“No one has suggested anything out of line there, Judge. My mother gave Annie Guzzo piano lessons, and Sol Mandel probably saw the same qualities in her my mother did—ambitious, hardworking, wanting a chance to live a life away from South Chicago. The neighborhood gets a bad rap, like Back of the Yards used to, but there are plenty of decent people who want to help kids. Rory Scanlon, for instance. He made important connections for my cousin when Boom-Boom was starting out, and from what I hear, he’s still doing it for kids today.”
“Scanlon is still active?” The question was casual, but Grigsby eyed me closely, again using his coffee cup as cover.
“He’s apparently still working with kids and sports.”
“You’re an investigator, right?” Grigsby added. “Is someone paying you to poke around in this old case?”
Definitely a C student, if it had taken him this long to think up that question. I smiled again. “It’s such an odd case that people keep raising questions about it. During the trial, did Joel ever try to suggest Stella had been framed?”
“Every criminal defendant claims they’ve been framed. If you were with the County Criminal Defender’s office, you know that.”
I laughed, hoping he would think I was on his side. “Five million people in Cook County, but only three stories: ‘I wasn’t there,’ ‘I was set up,’ ‘It was a Vice Lord.’ But Stella is pointing a finger straight at Boom-Boom. I’m sure you’d remember if she suggested that at the trial. He was big news at the time.”
“She was convicted of a very heinous crime,” Grigsby said in his sternest courtroom voice. “She did her time. My best advice to you is to leave the trial alone. No good can come of scratching those old sores after all these years.”
“I don’t disagree, Judge, but, as I said, people keep coming to me with odd questions. Just yesterday, someone told me that Stella had been told she’d get an early release, despite the length of the sentence. Who would have made a promise like that?”
“Are you daring—daring!—to suggest I fixed a trial?” His face started to swell with fury.
I looked at him curiously. “I assumed the state’s attorney would make an offer like that, not the judge.”
“Who told you such a thing about a trial in my courtroom?” he demanded.
“Someone in the neighborhood,” I said vaguely. “As I said, I grew up there, I know a lot of people, a lot of them have been talking.”
MY LAST DUCHESS
Before Grigsby said anything else, the swinging door to the back of the apartment opened and a woman came in. Marjorie Grigsby was short and plump, her gray hair a thick bubble around her head. Her daytime makeup was carefully applied, but her smile was warm and genuine.
“Elgin, you need to get over to the Architecture Foundation.”
She turned the same warm smile onto me. “I’m sorry to interrupt you, dear, but Elgin was a judge for so many years he stopped wearing a watch: his clerk always got him where he needed to be and now I do it.”
The judge preened some more—apparently he thought this was a tribute to his status, not a criticism. Marjorie straightened his lapels, took his coffee cup, told him to enjoy himself.
“Although he always does,” she added to me. “Presiding over an architecture tour, Elgin has the same chance to lay down the law as he did at Twenty-sixth and California, except he gets to rule on the whole city.”
It was hard to tell from her voice if she was mocking him or praising him. She stood on tiptoe to kiss his cheek and held the outer door open for us.
The judge and I stood in a strained silence until the elevator arrived. The engraved brass doors slid open, a whisper of noise, not the clanging they used to make. The pulleys didn’t groan on the way down, either. The judge stood in front, right next to the doors, pretending I wasn’t there. We stopped on the ninth floor to let in a woman with two Harlequin Great Danes. She was dressed for running, her phone in an arm sleeve, the music from the earphones tinnily audible.
“You’re supposed to take those down in the service elevator, young woman,” Grigsby said sternly.
She paid no attention to the judge, but patted her dogs’ shoulders until they sat. Grigsby yanked out her earbuds and shouted that she needed to use the service elevator. The dogs began to curl their lips, not a good sign.
“My dogs don’t like it when people cross into my personal space,” the woman said. “We don’t use the service elevator because we don’t like the alley. Get used to us.”
I moved between the dogs and Grigsby, forcing him to the far corner of the car. The dogs continued to stare at him until we reached the lobby. Grigsby flung the woman’s earbuds to the floor and marched over to the doorman. He was pointing at the woman and the dogs, gesticulating, while she sailed out the front door, a dog on either side.
I slipped into the coffee bar, watching the doorman soothe Grigsby. When they’re in their courtrooms, judges have great power over the people in front of them. They can fine insolent parties or lawyers, lock them up for contempt, rule against them. Grigsby obviously had come to expect so much deference to his rulings that he thought it carried over into daily life. But would he have been as angry about the dogs if I hadn’t rattled his cage first?
The indie bar had a shiny Simonelli machine and advertised organic small-batch beans that were probably hand massaged, but the baristas were sloppy and the espresso had a sour edge. Too short an extraction time. I was going to demand a repour when I saw Marjorie Grigsby in the lobby, wearing a lilac-colored trench coat against the edge in the April air. She chatted briefly with the doorman, giving him the same smile she’d turned on her husband and on me.
I put the cortado back on the counter and followed Ms. Grigsby, catching up with her in front of the Art Institute. I wondered if she volunteered there while her husband pontificated on architecture for tourists, but she was holding out her arm for a cab.
She put her hand down when she saw me. “Were you looking for me, dear?”
“Just catching a cab back to my office, ma’am,” I said.
“Is your office north? You can ride with me as far as Division.”
When a cab pulled up, I helped her into the backseat.
“I heard Elgin shouting at you, dear. Why?”
When I didn’t say anything, she patted my hand. “My husband has a sensitive skin, but I don’t. Does this have something to do with the hockey player named Warshawski who was in the news last week?”
“Right you are, ma’am.” I gave her an abbreviated version of the Guzzo soap opera. “I learned on Friday that someone told Stella Guzzo she wouldn’t have to serve her full sentence, that she’d be out in three years. I wondered if it was your husband who’d made that promise.”
I braced myself for an outburst, but she merely said, “I see, dear: you wanted to know if someone paid Elgin to overturn the sentence. I don’t think my husband has shoeboxes filled with cash in the Cayman Islands—of course, I’d know if he were keeping them in the apartment.”
“I’m sure you would, ma’am.”
A legendary Illinois secretary of state, who lived in a fleabag in Springfield, left a closet filled with cash-stuffed shoeboxes when he died. Whenever someone needed to buy a favor, he supposedly rubbed his hands and exclaimed, “I can smell the meat a-cooking.”
“It’s not easy to be an elected official in Illinois,” Ms. Grigsby sighed. “You have to go to everyone’s fund-raisers in the hopes that they go to yours. Your staff is tied up selling tickets to the Speaker’s events, or the governor’s, or whoever is in power at the time, when they ought to be researching case law for you. It got so my friends wouldn’t answer the phone if I called during primary season.” She gave a merry laugh.
The drive from the Art Institute to LaSalle and Division doesn’t take long. We had already crossed the river and were waiting to turn left onto Ontario. I frantic
ally tried to think of something to say besides, “Did the judge have an unusually large portfolio when he retired?”
The thought of large portfolios reminded me that I’d seen a photo of Grigsby with my most important client: Darraugh Graham had a large enough portfolio to own whole chunks of the Caymans if his tastes had run in that direction. “I understand that the judge knows Darraugh Graham. If you have any questions about me, Mr. Graham knows me well.”
“Does he, dear?” she said thoughtfully. “I don’t know if I would mention that to Elgin. He never felt that Mr. Graham responded appropriately to him. Of course, that may be because Elgin has a chip on his shoulder about elbowing his way out of Back of the Yards. He felt Darraugh Graham was looking down on him, although I always thought Mr. Graham was most painfully shy.”
I murmured agreement. Darraugh’s wintry manner didn’t exactly hide a heart of gold, but he’d definitely been a poor little rich boy.
The taxi pulled up in front of a women’s health clinic. Ms. Grigsby laughed again when she saw the surprise in my face.
“I volunteer here. You younger women think you have a corner on these issues, but believe me, I’ve been in these trenches since you were in kindergarten. I had to give it up when Elgin was on the bench; it wouldn’t do for a judge’s wife to be seen on one side of this issue or another, so I was happy for many reasons when he decided to step down.”
She handed the driver a twenty and told him to take me where I was going. He took me to my office—I’d driven down there with the dogs, since I hadn’t had a chance to run them this morning, and Bernie looked as though she was going to sleep until a second before her shift started.
The dogs were whining and pacing in my office. I drove them over to Lake Michigan. The water was bone-numbingly cold, at least for me—the past winter had been brutal, even by Chicago standards. In the middle of March we still had temperatures below freezing. Now, in April, no one trusted sunny days to stay warm. No country for old detectives.
I didn’t let the dogs go very far out, in case they got into trouble, but they were happy to swim and run. I was the one who got chilled, standing in the sand while the wind picked up speed again.
“What do you think, guys?” I asked the dogs on our way back to the parking lot. “Was Marjorie trying to tell me something that was too subtle for me to follow?”
Mitch lunged for a squirrel, but Peppy furrowed her golden brow, seeming to give the question serious thought.
“You think she was trying in a delicate way to suggest that Grigsby did favors for people who supported his election campaigns? And maybe Stella or Frank promised him something but couldn’t deliver, so there was no quid, since there’d been no quo?”
Peppy gave a sharp bark.
“You’re right: it’s a good guess, but it doesn’t explain where Stella got the money to keep up her mortgage payments. You know, it might be time to follow that money trail. After we do a little work to earn some money ourselves.”
Betty had mentioned Ferrite Workers S&L on Friday. It had been the bank of choice for most families in my neighborhood and I was betting they’d held the mortgage on the Guzzo house, too.
Of course, Ferrite didn’t exist anymore. Like a lot of neighborhood S&Ls, it had died in the savings and loan debacle of the 1980s, but Fort Dearborn Trust had taken over those accounts. And left the Ferrite name on the door in the hopes of keeping what was left of the steelworking customer base.
After three hours of steady work on my paying customers’ concerns, I took the dogs for a walk down Milwaukee to the nearest branch of Fort Dearborn, where I opened an account. On the way back we stopped for falafel, which I took to the office to eat while setting up Internet banking for my new account.
Security questions: mother’s date of birth, street where I grew up, my first-grade teacher. All questions I could answer if I was looking at Frank Guzzo’s account, but not his mother’s. How creepy did I want to be on my quest? I called the Streeter brothers, who help fill in the blanks for me when my workload gets out of hand.
“Hey, V.I.” It was Kimball Streeter, the brother I almost never saw, who answered the phone. “I see you got your face in the news again.”
I gritted my teeth for another conversation about my cousin and Annie’s murder.
“No, not that. They say you’re writing the story of his life. About time someone did that, but I didn’t know you could write.”
“I didn’t, either,” I agreed feebly. “I’m not sure I can make it happen.”
While we spoke, I looked up my name in the daily news. Natalie Clements, the woman in the Cubs media office, had been so enthusiastic about my project that she’d put out a press release, including the photo of Boom-Boom on the mound with Mitch Williams.
Local Detective Takes on a New Case: Investigating a Sports Legend’s Life, was how the Herald-Star pitched it. They quoted Mr. Villard, the retired media relations man who’d dug up the photos, on what a great sports town Chicago was, and how he knew the Cubs would be delighted to cooperate with me and the Blackhawks on writing Boom-Boom’s life story.
The Star had dug up their own old story of the day of the open tryouts. Boom-Boom had apparently led both the press and the official Cubs photographer on a merry chase around the ballpark, trying to get into all the parts of the stadium that were normally closed to the public.
Warshawski loved to play pranks, on the press and on his teammates, but the Cubs asked us not to publish the photos at the time—they didn’t want kids or other fans to get ideas about how to get into closed-off sections of Wrigley. The paper got rid of a lot of print archives in the transition to new media. Those tryout shots were never digitized, so we can’t show you what he was up to, but the book itself should help fans remember what Boom-Boom Warshawski did for this city besides his practical jokes: three Stanley Cups, and endless goodwill with local charities.
My cheeks turned hot: with this kind of publicity, I would have to write the book.
I realized I’d been carrying on some kind of conversation with Kimball Streeter, but not paying attention to the words. I had to drag my mind back to the reason I’d called: I wanted to hack into Stella Guzzo’s bank account—but I didn’t tell Kimball that.
Kimball agreed to be a researcher for the Hibernian Genealogical Society and to try to get answers to the questions I e-mailed him.
He called back forty minutes later to report that Stella had hung up on him, but that Betty had been very chatty. She didn’t know her mother-in-law’s first-grade teacher, but she knew Stella’s mother’s date of birth: March 29, when the family had to go to Grace O’Rourke Garretty’s grave and pray the rosary.
“Betty was peevish because now that Stella is out of prison, they had to go to Resurrection Cemetery again this year, when there was still snow on the ground, and kneel there doing the decades. Oh, and Stella grew up on Oglesby.”
No sooner had Kimball Streeter hung up than Murray called. He was fuming that I’d started a book project without consulting him.
“Warshawski, the only thing you know how to write is a case report. You’re clueless about narrative, story arc, building suspense. You got a ghost writer?”
“Don’t start by insulting me, or I’ll make you read my senior thesis, which won top honors in the Social Sciences Division the year I graduated.”
“Sorry, sorry,” Murray said hastily. “I know you’re mad at me, Warshawski, but honestly, it’s hard to learn about something like this in my own paper when everyone knows how tight you and I are.”
I sighed. “Murray, if I tell you something off the record, you had better keep it off the record, or I will post candid pictures of you on your Facebook page.”
He promised, but when I told him, he was enthusiastic. “Let me do it, V.I.—it’s the perfect refutation for the diary story, and anyway, the city still loves him.”
“
Maybe, Murray, maybe. Let me get out from under the Guzzos first.”
When I hung up, my eye caught the engraving of the Uffizi on the wall to my right. It had been my mother’s. I could feel the sternness of her disapproval as I dialed Fort Dearborn’s Internet help line.
I was afraid scam artists had helped themselves to my mother-in-law’s debit card, I said. She was eighty-eight and so rattled that she couldn’t remember her account number; could they help me? No, I didn’t have her Social Security number, but I could verify her current address on Buffalo, the street she grew up on and her mother’s date of birth.
Three clicks later and I was looking at Stella’s bank account. I couldn’t get statements from twenty-five years ago, which might have shown whether or not she had enough cash to bribe Judge Grigsby, but I could go back two years. The house must have been owned free and clear some time before that, because every month showed automatic debits to the utility companies, and twice a year the property tax of $546.50 had been paid, along with the homeowners insurance.
Once a quarter, enough money had come in to cover those bills via wire transfer from an account at Global American Bank. The transfers had stopped the quarter before Stella’s release. Once she’d been released, she started collecting Social Security survivor benefits, slightly more than what her benefactor had been putting into the account.
I printed out the screen, but didn’t know how to dig any deeper than that, not without a professional hacker, a bigger budget and even fewer scruples than I’d already demonstrated.
“But we’ve learned something,” I said to the dogs. “We know that someone was paying Stella’s bills. She didn’t have any money—Mateo Guzzo’s pension disappeared in the big meltdown of the steel industry and none of those Garretty brothers had two nickels to rub together. Who paid her bills?”
Mitch flattened his ears. “She threatened someone, is your theory? Could be. Or did a big favor for someone. They stopped paying when she got out. Is that why she decided to look for exoneration? Because her invisible angel stopped pouring gold coins on her?”
Brush Back (V.I. Warshawski Novels Book 17) Page 14