Brush Back (13 page)

I laughed, but I knew that in the morning I would be going back to Jeffery Avenue to talk to Joel Previn again. Early, before he fell into the Pot of Gold.

BUY ME SOME PEANUTS

As it turned out,
Joel was able to get quite a long lead on his vodka the next day. After leaving Rafe and Ken, I drove to my office, where I learned that the media obsession with Boom-Boom’s alleged involvement with Annie Guzzo hadn’t abated. A car was parked in my space in the lot by my building, meaning I had to pay to use a meter on the street. When I walked over to confront the driver, he jumped out with a handheld mike and a video cam. Another crew emerged from the coffee bar across the street.

The guy in my parking space shoved his mike into my nose. “Les Fioro with Global, Vic. How do you feel about these accusations?”

I backed away. “Sorry, what accusations?”

Another mike appeared—the people from the coffee bar were piggybacking onto Les’s interview.

“Your cousin, wasn’t he?” the second mike said.

“My cousin? What cousin?”

“Haven’t you seen the news? Stella Guzzo is claiming your cousin killed her daughter,” Les said.

I shook my head. “My cousin has been dead for a good decade now. I doubt he’s come back as a zombie to murder anyone.”

Les was getting exasperated. “This happened before he died.”

“Ah, that would explain it,” I said.

“So how do you feel about it?” the second mike demanded.

“I still don’t know what you’re talking about.”

I went to the front door to type in the code, but Les wasn’t so easily put off. He came up behind me, telling me about Annie’s murder, and Stella’s claims. I dropped my briefcase and when I stood up with it, knocked the mike out of his hands.

“I’m sorry,” I said, smiling. “I didn’t realize you were standing so close to me. I hope it still works.”

The second mike retreated to the street: I was too unstable to waste more time with. I retyped the code and went inside while Les was chasing the mike, which had rolled to the curb.

I stood with the door open a few inches. “Mr. Fioro, my first phone call is going to be to a towing service: you are in a space that is clearly marked as reserved for tenants. Unless you want to pay towing fees, move your car.”

Once in my office, I scrubbed the avocado off my jacket as best I could, but the lapel of the wheat-colored linen now had a green cast to it. It can always get worse, I reminded myself, so don’t curse what’s already gone wrong. At least the tostada had been light and crisp, the vegetables fresh, the beans homemade.

I opened my file on Stella and tried to type in what I’d learned today. Not much of anything. I couldn’t see a trial transcript, no one knew if she’d been going to blame Boom-Boom in court when he was still alive and could sue for slander, no one knew why Sol Mandel made the hapless Joel defend her.

I’d told young Bernadine that I was going to get information but so far, the score was Stella ten, V.I. nothing. Or maybe one: I did have one new fact: Mr. Mandel’s first name had been Sol. And I knew, or at least was pretty sure of, another: that the diary hadn’t been in the Guzzo house twenty-five years ago.

I wanted to see it myself, so badly I began imagining ways to break into Stella’s and look at it. Really poor idea, V.I., let it go.

I still wanted to shoot Stella, but it was time to move on. However, when I logged onto my server, the media inquiries were sprinkled with fretful messages from clients. Had my cousin been involved in murder? Was I covering it up? That seemed to be the common theme, although some had an avid curiosity covered by a thin veneer of concern, what could they do to help, and what had Boom-Boom done, really? I could trust them.

I put on a big grin and started returning calls—yes, I’m an upbeat, problem-solving professional and your affairs are safe in my hands. No murderers anywhere.

When I’d taken care of the most urgent calls, I went into Lexis-Nexis for some background on Nina Quarles, current owner of the Mandel & McClelland firm. Quarles had apparently seen the firm as an investment opportunity, despite the violent neighborhood and the nearly nonexistent income of the client base. The firm mostly handled wills and real estate matters for people like Melba and Harold Minsky, petitioned for orders of protection against people like me. No, just joking—mostly against violent domestic partners. They also handled criminal defense for people with enough money for a private lawyer.

I couldn’t believe that kind of business generated enough income to support a woman like Nina Quarles in her travel and shopping habits, but when I looked up her personal profile, I saw she had other resources. She’d grown up on the East Side, only child of Felicia Burzle and Norman Quarles, a guy who’d had a successful business manufacturing brakes for freight cars.

Both her parents were dead and her trust fund would keep her in Givenchy and Armani for another two or three hundred years, even if she bought a new outfit every day. This didn’t explain why she’d bought the firm, but maybe McClelland had put her trust together and she’d felt sentimental about it. I shrugged and shut down my system.

I was turning out the lights when a call came in from Natalie Clements in the Cubs media department. Her young voice was vibrating with cheer. “Ms. Warshawski? I’m sorry it took me so long to get back to you, but we do have a few photographs of Boom-Boom Warshawski at Wrigley Field. Mr. Drechen says you can come up to see them when it’s convenient for you, as long as it isn’t a game day.”

I’d forgotten about going to the Cubs in an effort to double-check Frank’s story about the tryouts. Now I wondered if it was really worth it, but the publicity crew at Wrigley seemed to be the only people willing to help me. It would be churlish to say I’d lost interest: I told her I’d stop by first thing in the morning.

Bernie was still asleep when I left the next day. She’d announced when she came home last night that she’d found a job at a Bucktown coffee bar. I hoped she hadn’t been hired for the early shift.

No one bothered me when I cautiously looked out my front door. The media vultures, who’d still been hovering last night outside my building, had finally gotten bored.

When I got to Wrigley Field, crews were hard at work getting ready for an upcoming home stand. They were doing everything from bringing in supplies to testing the PA system. Food vendors were lined up along Clark, unloading through the big doors. Behind them was a fleet of beer trucks. I’m not much of a beer drinker at the best of times; the sight of so much of it, so early in the morning, made me queasy.

Bagby Haulage, the outfit Frank Guzzo drove for, had a truck there, too, parked along Addison. I’d thought they were local to the far South Side, but they clearly were bigger than I’d imagined if they had a contract with someone who served the Cubs. It would be a cruel punishment for Frank, if he had to ferry peanuts or Cracker Jacks to the ballpark where he’d hoped to play. I craned my neck to see who was in the cab, but the truck was empty.

Natalie Clements had left a pass for me with the security staff at the main gate. As I hiked up the ramps to the floor with the press offices, I passed the crews moving their loads of food and souvenirs into the storage caves behind the vending booths.

The belly of Wrigley wasn’t pretty. Work lamps were hooked under low-sloping ceilings. There were small cracks in the concrete, and the massive cables that fed the stadium’s power were attached to the outside of the weight-bearing columns, snaking along floors and walls—it would have cost too much to break into the concrete and install them out of sight.

Before going into Natalie Clements’s office, I went to the doorway leading to the stands. A team was hosing down the seats, collecting trash they’d missed after the last home game. The grounds crew would have been out already at first light, but they were finicking around the pitcher’s mound, getting the slope the way tomorrow’s starter liked it.

The grass was greener than it had been a week ago. The thick vines along the outfield wall were starting to turn green. I was facing the bleachers, where Boom-Boom and I used to climb the back wall and scramble into the seats—after sneaking onto the L by shinnying up the girders. We didn’t have any pocket money, but I guess that’s no excuse for a life of crime. I was still committing cons and crimes, I suppose, since I was letting Natalie Clements think I was writing my cousin’s biography.

I followed the ramps to the section where the press offices lay. They were cubbyholes, really, since every cubic inch in a ballpark needs to generate revenue. Natalie Clements introduced me to her boss, Will Drechen, who told me he hadn’t thought at first that they’d kept any of the pictures from that particular day.

“I happened to mention your project to my old boss when I went to see him last night. He’s been retired a long time, but he was a big fan of your cousin,” Drechen added. “He’d found these when he was going through old files.”

Drechen had the photos laid out on a tabletop. One showed Boom-Boom on the field, clowning around with Mitch Williams, who’d been a wild man on the mound, equally terrifying to fans and opponents. Boom-Boom’s face was alive with the excitement I’d seen a thousand times, whenever he was doing something high-risk. It was such a vivid photo I thought if I turned around my cousin might be standing behind me.

Natalie said, “Mr. Villard, he’s the gentleman who had the photos, he used to handle community relations, he said when Boom-Boom couldn’t come close to hitting Mitch Williams, Boom-Boom said it was because he was used to being in the penalty box for having his stick up that high.”

“Sounds like him,” I agreed.

I busied myself with the rest of the array to hide an unexpected spasm of grief. Seeing Boom-Boom’s face so filled with vitality, hearing my cousin’s words, the loss suddenly felt recent, not a decade old.

The pictures included three shots from inside the dugout. Frank was seated halfway down the bench, his face just visible behind Andre Dawson: the great right-fielder was leaning over to talk to my cousin, who was sitting at the end farthest from the field. Poor Frank. No wonder he felt bitter. No wonder he’d whiffed the curve.

I said, “It must have been hard on the guys who came to try out to have Boom-Boom in the spotlight there. Do you know if any of them actually got picked up by the franchise?”

Drechen bent over a group photo. All the men were in the uniforms of the amateur teams they played for. I could see the “Ba” from Bagby on the front of Frank’s warm-up jacket. Frank’s head was up, shoulders back, but his expression was fierce—a man holding back tears. The picture must have been taken after the guys had their chance.

Drechen said, “This guy back here”—he tapped the face of a man in the second row—“he played a season for us in Nashville, but he couldn’t adjust to the pros. We sent him to a development squad the next year, but he quit before the season was over. The rest of them, sadly, no. Open tryouts are like that. Every now and then you find that diamond in the rough, but we chiefly hold them because it’s good community relations. Fans give their heart and soul to this franchise and we want it to be a welcoming place for them.”

“Ever get any women at your open tryouts?” I asked.

“Every now and then,” Drechen said. “You want a shot?”

“If my cousin couldn’t hit major league pitching when he was at his peak, no way do I have a fantasy about doing it myself. Although a chance to stand on that turf—let me know the next time you’re holding them.”

Drechen laughed, said he understood I was writing a biography of Boom-Boom; they’d be glad to get me permission to use the pictures.

“The one of Boom-Boom with Mitch Williams, I’d like a copy of that for myself if it’s possible. The rest, I’ll let you know when I get that far.”

I left, offering a shower of thanks, before Drechen or Natalie could ask me for the name of a publisher or a publication date. On my way out, I stopped to study the pictures along the walls. Great moments in Cubs history covered everything from the time they brought elephants onto the field to Wrigley’s “League of Their Own” team in the 1940s.

I slowly followed the ramp back down to the ground, sidling past a forklift hoisting a crew up to do something with an overhead pipe, almost getting run over by a motorized cart hauling beer kegs. When I got outside, it was a relief to be in the open air, away from the dank pipes and the smell of beer.

I was at the corner of Clark and Addison when I heard my name called; it was Natalie Clements from the press office, breathless from running down the stairs.

She held out a folder to me. “I was hoping I’d catch you—I made a print of your cousin for you. And Will wanted to give you a pass to next week’s game against New York.”

She darted back inside on my thanks, running in high heels without tripping, which ought to be an Olympic event. I walked along, bent over my cousin’s face, and ran into someone.

“Sorry!” I looked up, smiling my apologies.