Текст книги "Brush Back"

Автор книги: Sara Paretsky

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Текущая страница: 26 (всего у книги 28 страниц)

SWINGING FOR THE FENCES

Joel’s clock started to chime the hour. Sixty minutes to get something up on Facebook. Sixty minutes to save Bernadine. If she was still—of course she was still alive. She was the terrorists’ bargaining chip.

We left Joel standing in the middle of his living room, the half gallon of Grey Goose in one hand, a half-drunk glass in the other. He tried to keep us there—he wanted to talk about Mandel, did I really think Mandel had killed Annie, but I brushed him off.

“The only thing I care about this morning is saving Bernadine Fouchard. We’ll worry later about Spike and Scanlon and whether Mandel killed Annie.”

As we walked out the door, he called after me that he wanted me to talk to Ira. “Tell him his old pal Sol was a criminal and a murderer.”

I shut the door, pushed the elevator button over and over.

“He only thinks about hisself,” Mr. Contreras fumed when the car finally arrived. “Don’t he care about Bernie?”

When we were back on the street, I took a precious minute to phone Conrad. He’d gotten a search warrant for Sturlese but they hadn’t found Bernie.

“What about the Sturlese brothers? Were they all there?”

“Two were on job sites, at least according to dispatch. One claims he was home with the flu, but his wife said he felt so sick he’d gone to the hospital. We’re trying to track them all down.”

“Anything on Sebastian?”

“No one’s spotted him yet. We went to the sister, what’s her name? Viola? Told her where you’d found him, tried to get her to cough up someplace he might be hiding. I don’t know if she’s scared stupid or really doesn’t know. I had my guys take her in, but all she does is sit and cry. Give me a bright idea, Warshawski.”

“Scanlon,” I said. “He’s got a slush fund under cover of his Say, Yes! foundation. He’s connected to this—”

“What I meant was a smart idea.” He hung up.

I put the car in motion. I’d come up with only one idea and it wasn’t necessarily bright or even smart, but I talked it over with Mr. Contreras and he agreed to try it.

We found the nearest copy center, down on Jeffery, and dug up photos of Scanlon and Sol Mandel online. We used free software to create a new website that we called “Annie Guzzo’s Murder.”

Stella Guzzo spent twenty-five years in Logan Correctional Center for killing her daughter. In the words of the Chicago Mob, she wore the jacket. Only she never agreed to. She didn’t know she was covering up for two smooth operators: Sol Mandel and Rory Scanlon.

When a police officer tried to put an end to a campaign of terror against South Chicago’s small businesses, Scanlon sent money to the police widows and orphans fund and got the officer sent to Chicago’s highest-crime district, with a target painted on his forehead for his fellow officers to aim at. Here’s the cocky note Rory Scanlon sent to the officer when the old Fourth District watch commander got rid of the meddlesome cop.

We scanned the letter and added it to the site. I also e-mailed it to Freeman Carter, my own lawyer, with the login and password for the website. Do your best, Freeman, in case I’m not around to do it for you, I wrote. I’m putting the originals in the mail to you.

We posted Scanlon’s and Mandel’s photos, spun a narrative based on my guess about the use of Say, Yes! funds, to send Hurlihey to the state legislature, and finished by writing, Stay Tuned for More Details.

We finished at 8:56. At 8:57, while we were still at the copy center computer, my phone rang again.

“Not seeing anything on your Facebook page, Contreras,” the ugly voice growled.

“Not there,” my neighbor said. “Got a website. You check it out. For the next hour, you can only get to it with a password. You turn over Bernie—Bernadine—and if she ain’t been hurt, I’ll take it down. You screw up, the whole world will see it and I’ll be adding details. Password is ‘ScumbagYes.’”

There was a pause while the caller went online. “We won’t meet you in Calumet Park, too exposed, too easy for you to get cops into the Coast Guard building. We’ll wait for you on Stony, where it dead-ends at the river. Be there in thirty with that letter you’re saying Scanlon wrote.”

“Sixty,” Mr. Contreras said. “I’m ten miles away from you.”

We heard muted talk in the background. “Forty-five. We see cops coming, the kid goes over the retaining wall into the Cal.”

“They’re already there,” I said flatly to Mr. Contreras when he’d hung up. “It’s the perfect ambush spot: there’s only one way in.”

I put the original of the “widows and orphans” letter into an express pack and sent it off to Freeman.

“Don’t be calling the cops,” Mr. Contreras begged as we hustled back to the car, “’cause they won’t know to come in quiet and next thing you know, these bastards’ll toss little Bernie overboard.”

“We can’t drive in,” I said.

“You gonna hijack a chopper?” my neighbor said. “We don’t have time to joke around.”

He was right. The clock kept ticking. I drove fast and dangerously, running red lights, weaving around traffic on two-lane streets, earning fingers, honks, even a brandished weapon at Eighty-third.

At 103rd, the top of the marshes along the Calumet River, I crossed over to Stony Island. We were at the start of a stretch of swamp, park, golf course, waste dumping and heavy industry, dotted with ponds made by the overflow from the big lake and Lake Calumet. If the thugs were in place, they were three miles to the south.

Move, move! I ordered myself savagely. Mr. Contreras was almost weeping with anxiety. My own state: sick, terrified, head a balloon bouncing ten feet from the ground, body in motion, body in motion will stay in motion, at rest—will rest forever.

I spied a canoe in the underbrush, jumped out of the car, saw the canoe was chained to a log. The old man still had enough strength to shatter the lock with a rock. I took the paddle stuck in the mud underneath it.

Stealing, no, borrowing, stuffing it any old way into the Taurus’s trunk, bouncing it down the road to the top of Dead Stick Pond, smashing through the fence around the pond, launching the boat. Mr. Contreras watching while I climbed into waist-high filthy water, fanny pack around the neck to keep my gun dry. He scrambled back through the brush to the car while I began to paddle, paddling for life, not a beautiful stroke, not knowing how to do it except by gut feel. Herons watched me with malevolent eyes: I was frightening away their lunch. Geese squawked indignantly, took to the air.

At the south end, I climbed out again into water brown with waste, purple-green with industrial oil, boots soaked, squelching through mud, up the bank to the wall separating the road from Lake Calumet. I could see the smokestacks of ships on the far side of the wall. The dredges and cranes at work on the hidden docks covered the noise I was making.

I used to walk that wall with Boom-Boom, while we dared each other to jump off under the noses of the freighters in Lake Calumet. We used to boost each other up. Back then, we wore dry clothes and shoes, but I could do it alone today in sodden jeans and mud-caked boots.

I found a place where the concrete had crumbled, exposing rebar. Put a toe in, hoisted myself into place. This was so easy, my third wall in twenty-four hours, I could join Cirque du Soleil. I straddled the wall, crabbed across, lay flat when I got in squinting distance of the road. The goons’ car was on the shoulder, tilting downward into the ditch, hidden from street view by the shrubs and tall marsh grasses.

Fifteen minutes from launch, five over our limit. I pulled out the Smith & Wesson, took off the safety, placed the spare clips on the wall in front of me. Right on time, the Taurus engine roared as Mr. Contreras floored it and drove headlong toward the wall. He swerved a second before he hit it and fishtailed, knocking the rear end against the wall.

The doors facing the wall opened and the dogs jumped out.

Gunfire rattled from the underbrush. The Taurus’s windshield shattered. I aimed at the flash of light in the weeds, emptied half a clip, saw movement in the brush, fired again, reloaded, slid from the wall, jumped across the ditch to the enemy car, shot out the tires. A savage growl behind me: I turned to see Mitch fling himself against a thug sneaking up behind me. Mitch knocked him to the ground. I stomped on the man’s arm, forced him to drop his gun, kicked the gun away, kicked the thug’s head hard enough to knock him out, hit the road as more gunfire erupted.

“Down,” I ordered Mitch, panting, “down!” He loped off instead, heading across the road to Dead Stick Pond.

I didn’t know where Peppy was, didn’t know where Mr. Contreras was, had to concentrate on the gunfire still coming from the thick grasses.

Furious shouts from behind the retaining wall. Heads appeared—men in hard hats, men with walkie-talkies, cell phones. The gun roar filled my head; I didn’t know what they were saying, kept my eyes on the car, on the underbrush. Saw movement in two places, ducked low, shot at the feet as they appeared. And then the hard hats were over the wall, moving into the brush, surrounding the punks.

Police cars screamed in. Pierre arrived with a team from the private security firm Tintrey, the FBI alongside them. By then we had found Bernie, where the thugs had tossed her bound body. It was Mitch and Peppy who led me to her: the goons had dumped her in the mud along the edge of Dead Stick Pond. Mr. Contreras tried to follow us to Bernie, but he was too dazed and exhausted; he collapsed onto the backseat of the Taurus. The hard hats, guys who’d been working on the barges below us on Lake Calumet, were talking excitedly to the cops, helping them hoist the thugs into squad cars.

Bernie was still alive, but with a very weak pulse. My own exhaustion was overwhelming me; I fumbled at her bonds with thick clumsy fingers until one of the hard hats saw what I was doing and came to my aid. A sheet of gray water seemed to envelop me, making it hard for me to move or think. I could see Mitch and Peppy anxiously lick Bernie’s face and hands but couldn’t decide if that was good or bad and couldn’t move my arms to stop them.

Pierre appeared and pushed the dogs away, lifted Bernie. I saw his mouth move but couldn’t hear any words. A helicopter materialized and Pierre and Bernie shimmered away into it. The water pulled me down, into the grasses, the mud, the rusting cans. No more responsibilities. How good it felt to drown.

FIFTEEN-DAY DL

I was out for the better part of two days. The concussion I’d suffered under Wrigley Field, the lack of rest, the more-than-strenuous race around Chicago had me unconscious long before an ambulance drove me to Beth Israel Hospital. Lotty’s anesthesiologist gave me a cocktail that kept me deeply asleep while the worst of my wounds healed.

For once, I slept dreamlessly, no nightmares about tar pits or Stella Guzzo. It was only when I woke the next night, feeling Lotty’s fingers on my wrist, that the fears came tumbling back in on me. Bernie, Mr. Contreras—I’d watched him collapse—but I’d passed out instead of helping him. The dogs, the thugs.

Lotty looked at me with wry sadness. “I’m tempted to put you under again, Liebchen, if you’re only going to wake up to frenzy. Your neighbor is recovering. He was dehydrated and exhausted—he went through a heavy workout for a man his age. For anyone of any age, even for you. As for Bernadine, she, too, is on the mend. She isn’t my patient, but the doctors at the University of Chicago who have been treating her tell me she is tormenting herself with guilt over putting you and your neighbor in peril.”

Lotty sat on the edge of the bed, brushing my hair back from my face, her black eyes glittering with unshed tears. “When you come to me like this, wounded, my heart stops: I don’t want to be the one to outlive you. But if you hadn’t torn yourself apart, Bernadine would be dead. I’ll never be able to balance what you do to yourself to save others with my own need for you to save yourself, but I promise to stop adding to your torment by chastising you for it.” She stopped, smiled wryly and added, “I will try to stop.”

I squeezed her fingers. “What happened to my dogs?”

“The dockworkers who saved you before the police arrived seemed to have taken charge of the dogs, as well. Your neighbor wouldn’t let me hospitalize him until he knew they were safe. Jake went to South Chicago to collect them. He’s boarding them in the place he says you always use.” She made a face. “He said it’s called doggie day care—because you are convalescing, I will spare you my opinion of that.”

I laughed weakly and fell back into sleep while she sat next to me. When I woke again, Lotty was gone; a nurse had roused me to warn me that the police and an FBI agent were on their way up to my room.

I felt at a disadvantage in my hospital gown, grubby and unkempt. I made them wait while I wobbled into the bathroom and rinsed my face and hair. Jake had brought over some clean clothes, a pair of his own jeans, since I’d trashed all three of mine, and a rose cotton top, which made me look almost soft, graceful—a useful piece of misdirection in speaking to the law.

Conrad looked ostentatiously at his watch when I emerged. “You can spare a few minutes now? Must be nice to take off for R and R when you feel like it, instead of sleeping standing up the way I’ve been doing.”

“Like an elephant.” I sat cross-legged on the bed.

Derek Hatfield, from the FBI, looked startled. “Elephant?”

“They sleep standing up. I expect if you’d been shot in the head and kept going so you could rescue a kidnap victim, the department would let you take a break. At least twenty minutes. Take it up with Captain Mallory. What can you tell me?”

“Wonder Woman saves the city again.” Conrad was only half jeering. “You got some major bad boys way out on a limb they can’t climb back from. The Sturlese brothers and Boris Nabiyev, they were the goons who tried killing you and the Fouchard girl. Their alibis—the flu, being on job sites—unraveled like my mother’s knitting, once we flashed some warrants around. They didn’t really have any interest in any ancient papers, just wanted to get a couple of meddling women out of the way.”

“Did they reveal who paid them?” I asked.

“The Sturlese boys say it was all about the muscle they tried to put on the facilities VP at Wrigley. They were deep in debt after the downturn, Nabiyev got money for them from the Grozny Mob, but they had to earn it out. The Grozny goons wanted to pour all the new concrete in the Wrigley reno, and when the Cubs wouldn’t talk to them, the Uzbekis sent Fugher in to try to bribe or batter a guy named Brineruck in the Cubs organization. He was the person talking to Fugher in the recording you turned up.”

“How’d you smoke him out?” I asked.

Conrad yawned. “Your friend Villard, the guy who was shot up in Evanston, he made it through surgery. He ID’d the punk speaking to Fugher. Villard called him after you played the recording and the creep panicked, called Brian Sturlese for advice. Sturlese and Nabiyev weren’t going to take any chance on being named in a potential bribery case; they drove up to the Villard mansion with Brineruck, used him as their stalking horse, and shot Villard. The Cubs fired Brineruck on the spot, of course, but we arrested him for conspiracy to commit murder. Bribery, too, but attempted murder always plays well with a jury.”

“What about Sebastian Mesaline?” I asked. “Did he ever show up?”

Conrad made a face. “Punk was hiding in his uncle Jerry’s garage down in Lansing. He dissolved like the soggy piece of Kleenex he is. Sniveled about the loan he’d been forced to take out to cover his embezzlement. His sister, who must have ‘Born to be a Martyr’ tattooed on her someplace, is insisting that he didn’t do anything wrong—even though he locked the Fouchard girl behind a steel barricade and left her to die there. Sis is putting aside money for his legal defense. She tried hiring your mouthpiece, but Freeman Carter apparently told her there’d be a conflict of interest.”

“Was there any sign that Vince Bagby was involved in the Fugher murder?”

“You have a hard-on—”

“Disgusting expression, especially when talking to me,” I said. “The Sturlese brothers didn’t have an interest in anything Annie Guzzo may or may not have hidden under Wrigley Field. I’m trying to find out who planted that in their tiny minds, or in the Grozny Mob’s brains. If it was Vince Bagby—”

“I’m not digging into Bagby on your say-so,” Conrad said coldly.

“He was at Say, Yes! the night that Bernadine and I were beaten up, and he’s been popping up every time something dramatic happens. I don’t know if it’s coincidence, or because he’s keeping an eye on me for Scanlon.”

“I can’t help you there. Maybe he knows you’re an unguided missile and he’s trying to make sure you don’t land on his trucks.”

Derek swallowed a grin.

I curled my lip. “I suppose mocking me is the easiest way to assuage your guilt over not getting to the Sturlese brothers before they dragged Bernadine Fouchard to South Chicago. Thank goodness Mr. Contreras and I rescued her before she died.”

Conrad shifted in his chair. “Sorry. Out of line. But I’m still not going after Scanlon, or Bagby, because you have an itch you want to scratch.”

I sucked in a breath, held it for a count of ten, waited for the red to fade from in front of my eyes. “There’s the business of Annie Guzzo, and what she was hiding in the tunnel at Wrigley, and why she was murdered. And all of that leads back to Rory Scanlon.”

“There’s no connection to Scanlon. And definitely not one to Bagby, who wasn’t even running the trucking company when Annie was killed.”

“Bagby and Scanlon are cousins, and Bagby is the younger one. He wanted the big boys to let him play with them when he was little, so he’d do whatever they said. It got to be ingrained. Now that they’re all grown, Bagby still does what the older boys want so he can be part of the gang.”

“What, now you’re a family therapist? They’re cousins, they do things together, so Bagby helps support Say, Yes! I’ll admit you were a big help two days ago in South Chicago, but I’ve got enough real crime in the Fourth to keep me going until my granddaughter’s in college—and I don’t have a kid of my own yet. I’m not going to start inventing crimes where the system is running smoothly.”

“The system is exactly what runs smoothly only for the people running it!” I cried, exasperated. “Scanlon is funneling money through that Say, Yes! foundation to stuff that’s either illegal or would get his insurance license revoked. Back when Annie Guzzo worked for Mandel & McClelland, she uncovered evidence that Scanlon was using the kids in his Say, Yes! foundation to beat up local businesses and push them into buying their insurance through his agency. Joel Previn overheard Scanlon and Mandel talk about using foundation funds to bankroll Spike Hurlihey’s first political campaign.”

I told them what I’d learned from Joel, from Frank Guzzo, from Mr. Villard and from the photographs themselves.

Conrad rubbed his forehead. I could see past my anger to the fatigue lines gouged in his face.

“I am not a fan of Stella Guzzo,” I added, “but the night Annie Guzzo was murdered, two other people came to the house while Stella was off playing bingo: first, Joel Previn, and after he left, Sol Mandel.”

Conrad sat upright. “What? What crystal ball spat that detail out twenty-five years after the fact?”

Derek interrupted to ask who we were talking about.

“Joel told me he was there,” I said after Conrad and I had explained the Guzzo murder story. “I never could understand why Mandel & McClelland took the case, or why poor Joel, who had a crush on Annie, agreed to represent Stella, but he told me Mandel saw his car outside the Guzzo house and threatened to turn him over to the cops if he didn’t defend Stella. It had never occurred to him that Mandel could have been Annie’s killer.”

“Maybe because Joel had already killed her himself,” Conrad snarled.

“Yeah, right, that’s a possibility. I don’t believe it after spending a lot of time with Joel.”

“Convenient to blame it on the dead partner.” Derek chipped in his two cents.

“Yes, but there’s a living person who had a stake in what Annie had uncovered,” I said. “I’m betting he came along for the ride, if not for the deed.”

Conrad stared at me. “You’re back on Scanlon’s ass. God damn it, Warshawski—”

I bared my teeth in a ferocious grin. “I have a handwritten note to my dad, rubbing his face in the fact of his transfer to West Englewood. Whoever wrote it implied that he put word out that Tony snitched on his brother officers—in order to make sure Tony was in maximum danger on the street. My father was almost killed, not once but many times, because the boys at the Seventh didn’t get him backup. The stress—he might still be part of my life today if it weren’t for whoever made sure he got put there!”

Conrad said, “And you think it was Scanlon? What proof, Ms. W.? What proof?”

“The letter! I’ve sent it to my lawyer for safekeeping, but—”

“We could run forensics on it,” Derek offered.

“I don’t want to risk it evaporating while it’s out of my custody,” I said coldly. “But I’m betting Conrad can at least ID who wrote it, even if not the taunting message to my dad. A facsimile is up on the Annie Guzzo’s Murder website.”

Conrad’s copper skin darkened to mahogany. “You did what? You set up a murder site on your own without talking to the police? And you complain when I say you take the law into your own hands?”

“We were working against the clock. I was keeping in touch with you, but the police apparatus, you couldn’t move on this as fast as I could.”

Conrad gave me a withering look, but buried himself in his smartphone, looking up the URL. I gave him and Derek the password Mr. Contreras and I had created.

Conrad looked up after reading the letter, anguish in his eyes. “I know that handwriting: Oswald Brattigan. He was my watch commander at the Fourth when I was first transferred in there. If that sentence to your father was written by Scanlon—” He broke off, his chin collapsing against his chest.

“I don’t want to believe this, or deal with it,” he mumbled after a moment. “Rory Scanlon—if he’s been using the kids in Say, Yes! to extort or intimidate—my God—it’s going to be an unholy war down there. He’s so connected, Vic: he’s got the Speaker in his pocket, the local parish—”

“But if Joel’s report on what he overheard Scanlon and Mandel talk about is correct, they were using both client accounts and foundation money to fuel political campaigns. Spike Hurlihey owes his Speaker’s gavel to illegal money.”

Conrad smacked his thigh. “That doesn’t mean he knew the money was illegal. Assuming it was illegal, which is a big ‘if.’ An overheard conversation twenty-five years ago by an alkie who couldn’t cut it at the firm? I don’t believe it and neither will a jury.”

“The prosecutor for the Northern District is going to want to take a look,” Derek said. “If the paper trail is there—we can subpoena records from Continental Illinois. Do a handwriting check on this ‘FYI, Law and Order Man’ scrawl. Maybe we can roll on one of the Say, Yes! kids to wear a wire.”

“They’re used to prison,” Conrad said. “It doesn’t frighten them. They build new gang networks there, they learn new street skills.”

“Okay, someone in the law office, or someone in Hurlihey’s office,” Derek said. He looked sympathetically at Conrad. “I don’t have to work there every day, it won’t bother me any.”

“And Annie’s murder,” I said stubbornly.

Conrad thought it over. “There’s no forensic evidence, Vic. I told you I had the files sent up when the story broke about Boom-Boom. It looked so cut and dried, girl dies from bleeding into the brain after mom beats her on the head, we didn’t look for other prints at the scene. There’s nothing to tie anyone—not even Previn—to the murder scene now.”

I let it go at that. He was right, for one thing, and for another, I was too exhausted to argue any further.

Conrad held the door open for Derek, but came back to my bed after the Fed had left. “You know that call, warning you away from South Chicago after the Dragons attacked you? I found out that Sid Gerber did it.”

“Sid?” My dad’s old pal who was the desk sergeant now down in the Fourth. “Conrad—no, he can’t have been part of—”

“No, he wasn’t, stupid old goat. He was worried about you, thought he’d be doing your old man a favor by scaring you away. When he saw what had happened down in Dead Stick Pond, he talked it over with one of the boys, who came to me with the news. I decided to pretend I hadn’t heard about it—guy is six months from retirement. I just told him that the quickest way to get you stung by a thousand wasps was to tell you to stay out of their nest.”

He turned on his heel and marched out before I could respond. I went back to sleep, but was awakened an hour later by Murray Ryerson, who’d bullied or charmed his way past the nursing staff, demanding an exclusive. He’d found photos from Mr. Contreras’s and my rescue at Dead Stick Pond that one of the hard hats had posted on Facebook and wanted my story.

I gave him most of what I knew but didn’t tell him that Derek might get the Feds to look into the Say, Yes! foundation accounts—I didn’t want to short-circuit a potential investigation with a media broadside. Instead, I told him my growing doubts about Stella’s guilt in her daughter’s death. For Murray, an old crime reporter, this was like a gazelle wandering in front of a lion. He agreed there wasn’t enough to print yet, and also no way to get evidence linking either Mandel, Scanlon or one of the juniors in Mandel’s firm to Annie’s death.

“Why did Previn have to be reckless enough to go up to Wrigley to find the papers and then such a twitcher that he fled as soon as someone confronted him?” Murray grumbled.

“Doesn’t matter,” I yawned. “The documents wouldn’t have survived the damp, let alone the rats, after all this time. The unbelievable thing is that the binder itself was still there for that prize idiot Sebastian to discover.”

Jake arrived after lunch to bring me home. I spent the afternoon listening to him rehearse the Martinsson concerto, and in the evening went with Lotty and Max to hear him perform.

All my houseplants had died from neglect. The next day, I went to my office so that my practice didn’t suffer a similar fate. In the evening I went back up to the hospital to collect Mr. Contreras, and to bring the dogs home from the doggy B&B where they’d been boarding. While we rehashed our glorious rescue mission over a picnic supper, Pierre and Bernadine showed up.

“We’re flying home tomorrow,” Pierre said, “but—I called you a lot of bad names when this petite monstre was cracking my life apart. I need to say that I am sorry.”

Bernie flushed and drew a semicircle on the floor with the toe of her boot. “I’m sorry, too, Vic, I—I almost died. Twice in one night and two times you almost died to save me.”

Mitch bounded over, pushed his big nose between Bernie and me, turning the awkward moment into a laugh.

“You had a horrific time,” I said. “Does it mean you’re going to turn your back on Northwestern’s scholarship?”

Bernie made a moue. “Cornell, Syracuse, they want me, too. I will decide after I visit them, but—”

“But only with Arlette,” Pierre said. “This tourbillon goes nowhere alone until she is forty.”

“Papa!” Bernie protested.

“Very well. If you behave and endanger no one’s life for ten years, I will reduce the sentence to age thirty-five.” Pierre smiled, but he pulled his daughter to him in a ferocious hug.