Текст книги "Brush Back"

Автор книги: Sara Paretsky

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Текущая страница: 14 (всего у книги 28 страниц)

DEAD BALL

Joel was alone in the Previn law office when we got there, an unexpected bonus. He was hunched over a computer with a super-size soft drink nearby. He buzzed us in, but his greeting was surly.

“Ira’s in court and Eunice is at the hairdresser if you were expecting to talk to them.”

“Nope. You’re the man I was looking for.”

“What do you want? Who’s the girl? Is she supposed to make me think of Annie and confess crimes I never committed?”

Bernie as Annie Guzzo’s double? Except for being small and dark, they didn’t look much alike. However, if Joel was obsessed with Annie, every small dark young woman might make him think he was seeing her.

“This is Bernadine Fouchard; Joel Previn. Joel is a lawyer, Bernadine is a hockey player. She’s my godchild: I inherited her from my cousin when he died.”

“Oh, hockey.” If I’d introduced her as a toilet cleaner he couldn’t have been more contemptuous. “Of course. That cousin of yours played.”

“He had his moments,” I said. “What uncommitted crimes will Bernadine make you confess?”

His skin turned a muddy color. “None. It was a figure of speech. I assume you know what those are.”

Bernie was frowning at me, wanting me to fight, but I said, “I talked to Betty Guzzo the other day—Annie’s sister-in-law.”

“I know who she is. She hated Annie.”

“How do you know that?”

“Annie liked to talk to me. I was the only person in that office who thought there was more to life than sports and getting drunk.”

“What did Annie tell you about Betty?”

“She couldn’t wait to leave Chicago, leave all the small-minded people like her sister-in-law behind. Betty and Stella didn’t get along, but they both liked to beat up on Annie. Annie came in one afternoon after school with a big bruise on her face and on her shoulder. Some women, they try to cover up bruises with makeup or scarves or whatever, but Annie wanted the whole world to know what her family was doing to her.”

“And she said Betty had done this?” I asked.

“First Betty, then Stella. She’d tried to talk to her sister-in-law about contraception, that she didn’t need to keep having one baby after another, and Betty punched her in the mouth, then called up Stella and told her, so when Annie got home she got a double whammy from her mother. Next they got that priest to preach a special sermon on the hellfires waiting for girls who used contraception, and unmarried girls who had sex. Annie walked out in the middle of the sermon and when Stella got back from church, she hit her again.”

“And this Annie didn’t fight back? She didn’t kill them?” Bernie interjected, trembling with anger.

“Her mother was eight inches taller and a hundred pounds heavier,” Joel said. “If you’d ever been beaten up by bullies, you’d understand how hard it is to fight back.”

“You go for the ankles,” Bernie said fiercely. “Me, I know this because I am small, too, smaller than girls who play half as well as I do. If Annie didn’t know that, then it was not Uncle Boom-Boom who was sleeping with her: he would have taught her.”

I couldn’t help smiling, but Joel had hunched himself deeper over his computer, his biscuit-colored skin an ugly shade of umber, as if Bernie was criticizing him for not standing up to the bullies in grammar school.

“Your logic is impeccable, babe,” I said to Bernie, “but I’m not sure a jury would buy it. Not unless you could make sure they were all Blackhawks fans.”

“But Uncle Boom-Boom isn’t on trial! It’s that salope, the ostie de folle, who should be on trial for lying about him.”

“Maybe,” I said. “Let’s go back to the trial that actually took place. I can’t find a transcript so I don’t know what you said in Stella’s defense. But what did she say to you, to her lawyer?”

“Just what I said in court,” Joel said. “Stop harassing me! I can’t turn the past into something that you or anyone else wants it to be.”

I ignored that. “Until I talked to Betty, I was completely convinced of Stella’s guilt. I thought it was her delusions about her own probity that made her think she could get a post-sentencing exoneration. But the other day, when I stopped to watch her son play baseball, when Betty threatened me, she made me think for the first time that Stella might not have been guilty, or at least, not the only guilty party. Stella beat Annie, but maybe Betty finished the job while Stella was at bingo.”

“This is game playing,” Joel said, sullen. “If you’d been there at the time, you’d know Stella was off the rails. She didn’t care about anyone else enough to protect them. She never even talked about Betty.”

“Stella wouldn’t protect Betty, but she might protect Frank,” I said. “It’s barely possible she wore the jacket for his sake, to keep his children’s mother out of prison. Now, Stella’s done her time, Betty won’t have more kids, and the ones she does have are almost grown. As soon as Frankie gets his shot at baseball camp, Stella can name names. I’m betting she will.”

“Wore the jacket?” Bernie said. “Whose jacket?”

“Mob talk, sweetie. Means she confessed to a crime she didn’t commit.”

“No one would do that!” Bernie was scornful.

“You’re wrong: people do it all the time, usually because they feel confused and helpless when they’re interrogated.”

“Stella never confessed,” Joel protested.

“And she didn’t say one word that implied she had a theory about who actually did kill Annie?”

“I don’t remember!” Joel shouted. “It was twenty-five years ago.”

He took a long swallow from the soda cup. It isn’t really true that vodka is odorless, it just doesn’t smell as noticeably as scotch or rum.

“Betty went through Annie’s things while Stella was in prison, looking for a secret stash. Stella had already taken two thousand dollars from Annie and Betty hoped there’d be more. She also took Annie’s lingerie, even though she thought it was the kind of underwear that sends you to hell.”

I could picture the greed on Betty’s face, the justification: she was a whore, I’m righteous, I should have these pretty things. They wouldn’t have fit—even twenty-five years ago, Betty wasn’t the elfin creature her sister-in-law had been. I had a skin-crawling fantasy of her hiding them, taking them out to play with, and started speaking to cover my discomfort.

“If there’d been a diary in Annie’s bra drawer, Betty would have seen it. No, the diary and the implication of Boom-Boom only appeared when Stella started talking about exoneration.”

Joel put the cup down halfway to his mouth. “You’re saying someone planted a made-up diary to shut Stella up?”

“No one can shut Stella up; you told me not even Judge Grigsby’s warnings kept her from outbursts in court. No, someone wanted to divert attention from Stella’s exoneration claim.”

“This Betty?” Bernie asked.

“Betty isn’t imaginative enough to make up a diary. Someone else is pulling those strings behind the scenes.” I eyed Joel thoughtfully: he was smart, even if he was drunk, smart enough to seem more belligerent than he was. “You’re sure Stella hasn’t been consulting you?”

“I keep telling you, her opinion of me was lower than, I don’t know, Ira’s and Sol Mandel’s put together. She wouldn’t come to me for a glass of water if she was dying in the desert.” The metaphor made him tilt his head back and drain the cup.

“Mr. Mandel went along with the bullying in his office, I gather—the way Spike Hurlihey taunted you, for instance. What about Mr. McClelland? No one ever mentions him.”

“McClelland? He wined and dined politicians and got them to throw a few alewives our way. He and Mandel figured out how to get rich in a poor neighborhood, but they needed bigger clients, downtown clients, the kind that can pull strings for you. McClelland worked that angle.”

“The Loop office.” I remembered Thelma Kalvin, the manager at Nina Quarles’s law office, mentioning it. “The downtown connections; they were something that Nina Quarles bought from Mandel & McClelland when she took over the South Chicago practice?”

Joel hunched a shoulder. “I suppose. I stopped paying attention to their business a long time ago. Anyway, McClelland wasn’t in the office very often, but when he was, he laughed and clapped along with the rest of the audience over how Hurlihey and his clique talked to me. Only Annie . . .”

“Only Annie didn’t laugh?”

“I helped her with her college applications,” Joel muttered. “She needed to stand out, going up against all those prep school graduates. I helped her write her essays, then I helped her write a song. Her piano playing, she was technically good, but she didn’t have the—the passion to stand out in a crowd, so we thought if she could be a composer . . .” His voice trailed away again.

My brows went up: Joel did have an interest beyond sports and drinking. “Do you still write music?” I asked.

His round cheeks bunched up so high his eyes disappeared. “I fail at everything I touch. My music was derivative, Ira knew enough to tell me that.”

I couldn’t think of any suitable response and even Bernie looked daunted. Joel took the plastic cover off his cup and dug out a handful of ice, which he crunched noisily.

“What about Rory Scanlon?” I finally asked. “The firm is in his building now and there’s a sort of revolving door between the insurance and the legal part of the operations. Was that true in your time, too?”

“Come on, you know the South Side, everyone’s got a finger in everyone’s business,” Joel said. “McClelland and Scanlon both worshipped at Saint Eloy’s. Sol Mandel and my parents belonged to Temple Har HaShem. They pray together, then they get out of the pews and do business with each other.”

“Ira does business with Scanlon and with Nina Quarles?” I asked.

“Quarles doesn’t practice, she just spends the profits. But why shouldn’t we buy our insurance from Scanlon? He’s loyal to the neighborhood, after all, and so is Ira. Scanlon sends Ira some legal business now and then.”

“Most of the people I talk to think Mr. Mandel got you to represent Stella to taunt you. Is that how you felt?”

Next to me, Bernie was quivering with impatience, wanting to leap in with advice about going for the ankles or whacking people under the chin. I put a restraining hand on her arm.

Joel took another handful of ice out of the cup. His eyes flickered to the door—this was painful, he wanted to get away from me to the Pot of Gold. I felt as though I were on Spike Hurlihey’s side, bullying him, and I didn’t like it.

“What about Mandel himself? Nothing anyone is saying makes it possible for me to understand why he would take on Stella’s defense. Annie was his pet, she was the office pet, for that matter—”

“Not everyone felt that way,” Joel said. “She teased Spike and he didn’t like it.”

“Teased him how?”

“Spike passed the bar, but that’s because his dad was the Tenth Ward committeeman, he was tight with the mayor’s family, they pulled a few strings in Springfield after Spike failed the first two times. Word processing was just starting when I worked there, and guys like Spike or Mandel couldn’t type—they’d dictate their mail, so Annie picked up legal ideas from typing everyone’s letters and briefs and so on. She’d give Spike back his letters with paragraphs circled in red and write next to them, ‘I don’t think this is what the statute says. Want me to change it before you send it out?’”

My eyes widened. Hurlihey’s temper was the stuff of legends down in the legislature. Annie must have been brave, or foolhardy, or convinced that Mandel would protect her. Maybe all three.

“You think Hurlihey pushed Mandel to defend Stella because Annie got under his skin?”

Joel reddened but didn’t say anything.

“Did you have a theory at the time?”

“It wasn’t my job to have theories. It isn’t my job to have them now. It’s my job to finish this motion before Ira gets back and shakes his head like a mournful cow over how I can’t get the least thing done in his absence!”

“Right. We’ll get out of your way.” I got to my feet. “Is there anyone who worked in that office, I mean besides Spike Hurlihey, who’s still around?”

“Besides Thelma, you mean?”

“Thelma Kalvin?” I echoed, incredulous.

“She was the full-time secretary. She was another one who didn’t like Annie because Annie muscled her out of the way of working personally for Mr. Mandel. Annie got twice as much done in the three hours a day she put in after school as Thelma did all week long, so of course the partners started giving Annie their dictation. Thelma ended up working for me and Spike and the other associates, and her nose was so out of joint she wouldn’t type for me because she knew I was close to Annie.”

“I talked to Thelma after I left here last week, and she claimed she didn’t remember ever hearing about the Guzzos,” I snapped.

“Don’t shout at me,” Joel said. “I don’t know why she’d lie, except no one in that office ever told the truth. It was the perfect place for Spike to start his illustrious career. He bullies everyone in Springfield, but he got his start right here on the South Side.”

I was heading to the door when another question occurred to me. “What about Boris Nabiyev? Was he a client when you worked at Mandel?”

Joel snarled that he’d never heard the name. “I have to work if you don’t.” He turned back to his computer, his wide back a wall of silence.

BLOOD SPORT

When we reached the street, Bernie made a face. “He’s a creep. Did you see his hands? Big soft paws, no muscles in them. Can you imagine him touching you? He was in love with that murdered girl, wasn’t he? Do I really look like her? Is that why you brought me down here, to see what it would make him do?”

“No, cara. I brought you because I didn’t want you roaming around the city with nothing to do. And yes, he was in love with Annie Guzzo, or infatuated, anyway. Which is why you made him think of her. Have you ever been in love, or had someone you were close to die?”

“Not really. There was a boy last year, but really, it was over before it began.”

“What, you went for his ankles?”

She started a hot protest, then realized I was teasing her. “It was infatuation. I thought he was in love with me but really, it was my answers on the maths exams. Why?”

“You see the beloved object everywhere,” I said. “The man I married—there was a time when my heart turned over every time I thought I saw him on the street. Even more, though, there are still days when I think my mother has passed me and I turn—and it’s a stranger and for a second I’m in raw mourning once again.”

Bernie shifted uncomfortably. “Anyway, this Joel, he was lying. And you let him.”

“What should I have done?”

“Made him tell the truth.”

“I don’t have any way to do that, at least not yet.”

“Threaten him, tell him you’ll follow him day and night until he shows you the diary.”

“I don’t think he has the diary.”

“Because he said so? But all he did was lie!”

A Lincoln Town Car pulled up in front of the building. The driver held the back door open and a walking stick emerged, was planted in the road, followed by brown wool trousers that ended in orthotic shoes. Another moment, and the top of Ira’s head appeared over the car. The driver followed him around the car to the sidewalk, but didn’t try to take his arm. Ira straightened his lapels, adjusted his bow tie and nodded to the driver.

“See you Monday morning, Mr. Previn,” the driver said.

When Ira spotted me, his heavy cheeks contracted, turning his eyes into puffy slits. “What are you doing here, young woman? I thought Judge Grigsby told you there was nothing in that old case.”

I guess to a ninety-year-old man fifty looks young. “That’s what everyone says, but I’m like the cat in that old song: no matter how many times the ship goes down or the rocket blows up, I keep coming back.”

“This is beginning to look like harassment. I can have an order of protection issued.”

“Of course you can. You can join Stella Guzzo behind a barrier, trembling at my footsteps.”

Ira scowled.

“It’s this pesky business about why Sol Mandel undertook Stella’s defense, and why he insisted Joel do the heavy lifting,” I said. “Rory Scanlon said it was to put some backbone into your son. There was a lot of bullying in that office, and it’s not—”

“Joel couldn’t take the heat. He never could take the heat. His mother and I believe in public schools, but we ended up sending him to a private school because he didn’t know how to stand up to boys who taunted him.

“You don’t give in to them, I told him this time and again. If I’d been that sensitive I’d have crumpled the first time I went up against the Machine. A few schoolyard insults, they were nothing compared to the threats and hang-up calls I’ve gotten my whole life.”

His cheeks puffed out and in like the bellows of an old pedal organ. “His mother and I, we wanted him to be proud of the life we were making. We marched in Selma, we marched in Marquette Park, and instead of being thrilled at making history, all he wanted to do was ‘fit in.’ As if a boy like him could ever fit in!”

I felt my mouth twist in disdain and tried to straighten it. It was hard to listen to one of my own heroes talk so contemptuously about his only child.

“I can’t see how forcing him to defend Stella would have given him a deep and abiding respect for principles of social justice. Why not get him involved in some of your own work—weren’t you acting on behalf of Guatemalan asylum seekers back then?”

Ira leaned heavily on his cane. “Mandel & McClelland didn’t do that kind of law, and Eunice and I agreed that Joel would wither if we tried bringing him into our firm. In the end, we had to, of course, because he couldn’t make it anywhere else. I can’t retire, not the way men who live to my age usually do, because—”

“Because you’d miss the applause you get for showing up in court and tying witnesses into knots.”

I hadn’t seen Joel come out of the office. Ira said, “How dare you, sir? That’s—”

Joel cut him off again. He’d apparently overheard most of our conversation, because he added to me, “If you really want to know how I ended up defending Stella, Mandel and McClelland liked to pit their associates against each other. Genteel blood sport, no physical blows exchanged. We’d meet in the conference room, go around the table, everyone got thirty seconds to pitch how they saw the case. Then we’d all leap on the pitch and tear it to shreds, trying to score points with the partners. I got good at shredding, but not as good as Spike. Mr. McClelland liked Spike, he took him to the downtown office where he started making the connections that carried Spike to Springfield. And so Mr. McClelland would feed Spike the good cases before we ever got to the conference room.”

“That’s the voice of envy and insecurity speaking,” Ira puffed. “You imagine because you couldn’t—”

“I don’t have a good imagination, as you’ve kindly told me many times. A big case came into the office, the kind of thing we hardly ever had a crack at, a class-action case involving the women at the local Buy-Smart warehouse. I stayed late to work on my pitch.” Joel’s lip curled into a sneer. “I didn’t talk to you about it—I thought if I could make the winning pitch without your help it would prove to you that I wasn’t a loser and a whiner and a crybaby and a drunk and whatever other epithets you like to use about me.”

An elderly woman came up the street, using a cane herself. She stopped to greet Ira, reminded him they had an appointment.

“Let Ms. Murchison into the office, Joel,” Ira rasped, “and let’s not hear more of this nonsense.”

“Ms. Murchison, go inside and make yourself comfortable. Ira will be in soon.”

Joel spoke to the older woman with unexpected gentleness, took her arm while he unlocked the door. Once she was inside, he stood with his back against the door, facing his father, who was stumping up the walk toward him. Bernie was silent, her vivid face turning from father to son, her brow puckered with trouble at their argument. I put a comforting arm around her.

“This isn’t nonsense,” Joel said. “This is something you haven’t wanted to hear all these years, but you can hear it now. Your friend Sol, he wasn’t a nice man, and neither was his partner. You can say all you want about South Chicago being a hard place, and lawyers needing to be tough to stand up to the grime and corruption, but those two enjoyed seeing associates like me humiliated. They wouldn’t get their hands dirty themselves, but they liked having someone like Spike on board to make it a fun game for them!”

“That’s—that’s such a perverted version of the lives of two good men,” Ira puffed. “You couldn’t handle the job and so someone else had to be in the wrong, never you! You’ve been like that since a child. I golfed with Sol Mandel a hundred times, we were on the board of Har HaShem together—”

“I know. He was a saint and I have a dibbuk in me,” Joel said. “You said you don’t believe McClelland fed Spike, but I’m telling you, I witnessed it. Pay attention. Stand up straight and listen.”

That seemed to be a repetition of words he’d heard from his father more than once; Ira turned red, but subsided.

“The night I stayed late putting together an argument for the Buy-Smart women, Spike was working late, too. Every now and then he’d make some crude crack about how even if I got the case, I’d be a fool in the courtroom—fall over my feet because I was too fat to see them, or get a mistrial for making a pass at the judge—like you, Spike and Mandel and the others assumed I was queer and they loved to rub it in. By and by, McClelland came in. He went to his office and Spike, giving me this shit-eating grin, went in with him. McClelland’s office shared a wall with the women’s toilet, but Annie and Thelma, they were the only two women on staff and neither of them was in, so I went in and heard their whole conversation through the grate.”

“Sneaking into the women’s toilet, no, not even that was beneath you,” Ira said.

“I heard McClelland feed Spike his presentation,” Joel shouted. “I heard that, and then I got to be part of the process of watching Spike win the chance to take the case to trial. Which he lost, even with McClelland in the second chair, and then I realized, after he ran for office and became our state rep, that Spike wanted to lose the case. Buy-Smart gave him campaign contributions. The whole thing was a fucking racket.

“And that’s what happened with Stella. We all had to make our case, and I didn’t want to take part. Was I a crybaby? A queer crybaby, not big enough to play in the big leagues? Didn’t I know about Gideon v. Wainwright? Stella might be an unpleasant defendant, but she deserved counsel. This was how lawyers proved themselves, but if I wanted to sit in a corner and masturbate over Annie instead of pulling my weight in the firm—apparently I could be queer and in love with Annie at the same time! And so on it went and so of course, whiny crybaby that I am, I caved under the pressure. Not like you: you would have stood up to Spike and Mandel and McClelland like you did to Richie Daley and the Machine when they came after you. Just like you did to George Wallace in Selma. But not me. And now, by God, I am going to have a drink, and fuck you, Ira Previn. Fuck you and fuck all those like you.”