Текст книги "Brush Back"
Автор книги: Sara Paretsky
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Текущая страница: 18 (всего у книги 28 страниц)
“That’s because you never saw the hitman.”
“I never saw a germ, either.” He put his free arm around me for a moment before going into his own place to park the bass. “But I know what they can do to my sense of hearing.”
When I went back inside my own place, I saw a coaster from Weeghman’s Whales on the floor. I frowned over it—it’s a Wrigleyville bar that I never go to. It must have fallen out of the sofa when we were collecting Bernie’s animals, but what had Bernie been doing there? Another problem for another day. I went into my closet safe to take out my gun storage box.
Jake came in behind me, unfortunately: he hates guns, he hates to know I even own one. The sight of the weapon made him back away from me.
“Call me when you’ve put that thing away, V.I. I can overcome my terror of the rhinovirus, but a gun is a total antiaphrodisiac.”
CHANGEUP
When I finally woke up, a little after nine, my clogged sinuses were putting painful pressure on my sore eye—not to mention my broken nose. I wanted to take enough sleeping pills to put me under until at least my cold had passed, if not until every member of the Guzzo family died, but I forced myself to my feet.
My face in the bathroom mirror would have done Picasso proud: the left side held a creative mix of yellows, purples and greens. Just as well the Smith & Wesson had driven Jake away last night: Romeo would have vanished without a single metaphor if Juliet had appeared on her balcony looking like this.
While my espresso machine heated up, I huddled over a ginger steam pot. After fifteen minutes of that, and a few shots of caffeine, I didn’t look any more beautiful, but my left eye was working; I would make it through the day.
I went down to the ground floor where Mr. Contreras was feeding Bernie his staple comfort breakfast of French toast. She agreed to a walk over to the lake with me and the dogs. She chatted about Northwestern’s hockey camp, wondering if it had been a mistake to commit to their program without seeing Syracuse and Ithaca.
My gun was in my tuck holster inside my jeans waistband. As we walked along Belmont, I wondered how much of the rest of the city was armed. I didn’t blame Jake for hating guns; they make you twitchy, make you see the world around you as dangerous, as if you wanted an excuse to pull your weapon and fire.
Every half block or so, I’d pull Bernie and the dogs into an alley or doorway to see whether the same people were around us, and if they, too, were halting. Bernie made a few scornful remarks about imaginary Uzbeks, but when we returned home, she assured me she would spend the day pulling her things together for her return to Canada.
“Is this one of your things?” I held out the coaster from Weeghman’s Whales.
“Oh!” She turned red and stuffed it into her backpack. “I went there with friends the other night. I am eighteen, you know, or at least, I will be in five weeks!”
“Darling, the legal drinking age may be eighteen in Quebec, but here in Illinois it’s twenty-one. Don’t tempt the fates again, okay?”
She accepted the reprimand without argument, to my surprise, just gave me a puckish smile and announced she was going to use my bathroom before she went back to Mr. Contreras. “Your tub is so big, I love lying in it.”
I hoped she couldn’t get in trouble in a midday bath, because I needed to go to my office. Although it was Saturday, I was too far behind in my work to stay home with her.
I resolutely put the Guzzo-Bagby-Scanlon world out of my mind while I caught up on client business. Murray called as I was crossing Milwaukee for a coffee. He was exuberant, taking the e-mail I’d sent him yesterday about Hurlihey’s involvement in Virejas Tower as a sign that we were once again best friends forever.
“What do you have on Spike that you’re keeping to yourself, Warshawski? You know this environmental exception only looks serious if you live in Vermont or Oregon.”
“Nothing, Murray, just fishing in very murky waters.”
“Come on, Warshawski, something’s going on: I read the police reports, and I know you tangled with Insane Dragons the other night. I know Spike comes from the same slagheap you do, so if you’ve been digging up skeletons in the land of your youth, tell me now, while I still feel I owe you one. If you sit on the story too long, I’m going to be peevish and make you look bad on air.”
“Spike didn’t come from my slagheap—he was across the Calumet on the East Side, back when that was the tony part of Steel City,” I objected.
I put him on hold while I ordered a cortado. My frustrations with Murray, for letting himself look ridiculous on cable TV, or for trying to pretend he wasn’t fifty by dating women half his age, were outweighed by our long years of working together.
He was still on the line when I came back. “There’s no novel, Murray, at least not yet, but there are a whole lot of unconnected chapters.”
I gave him a thumbnail. The number of names and relationships were so complicated Murray decided he needed to see my reports firsthand. As a further sign of renewed friendship, we agreed to meet at the Golden Glow around seven.
Thinking about the control Spike had over the legislature made my head ache again. In my own lifetime, four Illinois governors have gone to prison for fraud. As has the mayor of Cicero, numerous Cook County judges, Chicago aldermen, and state and federal representatives. What a place. Maybe I should move to Vermont or Oregon, where people are still shocked by violations of the public trust, and are willing to take action to stop them. Moving would also get me far away from the Cubs. I couldn’t see a downside.
Back in my office, I had an alert on my computer, reminding me that I owed one of my regular clients a report on an internal auditor suspected of skimming. Senior staff were meeting on Saturday so they could get together without alerting the suspected auditor. The company had let me insert keystroke software into the suspected skimmer’s computer, which showed him sending a penny on every hundred dollars to an account in Liechtenstein. I took a heavy-duty decongestant and was pulling together the final report—with ten minutes to get it to the client—when Stella Guzzo phoned.
I stared at the caller ID in disbelief, but let the call go to voice mail while I did a final proofread and e-mailed the report to the client. We were handling the meeting via videoconferencing, so I got myself hooked up to the meeting room before playing Stella’s message.
“You need to come to South Chicago this afternoon to see me.” The recording accentuated the harshness in her deep voice.
My impulse was to phone her back, but I thought of all the changes she and Frank—and Betty—had been putting me through. She could summon me, and then have me arrested for violating the restraining order. I copied the message and e-mailed it to my lawyer’s office.
Is there some way to find out what she wants? Is she vacating the r.o.? Going into a meeting; will call back in an hour.
I sat through the meeting in profile, good eye to the camera, answering questions more or less on autopilot, trying to imagine what Stella wanted. When I’d finally fielded the last of the financial VP’s questions—he kept asking the same thing, hoping for a different answer—I checked my messages.
Freeman Carter had called to say that the restraining order was still in place. “Her lawyer is doing a very annoying dance. The short answer is don’t go near the Guzzo family until I tell you I’ve got a document signed by a judge lifting the order. Call or e-mail me to confirm that you will not go down there.”
The urge to drive to Stella’s house, to burst in on her and turn her house inside out, was strong, but even more than dismembering Stella, I wanted to sleep. I called Freeman to confirm that I was following his advice. Between the decongestant, the injuries and the pain meds, I could barely keep my eyes open. I staggered to the cot in my back room and was asleep almost before I was horizontal.
The phone dragged me awake an hour later. It was Natalie Clements, the young woman in the Cubs media relations department.
I felt drugged, but Natalie was bright and peppy and delivered a breathless monologue. “Your name came up last night when Mr. Drechen and I went to visit his old boss. Mr. Villard is the gentleman who had the pictures we showed you of your cousin. The day after our press release, his house was broken into and somebody stole a lot of his photographs. They took Billy Williams’s first home run ball, oh, a lot of treasures. It’s horrible—they’re his memories!
“Anyway, he’s cleaning out his house, or his daughter is—he has to move, which is really sad, but he has diabetes, same as Ron Santo, and it’s getting hard for him to walk or climb stairs. He asked if you were still interested in photos of the day your cousin came to Wrigley Field. I said I didn’t know how far along you were with your book, but I’d ask you.”
“Not very far,” I admitted.
My voice came out as a thick croak. I carried the phone with me to the bathroom and tried to gargle in a discreet and soundless way while Natalie went on.
“Well, his daughter came on a box of photos up in the attic, and some of them are from the day your cousin came to the open tryouts. Mr. Villard would love to show them to you.”
I told her I was a little under the weather but would be glad to visit Mr. Villard early next week.
“I’m sorry if you’re not feeling well, but it would be best if you could come today. His daughter is packing up his baseball collection, what the thieves didn’t steal—she’s going to auction it off to give to Cubs Care. He’s afraid if you wait, she’ll get rid of all those photos.”
That threat gave me enough of an adrenaline boost to say I’d be at Villard’s place within the hour. I held an ice cube over my eyes for a few minutes to make my sinuses retreat, washed my face, decided makeup would only make my green-and-purple eye more lurid, and headed north, to the Evanston address Natalie had given me.
Pierre Fouchard called while I was driving. “Bernadine called me. She seems well, but what do you think?”
“She’s very resilient but she’s showing some delayed shock,” I said. “Even though she’s saying she doesn’t want to go home, she’ll probably feel a lot better when she’s back in Quebec.”
“Oui, yes, I mean. But this is the story, Vic: the Canadiens, they are playing the Bruins tomorrow night in Boston. The Canadiens want me to go to the game. I have scouted many of these Bruins, you see, and the management, they think my opinion can help the team. Arlette says no, but—Bernadine will be all right for two more nights, do you think?”
My heart sank: until that moment I hadn’t realized how much I was counting on unshouldering my caretaking burden. “I hope so. I hope so, but maybe I’ll hire some extra protection, just to be on the safe side.”
“Bien. I will be in Chicago for sure by Monday afternoon.”
I pulled over to a side street when Pierre hung up. Between the gang attack, Stella’s message and the threat about my dad, I was unusually nervous about how to look after Bernie. I called Mr. Contreras to double-check on her. To my dismay, she’d gone off to meet with the girls from the peewee league she was coaching.
I bit back a sharp remonstrance: the old man was easily wounded, and I knew how hard Bernie was to keep in check. I hung up and called her cell. She was well, she was impatient with me, yes, her dad had phoned her, she was happy to stay in Chicago as long as possible.
“I’m not the scaredy-cat,” she said.
“Yep, that’s me, meow, meow. Don’t leave the rink alone, okay? Seriously, Bernie, word of honor or I’m driving straight there to collect you.”
“Oh, very well. Word of honor.” She cut the connection.
I didn’t have the time or energy to bird-dog her. I needed backup. The Streeter brothers, whom I’d called on to help get access to Stella’s bank account, do body-guarding, furniture hauling, anything that takes a lot of muscle. They are quiet, they are smart, and fortunately Tim, whom I most often work with, was free. He’d go to the rink where Bernie was working, he’d make sure she got back safely to Mr. Contreras’s apartment. He’d keep an eye on the street until midnight; his brother Tom would cover the midnight to eight A.M. shift.
Mr. Contreras was huffy when I phoned with the details—maybe he was ninety-something, but he didn’t need some kid showing him how to look after Bernie. Bernie herself was even huffier: I was une lâche, beu platte, it was surprising I didn’t have spiders weaving webs in my hair I was so old.
“Yep, my precious one, and those spiders are attached to you until your dad gets here, so you’ll have to put up with the sticky webs for the duration.”
I texted Tim’s picture to her, texted hers to Tim. He’d let me know when he’d connected with her. I looked up beu platte and lâche in my online dictionary. I was not only an antique fuddy-duddy, but a coward. As I turned back onto Sheridan Road, I realized I was hurt by the accusation. I was the risk-taker, the person who skated close to the edge—how could she possibly think—until I had to laugh at my own absurdity. The next time Lotty got on my case, I’d put her in touch with Bernie Fouchard.
HIGH SPIRITS
When I saw Villard’s house—mansion—on a cul-de-sac overlooking Lake Michigan, I realized why a man having trouble walking needed to move. An old stone building with graceful lines, on a bluff overlooking Lake Michigan, it was three stories tall, with a high staircase to the front door. Even with the ramp he’d installed over the marble steps, just getting into the house would be a challenge.
Villard’s daughter, a brisk woman of sixty or so, let me into the house. “I hope you’re going to take some of Daddy’s memorabilia with you—he’s an impossible packrat—he still has all of Mother’s clothes in their bedroom closet and she’s been gone over twenty years now! When he had the break-in, he finally realized how vulnerable he is out here. I don’t even know how the thieves had the patience to dig through his baseball memorabilia to steal anything of value!”
She flung these remarks over her shoulder as she led me to a sitting room on the Lake Michigan side of the building. Villard was in an easy chair facing the lake, but he struggled to his feet when he heard his daughter and limped over to greet me. Although he had bedroom slippers on his swollen feet, he was dressed as he must have been all the years he went to work, in trousers, a white shirt and a sports jacket with a large Cubs logo pin in the lapel.
He politely didn’t look at my face while shaking my hand. “It’s a pleasure to meet you, Ms. Warshawski. Like everyone else in this city, I was a big fan of your cousin’s.”
His daughter turned the chair around to face me and bundled him back into it. “Daddy, I’ll get Adelaide to bring you and your guest something to drink, but I have to get back to the papers in your den. I’ve left all the photographs you were interested in on the table here, and Adelaide will find me if you need anything else.”
“It’s a pity my daughter didn’t want to go into baseball,” Villard said. “She’s such a brilliant organizer, she’d have whipped the Cubs into a World Series or two by now.”
His daughter kissed his cheek. “Daddy, it’s enough I take flak for wearing my Cubs gear in Diamondback country. Anyway, someone has to stay on top of getting you packed and moved.” She looked at me. “I live in Tucson and I can’t stay away too long; I’m the associate dean of the nursing school down there. My sister’s flying in from Seattle next week to finish up.”
She was off, her jeans making a rustling sound that conjured an old-fashioned starched white uniform. A few minutes later another woman came in—Adelaide, who was Mr. Villard’s attendant, not, as I’d supposed, another daughter. She was as unhurried in her movements as the daughter had been brisk, but she managed to make Mr. Villard comfortable without taking anything from his dignity.
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.
