Brush Back (14 page)

The man I’d bumped scowled and growled at me in a thick Slavic accent. “Watch where you put your feet.”

It wasn’t his hard-lined, cold-eyed face that wiped the smile from my mouth, but his companion: a short wide man who bore an amazing resemblance to Danny DeVito.

“Uncle Jerry,” I exclaimed.

“Who told you my name?” Uncle Jerry glanced involuntarily at the hard-faced man.

“No one. That’s what the woman you were with called you when I saw you in the church.”

“I wasn’t in church.” He looked again at the other man, whose eyes seemed even colder.

I don’t like to see people in fear, even rude angry men. “I must be confusing you with someone else,” I agreed.

“What church Jerry was in?” the hard-faced man asked. His syntax was Slavic but his accent was gravel in any language.

“I said I mistook him for someone else,” I said. “Let’s all just get on with our day, okay?”

“What woman he was talking to?”

“I don’t know,” I said. “I don’t know you, I don’t know him, I don’t need this interrogation for the simple misdemeanor of not looking where I was going.”

“You know his name is Jerry. Where are you meeting him?”

“Tell you what,” I suggested. “You give me your name and tell me why you want to know, and I’ll answer the question.”

“When I ask question, I expect answer, no smart broads making funny. Got that?”

He bent over me, breathing garlic down my shirt. Beads of sweat stood out on Uncle Jerry’s forehead and my own throat felt tight, as if I were being strangled. I started to cross Clark, but the man grabbed my shoulder in a steel grip. I kicked hard against his exposed shin and twisted away, running into Clark Street.

Cars honked and swerved around me. Mr. Gravel-voice was trying to get at me but the street was lively with cabs; one stopped when I pounded on the door.

“Drive around the ballpark,” I said. “I want to see which way those two creeps are going.”

“He going to shoot me?” the cabbie asked, watching Gravel stick a hand inside his jacket.

“He’s going to realize he’s in the middle of a busy street with a thousand cops around him.”

The cabbie accelerated and turned left across the northbound traffic. As we turned, I saw a cop blowing a furious whistle at Gravel, forcing him back to the sidewalk. Hands on his hips, Gravel swiveled to keep an eye on the cab I was in.

I lost sight of him when we turned up Sheffield. The cabbie made the next left onto Waveland. I stopped him at the corner, handed him a ten for the three-dollar fare, stopped a cab from a different company and got him to drive me back down to the corner I’d just left. We were in time to see Gravel and Uncle Jerry climb into the Bagby truck. I took pictures as best I could from the moving taxi, but photos couldn’t begin to convey the menace in Gravel’s face or the fear in Uncle Jerry’s.

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.