Текст книги "Brush Back"
Автор книги: Sara Paretsky
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Текущая страница: 8 (всего у книги 28 страниц)
EJECTED
Joel was actually at his desk when I got to Ira’s office, typing on an old-model Dell. One thing about habitual heavy drinkers, they can stay upright and even function when the rest of us would be comatose. Ira wasn’t there, but Eunice was talking with an African-American woman around her own age. They were going through a thick stack of documents, checking them against an old calendar.
Eunice had buzzed me in, but her face was stiff with disapproval. Joel wasn’t ecstatic at seeing me, either.
“Are you here to nag some more about Stella? I told you yesterday that I know I fucked up her defense. There’s nothing else to say.”
He spoke loudly, belligerently, and Eunice froze in the middle of her own conversation.
“Joel, please take Ms. Warshawski into the office. Mrs. Eldridge’s affairs are complicated and we need quiet to focus on them.”
Joel muttered under his breath that he wasn’t a baby, he was tired of being bossed around, but he got to his feet and clumped his way to a small room at the back, not bothering to see if I was following.
“Well?” He stood just inside the door, arms folded across his chest, the edges of his full cheeks stained red.
“I talked to Melba Minsky yesterday and she sent me to Rafael Zukos.”
The red spread across his face. “Melba Minsky, she always was a goddam buttinsky. Minsky Buttinsky. She tell you the boy wonder’s amazing success stories, or did she fill your head with smutty gossip?”
“Neither.” Joel was blocking the visitor’s chair. I went around and sat behind the desk, facing him as his father must often have done. “All she said was that you and Rafe were in the same bar mitzvah class. Rafe told me—other things.”
Joel looked behind him at his mother, who couldn’t help turning around to send him an anguished glance. He closed the door and plopped heavily onto the visitor’s chair.
“Did you come here to threaten to tell Eunice and Ira those things?”
I shook my head. “Mr. Previn, your private business is no concern of mine, your parents or any other soul on the planet. Not unless your private business involved concealing evidence in Stella’s murder trial.”
A glaze of sweat covered his face, as if glass had been poured over it. The vodka, the fear, they were hammering his heart; he would be dead before Ira if he didn’t change soon.
When he didn’t speak, I said, “This diary of Annie Guzzo’s—when did you first learn about it?”
“On the news two nights ago.” His voice was thick—another sign of fear, or of lying? On the TV shows, the FBI or the con artist always can tell by body language, or the way the eyes are moving, when someone is lying, but it actually isn’t that simple.
“Stella didn’t bring it up when you were prepping her for her trial?”
“What are you getting at?”
“This diary. Is it real?”
“How should I know?” he said sullenly. “You think she’s smart enough to invent a diary? She never seemed that bright to me, the way she carried on in court no matter how many times I or Mr. Mandel or the judge told her it made her look out of control.”
“She’s angry and volatile, but not stupid. You were in love with Annie Guzzo.”
“That’s a goddam lie! Who told you that? Minsky Buttinsky?”
“I learned it from you. From the way you talked about her yesterday. What no one can understand is why you agreed to defend her killer. I know you were pushed into it by Sol Mandel, but he must have had quite a substantial club to hold over your head. Rafe told me he knew you were afraid, but he didn’t know of what—he assumed you were afraid someone was going to reveal that you and he had a few boyhood liaisons. But it wasn’t that, was it?”
He glared at me, the same look he gave his mother: angry, impotent.
“You’d seen the diary, and Annie had made fun of you. You were terrified that Stella would—”
“That’s not true! I never saw a diary, Annie never made fun of me, she knew I admired her, she knew I wasn’t out to hurt her. Not like some of the others.”
“Who in the office was hurting her?” I asked. “Mr. Mandel?”
“Oh, Mandel!” Joel made a dismissive gesture. “She knew he was an old goat wanting to act like he was still a young stud, she let him kiss her, he gave her money to help with her college fund, it was a game to her.”
“She blackmail him?”
“Annie wasn’t a criminal,” Joel cried. “Don’t make it sound dirty when it wasn’t.”
“Of course she wasn’t a criminal. She was a young woman with a big dream and no resources. She was getting help where she could find it. How much money did he give her?”
“I don’t know. I saw him one night when I was working late, she was in his office and I saw him kissing her, and then I went to the john and he was slipping something into the photocopier. I looked on my way back—it was a hundred dollars, and then Annie came out to copy something a minute later, and she stuffed the money into her purse. I never said anything to her, but I could see it was like a game to her.”
That meant that if anyone had been afraid of a possible diary becoming public knowledge, it should have been Mandel, not Joel. But Joel had been afraid during the trial, at least according to Rafe.
I thought back to yesterday’s conversation. “Spike Hurlihey? Is he the person you were afraid of during the trial? What did he know about you that you wanted kept a secret?”
“Nothing,” Joel said thickly. “Nothing, because there was nothing to know.”
“Were you afraid he was going to talk about you and Rafe?”
“Spike didn’t know about me and Rafe because we were at University High and he was down at Saint Eloy’s. I represented Stella because Mandel and Mr. McClelland told me to.”
“Didn’t that make you wonder?”
Joel’s sullen expression deepened. “I figured Mandel felt ashamed of giving Annie money. I thought he was afraid Stella would start asking questions, or bring up Annie’s—Annie’s behavior. Stella cared more about sex than anything, she couldn’t stop being angry about the way Annie attracted men. I couldn’t get her to shut up about it, it was why she was so hard to defend.”
“Everything you’re saying explains why Mandel might have been nervous during Stella’s trial. Not why you were, or why you agreed to take the case.”
“Everything you’re saying explains why you and Melba Minsky hit it off. You don’t have any grounds for asking me questions and I do not have to answer them.”
The words were brave but the tone was querulous, not confident. He looked around involuntarily, not at his mother but as if he feared an eavesdropper.
“Of course you don’t. But whatever happened to you at the Mandel & McClelland offices has been haunting you for a long time. If you told me about it, it’s possible that I could make it go away. Assuming you aren’t hiding a crime.”
His cheeks turned red again and he stumbled to his feet. “Whatever you think you’re implying, you are way out of line. Get out. Get away from Ira’s desk and go mind your own fucking business.”
I got away from Ira’s desk. Eunice was wrapping up her appointment with Mrs. Eldridge as I passed back through the main room. She gestured at me to wait. She helped the client into her coat, escorted her to the door, assured her that they were always happy to help, she knew Mrs. Eldridge was carrying a load too heavy for one woman and that’s what she and Ira were there for, to share the load.
She wasn’t nearly as gracious when she came back to me. “I don’t approve of Joel’s language, but I do share his sentiment. Annie Guzzo died a long time ago. So did your cousin. Let them all rest in peace, let Stella Guzzo alone. She can’t do you any harm. There’s no reason for you to keep coming around here.”
“You’re probably right,” I agreed. “But do you know what Joel was so afraid of that he agreed to represent Stella?”
“Leave now, Ms. Warshawski.”
She stared at me implacably until I left.
INTO THE GAP
Who had held Joel’s feet to a fire that scared him worse than Stella? I hoped it wasn’t Spike Hurlihey—the Illinois Speaker had a phalanx of protectors around him thicker than any wall I could penetrate.
I bet that Eunice knew, or at least guessed. The way she dismissed me—Joel might be a worry and a disappointment, but he was still her tiger cub, she was still protecting him. I also bet that I could bring down Spike Hurlihey before I persuaded Eunice to confide in me.
Joel came out of the office while I was brooding over his unknown sins. He didn’t see me, but beetled straight to the Pot of Gold. My stomach turned: I had browbeaten him and he was turning to his tried-and-true consolation, the Grey Goose.
I thought of the scroll hanging in Rafe Zukos’s living room, the geese in flight. Rafe, the boy wonder, Joel had bitterly called him. Rafe had moved far away from his unhappy South Side adolescence, the geese in flight, but Joel had been pulled earthward by some unhappy mix of family history, personal issues. Maybe Stella Guzzo’s trial, as well.
Joel was sure Spike hadn’t known about his and Rafe’s sexual fumblings, but bullies have a way of sniffing out secrets, or at least their targets’ weaknesses. As Rafe had reminded me yesterday, twenty-five years ago, even a whiff that a lawyer was gay could have derailed a career. Spike could have taunted Joel with the possibility—but twenty-five years ago, Spike was still a pretty young lawyer himself. He wasn’t in charge of the office, Mandel and McClelland were, so no matter how much tormenting Spike did, he wasn’t the person who decided what cases the firm took or who the partners assigned them to. How had it happened? That was what no one could tell me.
I was like someone trying to get over a video game addiction: just one more hand and I’ll give it up for good. One more conversation and I would let the Guzzos pickle in their own brine. I’d spoken to Stella’s current priest, to her trial lawyer, to the manager at the firm that had taken over Mandel’s practice. And I’d spoken to her son. I hadn’t talked to Betty, the woman Frank left me for when we were back in high school. I hadn’t seen the restraining order yet, but I didn’t think it included Stella’s daughter-in-law.
My route to the East Side, where Frank and Betty lived with her father, took me past the west side of St. Eloy’s, the side where the school and the playing fields stood. Boys were playing baseball. I stopped to look. These were high school teams, St. Eloy in silver, the visitors from St. Jerome in scarlet.
The bleachers were full of kids and parents from the two schools. It was the parents who were engaged by the action on the field; the kids were mostly listening to their devices rather than watching the action. Father Cardenal was in the front row, clapping enthusiastically.
St. Jerome’s was batting in the top of the third. The first batter reached on a routine single, the second hit a sacrifice fly to right field, but when the third kid hit a line drive headed to left field, the St. Eloy’s shortstop leapt into the gap, lay almost horizontal in midair to make the catch, and turned to double up the kid on second.
As St. Eloy’s trotted off the field, his teammates pounded the shortstop’s back, knocking his cap off. I didn’t need to see the crown of red-gold hair to know this was Frank’s son. It wasn’t just the grin, like his father’s at the same age, but those fluid moves.
Frank had covered the gap like that at sixteen. My stomach twisted. No wonder he was bitter, and wistful, seeking vindication through his son. It might happen, too, if young Frank got the right coaching, if he caught the eye of the right scouts, if he didn’t injure himself, if he continued to mature—if all the imponderables of luck and talent came together in him, Frank was right, his son had a ticket out of South Chicago, to college for sure, maybe even to the show.
The priest got up from his seat to fist-bump the kids, then started climbing the stands. I picked up the sweet-acrid smell of weed a second after he had, and saw the users bunched together on the top row. I watched the comedy play out, the desperate extinguishing of roaches, the taking of names, the promises of detention. Cardenal stayed up on the top of the stands, rummaging in the boys’ backpacks, while St. Eloy’s took the field. As he looked around he caught sight of me.
“Hola, Detective, come on up and sit down.”
He was messing with his dopers by calling me a detective, but I threaded my way up through the rows of students and parents.
“What should I do with these children smoking on my school yard?” the priest asked, jovially grabbing one of them by his shirt collar. “Set up a trace on their bank accounts, find out who they’re buying from and selling to?”
“You’re confusing me with the FBI, padre. I can’t do magic tricks with people’s money.”
“Ah, but you could follow them, right?” He slapped their shoulders. “Keep an eye behind you, this is one crafty detective. We never know whether she’s going to be on the North Side or the South Side, so you have to look in both directions.”
I didn’t say anything: I didn’t want to be part of his intimidation scheme. He let the boys sweat for a beat or two, then said, “So, Detective, come with me, tell me about your North Side investigations.”
I followed him back to the ground, looking at the action on the field while he stopped to talk to parents and children. I was hoping young Frankie would come to the plate while I was there, but St. Eloy’s already had an out and Frankie was still in the dugout.
When Cardenal finished glad-handing, he took me a short way away from the stands. “What is it you really want down here, Detective?”
I looked at him steadily. “Some slice of the truth, padre.”
“But which slice? And what do you plan to do with it?”
“Certainly not intimidate a bunch of high school kids. If they are drug-dealing gangbangers, they belong to the cops. If they’re bored, undermotivated kids with no future, you can do more for them than I can.”
“Oh—those boys up there. Yes, they’re a worrying problem all right. If they’re bored and undermotivated then they will inevitably become gangbangers. That’s why I don’t expel them for smoking dope in the ballpark—I don’t want to move them faster into gangland than they’re already going. I don’t expect you to take them on. I’m more interested in why you are looking at people in my church and then up at Wrigley Field.”
I stared. “Who– Oh. Uncle Jerry? He complained to you?”
“‘Uncle Jerry’?” Cardenal repeated. “He didn’t tell me you were a relative.”
“I don’t know his real name,” I said. “The first time I saw him, he was expostulating with a young woman; she called him ‘Uncle Jerry.’ I bumped into him this morning, quite literally. It was only five or six hours ago, but it’s fascinating that he came running to you. What did he say?”
“He says you taunted him about being in church.”
“Taunted?” I gaped. “I reminded him that we’d seen each other at Saint Eloy’s. I couldn’t find the utility closet when I was trying to stow your ladder; I lugged it all over the place and ended up in the church, where Jerry was arguing with a young woman. This morning, Jerry claimed he’d never been in church. He seemed terrified of the guy he was with, so when he denied all knowledge of Saint Eloy’s, I let it go.”
I pulled out my phone and opened the photo I’d taken of Jerry and Gravel. “This Uncle Jerry?”
Cardenal peered over the screen. “Yes, that’s Jerry. The other guy I don’t know. Who is he?”
I shook my head. “No idea. Who is Jerry?”
Cardenal paused before answering, as if trying to decide whether I wanted him to violate the confessional. “Jerry Fugher. He sometimes works on the electrics for us. He’s a kind of handyman, I guess. I don’t think he has a regular job, although his work for us is always good enough. Not creative, but functional, if you know what I mean. Maybe Bagby hires him to take care of wiring on the trucks.”
“What was he doing at Wrigley?”
“I didn’t ask,” Cardenal said, his tone reproving. “When I told him you were a detective, he became quite angry, wanting to know who hired you to stalk him. So you can see why I want to know your real business. Did you come to this church last week looking for him?”
“I didn’t think paranoia was an infectious condition, but you seem to have caught it from him. I have no interest in Jerry Fugher. My business down here is just that: my business. My cousin, remember? Stella Guzzo slandered him all over Chicago. Which brings me to a question for you: Did she give you this infamous diary for safekeeping?”
“If she did, that would not be any business of yours.”
“Have you seen this diary?” I said, impatient. “I’d like to know if it looks convincingly like a twenty-five-year-old document.”
“What does that mean?”
“A forensic expert would have to test the age of the paper, but there are a few simple things. Like, if it’s in a ‘Princess Fiona’ book, it’s definitely a forgery.”
A teacher came over to claim Cardenal’s attention: a fight had broken out behind the stands between a couple of boys from St. Eloy’s and a group from St. Jerome’s. I stopped at the home plate fence for a last look at the field. St. Eloy’s was still batting with one on and two out. Frankie was on deck. The batter ahead of him dribbled a ball back toward the mound, which should have been a routine out, but this was high school; the pitcher bobbled the throw and both runners were safe.
Frankie stepped up to the plate and the St. Eloy students and parents came to life, shrieking, stomping, yelling encouragement. The loudest cheers came from a heavy woman in the front row wearing a St. Eloy’s cap and warm-up jacket.
She screamed at me to get out of the way. “Do you own this ballpark? No one can see over your fat head.”
I backed away to the side of the stands. Frankie took strike one and a collective groan rose from the spectators.
The woman kept yelling. “Keep steady, Frankie, make him throw your pitch, he doesn’t have an arm, he has an old sock sewn to his shoulder.”
The women on either side of her were laughing and encouraging her. “You tell him, Betty! Frankie, listen to your ma, get us a hit!”
Betty Pokorny? I gaped at her. She’d put on thirty or forty pounds since high school, but it was her face that had changed. When I’d known her, she’d had soft round cheeks framed by light brown curls. Somewhere along the way she’d started bleaching her hair until now it hung in pale ropes to her shoulders. She had deep grooves along her mouth and in her forehead. Too much worry, too many cigarettes, maybe a few too many beers, too.
Frankie popped up while I was staring at her. One of her neighbors nudged her and pointed at me.
“What are you looking at?” she called. “You think your boy can outhit my boy?”
I shook my head, held up my hands, universal sign of peace, I don’t want any trouble, but the two women next to her were egging her on. Don’t let a St. Jerome’s mother dis your boy, and so on.
Betty started to her feet, fists clenched.
I went over to her. “Betty: it’s V. I. Warshawski. I stopped to watch Frankie—he’s an amazing—”
She slapped me before I could finish the sentence. “You?” she screeched. “I knew it, knew you’d never forgive me for stealing Big Frank from you. You’ve been up there on the North Side all these years, plotting—”
“No!” I roared.
She stopped shouting, but stood clenching and unclenching her fingers. Her two friends eyed her uneasily. They liked a shouting match but not a fight.
Other parents began yelling at us to shut up: “We didn’t come to watch two old broads fight.” “We’re here to watch our boys.” “Shut up!” “Get out of the way.”
I took Betty’s arm and hustled her away from the stands, to the back where Father Cardenal was dealing with the remnants of the fight he’d been summoned to break up.
BRUSH BACK
“You never did forgive me for stealing Frank,” Betty repeated, but uncertainly, as if she didn’t really believe it.
“You two broke my heart,” I agreed, “but it mended. I only stopped here today to see your son play. Frank told me he thought he might go all the way and—”
“So you have been sneaking around with Frank behind my back!”
It was the tiredness in her face that kept me from losing my temper, the heavy lines that I’d seen on the faces of my classmates’ mothers when I was growing up. She wouldn’t have wanted my pity, but poverty is an unrelenting taskmaster.
“Didn’t Frank tell you? He hired me to try to help Stella with her exoneration claim. Which only led to her slandering Boom-Boom, and then slapping me with a restraining order. We have been having fun without you, I suppose.”
“He hired you without talking to me? And me, trying to pay the bills and raise the kids on what he brings home from Bagby? Where’s that money supposed to come from? Stella’s right—you and your mother, you live to ruin our lives.”
“I hadn’t thought about you in years, Betty, not until Frank came to me two weeks ago. Sounds as though you and Stella are pretty close, though. I’m surprised—I didn’t think you wanted her moving in with you when she came home from prison.”
“I’m looking after enough people with my dad, the kids, Frank, I don’t need Stella. But that doesn’t mean I don’t respect her for standing up for her beliefs.”
“What beliefs?” I asked. “She has some moral code I don’t know about?”
“No, you wouldn’t,” Betty said scornfully. “You’re the one who encouraged Annie to go on the Pill, to sleep around, all that stuff. If she hadn’t hung out around you and your mother, she never would have carried on the way she did.”
“Carried on how?”
“She was like you: she’d go after anything in pants. Maybe Stella reacted too hard, but if either of my girls goes on the Pill and I learn about it, I’ll be just as mad as Stella was.”
“You’ll kill your kids? It’s an interesting riff on safe sex. You think Stella was right to murder Annie?”
Betty reddened. “You’re twisting my words! Of course not. I’m just saying Annie wasn’t the little saint you and your mother thought.”
Out of the corner of my eye I could see Father Cardenal looking at us. I was afraid he might interrupt, but the mother of one of the kids he’d been dealing with started shouting at him and he turned back to the other fight.
“How did you know Annie was on the Pill? Did she tell you?”
“Goddam right she did. Frank and me, we were married, Lucy was two and I was pregnant with Kelly—Frank Junior, he was my third before the two youngest girls. Anyway, Annie came over to watch Lucy for me while I went to the store. You never were pregnant, were you? That’s how you kept your figure, but babies take a toll, so I mentioned my sore back. And little Miss Priss says, ‘You ever hear of birth control?’ showing off her packet. Like this.”
Betty picked up a twig and dangled it between her thumb and forefinger. “I wanted to smack her, she was so smug and smirky. ‘Don’t you know it’s a mortal sin to take those pills?’ I said. I tried to grab them from her but she laughed, stuck them in her purse.
“‘I’m going to Philadelphia to college,’ she says. ‘No one’s going to tie me down with a baby and a husband. Mortal sins and coal dust, they’re both about as useful as Daddy’s pension.’ Mateo Guzzo’s pension disappeared along with everyone else’s when the steel company went bankrupt,” Betty added.
“Did Annie say who she was sleeping with?” I held my breath, hoping Betty would say Joel or Sol Mandel or even Spike Hurlihey.
“I asked who the lucky boy was and she got this look on her face, you know, like she’s Cosmo’s sex adviser. ‘No boys for me. They’re too young, they don’t know how to treat women.’ That’s how I knew it was Boom-Boom, because he was the only older man she was close to.”
I opened and shut my mouth without speaking. Annie had been close to my dad, and to Sol Mandel, and maybe to the other partner at the law firm, but I didn’t want to add to the muck Betty was carrying in her head.
Betty was still ranting. “Of course I told Frank about it and we agreed Stella should know. I mean, Annie wasn’t even going to be eighteen for another month!”
The field and stands seemed to shimmer behind me. Frank, coming to me, not telling me about that conversation? What a total fuckup, him, Stella, the whole situation.
“You told Stella. Is that why she had her final big blowup with Annie? Is that why Annie had to die?”
Betty’s chin jutted out in a major-league scowl. “You can’t say things like that! It’s not my fault if Stella went off the deep end. I thought she had a right to know, a right as a mother. She went through Annie’s dresser. Besides the pills, she found an envelope with two thousand dollars in it!”
“I hope neither of you is imagining Boom-Boom paid Annie to sleep with him. He was pushing women away with his hockey stick in hotel lobbies all over North America.”
Betty bunched up her lips. “Stella took the money. When Mr. Guzzo’s pension disappeared it was hard for her to keep up the mortgage payments, and for Annie just to sit on that cash! Me and Frank had to live with my folks, trying to save something extra for a house, which you don’t do when you’ve got a baby and another one coming. Annie thought she was so much better than us, going off to some East Coast college. Just like you she was, sleeping with anyone and everyone, flaunting her education.”
I couldn’t tell which the real grievance was—sex or education. Maybe both. “Did Annie reveal where the money came from?”
“Stella demanded, she had a right to know, and Annie said Mr. Mandel gave it to her, a present to help with college. And Stella asked what special favors Mr. Mandel asked for to help send Annie away. Annie slapped her, can you believe that? Hitting her own mother? So Stella had to fight back. It went on and on, night after night, the fighting, the shouting—the Jokiches even called the police—until the night, well, the night Annie died.”
“Don’t you see? If it was Mandel who gave Annie the money, then he was the older man in her life, not Boom-Boom.”
“She was so promiscuous, who knows how many people she took her pants off for,” Betty spat.
Her rage and her obsession with Annie’s sex life seemed to swirl around like a cloud of gnats, annoying but impossible for me to come to grips with.
“Who told you Annie slapped Stella?” I asked instead.
“Stella, of course. Annie would never admit she did one wrong thing in her life. And then of course the night she died she actually came at Stella with a kitchen knife.”
“Or so Stella claimed,” I said dryly. “If Stella went through Annie’s things hunting for her pills, why didn’t she find the diary when she found the two thousand dollars? Did you see the diary when you were searching Annie’s clothes after the trial?”
“What do you mean, searching?” Betty’s face quivered.
I meant she probably hoped there was another envelope full of cash. “Looking for mementos,” I suggested hastily. “Even if you had your differences, she was your husband’s sister, you must have wanted a keepsake.”
Betty still looked suspicious, but she said, “I wasn’t looking for the diary, for anything special, I mean, just what clothes could go off to the church rummage sale. She must have spent half her paycheck at Victoria’s Secret. Only a girl like Annie would own underclothes like those. I threw out the pills—I didn’t think Stella needed to stumble on those again when she got home—but I didn’t take the drawers apart, why would I?”
“So you didn’t see the diary,” I prodded.
“Stella told me when she found it last week, it was on its spine, wedged against the back of the drawer. You had to take the whole drawer out to see it, and I didn’t do that when I was clearing things out.”
“Did Stella show you the diary?” I asked.
“She’s given it to someone to keep safe, so you can’t get your dirty Warshawski fingers on it. She knows you want it.”
I inspected my Warshawski fingers. They didn’t look that dirty.
“Father Cardenal?” I asked.
“Never mind who she gave it to, it’s none of your business.”
“Why did you leave the house standing empty all that time that Stella was away?” I asked. “Frank could have sold it, used the money to buy Stella an apartment when she got out.”
“We didn’t expect her to be gone so long, you know, the lawyers, Mr. Scanlon, they all told us a good woman like Stella, never in trouble with the law—Mass every Sunday, First Friday devotions almost every year—they told us she’d be home within three years.”
“Mr. Mandel told you?” I asked.
“That’s what everyone said.” Betty scowled.
“Who in particular said she’d be out in three years?” I repeated.
“It was just the talk, Father Gielczowski, Mr. Scanlon, everyone who knew her, they all knew she didn’t mean to kill Annie, it was an accident, she shouldn’t have been in prison so long, that’s all I meant. They all said the judge would reduce the sentence, but then he didn’t.”
“What did Scanlon have to do with Stella’s trial?” I asked.
“Mr. Scanlon pays attention to everyone in this neighborhood. He’s in church every Sunday, pays for the prizes at the bingo. When Ferrite Workers S&L wanted to foreclose on Daddy, who do you think made them refinance us instead? If Frankie keeps his grades up, Mr. Scanlon’s going to get him into a good baseball camp this summer, one where the real scouts come and see the boys play.”
“Sounds like Santa Claus,” I said dryly, wondering what Scanlon got out of it. Frank’s offhand revelations about Father Gielczowski made me think about the horror stories that had come out of Penn State University. How many sports programs, sports camps existed as a cover for grown men to abuse boys?
I should have kept the thought to myself, but I made the mistake of asking Betty if she’d had the talk with Frankie Junior, the one where you remind your children that they don’t have to let people touch them, no matter how many promises they give about baseball careers.
“How dare you?” Betty’s eyes glittered dangerously. “Are you going to start making up smut about Mr. Scanlon so you can screw up Frankie’s chances? If you hurt him the way Boom-Boom did Big Frank, I swear on my mother’s grave that you will be sorry you ever were born.”
Father Cardenal had been hovering uneasily in the background. “Problem here, ladies?”
“Ms. Guzzo and I went to high school together,” I said. “We were catching up.”
