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

  “I went as a tourist, Frank. I can’t help your mother.”

  He came over to me, gripping my arms. “Tori, please. She went to, well, to a lawyer, who told her there wasn’t any evidence.”

  I pulled away. “Of course there isn’t. If she’d had any evidence when Annie died, she could have used it at her trial.”

  “Tori, come on, you know what it’s like, you go to court, it’s all confusing, she never pled guilty but the lawyer, he was inexperienced, he didn’t know how to run the case.”

  Frank was right: a trial is bewildering for inexperienced defendants. I didn’t like Stella, but I could imagine how unbalanced she must have felt. She’d never been to court, not even to fight a traffic ticket. She wouldn’t have known the first thing about how evidence is presented, how everything you say on the stand, or before you ever get to trial, is taken apart and put together again in a way you’d never recognize.

  “Even so, I am not wasting time and energy on problems Stella brought on herself.”

  “Can’t you let go of that old grudge? Ma’s had a hard life. Dad died in the mill, she had to fight the company for his workers’ comp, then Annie died—”

  “Frank, listen to yourself. She murdered Annie. And she had to fight the company for the comp claim because she started spreading rumors that your father committed suicide. Don’t you remember what Stella did at Gabriella’s funeral? She marched in on the middle of the service and dragged Annie out, yelling that Gabriella was a whore. I do not feel sorry for your mother. I will never feel sorry for your mother.”

  Frank grabbed my hands. “Tori, that’s why I thought—hoped—don’t you remember, that was the night—Annie was that upset, I never saw her like that, when Ma dragged her home—if someone told me Ma or Annie, one would kill the other, I would have thought Annie for sure, after your ma’s funeral. But I—don’t you remember?”

  My mother’s funeral was a blur in my mind. My father and I, uncomfortable in our dress-up clothes. The pallbearers—my uncle Bernie; Bobby Mallory, my dad’s closest friend on the force; other cops, all in their dress uniforms; a police chaplain, since my unreligious mother hadn’t known a rabbi. Gabriella had been a wisp by the time she died; her coffin couldn’t have taken six big men to lift it.

  Mr. Fortieri, my mother’s vocal coach, fought back tears, twisting a silk handkerchief over and over, but Eileen Mallory wept openly. I could feel the tightness again in my throat—I had vowed I wouldn’t cry, not in front of my aunt Marie. Annie Guzzo’s sobs had angered me. What right had she to cry for Gabriella?

  And then Stella roared in, beside herself. Mouth flecked white with spit, or was that a detail I was adding? At home that night I’d sat alone in the dark in my attic room, staring at the street, unable to move, leaving my dad to deal with his drunk sister Elena and the stream of neighbors, of cops, of my mother’s piano and voice students. And then—

  Frank had appeared at the top of the steep flight of stairs, come to say how sorry he was, for my loss, for his mother’s behavior. In the dark, sick with loss, tired of the adult world on the ground floor, I’d found a comfort in his embrace. Our teenage fumblings with clothes and bodies, neither of us knowing what we were doing, somehow that got me through the first hard weeks of Gabriella’s death.

  I squeezed Frank’s fingers and gently removed my hands. “I remember. You were very kind.”

  “So will you do this, Tori? Will you go back to South Chicago and ask some questions? See if there’s something that didn’t come out at the trial?”

  Past the naked, unbearable pleading in his face, I could see him as he’d been at seventeen, athletically slender, red-gold curls covering his forehead. I’d brushed them out of his eyes and seen the lump and bruise on his forehead. I got it sliding into second, he’d said quickly, scarlet with shame, pushing my hand away.

  My mouth twisted. “One free hour, Frank. I’ll ask questions for sixty minutes. After that—you’ll have to pay like any other client.”

  HOME BASE

  Over dinner that night with Jake, I found it almost impossible to explain why I’d agreed to go back to South Chicago.

  “This woman—what’s her name? Medea?—she doesn’t even merit a phone call,” Jake protested. “You know she was guilty, you know she’s venomous, why go near her?”

  “It’s not about her, so much,” I said.

  “What—this guy, Frank—you want to recapture the dreams of your youth?”

  “Jake!” I said. “Don’t start carrying on like a low-rent Othello, where you run around the stage in the third act shooting yourself because jealousy got the better of you in the second.”

  He made a face at me. “I hate guns. I’ll stab myself with a bow in the last scene, way more melodramatic, and heartbreaking because it will be a historic bow that makes an ominous appearance in Act One. But you did date him.”

  “When I was sixteen and he was a good-looking ballplayer.”

  “Is he still good-looking?”

  “In a way.”

  “The way being?”

  I paused, enjoying the way Jake’s lips twitched. He spends his days around twentysomething violinists with long straight hair and serious dedication. I try not to be jealous but I liked seeing I could inspire a twinge in him.

  “Oh, if you like a big feather pillow to sink into on cold winter mornings.”

  Jake shadowboxed me. “Then why bother? From the sound, you don’t owe him or Medea anything. And it’s not like you have any real ties to South Chicago anymore.”

  “You didn’t grow up in a neighborhood. You got together with other kids when your moms organized playdates. Besides, you were a boy wonder on tour from the time you were eleven. But South Chicago, those people, we lived on top of each other like puppies in a pet store, they’re who I am. When they call on me, it’s like some—”

  I broke off, struggling to put my complicated feelings into words. “It’s way more melodramatic than you being jealous of a guy I dated for six weeks thirty years ago. It’s more like one of these horror movies, where some chip was planted in my blood, and when the master monster presses a switch, I’m sucked into the vortex willy-nilly.”

  Jake pulled me to him across my plate of pasta. “Not going to happen. I will knot my bass strings together and attach them to your waist so I can haul you out.”

  We heard my front door slam; a moment later, Bernadine Fouchard clomped into the room. She was small and it always amazed me how loud her footsteps were. She bent over to kiss me, said the dinner smelled “divine,” and went into the kitchen to fix herself a plate.

  Bernadine—really, just Bernie—looked like her father, the same smile—a lightning flash that lit her whole face—the same soft brown eyes, the same reckless self-confidence. She’d been named for my cousin, Boom-Boom, Pierre Fouchard’s closest friend on the Blackhawks. Boom-Boom’s birth name had been Bernard, but only his mother ever called him that.

  Pierre had phoned me a month earlier to say that Bernie was planning to visit Chicago. “She’s such a skater, Victoria, such a natural on the ice. If the NHL wasn’t a bunch of sexist you-know-whats, she would be playing on a farm team right now! Boom-Boom would be so proud. One of these expensive universities, Northwestern, they are inviting her to play for them, all expenses paid for an education if she will show them good form, which she will—that goes without saying.”

  And then the request—Bernie was being recruited by many schools, but because Pierre and Boom-Boom had played for the Blackhawks, well, it stood to reason that Chicago would be her first choice, naturellement, only before she committed herself she would like to see the city, visit the school, all these things, and this was his busy season—he himself was a scout for the Canadiens, and Arlette, poor Arlette broke her leg skiing, so would it be possible—

  I’d interrupted to say of course, I’d be delighted to put her up, sh
ow her the sights. Her school year was essentially over; she’d go home for graduation, but her parents had gotten the Quebec high school to agree to let her turn in her final papers early. She’d be spending an intense summer in hockey training camp, and they wanted her to have a few months of freedom. Syracuse and Ithaca were apparently willing to wait-list her if she decided against Northwestern after spending a few weeks here.

  I’d picked her up at O’Hare a week ago. I’d been afraid that a seventeen-year-old would be a worry or a burden, but as Pierre had said, Bernie had her head screwed on right. She enjoyed exploring the city, she helped me run the dogs, she delighted Mr. Contreras, my downstairs neighbor, who’s been bereft since my cousin Petra joined the Peace Corps in El Salvador. The only major change in my life was that the nights I slept with Jake Thibaut were spent exclusively in his apartment.

  Five days into her stay, Bernie hooked up with a team in a girls’ peewee hockey league, as a volunteer coach. She loved teaching the girls and began toying with the idea of spending the rest of the spring in the city if she could find a job.

  She approached the world around her with the confidence bordering on recklessness that reminded me of my cousin, or perhaps myself when I was a teenager, when I didn’t feel the anguish of people whose lives had come uncoupled from their dreams.

  Despite the pity I’d felt for Frank, I still made him sign my standard client contract. Even though I was giving him a free hour and a reduced fee structure, he tried to fight it.

  “Boom-Boom would be ashamed of you, charging someone you grew up with.”

  “Boom-Boom would have high-sticked you and laughed about it if he knew you wanted to stiff me.”

  Frank grumbled some more, but finally signed both copies. He had a hard time figuring out how to leave the office, but I solved that problem by telling him I had a client meeting. “You came in between a couple of conference calls, Frank, but I have to get back to work.”

  “Yeah.” He tortured his copy of the contract, folding it into ever tinier squares. “Yeah, me too. They dock me for time away from the route. Yeah, I’d better get back to it.”

  I smiled sadly, for him, for me, and put up a hand to touch the tight dark curls around his bald spot. It wasn’t until the end of the afternoon, when I had time to look up Stella’s trial, that I got angry with myself for giving in to the emotional soup Frank had stirred up in me.

  Illinois v. S. Guzzo had been a minor proceeding. No appeal had been filed, which meant that only a minimum of information was available in the archive—the indictment, the names of the jurors and the sentence. Unless Stella’s attorney had ordered, and kept, transcripts, there wouldn’t be a record of her testimony.

  I knew there wouldn’t be any police files I could look at, not after all this time, but I double-checked with the Fourth District, which serves South Chicago. Conrad Rawlings, the watch commander, wasn’t in, but the desk sergeant who took my call was willing to answer my questions: A twenty-five-year-old murder? Was I joking? Those papers had gone to the warehouse a long time ago.

  The next morning, I got up while Bernie was still sacked out on the pullout bed in the living room. That, actually, was the one negative about her staying with me. She was a teenager, she slept late, and she did it in my public space. If she stayed for the next two months, I’d have to find her someplace else to live.

  I packed the dogs into my car and drove south, before I had a chance to think about it. Getting to South Chicago and back would take most of an hour. I hated to give Stella anything, but I’d eat the time and expense of the drive.

  It was one of those early spring days in Chicago that turns the city into the most beautiful place in the world: sunlight glinting on little waves on Lake Michigan, the sky the soft clear blue that makes you imagine you could take up painting. I sang “Vittoria, Vittoria, mio core” as I passed Grant Park and moved on to the South Side. True, it’s a love song, but the melody and the beat are martial, and I, too, would be victorious. Victoria, vanquisher of villains.

  At Seventy-fourth Street, I turned off and went to Rainbow Beach so the dogs could have a workout. Rainbow had been the nearest beach to my home when I was growing up and we often came up here in the summer, my parents and I and some of their friends, for a Sunday picnic, or Boom-Boom and I on our bikes. It used to be packed with people, but today the dogs and I had it to ourselves.

  Only a couple of women, one African-American with a short ’fro, the other a gray-haired white woman, were out, deep in conversation at the far end of the bike path. A mixed-race duo would have been assaulted in my childhood. Not all change is bad.

  Stopping had been a mistake. Throwing tennis balls for the dogs gave me time to think about Stella, to anticipate my conversation. She’d done the full sentence, unusual for an older woman. She must have been an angry and uncooperative prisoner, and I couldn’t imagine her personality would have changed much now she was out.

  I leashed up the dogs and returned them to the car, still dragging my feet. I waited through three lights before turning south again, then drove so slowly that people were honking and shouting abuse out their windows as they roared around me.

  “Yeah, right,” I muttered. “You’re mad, but no matter what you say, it won’t be a patch on what lies ahead.”

  SLUGGER

  The landmarks had changed since my childhood, the giant USX Southworks plowed under to make an extension for Highway 41. What hadn’t changed was the pollution. The air used to be stained yellow by sulfur from the mills. Now it was black, dust blowing from the pet coke mountains along the Calumet River. I started sneezing as soon as I hit Ninetieth Street. Pet coke, sounds like a bottle of the Real Thing that follows you down the street. Really, it’s the residue of superheated coal that gets reused as industrial fuel. They don’t allow it to be stored out in the open across the river in Indiana, but everything is easier in Illinois. Down here, the city didn’t look like the most beautiful place on earth.

  I turned onto Commercial Avenue, the retail heart of the neighborhood. When I was a child, the street was always crowded. It used to be filled with shops, anchored by Goldblatt’s, one of Chicago’s great department stores. The grand Beaux Arts building, where everyone shopped for everything from socks to refrigerators, was still there, but most of the windows in its three stories were boarded over. The ground floor had been divided into small shabby storefronts.

  The Navral Building, where our doctor and dentist had had their offices, was gone as well, replaced by weeds and broken asphalt. Discount beauty stores, wig shops filled with luridly colored hair, jostled with bars and carry-out joints. In between were too many boarded-over buildings, and a handful of general stores that looked like garage sales—unmatched kitchen chairs and racks of dusty clothes filled the sidewalks outside the doors, next to carts holding boxes of DVDs and shoes. A little boy was playing with the heel to a black stiletto. He’d almost ripped it free when his mother, who’d been inspecting shirts, smacked him.

  His howls were drowned by the surround sound from the car next to me, a bass so loud the car was rocking on its axles. At least it inspired me to start moving faster, across the tracks to Buffalo, where the Guzzos lived. Like Commercial Avenue, Buffalo was a mix of run-down buildings and empty lots—the city was bulldozing vacant houses in an effort to cut back on drug centers. The open green spaces gave the neighborhood a curious semirural feel.

  One thing about the sorry streets of South Chicago—besides sinkholes, drunks, addicts and garbage—they hold easy parking options. No pay machines and you had your choice of spaces. I pulled up directly in front of Stella’s bungalow.

  It was almost eleven now, and the few people in the area with jobs were long gone. Boys flashing gang signs and showing off their tattoos were gathering on the corners. They watched me go up the walk to Stella’s front door, but no one tried to stop me.

  Stella’s bungalow and the Jo
kich place next to it were twins, down to the peeling paint on the wooden window frames. Age and poor maintenance had caused them to lean into each other, like an elderly couple clinging together to stay upright.

  The house sported a heavy steel door with a peephole. I rang the bell. The chime echoed inside. Nothing happened. After the second ring, I was ready to walk away when I heard a heavy step coming to the door. After another moment, where Stella stared at me through the peephole, a series of locks tumbled back.

  She opened the door a crack. “Who are you and what do you want?”

  “V. I. Warshawski. Answers.”

  She stared at me, frowning as she tried to connect me to my adolescent face. “The whore’s daughter.”

  “Good to see you, too, Stella,” I said. So Frank hadn’t had the guts to tell her I was coming.

  I was going to keep my temper if I had to swallow my tongue to do so. Or at least I wasn’t going to blow up in front of her; I figured nothing would bring her a greater sense of perverse pleasure.

  “You might want to lock up while we talk. Lot of Communists out there.” I pushed past her into the house.

  “What are you talking about?” She peered down the walk. “Those are just the Mexicans that started littering this neighborhood while I was away. Breed like flies, the lot of them.”

  “Gosh, I remember what they used to say about the Irish.” Stella had been a Garretty before her marriage. “Weren’t you one of nine?”