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“Stella never confessed,” Joel protested.

“And she didn’t say one word that implied she had a theory about who actually did kill Annie?”

“I don’t remember!” Joel shouted. “It was twenty-five years ago.”

He took a long swallow from the soda cup. It isn’t really true that vodka is odorless, it just doesn’t smell as noticeably as scotch or rum.

“Betty went through Annie’s things while Stella was in prison, looking for a secret stash. Stella had already taken two thousand dollars from Annie and Betty hoped there’d be more. She also took Annie’s lingerie, even though she thought it was the kind of underwear that sends you to hell.”

I could picture the greed on Betty’s face, the justification: she was a whore, I’m righteous, I should have these pretty things. They wouldn’t have fit—even twenty-five years ago, Betty wasn’t the elfin creature her sister-in-law had been. I had a skin-crawling fantasy of her hiding them, taking them out to play with, and started speaking to cover my discomfort.

“If there’d been a diary in Annie’s bra drawer, Betty would have seen it. No, the diary and the implication of Boom-Boom only appeared when Stella started talking about exoneration.”

Joel put the cup down halfway to his mouth. “You’re saying someone planted a made-up diary to shut Stella up?”

“No one can shut Stella up; you told me not even Judge Grigsby’s warnings kept her from outbursts in court. No, someone wanted to divert attention from Stella’s exoneration claim.”

“This Betty?” Bernie asked.

“Betty isn’t imaginative enough to make up a diary. Someone else is pulling those strings behind the scenes.” I eyed Joel thoughtfully: he was smart, even if he was drunk, smart enough to seem more belligerent than he was. “You’re sure Stella hasn’t been consulting you?”

“I keep telling you, her opinion of me was lower than, I don’t know, Ira’s and Sol Mandel’s put together. She wouldn’t come to me for a glass of water if she was dying in the desert.” The metaphor made him tilt his head back and drain the cup.

“Mr. Mandel went along with the bullying in his office, I gather—the way Spike Hurlihey taunted you, for instance. What about Mr. McClelland? No one ever mentions him.”

“McClelland? He wined and dined politicians and got them to throw a few alewives our way. He and Mandel figured out how to get rich in a poor neighborhood, but they needed bigger clients, downtown clients, the kind that can pull strings for you. McClelland worked that angle.”

“The Loop office.” I remembered Thelma Kalvin, the manager at Nina Quarles’s law office, mentioning it. “The downtown connections; they were something that Nina Quarles bought from Mandel & McClelland when she took over the South Chicago practice?”

Joel hunched a shoulder. “I suppose. I stopped paying attention to their business a long time ago. Anyway, McClelland wasn’t in the office very often, but when he was, he laughed and clapped along with the rest of the audience over how Hurlihey and his clique talked to me. Only Annie . . .”

“Only Annie didn’t laugh?”

“I helped her with her college applications,” Joel muttered. “She needed to stand out, going up against all those prep school graduates. I helped her write her essays, then I helped her write a song. Her piano playing, she was technically good, but she didn’t have the—the passion to stand out in a crowd, so we thought if she could be a composer . . .” His voice trailed away again.

My brows went up: Joel did have an interest beyond sports and drinking. “Do you still write music?” I asked.

His round cheeks bunched up so high his eyes disappeared. “I fail at everything I touch. My music was derivative, Ira knew enough to tell me that.”

I couldn’t think of any suitable response and even Bernie looked daunted. Joel took the plastic cover off his cup and dug out a handful of ice, which he crunched noisily.

“What about Rory Scanlon?” I finally asked. “The firm is in his building now and there’s a sort of revolving door between the insurance and the legal part of the operations. Was that true in your time, too?”

“Come on, you know the South Side, everyone’s got a finger in everyone’s business,” Joel said. “McClelland and Scanlon both worshipped at Saint Eloy’s. Sol Mandel and my parents belonged to Temple Har HaShem. They pray together, then they get out of the pews and do business with each other.”

“Ira does business with Scanlon and with Nina Quarles?” I asked.

“Quarles doesn’t practice, she just spends the profits. But why shouldn’t we buy our insurance from Scanlon? He’s loyal to the neighborhood, after all, and so is Ira. Scanlon sends Ira some legal business now and then.”

“Most of the people I talk to think Mr. Mandel got you to represent Stella to taunt you. Is that how you felt?”

Next to me, Bernie was quivering with impatience, wanting to leap in with advice about going for the ankles or whacking people under the chin. I put a restraining hand on her arm.

Joel took another handful of ice out of the cup. His eyes flickered to the door—this was painful, he wanted to get away from me to the Pot of Gold. I felt as though I were on Spike Hurlihey’s side, bullying him, and I didn’t like it.

“What about Mandel himself? Nothing anyone is saying makes it possible for me to understand why he would take on Stella’s defense. Annie was his pet, she was the office pet, for that matter—”

“Not everyone felt that way,” Joel said. “She teased Spike and he didn’t like it.”

“Teased him how?”

“Spike passed the bar, but that’s because his dad was the Tenth Ward committeeman, he was tight with the mayor’s family, they pulled a few strings in Springfield after Spike failed the first two times. Word processing was just starting when I worked there, and guys like Spike or Mandel couldn’t type—they’d dictate their mail, so Annie picked up legal ideas from typing everyone’s letters and briefs and so on. She’d give Spike back his letters with paragraphs circled in red and write next to them, ‘I don’t think this is what the statute says. Want me to change it before you send it out?’”

My eyes widened. Hurlihey’s temper was the stuff of legends down in the legislature. Annie must have been brave, or foolhardy, or convinced that Mandel would protect her. Maybe all three.

“You think Hurlihey pushed Mandel to defend Stella because Annie got under his skin?”

Joel reddened but didn’t say anything.

“Did you have a theory at the time?”

“It wasn’t my job to have theories. It isn’t my job to have them now. It’s my job to finish this motion before Ira gets back and shakes his head like a mournful cow over how I can’t get the least thing done in his absence!”

“Right. We’ll get out of your way.” I got to my feet. “Is there anyone who worked in that office, I mean besides Spike Hurlihey, who’s still around?”

“Besides Thelma, you mean?”

“Thelma Kalvin?” I echoed, incredulous.

“She was the full-time secretary. She was another one who didn’t like Annie because Annie muscled her out of the way of working personally for Mr. Mandel. Annie got twice as much done in the three hours a day she put in after school as Thelma did all week long, so of course the partners started giving Annie their dictation. Thelma ended up working for me and Spike and the other associates, and her nose was so out of joint she wouldn’t type for me because she knew I was close to Annie.”

“I talked to Thelma after I left here last week, and she claimed she didn’t remember ever hearing about the Guzzos,” I snapped.

“Don’t shout at me,” Joel said. “I don’t know why she’d lie, except no one in that office ever told the truth. It was the perfect place for Spike to start his illustrious career. He bullies everyone in Springfield, but he got his start right here on the South Side.”

I was heading to the door when another question occurred to me. “What about Boris Nabiyev? Was he a client when you worked at Mandel?”

Joel snarled that he’d never heard the name. “I have to work if you don’t.” He turned back to his computer, his wide back a wall of silence.

BLOOD SPORT

When we reached the street,
Bernie made a face. “He’s a creep. Did you see his hands? Big soft paws, no muscles in them. Can you imagine him touching you? He was in love with that murdered girl, wasn’t he? Do I really look like her? Is that why you brought me down here, to see what it would make him do?”

“No,
cara
. I brought you because I didn’t want you roaming around the city with nothing to do. And yes, he was in love with Annie Guzzo, or infatuated, anyway. Which is why you made him think of her. Have you ever been in love, or had someone you were close to die?”

“Not really. There was a boy last year, but really, it was over before it began.”

“What, you went for his ankles?”

She started a hot protest, then realized I was teasing her. “It was infatuation. I thought he was in love with me but really, it was my answers on the maths exams. Why?”

“You see the beloved object everywhere,” I said. “The man I married—there was a time when my heart turned over every time I thought I saw him on the street. Even more, though, there are still days when I think my mother has passed me and I turn—and it’s a stranger and for a second I’m in raw mourning once again.”

Bernie shifted uncomfortably. “Anyway, this Joel, he was lying. And you let him.”

“What should I have done?”

“Made him tell the truth.”

“I don’t have any way to do that, at least not yet.”

“Threaten him, tell him you’ll follow him day and night until he shows you the diary.”

“I don’t think he has the diary.”

“Because he said so? But all he did was lie!”

A Lincoln Town Car pulled up in front of the building. The driver held the back door open and a walking stick emerged, was planted in the road, followed by brown wool trousers that ended in orthotic shoes. Another moment, and the top of Ira’s head appeared over the car. The driver followed him around the car to the sidewalk, but didn’t try to take his arm. Ira straightened his lapels, adjusted his bow tie and nodded to the driver.

“See you Monday morning, Mr. Previn,” the driver said.

When Ira spotted me, his heavy cheeks contracted, turning his eyes into puffy slits. “What are you doing here, young woman? I thought Judge Grigsby told you there was nothing in that old case.”

I guess to a ninety-year-old man fifty looks young. “That’s what everyone says, but I’m like the cat in that old song: no matter how many times the ship goes down or the rocket blows up, I keep coming back.”

“This is beginning to look like harassment. I can have an order of protection issued.”

“Of course you can. You can join Stella Guzzo behind a barrier, trembling at my footsteps.”

Ira scowled.

“It’s this pesky business about why Sol Mandel undertook Stella’s defense, and why he insisted Joel do the heavy lifting,” I said. “Rory Scanlon said it was to put some backbone into your son. There was a lot of bullying in that office, and it’s not—”

“Joel couldn’t take the heat. He never could take the heat. His mother and I believe in public schools, but we ended up sending him to a private school because he didn’t know how to stand up to boys who taunted him.

“You don’t give in to them, I told him this time and again. If I’d been that sensitive I’d have crumpled the first time I went up against the Machine. A few schoolyard insults, they were nothing compared to the threats and hang-up calls I’ve gotten my whole life.”

His cheeks puffed out and in like the bellows of an old pedal organ. “His mother and I, we wanted him to be proud of the life we were making. We marched in Selma, we marched in Marquette Park, and instead of being thrilled at making history, all he wanted to do was ‘fit in.’ As if a boy like him could ever fit in!”

I felt my mouth twist in disdain and tried to straighten it. It was hard to listen to one of my own heroes talk so contemptuously about his only child.

“I can’t see how forcing him to defend Stella would have given him a deep and abiding respect for principles of social justice. Why not get him involved in some of your own work—weren’t you acting on behalf of Guatemalan asylum seekers back then?”

Ira leaned heavily on his cane. “Mandel & McClelland didn’t do that kind of law, and Eunice and I agreed that Joel would wither if we tried bringing him into our firm. In the end, we had to, of course, because he couldn’t make it anywhere else. I can’t retire, not the way men who live to my age usually do, because—”

“Because you’d miss the applause you get for showing up in court and tying witnesses into knots.”

I hadn’t seen Joel come out of the office. Ira said, “How dare you, sir? That’s—”

Joel cut him off again. He’d apparently overheard most of our conversation, because he added to me, “If you really want to know how I ended up defending Stella, Mandel and McClelland liked to pit their associates against each other. Genteel blood sport, no physical blows exchanged. We’d meet in the conference room, go around the table, everyone got thirty seconds to pitch how they saw the case. Then we’d all leap on the pitch and tear it to shreds, trying to score points with the partners. I got good at shredding, but not as good as Spike. Mr. McClelland liked Spike, he took him to the downtown office where he started making the connections that carried Spike to Springfield. And so Mr. McClelland would feed Spike the good cases before we ever got to the conference room.”