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LAND OF THE DEAD

I sat for a while,
staring at nothing. My office phone roused me from my stupor some minutes later. Stella Guzzo. This time, I answered the call, instead of sending it to voice mail and alerting my lawyer.

“Is this the whore’s daughter?” she demanded.

“Nope. Wrong number,” I said, and hung up.

An instant later, she phoned again. “I’m looking for Warshawski.”

“Right this time,” I said. “But you have an order of protection against me. You can’t be calling me.”

“I can do whatever I goddam well want. I told you to come down here Saturday and you never showed up.”

“The order of protection,” I repeated. “I come see you, you get me arrested, and then I’m in jail and lose my license.”

“But I
needed
to see you.”

I knew Freeman would kill me for not hanging up, but instead I said, “You didn’t have anyone left to insult?”

“I can say what I want to whoever I like, and if you and your family—” She cut herself off mid-rant. “Frank came to see me last week.”

“He’s a good son.” I kept my voice neutral.

“Maybe he is, maybe he isn’t. You look at him, and he’s the image of my dad and my brothers, but inside, he’s just as soft as his own old man.”

I couldn’t imagine any way to respond to that.

After a moment, Stella went on broodingly. “I could tell he had something on his mind, but it took him all night to spit it out. What’s this you’re saying about Betty?”

“Nothing.” I was astonished.

“Don’t lie to me! All you Warshawskis lie faster than you talk. Frank told me you thought Betty killed Annie while I was at the bingo.”

“No, ma’am. I thought
if
you hadn’t actually killed your daughter when you punched her in the head, there was only one person you might have taken the fall for, and that was Frank. If you thought his wife had killed your daughter, there was a sliver of possibility you wouldn’t have said anything so that his children’s mother stayed out of prison.”

“Listen, you. You know as well as me that you’re trying to cover up for your old man stealing evidence from the crime scene. You want this to be about my family, but you won’t admit that it’s really about yours.”

She hung up.

Every time I talked to Stella, I felt about a hundred years old. I leaned back in my chair, eyes shut. I was paying an awfully high price for the brief comfort Frank had brought me all those years ago.

I started to call him, then decided to go see him in person. Enough of this idiocy.

Using one of my burner phones, I called Bagby Haulage. Fortunately, not only did Delphina answer the phone, but Bagby’s dispatcher wasn’t at her elbow to guide her away from people like me. She accepted my spurious story, that we’d given the wrong package to the truck Frank Guzzo was driving, and even let me know that he was in the Midway Airport area.

“Great,” I said heartily. “We’re at 5236 Sixty-seventh Street. Sanjitsu Electronics.”

“You’re not in my system,” she said.

“We may be there under a different name; we recycle for a lot of different electronics companies. Tell Guzzo someone from shipping will meet him on the loading bay in thirty.”

I hung up before she could say anything else. As I closed the office door, the burner phone started ringing. At least she was calling back, a good double check. What a pity I hadn’t thought to record voice mail.

The address I’d given Delphina was almost sixteen miles southwest of my office. By pushing my luck with cops and speed limits, I got there within half an hour.

The short runways at Midway bring the planes in low and slow overhead. Driving down Cicero Avenue, I kept wincing as the Southwest wheels skimmed the treetops along the route. They’ve never actually taken out a building, but it’s an unnerving flight path.

The address I’d randomly chosen for its closeness to the airport belonged to a giant cardboard manufacturer. The parking lot was packed, but I found an open space in the middle and walked over to the loading bays.

There wasn’t any sign of a Bagby truck. Maybe Frank had come and gone, maybe Delphina decided the call was a prank and didn’t tell him about it. I walked across the lot to the road and waited twenty minutes. Just as I was deciding my luck was out, Frank turned into the parking lot.

I stood in front of his truck. He leaned on the horn, and then opened the cab door to swear at me.

I walked over. “Hey, Frank.”

“Tori!” He was so startled that his foot slid on the clutch and the truck shuddered. “What the—and what happened to your eye?”

“Vince didn’t tell you?” I said, smiling affably. “He was right there when it happened. You and I have so much catching up to do, and neither of us has much time. I’m going to follow you until you take a break.”

“The lawyer said—”

“Yes, we all know what the lawyer said. Stella violated the order herself this morning, calling to tell me to stay away from your family. Since I’m already hog-tied by the order, it’s hard to know what she’s referring to.”

His sunburnt face turned a richer shade of sienna. “Maybe it was Betty talking to her about you showing up at Frankie’s game. You have to stay away.”

“And I will. She’s not a pleasure to talk to, and nor, at the risk of hurting your feelings, is Betty. Both of them slug first and listen second. I hope Betty doesn’t beat you, but I can give you the number of a domestic—”

A short queue of trucks was trying to get into the lot. They honked loudly. Frank slammed his cab door shut and drove forward. I sprinted to where I’d left the Subaru and wove my way around the lines of parked cars. Frank had to drive all the way into the yard to find a space where he could turn around out of the way of the trucks that were pulling in. I caught up with him easily as he exited onto Lavergne Avenue.

Frank made another pickup at a warehouse a few blocks farther west, saw me in his rearview mirror when he left and pulled into a Wendy’s.

“Make it fast, Tori, I got fifteen minutes, and they monitor every leak we take.”

I climbed into the cab, over his protests—he wanted to shout down at me from his window.

“So your mother thinks I’m doing something to wreck Frankie’s chances?”

Frank’s shoulders slumped. “Nothing in my goddam life ever works out for me. My shot at the show, Frankie’s, whatever it is, it always falls apart.”

“Yes, your shot at the show, that’s something else I wanted to ask you about. The day of your tryout at Wrigley, when Boom-Boom was there and made you so angry you whiffed the curve, Annie was there as well. Why did she come along and why didn’t you tell me?”

His lip curled in disgust. “Are you my fucking parish priest? Am I supposed to confess every detail of my life to you?”

I grinned savagely. “Only the ones relevant to why you involved me in the Guzzo melodrama. Annie had something with her. She lost it, or deliberately hid it, inside Wrigley Field. Was this her diary, for real, and did someone dig it out and put it back in your mother’s house when Stella got out of prison?”

He was bewildered. “I don’t know. I don’t know what you’re talking about. I mean, the diary, I told you already, Ma says she gave it to someone for safekeeping, so I can’t tell you. Are you saying Annie had it with her at the ballpark?”

“If I knew I wouldn’t be asking you,” I said. “She was holding something about the size of a clutch purse.”

“Yeah, I carry one of those all the time so that tells me a lot.”

“About four by eight inches, say, and maybe an inch thick. I only saw it in an old photo, so I don’t know what it is. It was dark, maybe black or navy, but didn’t seem to have any writing on it.”

“Tori, I had way more important stuff on my mind that day. I didn’t even remember about Annie being there until you told me just now.”

“Why was she there in the first place?” I asked. “I assumed she came to cheer you on.”

“Cheer me on?” he jeered. “You’re thinking of a different family. God, I hope my girls turn out for Frankie when he needs them. And him for them, come to that.”

“Did Annie drive up with you?” I repeated.

“Vince’s old man ordered a limo for the five guys from Bagby’s team who were going to the tryout. I didn’t want Boom-Boom riding with us, everyone would have been all over him.”

I didn’t say anything, out of sympathy, but Frank took it as a criticism. “Okay, I was jealous. Are you happy? I was so fucking jealous of Boom-Boom. He always was so fucking lucky! It was like some old fairy tale Ma told us when we were little, some Irish thing about a boy who got taken up by elves and everywhere he went, the sky opened up and gold fell down. That was your goddam cousin.”

“He got murdered, so not so fucking lucky,” I snapped. “Annie went with Boom-Boom?”

“Yeah, I guess. She was a brat sometimes, you know. She wanted to see the tryouts, or to be with Boom-Boom, I don’t know what. The night before, when Boom-Boom stopped by the house to give me some last-minute advice, she heard us and came in demanding to go along. It was like when she was five years old and wanted to play baseball with me and my friends,
Why can’t I, you can’t stop me, Daddy will bring me.
Only this time, our father was dead, so I guess she got Boom-Boom to take her.”

“Were they dating?”

“I don’t know! Why does it matter? Maybe she wheedled him into taking her to the park and then charmed him into going to bed. Why do you care?”

“I’m trying to find out what your real reason for coming to see me was. What did you or Stella hope to gain by involving me in your problems—was this some revenge Stella fantasized about all those years in prison—bring the only living member of the Warshawski family back down here so she could humiliate me in public?”

Frank turned on the engine but didn’t put the truck into gear. “Believe me or not, my mother didn’t know I was coming to see you. She had a shit-fit when you showed up the next day. I hadn’t had time to tell her, and afterwards, the fury she was in! It took me back to all those times—she tried to slug me one last time, but she wasn’t strong enough to, anymore.”

“But what did you think I could do? Why involve me at all?”

Frank pounded the steering wheel with his right fist. “The exoneration claim. Scanlon, he’s taking an interest in Frankie’s future. He told me, baseball isn’t like the old days, they look at the family, not just the kid, and if Ma involved the press in this exoneration claim, then Annie’s murder would be on everyone’s minds, and it could hurt Frankie’s chances. I was hoping you could stop Ma, but it’s like so much in my so-called life, nothing works out the way I want it. I call you, Ma goes postal, Scanlon’s annoyed because the press is all over us.”

He covered his face, his voice dropping so low I had to lean over the steering wheel to hear him above the engine. “I—if all this derails Frankie—I don’t know what I’ll do.”

The driver behind us leaned on her horn. Frank saw he’d done the unpardonable—left a big gap in front of him. He drove up to the mike and ordered a double cheeseburger with extra-large fries and a super-sized shake.

“Scanlon told you to stop your mother?” I asked.

“Not like that. He said no one cared about a crime that old anymore, unless she made them care, don’t you see? He came up to me at Saint Eloy’s when I was watching Frankie and said he’d heard through the grapevine what Ma was doing. He was going to get one of his lawyer pals to look after her interests so she wouldn’t feel like we were giving her the brush-off, but if I could talk her into letting it lie it would be better for Frankie. And then, everything got out of control. Like it always does in my life.”

He pulled over to the curb with his order and started eating moodily, shoving a great handful of fries into his mouth.

“What did Scanlon say after all the press brouhaha began?”

“I was sweating bullets. I talked to Vince and asked him what I should do, but he spoke to Scanlon for me, and he told me Scanlon saw I wasn’t to blame; he still is willing to sponsor Frankie.”

I turned sideways in the seat to look at him squarely. “Frank: someone sicced a trio of Insane Dragons on me when I left Scanlon’s office the other night. Do you know anything about that?”

“What the fuck are you trying to say?”

“Bagby or Scanlon or Thelma Kalvin, they were all there when I went up to visit his youth program, and so was Father Cardenal. Did any of them talk to you, tell you that
I
was bringing too much attention to your family?”

“Crap, Tori.” He set his box of food on top of the dashboard so violently the fries jumped out of the box onto the gearshift. “You cannot go around accusing people of stuff like that. There are so many gangbangers in South Chicago I bet every person you pass on the street has at least one in their family. You were in the wrong place at the wrong time. Don’t go accusing Scanlon of this: everyone knows your old man couldn’t get along with him, but he’s the person who—”

“I know,” I cut him off. “Believe me, I hear that script every time I cross the border.”

He gaped at me.

“Only making a feeble joke. So many people have told me I don’t know anything about the South Side that it’s starting to seem like you guys think you live in a different country than the rest of the city.”

“We do,” Frank said. “We live in the land of the dead.”

That shut me up for a moment: it was poignant, but also an unexpected image to hear on his lips. I couldn’t let his previous comment rest, though.

“What do you mean, everyone knew Tony couldn’t get along with Scanlon? When I saw Scanlon last week, he passed a comment about my dad—what does the whole neighborhood know that I don’t? Did Rory get Tony shipped off to Englewood?”

“You are like a goddam squirrel trying to get into a birdfeeder, Warshawski. I don’t know who did what to whom, but everyone knows that Tony wouldn’t ride to Boom-Boom’s first game in Scanlon’s buses. Everyone talked about it, back at the time, I mean. Don’t ask me what that was about because I fucking do not know.”

“If Tony didn’t trust Rory Scanlon, then Scanlon was up to something. What was it?”