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

  ALSO BY SARA PARETSKY

  Critical Mass

  Breakdown

  Body Work

  Hardball

  Bleeding Kansas

  Fire Sale

  Blacklist

  Total Recall

  Hard Time

  Ghost Country

  Windy City Blues

  Tunnel Vision

  Guardian Angel

  Burn Marks

  Blood Shot

  Bitter Medicine

  Killing Orders

  Deadlock

  Indemnity Only

  G. P. PUTNAM’S SONS

  Publishers Since 1838

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  New York, New York 10014

  Copyright © 2015 by Sara Paretsky

  Penguin supports copyright. Copyright fuels creativity, encourages diverse voices, promotes free speech, and creates a vibrant culture. Thank you for buying an authorized edition of this book and for complying with copyright laws by not reproducing, scanning, or distributing any part of it in any form without permission. You are supporting writers and allowing Penguin to continue to publish books for every reader.

  Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

  Paretsky, Sara.

  Brush back / Sara Paretsky.

  p. cm.—(A V.I. Warshawski ; 17)

  ISBN 978-0-698-19683-4

  1. Warshawski, V. I. (Fictitious character)—Fiction. 2. Women private investigators—Illinois—Chicago—Fiction. I. Title.

  PS3566.A647B78 2015 2015005018

  813'.54—dc23

  This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents either are the product of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously, and any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, businesses, companies, events, or locales is entirely coincidental.

  Version_1

  For Jeremy

  He had but little gold within his suitcase;

  But all that he might borrow from a friend

  On books and learning he would swiftly spend,

  . . . And gladly would he learn and gladly teach.

  —CHAUCER

  THANKS

  Bill and Eleanor Revelle showed me V.I.’s route into the Villard mansion in Chapter 44. Fay Clayton gave generous advice on payday loan companies. Cheryl Corley and Elizabeth Brackett’s coverage of the pet coke in South Chicago, for Public Radio and PBS, respectively, first alerted me to the existence of these dust mountains in Chicago. Tricia Rumbolz drove me as close as we could get to them as ordinary tourists. Kathryn Lyndes stepped into the breach to help me finish the final rewrites.

  This book is a bit of an anachronism: part of the action takes place under the stands at Wrigley Field, but starting in the fall of 2014, the field has been undergoing major demolition and reconstruction. I first heard about Wrigley’s underground spaces from Brian Bernardoni and thought they would be a perfect setting for a crime novel. Although I tried for over a year to see these spaces firsthand, I was never able to get calls or e-mails to the Cubs answered, and so I relied on my unfettered imagination to describe them.

  As for climbing up the bleachers into the stands, as V.I. says she and her cousin Boom-Boom used to do, when I worked in advertising many years ago, one of my clients told me about doing this as a young man during the Great Depression, when he couldn’t afford the price of a ticket. He also used to shinny up the L girders so he could ride the trains to Wrigley Field for free.

  I’ve also taken a few liberties with how Bernadine Fouchard handles the college admissions process.

  Thanks to Karl Fogel for explaining how easy it is to hack into someone’s bank account online.

  Aimee LaBerge gave correct Québécois idioms for the French in the novel, in particular the insult “ostie de folle.” Heather Watkins confirmed this phrase.

  Readers interested in how Boom-Boom ended his life under the screw of the Bertha Krupnik can find out by reading Deadlock.

  CONTENTS

  Also by Sara Paretsky

  Title Page

  Copyright

  Dedication

  Thanks

  1. Shortstop

  2. Home Base

  3. Slugger

  4. Out at the Plate

  5. Whiffing the Curve

  6. Force Play

  7. Crowd Noise

  8. Calling Time

  9. Minor League

  10. Balk

  11. Fleeing the Lions

  12. Brush Work

  13. Buy Me Some Peanuts

  14. Ejected

  15. Into the Gap

  16. Brush Back

  17. Keep on Truckin’

  18. Ballpark Chatter

  19. My Last Duchess

  20. Dog Days

  21. The Umpire Strikes Back

  22. The Too-Real Thing

  23. The Play’s the Thing

  24. Short Relief

  25. High and Outside

  26. Roach Motel

  27. Dead Ball

  28. Blood Sport

  29. It Ain’t Beanbag

  30. Gamer Gate

  31. Road Test

  32. Chin Music

  33. Floral Offering

  34. Mixing It Up

  35. Family Ties

  36. Changeup

  37. High Spirits

  38. Suicide Squeeze

  39. Pinch Hitter

  40. Sound Check

  41. Land of the Dead

  42. Stickball

  43. Dinner Party

  44. High and Inside

  45. Behind in the Count

  46. In the Madhouse

  47. Olympic Tryouts

  48. Rundown

  49. Beanball

  50. Wild Pitch

  51. Rigging the Game

  52. Swinging for the Fences

  53. Fifteen-Day DL

  54. Loading the Bases

  55. Money Pitch

  56. Clutch Hitter

  57. Stealing Home

  SHORTSTOP

  I didn’t recognize him at first. He came into my office unannounced, a jowly man whose hairline had receded to a fringe of dark curls. Too much sun had baked his skin the color of brick, although maybe it had been too much beer, judging by those ill-named love handles poking over the sides of his jeans. The seams in the faded corduroy jacket strained when he moved his arms; he must not often dress for business.

  “Hey, girl, you doing okay for yourself up here, aren’t you?”

  I stared at him, astonished and annoyed by the familiarity.

  “Tori Warshawski, don’t you know me? I guess Red U turned you into a snob after all.”

  Tori. The only people who called me that had been my father and my cousin Boom-Boom, both of them dead a lot of years now. And Boom-Boom’s boyhood friends—who were also the only people who still thought the University of Chicago was a leftist hideout.

  “It’s not Frank Guzzo, is it?” I finally said. When I’d known him thirty years and forty pounds ago, he’d had a full head of red-gold hair, but I could still see something of him around the eyes and mouth.

  “All of him.” He patted his abdomen. “You look good, Tori, I’ll give you that. You didn’t turn into some yoga nut or a vegan
or something?”

  “Nope. I play a little basketball, but mostly I run the lakefront. You still playing baseball?”

  “With this body? Slow-pitch sometimes with the geriatric league. But my boy, Frankie Junior, Tori, I got my fingers crossed, but I think he’s the real deal.”

  “How old is he?” I asked, more out of politeness than interest: Frank always thought someone or something was going to be the real deal that made his fortune for him.

  “He’s fifteen now, made varsity at Saint Eloy’s, even though he’s only a freshman. He’s got a real arm. Maybe he’ll be another Boom-Boom.”

  Meaning, he could be the next person to make it out of the ’hood into some version of the American dream. There were so few of us who escaped South Chicago’s gravitational pull that the neighborhood could recite our names.

  I’d managed, by dint of my mother’s wishes, and my scholarships to the University of Chicago. My cousin Boom-Boom had done it through sports. He’d had seven brilliant seasons with the Blackhawks until he injured his ankle too badly for the surgeons to glue him back in any shape to skate. And then he’d been murdered, shoved off a pier in the Port of Chicago, right under the screw of the Bertha Krupnik.

  When Boom-Boom and Frank hung out together, Frank hoped he’d be a real deal, too, in baseball. We all did—he was the best shortstop in the city’s Catholic League. By the time I started law school, though, Frank was driving a truck for Bagby Haulage. I don’t know what happened; I’d lost touch with him by then.

  Maybe he could have been a contender. He wasn’t the only kid in South Chicago with a spark of promise that flared up and died. They start to spread their wings and then they fall to earth. It’s hard to leave the world you know. Even if it’s a painful place at times, you grow up learning how to navigate it. The world north of Madison Street looks good on TV, but it has too many hidden traps, places where a homey can make a humiliating mistake.

  Perhaps Frankie Junior would have the drive, the mentors and the talent to be another Boom-Boom. All I said was I hoped Frank was right, it would be great. “You stayed in South Chicago?” I added.

  “We moved to the East Side. My wife—uh, Bet—uh,” he stumbled over the words, his face turning a richer shade of brick.

  Frank had left me for Betty Pokorny when we were all in high school. Her father had owned Day & Night Bar & Grill. When the mills were running three shifts, no matter what time you got off or went on, you could get steak and eggs with a boilermaker.

  When Betty started smirking at me in the high school hallway, I’d been heartbroken for a few weeks, but my dad told me that Frank wasn’t right for me, that I was looking for love in all the wrong places because Gabriella had died a few months earlier. He’d been right: it had been years since I’d thought about either Frank or Betty.

  Looking at Frank this morning, in his ill-fitting jacket and uneasy fidgeting, he seemed vulnerable and needy. Let him imagine that hearing about Betty could cause me a pang or two.

  “How are Betty’s folks?” I asked.

  “Her ma passed a few years back, but her dad is still going strong, even without the bar—you know they had to shut that down?”

  “Someone told me,” I said. Day & Night had followed the mills into extinction, but by then I was so far removed from the neighborhood that I hadn’t even felt Schadenfreude, only a vague pity for Frank.

  “Her dad, he keeps busy, he’s handy with tools, builds stuff, keeps the house from falling over. I guess you don’t know we moved in with him when, well, you know.”

  When they got married, I guessed. Or maybe when Stella went to prison. “What did you do about your place on Buffalo?”

  “Ma kept it. My dad’s insurance or something let her make the payments while she was in Logan. I looked in on it once a week, made sure nothing was leaking or burning, kept the rats and the gangbangers from moving in. Ma says she owns it clear and free now.”

  “She’s out?” I blurted.

  “Yeah. Two months ago.” His heavy shoulders sagged, further stressing the shoulders in the jacket.

  Annie Guzzo had been three years younger than me and I was finishing my junior year of college when she died. I counted in my head. I guess it had been twenty-five years.

  South Chicago was a neighborhood where violence was routine, ordinary. Stella Guzzo had grown up in a hardscrabble house herself and shouting and hitting were her main modes of functioning. We all knew she hit her daughter, but what turned people’s stomachs was that Stella had beaten Annie to death and then walked up to St. Eloy’s to play bingo. Not even my aunt Marie, Stella’s chief crony, stood up for her.

  “I never made those marks on my girl,” Stella protested at the trial. “They’re lying about me, making me look bad because I was trying to get Annie to see the facts of life. She was getting those big ideas, way above herself. She didn’t think she needed to vacuum or do the laundry because she was going to school, but she needed to remember she was part of a family. Everyone has to carry their weight in a family. She’s got a brother, he’s the one with a future and he needs looking after, I can’t do it all on my own, especially not with their father dead. But Annie was fine when I left the house.”

  Father Gielczowski, the priest at St. Eloy’s, had testified for Stella: She was a good woman, a dedicated mother. She didn’t spare the rod, but that was what made her a good mother; she didn’t tolerate the rudeness a lot of modern women let their children get away with.

  Priests usually play well with Chicago juries, but not this time. Stella was built on massive lines, not fat, but big, like the figurehead of a Viking ship. Frank took after her, but Annie was small, like their father. The state’s attorney showed pictures of Annie’s battered face, and the family photos where she looked like a dark little elf next to her mother’s broad-shouldered five-ten.

  Instead of manslaughter, the state went for second-degree homicide, and got it. I didn’t remember the trial clearly, but I don’t think the jury deliberated longer than half a day. Stella drew the full two dimes, with a little extra thrown in to punish her for her belligerent attitude in court.

  I never would be a Stella fan, but the thought of her alone in a decrepit South Chicago bungalow was disturbing. “Is she there by herself?” I asked Frank. “It’s hard dealing with the outside world when you’ve been away from it so long. Besides that, South Chicago is a war zone these days, between the Kings, and the Insane Dragons and about five other big gangs.”

  He fiddled with a chrome paperweight on my desk. “I told Ma it wasn’t safe, but where else was she going to go? Betty didn’t want her living with us. It didn’t seem right, turning my own mother away after all she’s been through, but, you know, she’s not the easiest person to have around. Ma said she knew when she wasn’t wanted. Besides, she insisted on returning to the old place. It’s hers, she says, it’s what she knows.

  “She doesn’t care that the neighborhood’s shot to heck. Or she cares but all her old pals, they’ve moved further south, or they’re in assisted living. Either way, she doesn’t want to be near them. Thinks they’ll always be talking about her behind her back.”

  Frank dropped the paperweight. It bounced onto the floor where it dented one of the boards. We watched it roll under my worktable.

  “That isn’t why you came up here today, is it, Frank?” I asked. “You’re not imagining I’ll babysit Stella, I hope.”

  He picked up a stapler and started opening it and snapping it shut. Staples began falling onto the desktop and floor. I took it from him and set it down, out of his reach.

  “What is it, Frank?”

  He walked to the door, not trying to leave, just trying to pull words together. He walked around in a circle and came back.

  “Tori, don’t get mad, but Ma thinks—Ma says—she thinks—she says—”

  I waited while he fumbled for words.

&nb
sp; “Ma is sure she was framed.”

  “Yeah, that doesn’t surprise me.”

  “You know she was?” His face lightened.

  “No, Frank. But I believe she wants to rewrite the story of her life. She always set herself up as the most moral, pious woman in South Chicago, then she does time, can’t face the women she used to look down on. Of course she has to change the past so she’s the martyr, not the villain.”

  He pounded his thighs in frustration. “She could have been framed, it could have happened. I never believed she would have hit Annie hard enough to hurt her.”

  “I am not going to spend time and energy trying to prove your mother’s innocence.” My mouth set in a tight line.

  “Did I ask you to do that? Did I? That isn’t what I want.” He sucked in a deep breath. “She can’t afford a lawyer, a real lawyer, I mean, not a public defender, and—”

  “And you thought of me?” I was so angry I jumped to my feet. “I don’t know what the gossip about me is in South Chicago, but I did not become Bill Gates when I moved away. And even if I did, why would I help your mother? She always thought Gabriella was some kind of whore, that she cast a spell over your dad and then stole Annie. Stella liked to say I was a bad apple falling close to a rotten tree, or words to that effect.”

  “I—I know she said all that stuff. I’m not asking you to be her lawyer. But you could ask questions, you’re a detective, and people know you, they’d trust you the way they wouldn’t trust a cop.”

  By now his face was so scarlet that I feared he’d have a stroke on the spot.

  “Even if I wanted to do this, which I don’t, I don’t know the neighborhood anymore. I’ve been away as long as Stella has. Longer.”

  “You were just back there,” he objected. “I heard about it at Sliga’s, that you’d been to the high school and everything.”

  I shouldn’t have been surprised. South Chicago and the East Side are like a small town. You sneeze on Ninetieth Street, they whip out a handkerchief on Escanaba Avenue.

  Over the weekend, I’d taken Bernadine Fouchard, Boom-Boom’s goddaughter, on a tour of my cousin’s old haunts. I showed her the place near Dead Stick Pond where he practiced skating in the winter, and where I’d help him hunt for the puck when it went into the nearby marsh grasses. We’d gone to the breakwater in Calumet Harbor where Boom-Boom and I used to dare the freighters by jumping in to swim. I’d taken her to the public high school where I played on the state champion basketball team, picked up tacos at Estella’s on Commercial Avenue. We hadn’t gone to Sliga’s bar, but probably someone at the high school mentioned it over a boilermaker.