Brush Back (55 page)

“Your precious cousin.” Scanlon was panting. “I got him his chance, but Tony, high-and-mighty Tony Warshawski, bad-mouthed me in the precinct.”

“My cousin’s talent and drive got him where he needed to be,” I snapped.

“I made the connections that brought him to the attention of the Blackhawks organization. Otherwise he’d have been like Frank Guzzo, another loser wannabe driving a truck.”

“Is that the only kind of employee Bagby has?” I asked, looked at Vince. “Frank Guzzo works hard, he keeps his family going. That isn’t a loser’s behavior. A loser is someone who can’t operate without a lot of people in his pocket to do his dirty work for him.”

“Yeah, well, you’ve cost Frankie Junior his chance to go to ball camp,” Scanlon said. “I warned Guzzo to keep you away from here, but he’s such a useless piece of quivering jelly he couldn’t even manage that. His ma is twice the man he is. Twice the man old Mateo was, too.”

“You’ve been watching too many Clint Eastwood movies,” I said. “Mateo was like Frank: honest, quiet, hardworking. Twice—no—ten times the man you and your cousin are. Although ten times zero is still zero.”

Another blow. My mouth started to fill with blood and I spoke with difficulty. “On the night she died, Annie wrote in her diary that she saw your car outside the Guzzo house. Was it you who killed her? Or did you already have enough thugs on your team twenty-five years ago that one of them gave her the last blow?”

“I need to know where you got the diary,” Scanlon said. “I need to know if there’s more out there.”

“You mean, did Annie send a message through a medium to say you murdered her?” Blood dribbled down my chin and pooled on my neck. “I haven’t seen any ectoplasm shimmering through my office. If she wrote your or Sol Mandel’s name on the living room floor, the cops kept that detail private. Of course, Oswald Brattigan, watch commander at the Fourth, he was your boy, he could have disposed of any evidence you left, to make sure Stella Guzzo carried the can for you.”

The circulation was starting to go in my hands. I would have been worried about them, except I was more worried that I was going to die soon. I curled and uncurled my fingers. My wrists scraped against the rope.

“Mandel was soft,” Scanlon said. “He let that little bitch bleed him, instead of taking care of her from day one. As soon as he told me what she was up to, he agreed something had to be done, but he couldn’t bring himself to do it. I made him go to the Guzzo’s front door, on the pretext of reasoning with the girl about her demands. We let Spike do the honors, since it was his career we were helping build.”

Vince made a restless gesture.

“You think I shouldn’t say anything, little cousin?” Scanlon jeered. “Don’t tell me you’re soft, too. Warshawski isn’t going anywhere, isn’t going to tell anyone anything. Mandel and McClelland both knew Spike was tough enough to do anything, and he’s proved that over and over again in Springfield.”

“Yes, all you cousins,” I said, proud that my voice was steady, despite my terror and my aching mouth. “You and Vince, and Nina Quarles, who owns that law firm. Did you have her buy it in case Mandel had left any loose bits of evidence lying around in his old files?”

“Never mind why we did what we did. You wouldn’t understand that kind of loyalty, to family and to shared values. I’m giving you one chance to let me have the original of any other papers that came into your possession.”

“And if I give them to you?”

“Then your friends will survive to say prayers over your grave. If not, all those people, the old man, the dogs, the doctor, the musician, we will eliminate them one by one, and they will die cursing you.”

“Then if I had any papers to give you, I would do so in an instant. I don’t.”

More questions, no answers. More blows, no defense. Time lost meaning, voice lost meaning, body lost feeling.

We ended where we all knew we would, back in the pickup, out onto the docks, the hood on my head, truck driving up an incline, someone tossing me over the side, a smear of dust coming under the hood, choking me. I was on the coal mountain where Jerry Fugher died.

“That’s over with,” the smooth white voice said. “The last of the Warshawskis. They all thought they were too good for this world, and by God, they were.”

“Hey, man, you ain’tcha gonna bury her?” one of the green shirts asked.

“No need,” Scanlon said. “She’ll choke to death soon enough.”

“You’re making a mistake.” It was Bagby, his voice urgent but somehow supplicating. “You don’t own Rawlings and he won’t let her death go.”

“There’s no evidence, at least not if you do a good scrub-down in your office.” A pause. “Oh, Vince, Vince, don’t tell me you had the hots for her? It wasn’t an act? You ever get inside her pants? Want the boys to bring her back to the loading bay for some action before she dies?”

Bile rose in my throat.

“You’re an asshole, Rory.”

“Hey, I look out for widows and orphans and helpless cousins.”

Feet thudding on concrete, getting more remote. I burrowed hard with my butt, made a ledge in the coke. Shifted buttock to buttock, worked my hands down behind my thighs, bunched forward in a ball, slid my hands up over my legs. I lifted my bound hands to my face and the blood pounded painfully in my fingers. I tried pushing the hood away from my head, but it was buckled behind me. I couldn’t budge it. I stood on quivering legs, fell heavily.

Hands grabbed mine. Some action before I die, you’ll see action before I die. I kicked hard.

“Hey, V
ittoria, mio core
. Easy does it: I play with these fingers.”

STEALING HOME

I sat on the ground,
leaning against Jake’s legs while he unbuckled the hood. When he’d freed me, he helped me down the hill, our feet sliding and sinking to their ankles. I kept coughing up balls of black phlegm and at the bottom, I was hit by such a violent paroxysm that I fell again.

Jake squatted, pulling me to him, stroking my filthy hair. “I was so afraid,
mio core
, so afraid I wouldn’t be in time.”

The dogs had roused the whole building, he said. He’d run first to my apartment.

“I saw that the door had been broken open, but my brain wouldn’t work. And then I saw them carrying you through the gate, that foul thing on your head. I ran to the alley, but their truck was already rattling away.”

He pulled me closer. “I was afraid if I took time to call the cops, the truck would disappear. I didn’t have any phone numbers, anyway, just nine-one-one, which I called while I was driving.” He’d been frantic, trying to keep an eye on the Bagby truck, trying to explain what was happening to the emergency dispatcher.

“I hung up—I couldn’t talk and follow you, but I thought of Max. He knows everyone. He told me he’d locate your police pals. He tracked down Frank Guzzo, too, and got him to explain the likely places Bagby or Scanlon would take you. Max talked me through the route. He was way better than any GPS.” Jake gave a laugh that bordered on the hysterical.

He helped me back to my feet, waited out another coughing attack.

“So you got to the Bagby office?” I asked. “Where were you?”

“They’d left a window open. I stood under that and recorded it all, but it was agony, listening to—never mind that. I—I wasn’t brave enough to go in after you. Forgive me, Vic, but I just couldn’t do it.”

It was my turn to squeeze his shoulder reassuringly. “You made the right choice. If you’d gone in, you’d have been a hostage; we’d both be dead.”

Conrad roared up just then, six squad cars flashing in his wake.

“Five men in a truck,” Jake said to Conrad when he bounded over, roaring commands through a loudspeaker. “Two first chairs and three pit members. I stood under a window at the Bagby office and recorded their words.”

“Scanlon,” I coughed at Conrad, spitting out a mouthful of coke. “Scanlon and Bagby.”

Conrad sent his squads out to find them. He tried to question me, there on the Guisar slip, under the searchlights he’d turned on, but I couldn’t speak. Wouldn’t speak. Too many questions, too many blows. No more.

“I’m taking the lady home, Rawlings. I’ll e-mail you the recording from my smartphone.”

Jake guided me off the Guisar slip, drove me to Lotty, who’d been warned by Max that I might need reconstructing. She tucked me into her own guest bed. Over the next few days, her doorman and a private nurse kept cops and reporters at bay, even Murray, who thought he was entitled to a front-row seat.

Jake stayed close by. Even later, when I was back on my feet, resuming my workload, there were times when he thought I might have disappeared on him and he’d race to my office to check on me. He started practicing in my big workroom. The acoustics were good, so good that his High Plainsong group began rehearsing there.

“Remember I told you I’d pull you out of the tar pits if you got stuck in them?” he said the day he drove me home from Lotty’s.

“You said you’d use your bass strings,” I reminded him.

“From now on I’ll keep a spare set in the glove compartment,” he promised.

Eventually, of course, I did talk to the cops. According to Conrad’s off-the-record report, Spike had been using his many connections in Chicago to short-circuit any indictments, but the media storm for once was bigger than the Speaker’s power. The state’s attorney wasn’t able to indict Rory or Vince for Jerry Fugher’s murder, but he had enough from Jake’s recording and my own testimony to charge them not just with attempting to kill me, but framing Stella Guzzo for Annie’s murder.

When the SA subpoenaed the diary extracts that Murray had posted online, I handed them over without a murmur. Even if a lab decided they were forgeries, there wasn’t any way to trace them: they had indeed come to me in the mail, with no return address, postmarked from the Loop postal station that saw so much traffic no one could remember one manila envelope. And I had never claimed they were Annie’s, simply that I had them and was willing to submit them to tests.

The diary Frank had helped Scanlon or Bagby or Spike plant in Stella’s house was also subpoenaed. It turned out as Bernie had been insisting—Stella had given it to Father Cardenal. Having to guard Stella’s secret was probably why Cardenal’s attitude toward me underwent such a major shift.

When I finally got to see the document, I felt a certain satisfaction: Scanlon hadn’t made any effort to get old paper or to disguise the handwriting; the diary was declared fraudulent.

Kenji Aroyawa was ecstatic when two labs—my private one and the State of Illinois’s crime lab—decided my pages were authentic. He and I shared a bottle of champagne while Rafe Zukos sulked downstairs in front of his geese-in-flight painting. Zukos had bitterly opposed Ken “prostituting his art” to help anyone in South Chicago, but Ken had loved creating Annie’s diary.

“It’s an art project, Rafe, it’s what art students do—they copy the masters to learn their craft. It takes me back to my own sensei’s studio, copying someone else’s calligraphy—not that poor little Annie’s handwriting would have been allowed in Sensei Yamamoto’s atelier.”

I’d found paper for the project by going to garage sales until I came on an empty journal of about the right vintage for Annie to have kept. Ken took three days over the writing. I didn’t tell anyone, not even Mr. Contreras or Jake, about the project. It’s the kind of story people like to repeat, and it wasn’t one I wanted to hear in a courtroom.

There was some positive fallout. Ira and Eunice Previn’s chauffeur drove them to my office one morning to give me a backhanded thanks for making Joel’s role in Stella’s trial look less inept, or at least more explicable.

“I let my ties to Sol and the temple blind me to all the holes in the case. You were better than us on this one, young lady,” was all Ira said.

“It was more than that,” Eunice said. “We didn’t know—we didn’t want to know. Sol was one of the only people at the temple who took me—took our family—for what it was. Not me being the stereotypical black sexual animal ensnaring Ira, but a man and a woman who respected each other. And Joel—my only child—we wanted so much for him and—”

She broke off, squeezed her eyes shut as if she could blot out the pictures from the past. Ira tried to take her hand but she shook him away.

“I had three miscarriages, and then Joel, and—I wasn’t ready for such a sensitive boy. I—his music, I wish I’d let him follow his music.”

She stood, head erect, spine straight, marched to the door with Ira following more slowly in her wake. I wished I could believe the resolution of the story would send Joel into rehab, but his drinking was such an entrenched part of his life now that I wasn’t optimistic.

There was another, better outcome to the story: Murray decided it was high time someone actually wrote my cousin’s biography. He got a nice advance from Gaudy Press—with Boom-Boom back in the headlines, they thought it was a worthwhile project, assuming Murray could give them a quick turnaround.

As the cold spring turned into summer, I found myself taking refuge in singing. I would play a recording Jake made of counterpoint to Vittoria Aleotti’s madrigals, trying to match my voice to the intervals, sometimes succeeding. Even when I failed, the music, the muscles, the voice brought me a kind of connection to my mother that made the night in the coal dust seem like one more bad dream, nothing more.