Brush Back (53 page)

Jake and Lotty both urged me to stop thinking about South Chicago, despite the many open ends to the business. I knew I didn’t have the time or the money to dig into the
Say, Yes!
foundation’s records, or Scanlon’s old accounts at Continental Illinois. Perhaps the federal prosecutor for the Northern District was doing so, as the FBI’s Derek Hatfield had suggested. No ripples were surfacing on the street yet, so either the Feds were moving very cautiously, or they weren’t moving at all. I didn’t have any way of finding out.

The problem that gnawed at me—that made me so restless that Jake sent me home to my own bed more than once—was Annie’s death. I could let Scanlon’s and Mandel’s financial skulduggery go—almost.

But much as I disliked Stella Guzzo, much as I knew she’d beaten her children many times, and Annie on the last night of her daughter’s life, I couldn’t stop trying to imagine a way to prove she was innocent.

I’d become convinced she’d been set up. It wasn’t only Joel’s revelation that he and Sol Mandel had both been at the Guzzo house the night that Annie died, but the whole load of laundry that unfolded after I started asking questions. Every time I got close to a piece of the story, a new drama erupted, forcing my attention elsewhere. The diary implicating Boom-Boom, that had been designed to keep my attention away from Stella. The beating Bernie and I had experienced had roused my suspicions, but in a different direction.

Conrad was right: no physical evidence existed to prove one way or another if Mandel or Scanlon, or even Spike Hurlihey, had been in the Guzzo house the night Annie died. But there was another route, actually two other routes, and in the end, I decided—against Freeman Carter’s advice, and to Jake’s dismay and Lotty’s fury—to pursue both of them. The fact that both Mr. Contreras and Murray Ryerson supported me didn’t improve the atmosphere with Jake and Lotty.

I started with Frank Guzzo; he and I had already violated the restraining order, so I figured I could do it again without risking arrest.

We agreed to meet in Grant Park—halfway between north and south—next to the Christopher Columbus statue. Chicago’s Italian community had raised money for the statue; maybe it would make us remember Frank’s Italian father, my Italian mother, and bring us closer together.

Frank arrived half an hour after me. He was nervous, demanding I show whether I was recording him, looking around to make sure no one was videotaping him. He finally stood still long enough for me to say I’d come around to thinking his mother had been railroaded.

He was suspicious, not gratified. “What are you trying to trick me into saying?” he demanded.

“I’m trying to talk sense to you, Frank,” I said.

I told him about Joel Previn coming to the house and seeing Annie alive with all her wits about her the night she died, and he finally started paying serious attention to me.

“That means that Previn killed Annie?”

“Could mean it, but I doubt it. Sol Mandel and Rory Scanlon were the people who had the most to lose if Annie kept on the way she was going, and Mandel at least was at the house after Joel left. He had other people with him, possibly Spike Hurlihey, possibly Scanlon—”

“No, Tori! No, don’t you see—you cannot go around accusing Scanlon. You can’t, you mustn’t!”

“Or what?” I demanded. “He’ll send Stella back to prison? He’ll get Bagby to fire you?”

“I—oh,
damn
you, Tori, why can’t you leave well enough alone? The diary, that was supposed to make you go away, the mugging, nothing would stop you. Do you want them to kill you?”

“Frank, what is it? What have you done that has you doing whatever they want?”

“It’s not me,” he burst out. “It’s Frankie, my boy!”

A couple out walking their dog stared at us with open curiosity. I waved at them and they scurried on.

“What has Frankie done? Is he running with the Insane Dragons?”

“No. It’s baseball.”

“Baseball?” I repeated. “Oh. Scanlon has told you that if you rock the boat about Stella, he’ll make sure Frankie doesn’t get a shot at the big time.”

Frank didn’t say anything, just looked at his hands, his face holding such a naked display of helplessness that I had to look away.

“Frank, why did you come to me to begin with, then, if you were worried about Frankie? As soon as you asked me to investigate what your mother was up to, that whole string of lies was likely to unravel.”

“I didn’t know,” he said. “I came to you for the reason I said, I didn’t know what Ma was up to or what she was going to do. I was afraid if she started acting too wild in public, it would hurt Frankie. You know, baseball today, the family has to make a good impression. Scouts see there’s a crazy grandma bouncing around in public, they got a thousand other talented boys they can look at whose grandmothers didn’t beat or kill their own kids. Mr. Scanlon, he had promised he’d make sure no one found out about Ma killing Annie, but when you started asking questions, he got mad.”

“He came to you, told you this?” I asked.

“No, I’m too far down the food chain. He talked to Bagby. Bagby came to me, said Scanlon had a bee in his bonnet about you digging up old dirt, that you look down on the rest of us, you think people like me are idiots or fools for staying on in the old neighborhood.

“And then, the lady at the law firm, Thelma, she found Annie’s diary in an old desk. Vince told me maybe stick it in Annie’s dresser and have Betty go over and suggest to Ma that they get rid of Annie’s clothes. They thought if there was evidence against Boom-Boom, you’d want to bury it, and so you’d stop asking questions.”

“Oh, Frank. The law of unintended consequences. It turned up so conveniently that once I stopped seeing red, white and blue, I was sure it was a fake. The diary goaded me into asking more questions.”

“They told me it was the real thing. They said they wouldn’t ask me to plant a fake in my own ma’s house,” Frank said.

“But when you looked at it—you must have known it wasn’t Annie’s writing.”

Frank flung up his hands, exasperated. “I don’t know Annie’s writing. She didn’t write me letters, we lived in the same house! I wasn’t reading her school homework and even if I had been, it’s so long ago I wouldn’t know if it was her or you or the Pope who wrote it.”

He had a point. Besides, he’d wanted to believe in the diary: it was an easy way out of his problems. And given his lingering jealousy of Boom-Boom, he’d probably felt a certain Schadenfreude at the thought of fingering my cousin.

I pulled out a photocopy of the condolence letter Annie had written my dad when Gabriella died. “Does this look like her writing to you?”

He read it, hunched a sullen shoulder. “I guess, if you say so.”

“Yep. I say so. The original is in a safe, but if I can get a subpoena, I am going to force your mother to produce the book you hid in Annie’s dresser drawer. And then it will be an ugly court battle.”

“Just leave it alone. Ma, her doctor made her start taking lithium. She’s not going to bother you anymore.”

I glared at him. “I am not going to let the boys in the old Mandel & McClelland office get away with framing your mother for murder. I don’t know which one killed your sister, but I’m going to have a shot at forcing him—them—into the open. However—” I held up a hand, demanding silence, as Frank started to protest.

“I’ll make sure they know you didn’t have anything to do with it. I promise you that I will not leave you and Frankie out to dry.”

“Oh, your promises, you can promise anything, your life isn’t going to be hurt by you digging up dirt left, right and center.”

“What do you mean, my life won’t be hurt?” A red mist swam in front of my eyes. “I was nearly killed by the Sturlese brothers and their gorilla. You cost me weeks of income, asking me to work for you and then not paying me. I have legal fees from dealing with this insane order of protection your mother filed. Boom-Boom has been slandered. And all so you can protect the remote chance of Frankie making it to the show. I have bills, just like you. I work for a living, just like you. You’re lucky I don’t sue your sorry ass.”

“Yeah, well, you can’t get blood out of a turnip.”

“Maybe not, but you can get enough turnip juice to make soup.”

Frank kicked a hole in the grass with the heel of his work boot. He muttered something that might have been an apology, but when he had started back toward his truck, he couldn’t resist turning around to yell, “If you’d ever had any kids, you’d know you do anything to protect them.”

“Yeah, Frank, right, whatever.”

I watched him drive off before I got into my car—actually Jake’s Fiat—and headed north to Rafe Zukos and Kenji Aroyawa’s home in Rogers Park.

MONEY PITCH

“Today’s top story,
Chicago—who has the real diary written by murder victim Annie Guzzo on the night she died? V. I. Warshawski or Stella Guzzo? They call Warshawski Chicago’s premier investigator for a reason: she’s thorough, she’s good and she’s lucky. When she almost lost her life to save Blackhawks star Pierre Fouchard’s daughter, the news galvanized an anonymous citizen into mailing her pages from the diary of a long-dead Chicago girl, Annie Guzzo.”

It was a great story, and Murray made the most of it. While he narrated, the production team ran footage from South Chicago, from Pierre’s and Boom-Boom’s days with the Hawks, from Wrigley Field where Annie had hidden her diary.

“You can see a copy of the diary Warshawski received in the mail on our website: globalentertainmentnews/Annie-Guzzo-Diary. No one knows how the handwriting or content compares to the diary Annie’s mother, Stella, claims to have found, because no one, not even our lawyers, has been allowed to view that version.”

I went to the website. Sure enough, the pages of Annie’s diary that I’d given Murray were posted there, the sprawling schoolgirl handwriting difficult enough to read that Murray had put a typed transcript underneath.

September 10

Ma is out of control. Mr. M, ditto, Frank and Betty are so
depressing
, nothing but babies and diapers and looking down their nose at anyone who thinks there’s a life outside St. Eloy’s. Joel looks at me like a sheep that wants to break through the fence and nibble on me but is too scared to. Oh, I can’t wait to be FREE, FREE, FREE.

September 14

All Frank can talk about is stupid fucking baseball. There, I said it, at least in here. Can’t wait to get away. Bryn Mawr, that’s where I want to be, pictures are SOOO gorgeous. Ma thinks Frank walks on water, all she talks about is how he’ll be with the Cubs and then I’ll see how stupid my college dreams are. She doesn’t hit Frank anymore. She broke my front tooth yesterday, dental bill is HUGE. Have to work more overtime.

Boom-Boom is getting Frank in shape for tryouts. Says Frank has good hand-eye coordination but out of practice. Frank loves B-B, Frank hates B-B.

September 18

Going to Wrigley for Frank’s tryout. Frank said, no Boom-Boom, he doesn’t want the Star to take the shine away from him, but B-B wants to watch. Told B-B I wanted to come along.

September 24

Boom-Boom so angry with me for running off, he didn’t watch Frank fuck up on the field (my good deed for my brother, kept the Star from seeing him “whiff the curve”). Ma hit me again, mad at me because Frank lost his chance. Didn’t even feel it. Now all the papers showing what Mr. M and Rory Scanlon are really doing with the foundation money are safe, inside a kind of tunnel, wrapped inside insulating tape around some big pipe. Cubs photographer, maintenance guys, they were cool, they saw it as a big joke I was playing on the hockey star, they helped me out.

October 13

Mr. Warshawski says criminals feel an urge to share their cleverness, that’s how the police catch a lot of people. Now I know what he means, I’m aching to tell someone else, about the papers, and how I hid them, but who can I trust?

October 27

Mr. M tries to wheedle the papers out of me. Says I have a BIG Christmas bonus coming. I said I thought Jews didn’t celebrate Christmas. He said it’s a secular society, I’ll realize when I get out of the St. Eloy’s orbit.

December 20

Joel helped me with my college applications. Spike and the other guys make fun of him. If only he didn’t SWEAT so much I’d let him kiss me, he’s so sweet and vulnerable in a puppy kind of way.

He helped me write a piece of music to use in my college applications. I played it on Mrs. Warshawski’s piano; Mr. W said it sounded like Verdi, and that he was sure his wife was listening in heaven and loving it. I loved Mrs. W, I wish he hadn’t said that, if she’s listening in heaven she knows I didn’t do most of the work myself. Fail on your own merits, that was always her advice to me. Work hard and fail on your own merits, don’t succeed on someone else’s. Now—I’m disobeying her. Feels 1000 x worse than disobeying Ma. Who hit me AGAIN for bragging about the music. Maybe that evens it all out.