Текст книги "Brush Back"

Автор книги: Sara Paretsky

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Текущая страница: 2 (всего у книги 28 страниц)

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, show 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 Jokich 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?”

“Eight,” she snapped. “And we all worked our fingers to the bone. Me, especially, keeping house for my father and my brothers after Ma passed. Not like these wetbacks, wouldn’t know a job if it jumped out of the beer bottle and waved a paycheck under their noses.”

“It was a little easier to find work when the mills were running,” I said. “No one’s ever replaced those eighteen thousand jobs.”

She glowered at me, but decided I was too big for her to throw out. She shut the door with a bang and turned one of three dead bolts. “That’s not my fault. If they wanted to work—”

“I know. They could sell appliances at Goldblatt’s or work for one of the doctors in the Navral Building.”

“Neither of those even exists anymore, Miss Smartmouth.”

“Yeah, kind of my point, Stella.”

The entryway was so small that we were touching each other. I went into the living room. I moved automatically, not because I’d spent a lot of time there—even when Frank and I were dating, we always met someplace else—but because the layout was identical to my childhood home.

The house wasn’t as run-down inside as out, which was probably true for much of the neighborhood. Keep yourself looking too poor to rob. The floors were clean, the flat-screen TV was new, and so were the two armchairs that faced it.

“What do you want?” Stella rasped.

She’d kept her height even after all the years of bad diet and poor exercise. Her hair had gone that iron shade of gray that makes the face beneath it look hard—or harder, in her case—but her eyes were still a bright blue, like the sky over the lake as I’d driven south, and her arm muscles remained firm. She must have been attractive when she was young, in an athletic kind of way. In a different era she might have become a sports star herself.

“Frank asked me to talk to you.”

“That’s a flat-out lie.”

“He came up to my office yesterday. He says—”

“Oh, so we have an office now, do we, Miss Hoity-Toity. Frank drives a truck, but you have an office. Frank would have an office, too, if you hadn’t destroyed his chances.”

“Me? Please. You bullied Frank into breaking up with me thirty years ago. Don’t tell me that made him so depressed he stopped trying to make a success out of life.”

“No one ever got depressed when they got the Warshawskis out of their lives, but your family, they lived to bring mine down. Your whore of a mother broke up my marriage—”

“I thought Mr. Guzzo was still married to you when he died,” I objected. “Had he divorced you? Is that why USX tried to deny the comp claim?”

She swung an arm back, a reflexive urge to hit me. I took her wrist, not hard, just firm.

“Beating people up is what got you into trouble to begin with. You’re not going to hit me, Stella, so calm down.”

“Don’t you tell me what to do or not to do. I didn’t take shit from guards and wardens and bitches of drug dealers all those years to come home and take it from a Warshawski.”

She had a point. I perched on the arm of one of the easy chairs. “Let’s leave Gabriella and Mateo out of the discussion. They’ve both been dead a lot of years and can’t defend themselves. Tell me what I did to ruin Frank’s chances.”

“Not just you, your whole family.” Her lips were tight, but I didn’t like the way her eyes looked, too much white showing around the irises. “You Warshawskis always had to be number one, and when it looked like Frank had the same chance that Bernard got, you ruined it.”

“What?” I was genuinely baffled. “My uncle never had any special chances; he worked the docks his whole life. If Frank had wanted a job there instead of—”

“Shut up, numbskull,” Stella spat at me. “Young Bernard. You couldn’t stand—”

“Oh, you mean Boom-Boom. Frank didn’t play hockey, but if he had, Boom-Boom would have welcomed him like a brother.”

“Of course Frank didn’t play hockey.”

Stella’s exasperation was turning her skin a mottled red. She probably looked like this the night she killed Annie. I kept my weight forward, so that I could jump out of her way if her rage got the better of her—she might be close to eighty now but she still looked strong.

“Baseball. He was going to have his chance, they promised it, they promised he’d be at Wrigley Field where the top brass could see him, but it fell apart. That’s because you Warshawskis didn’t want it to happen. You’ve tormented us for as long as I’ve lived here. Your mother seduced my husband. Your cousin didn’t want Frank to have the same success as he got, your father”—she gave the word a horrible sarcastic inflection—“could have helped me, but he couldn’t be bothered to lift a finger. Little Annie was a saint or something to him and he figured he’d get his own back.”

“No, Stella. You’re making this up. There is no evidence, there’s no conspiracy, there’s only you, hating my mother and wanting to blame her for your troubles.”

She lunged at me so suddenly that I fell off the armchair to get out of her way. She tried to kick me but hit the chair instead. I scuttled backward on my butt and got to my feet as she lunged again.

I shoved the armchair into her path. “No, Stella, I told you no hitting. Frank said you want an exoneration. Are you going to tell the lawyer that Boom-Boom blocked Frank’s chances to play baseball and this made you so angry you killed Annie?”

“I didn’t kill my girl,” she panted. “It was an intruder. When I left the house to go to the bingo, Annie was alive. Everyone thought she was so sweet, they should have heard what she was saying. If she died with those words in her mouth she’s been burning in hell for it.”

Even across the armchair I could smell her sweat: bath soap and talcum mixed with the rankness of the hatred coursing through her.

“Why didn’t you bring that up at the trial?”

“I told that useless baby they gave me as a lawyer. I told him it was an intruder, but he didn’t know enough about the law to use it. Or maybe Boom-Boom bought him off. He had plenty of money, all those endorsements, all those girls going flat on their backs for him. Maybe Annie did, too. I told her she was going to turn out just like your mother, and she had the gall to say that was her prayer! No wonder I hit her! Anyone would have, but I didn’t kill her. That was someone else, maybe your cousin, that’s why your father buried the evidence. Your cousin came to the house and murdered Annie while I was at church, praying for her soul!”

I edged around the chair and headed from the room. “If this is what you believe, you need a psychiatrist, not an exoneration lawyer. Don’t ever repeat any of this in public, or I will sue you faster than you can spit.”

She jumped across the room and socked me. I ducked in time to take the blow on my shoulder, not my throat, and ran to the door. I had the dead bolt undone and was outside a nanosecond before she caught up to me.

She stood in the doorway, screaming, “People have been playing games with me my whole life, making fun, but I don’t take that shit anymore. You watch out, Missy, you watch your step.”

The punks on the curb stared, mouths agape. No wonder Stella was safe in the middle of Insane Dragon territory.