “You didn’t kill Annie, did you?” I asked Joel. “That isn’t why you defended Stella, is it?”

  Joel gave a mirthless laugh. “I don’t have that kind of—whatever it is. Initiative? Vanity? Annie didn’t want me, but it didn’t stop my feelings for her. Maybe it would have, if she’d lived. I dropped the bank statement, but I held on to the letter and walked out with it. I walked all the way back to this place. I forgot I’d driven down there. I am a useless fuckup from the beginning of the story to the end. I had to take the bus back down to pick up my car, and when I got there, Stella was walking up the street, coming home from the bingo. I ducked down and fell over onto the curb, but she didn’t see me.

  “Then, the next day, I learned Annie had died. And I told myself, all the hateful things she’d said, she hadn’t meant them, she said them because she had a brain injury from Stella beating her.”

  I stayed long enough to ask about the bank statement. “Why didn’t Stella say something about it during the trial?”

  He shook his head. “She didn’t know anything about it. I asked her, I asked her what she found in Annie’s room, or in the living room, anything that was connected to the law firm, but she didn’t seem to know what I was talking about.”

  “Why did you represent Stella? You’d seen Annie’s injuries, you must have known she was guilty.”

  Joel shot me a resentful look. “Mandel saw my car outside the Guzzo house. He said they needed someone to represent Stella, and either I would do it, or he’d tell the state’s attorney that I’d been there and had a chance to kill Annie.”

  The clock hands seemed to swoop and bend. “Joel.” My voice was so gentle he had to lean his stinking mouth close to hear me. “Joel, don’t you see. Mandel only knew you’d been there because he was there himself.”

  SWINGING FOR THE FENCES

  Joel’s clock started to chime the hour. Sixty minutes to get something up on Facebook. Sixty minutes to save Bernadine. If she was still—of course she was still alive. She was the terrorists’ bargaining chip.

  We left Joel standing in the middle of his living room, the half gallon of Grey Goose in one hand, a half-drunk glass in the other. He tried to keep us there—he wanted to talk about Mandel, did I really think Mandel had killed Annie, but I brushed him off.

  “The only thing I care about this morning is s
aving Bernadine Fouchard. We’ll worry later about Spike and Scanlon and whether Mandel killed Annie.”

  As we walked out the door, he called after me that he wanted me to talk to Ira. “Tell him his old pal Sol was a criminal and a murderer.”

  I shut the door, pushed the elevator button over and over.

  “He only thinks about hisself,” Mr. Contreras fumed when the car finally arrived. “Don’t he care about Bernie?”

  When we were back on the street, I took a precious minute to phone Conrad. He’d gotten a search warrant for Sturlese but they hadn’t found Bernie.

  “What about the Sturlese brothers? Were they all there?”

  “Two were on job sites, at least according to dispatch. One claims he was home with the flu, but his wife said he felt so sick he’d gone to the hospital. We’re trying to track them all down.”

  “Anything on Sebastian?”

  “No one’s spotted him yet. We went to the sister, what’s her name? Viola? Told her where you’d found him, tried to get her to cough up someplace he might be hiding. I don’t know if she’s scared stupid or really doesn’t know. I had my guys take her in, but all she does is sit and cry. Give me a bright idea, Warshawski.”

  “Scanlon,” I said. “He’s got a slush fund under cover of his Say, Yes! foundation. He’s connected to this—”

  “What I meant was a smart idea.” He hung up.

  I put the car in motion. I’d come up with only one idea and it wasn’t necessarily bright or even smart, but I talked it over with Mr. Contreras and he agreed to try it.

  We found the nearest copy center, down on Jeffery, and dug up photos of Scanlon and Sol Mandel online. We used free software to create a new website that we called “Annie Guzzo’s Murder.”

  Stella Guzzo spent twenty-five years in Logan Correctional Center for killing her daughter. In the words of the Chicago Mob, she wore the jacket. Only she never agreed to. She didn’t know she was covering up for two smooth operators: Sol Mandel and Rory Scanlon.

  When a police officer tried to put an end to a campaign of terror against South Chicago’s small businesses, Scanlon sent money to the police widows and orphans fund and got the officer sent to Chicago’s highest-crime district, with a target painted on his forehead for his fellow officers to aim at. Here’s the cocky note Rory Scanlon sent to the officer when the old Fourth District watch commander got rid of the meddlesome cop.

  We scanned the letter and added it to the site. I also e-mailed it to Freeman Carter, my own lawyer, with the login and password for the website. Do your best, Freeman, in case I’m not around to do it for you, I wrote. I’m putting the originals in the mail to you.

  We posted Scanlon’s and Mandel’s photos, spun a narrative based on my guess about the use of Say, Yes! funds, to send Hurlihey to the state legislature, and finished by writing, Stay Tuned for More Details.

  We finished at 8:56. At 8:57, while we were still at the copy center computer, my phone rang again.

  “Not seeing anything on your Facebook page, Contreras,” the ugly voice growled.

  “Not there,” my neighbor said. “Got a website. You check it out. For the next hour, you can only get to it with a password. You turn over Bernie—Bernadine—and if she ain’t been hurt, I’ll take it down. You screw up, the whole world will see it and I’ll be adding details. Password is ‘ScumbagYes.’”

  There was a pause while the caller went online. “We won’t meet you in Calumet Park, too exposed, too easy for you to get cops into the Coast Guard building. We’ll wait for you on Stony, where it dead-ends at the river. Be there in thirty with that letter you’re saying Scanlon wrote.”

  “Sixty,” Mr. Contreras said. “I’m ten miles away from you.”

  We heard muted talk in the background. “Forty-five. We see cops coming, the kid goes over the retaining wall into the Cal.”

  “They’re already there,” I said flatly to Mr. Contreras when he’d hung up. “It’s the perfect ambush spot: there’s only one way in.”

  I put the original of the “widows and orphans” letter into an express pack and sent it off to Freeman.

  “Don’t be calling the cops,” Mr. Contreras begged as we hustled back to the car, “’cause they won’t know to come in quiet and next thing you know, these bastards’ll toss little Bernie overboard.”

  “We can’t drive in,” I said.

  “You gonna hijack a chopper?” my neighbor said. “We don’t have time to joke around.”

  He was right. The clock kept ticking. I drove fast and dangerously, running red lights, weaving around traffic on two-lane streets, earning fingers, honks, even a brandished weapon at Eighty-third.

  At 103rd, the top of the marshes along the Calumet River, I crossed over to Stony Island. We were at the start of a stretch of swamp, park, golf course, waste dumping and heavy industry, dotted with ponds made by the overflow from the big lake and Lake Calumet. If the thugs were in place, they were three miles to the south.

  Move, move! I ordered myself savagely. Mr. Contreras was almost weeping with anxiety. My own state: sick, terrified, head a balloon bouncing ten feet from the ground, body in motion, body in motion will stay in motion, at rest—will rest forever.

  I spied a canoe in the underbrush, jumped out of the car, saw the canoe was chained to a log. The old man still had enough strength to shatter the lock with a rock. I took the paddle stuck in the mud underneath it.

  Stealing, no, borrowing, stuffing it any old way into the Taurus’s trunk, bouncing it down the road to the top of Dead Stick Pond, smashing through the fence around the pond, launching the boat. Mr. Contreras watching while I climbed into waist-high filthy water, fanny pack around the neck to keep my gun dry. He scrambled back through the brush to the car while I began to paddle, paddling for life, not a beautiful stroke, not knowing how to do it except by gut feel. Herons watched me with malevolent eyes: I was frightening away their lunch. Geese squawked indignantly, took to the air.

  At the south end, I climbed out again into water brown with waste, purple-green with industrial oil, boots soaked, squelching through mud, up the bank to the wall separating the road from Lake Calumet. I could see the smokestacks of ships on the far side of the wall. The dredges and cranes at work on the hidden docks covered the noise I was making.

  I used to walk that wall with Boom-Boom, while we dared each other to jump off under the noses of the freighters in Lake Calumet. We used to boost each other up. Back then, we wore dry clothes and shoes, but I could do it alone today in sodden jeans and mud-caked boots.

  I found a place where the concrete had crumbled, exposing rebar. Put a toe in, hoisted myself into place. This was so easy, my third wall in twenty-four hours, I could join Cirque du Soleil. I straddled the wall, crabbed across, lay flat when I got in squinting distance of the road. The goons’ car was on the shoulder, tilting downward into the ditch, hidden from street view by the shrubs and tall marsh grasses.

  Fifteen minutes from launch, five over our limit. I pulled out the Smith & Wesson, took off the safety, placed the spare clips on the wall in front of me. Right on time, the Taurus engine roared as Mr. Contreras floored it and drove headlong toward the wall. He swerved a second before he hit it and fishtailed, knocking the rear end against the wall.

  The doors facing the wall opened and the dogs jumped out.

  Gunfire rattled from the underbrush. The Taurus’s windshield shattered. I aimed at the flash of light in the weeds, emptied half a clip, saw movement in the brush, fired again, reloaded, slid from the wall, jumped across the ditch to the enemy car, shot out the tires. A savage growl behind me: I turned to see Mitch fling himself against a thug sneaking up behind me. Mitch knocked him to the ground. I stomped on the man’s arm, forced him to drop his gun, kicked the gun away, kicked the thug’s head hard enough to knock him out, hit the road as more gunfire erupted.

  “Down,” I ord
ered Mitch, panting, “down!” He loped off instead, heading across the road to Dead Stick Pond.

  I didn’t know where Peppy was, didn’t know where Mr. Contreras was, had to concentrate on the gunfire still coming from the thick grasses.

  Furious shouts from behind the retaining wall. Heads appeared—men in hard hats, men with walkie-talkies, cell phones. The gun roar filled my head; I didn’t know what they were saying, kept my eyes on the car, on the underbrush. Saw movement in two places, ducked low, shot at the feet as they appeared. And then the hard hats were over the wall, moving into the brush, surrounding the punks.

  Police cars screamed in. Pierre arrived with a team from the private security firm Tintrey, the FBI alongside them. By then we had found Bernie, where the thugs had tossed her bound body. It was Mitch and Peppy who led me to her: the goons had dumped her in the mud along the edge of Dead Stick Pond. Mr. Contreras tried to follow us to Bernie, but he was too dazed and exhausted; he collapsed onto the backseat of the Taurus. The hard hats, guys who’d been working on the barges below us on Lake Calumet, were talking excitedly to the cops, helping them hoist the thugs into squad cars.

  Bernie was still alive, but with a very weak pulse. My own exhaustion was overwhelming me; I fumbled at her bonds with thick clumsy fingers until one of the hard hats saw what I was doing and came to my aid. A sheet of gray water seemed to envelop me, making it hard for me to move or think. I could see Mitch and Peppy anxiously lick Bernie’s face and hands but couldn’t decide if that was good or bad and couldn’t move my arms to stop them.

  Pierre appeared and pushed the dogs away, lifted Bernie. I saw his mouth move but couldn’t hear any words. A helicopter materialized and Pierre and Bernie shimmered away into it. The water pulled me down, into the grasses, the mud, the rusting cans. No more responsibilities. How good it felt to drown.

  FIFTEEN-DAY DL

  I was out for the better part of two days. The concussion I’d suffered under Wrigley Field, the lack of rest, the more-than-strenuous race around Chicago had me unconscious long before an ambulance drove me to Beth Israel Hospital. Lotty’s anesthesiologist gave me a cocktail that kept me deeply asleep while the worst of my wounds healed.