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“Never mind that. Did you take them with you?”

“I was trying to pick them up when this maintenance man came in, wanting to know what the fuck I was doing in there. I said I got lost looking for the men’s room and he marched me out. I only managed to save part of a bank statement. When I got home, I saw another page had stuck to it—someone had torn it in two and taped it back together and the tape stuck to the bank statement.”

He licked his dry lips. “Where’s the old man with my drink?”

Mr. Contreras came out with a glass of water. “You don’t need alcohol to get you through the day, young man. You drink this and start pulling yourself together.”

Joel knocked Mr. Contreras’s hand away. “What, are you another goddam friend of Ira and Eunice’s sent to make me take the pledge?”

Joel left the room. I got up to follow him but collapsed as a wave of dizziness swept through me. I half fell onto the piano. By the time I’d steadied myself, Joel had returned with a half gallon of Grey Goose and a glass.

“The papers,” I said sharply. “What about the torn-up note?”

“It said—never mind, I have it someplace.”

He put the vodka and glass on a side table and went into another room, where we heard him opening drawers and rustling through papers. He came back with a tattered, yellowed page. At the top, someone had written in a tidy hand:
FYI, Law and Order Man
. The text was also handwritten, by a different person:

Thanks for the $7500 to our Widows & Orphans Fund. You know by now that your boys have been released—the SA agrees that youthful high spirits aren’t grounds for arrest. Our overzealous officer will be moving to the Seventh, where you can count on the unit’s hostility to snitches to keep him from bothering you again.

“Whose writing is this?” My voice came out in a croak: I was sure I knew who the overzealous officer had been.

“Don’t know. Someone in the police, I guess. I asked Annie and she said some of the boys from
Say, Yes!
had been picked up on assault or extortion. She said she was working late and overheard Scanlon talking to Sol Mandel about how to get the charges dropped. She wasn’t sure what the boys had done, but she guessed it had to do with ‘persuading’ local businesses to buy their insurance from Scanlon.”

“When did you talk to her about this?” I demanded.

“The night she died.” He poured vodka into the glass, but stared at it, not drinking, seeing a past that made him twist his mouth into a grimace of self-loathing.

“I tried figuring out what was so important about the things she’d hidden up at Wrigley. All I had was that one page of a bank statement, but it was from Continental Illinois, not Ferrite, where Mandel and Scanlon’s insurance agency and all of us banked—neighborhood solidarity, you know. It showed the balance from
Say, Yes!
but it was before the Internet, back when you still got your canceled checks sent to you in the mail. The page I found showed the closing balance, which was big for such a small neighborhood organization, I think it was ninety-three thousand.”

“You didn’t keep it?” I asked.

“No, I left it at Annie’s.”

“What? The night she died?”

He swallowed half the vodka in the glass, winced as the alcohol jolted his body.

“Yes, the night she died,” he mumbled. “I tried to figure out what the deal was with the
Say, Yes!
bank statement, why she thought it was worth hanging on to, and I thought it had to do with the fact that Scanlon kept the funds downtown, in the biggest bank in the state. I started working late—Ira was so pleased, he thought I was finding a vocation for the law. He didn’t know all I had was a vocation for Annie. One night, Scanlon came over to see Mandel. I don’t know if I’m such a negligible part of the landscape he couldn’t see me, but he told Mandel they had the fund up to where they could flex some serious muscle. ‘Get your boy Hurlihey ready for the front line, Sol,’ Scanlon said. ‘I think we’re going to get us a friend in Springfield.’”

“So they were using the
Say, Yes!
foundation funds to bankroll elections, or at least Hurlihey’s election?” I asked.

Joel shrugged. “Maybe, I suppose.”

“Why didn’t you turn them in?” Mr. Contreras asked. “They sound like a room full of crooks!”

“Turn them in to who? Rory and Sol’s cronies?” Joel jeered. “They were players, the SA was a player, they probably all played together. Anyway, what evidence did I have? A piece of a bank statement and an ambiguous conversation. I went to Annie, instead.”

Mr. Contreras was watching the clock in agony. He tugged on my arm, but I needed to get as much as I could from Joel if we were going to construct any kind of file that would persuade the thugs to release Bernie.

“I knew what nights her mother played bingo over at Saint Eloy’s. I waited across the street until Stella had taken off, then I went to the door. Stella had beaten her: Annie’s lip was bloody and swollen, she had a black eye and a cut on her forehead.

“I was so upset at seeing her all messed up that I forgot at first why I’d come. She laughed off her injuries, she wouldn’t let me take her to the hospital: she said she was going to be rid of all of us soon. I put my arms around her, I said something stupid, like, you don’t want to be rid of me, I’m the one who understands you, I helped you with your music composition that got you into Bryn Mawr. I even tried to kiss her. She put my face aside. She tried to cover up what she was feeling, but I could see the disgust in her face.” He rubbed his cheek, the spot where he could still feel her hand on him.

“‘You’re sweet, Joel, and I appreciate your help, but I don’t like you, not like that.’” He raised his voice to a savage falsetto in imitation. “No one ever ‘liked me like that,’” he added bitterly, in his own voice.

“I asked her if it was the jock—Warshawski—your cousin. ‘His career will be over by the time you’re thirty, he’ll get fat, too, believe me,’ I told her, but she said she wasn’t interested in love, not with any of us. ‘I’ve got a future of my own, my own life, not slaving for some man, whether he’s a lawyer or a hockey star or just a mill hand like my dad,’ she said.

“I showed her the Continental bank statement page, and the torn-up letter. She was startled, that was one thing—I completely took her off guard. She wanted to know where I’d got them. I said we could make a team, we could take Sol and Scanlon down, I’d start my own law firm, don’t ask me to remember every crazy thing I said, ‘but I need your help,’ I told her. ‘I need to know where they’re getting the money that they’re putting into the foundation account. Is it coming out of client accounts, or is Scanlon shaking people down? Once I know that, we can take them down—I’ll go to the federal prosecutor, we won’t be dependent on some corrupt state’s attorney.’”

He finished what was left in the glass and poured another tumbler full. “Here’s the part that will make you split your side laughing: Annie said she didn’t want to take Mandel down. ‘I won’t tell you what I know, I don’t want you hurting him. He’s my meal ticket, Joel. I didn’t get all those scholarships I bragged about. I got some, but not enough to go east, he’s paying me to go, I told him I have proof in a place so secret no one will ever find it, and he’s giving me the money to get me to Bryn Mawr. If you go snooping around, he’ll think I told on him. You’ll cost me my future.’

“‘What about this?’ I asked her, waving the letter. ‘That’s not from Mandel.’ And she said no, she was over at your house, playing on Mrs. Warshawski’s piano, and she saw your dad take it out of the mail and read it. He looked upset, sick, I think Annie called it, then he tore it in half and threw it out. She picked it out of the trash and took it away because she realized Scanlon had written the line at the top, that ‘FYI, Law and Order Man.’”

He looked at his feet and mumbled, “I hate to say it about her, but I think she thought she could use it to get more money.”

So that was why Tony had been sent to cop hell, all those nights on patrol with no one at the station backing him up. Beneath my fatigue and woozy concussed brain I could feel anger starting to burn, a fury with Rory Scanlon. The stress of that assignment, on top of my mother’s death, had easily taken a decade, maybe more, from my father’s life. That’s why he wouldn’t ride the buses Scanlon hired to take the neighborhood to Boom-Boom’s debut. It’s why Scanlon made that snide remark to me about another Warshawski upholding law and order for the neighborhood.

The clock chimed the three-quarter hour.

“Doll,” Mr. Contreras was frantic. “We gotta get going.”

He was right. I would sort out Scanlon when we had Bernie safe. I got up.

“You didn’t kill Annie, did you?” I asked Joel. “That isn’t why you defended Stella, is it?”

Joel gave a mirthless laugh. “I don’t have that kind of—whatever it is. Initiative? Vanity? Annie didn’t want me, but it didn’t stop my feelings for her. Maybe it would have, if she’d lived. I dropped the bank statement, but I held on to the letter and walked out with it. I walked all the way back to this place. I forgot I’d driven down there. I am a useless fuckup from the beginning of the story to the end. I had to take the bus back down to pick up my car, and when I got there, Stella was walking up the street, coming home from the bingo. I ducked down and fell over onto the curb, but she didn’t see me.

“Then, the next day, I learned Annie had died. And I told myself, all the hateful things she’d said, she hadn’t meant them, she said them because she had a brain injury from Stella beating her.”

I stayed long enough to ask about the bank statement. “Why didn’t Stella say something about it during the trial?”

He shook his head. “She didn’t know anything about it. I asked her, I asked her what she found in Annie’s room, or in the living room, anything that was connected to the law firm, but she didn’t seem to know what I was talking about.”

“Why did you represent Stella? You’d seen Annie’s injuries, you must have known she was guilty.”

Joel shot me a resentful look. “Mandel saw my car outside the Guzzo house. He said they needed someone to represent Stella, and either I would do it, or he’d tell the state’s attorney that I’d been there and had a chance to kill Annie.”

The clock hands seemed to swoop and bend. “Joel.” My voice was so gentle he had to lean his stinking mouth close to hear me. “Joel, don’t you see. Mandel only knew you’d been there because he was there himself.”

SWINGING FOR THE FENCES

Joel’s clock started to chime
the hour. Sixty minutes to get something up on Facebook. Sixty minutes to save Bernadine. If she was still—of course she was still alive. She was the terrorists’ bargaining chip.

We left Joel standing in the middle of his living room, the half gallon of Grey Goose in one hand, a half-drunk glass in the other. He tried to keep us there—he wanted to talk about Mandel, did I really think Mandel had killed Annie, but I brushed him off.

“The only thing I care about this morning is saving Bernadine Fouchard. We’ll worry later about Spike and Scanlon and whether Mandel killed Annie.”

As we walked out the door, he called after me that he wanted me to talk to Ira. “Tell him his old pal Sol was a criminal and a murderer.”

I shut the door, pushed the elevator button over and over.

“He only thinks about hisself,” Mr. Contreras fumed when the car finally arrived. “Don’t he care about Bernie?”

When we were back on the street, I took a precious minute to phone Conrad. He’d gotten a search warrant for Sturlese but they hadn’t found Bernie.

“What about the Sturlese brothers? Were they all there?”

“Two were on job sites, at least according to dispatch. One claims he was home with the flu, but his wife said he felt so sick he’d gone to the hospital. We’re trying to track them all down.”

“Anything on Sebastian?”

“No one’s spotted him yet. We went to the sister, what’s her name? Viola? Told her where you’d found him, tried to get her to cough up someplace he might be hiding. I don’t know if she’s scared stupid or really doesn’t know. I had my guys take her in, but all she does is sit and cry. Give me a bright idea, Warshawski.”

“Scanlon,” I said. “He’s got a slush fund under cover of his
Say, Yes!
foundation. He’s connected to this—”

“What I meant was a smart idea.” He hung up.

I put the car in motion. I’d come up with only one idea and it wasn’t necessarily bright or even smart, but I talked it over with Mr. Contreras and he agreed to try it.

We found the nearest copy center, down on Jeffery, and dug up photos of Scanlon and Sol Mandel online. We used free software to create a new website that we called “Annie Guzzo’s Murder.”

Stella Guzzo spent twenty-five years in Logan Correctional Center for killing her daughter. In the words of the Chicago Mob, she wore the jacket. Only she never agreed to. She didn’t know she was covering up for two smooth operators: Sol Mandel and Rory Scanlon.