“You finish writing that book already, young lady?” he asked as I bent over to shake his hand.
“Right now, that book is about as remote as a Cubs championship,” I said ruefully. “I have a favor, I guess yet another favor to ask. I want to play a recording for you and ask whether you recognize any of the voices you hear.”
He was pleased to help out; it would take his mind off the impending move.
“It’s not necessarily going to bring you pleasure: it’s a recording someone made of an attempt at extortion.”
I stepped him through the background of the recording before I played it. He was old, as old as Mr. Contreras, and he needed time to absorb the story, so I told it in small steps. Adelaide gave little gasps of horror at the description of Jerry Fugher’s death.
When Mr. Villard seemed to have the details under his belt, I took out my cell phone and played the recording for him. He had trouble hearing it, so I asked Adelaide to hold it to his ear.
At the end, he stared hard at me, eyes troubled. “You knew who it was before you played it for me, didn’t you?”
“No, sir,” I said quietly. “The first speaker is a man named Jerry Fugher. He was murdered last week, but I have no idea who the second person is. I thought it might be a politician, but now I’m thinking it’s someone connected to the Cubs.”
“I’m old. It’s easy to con the old.” He looked up at Adelaide. “Should I believe her?”
“Why did you think Mr. Villard would know who it was?” Adelaide asked.
“It was a guess, a leap, but Sturlese Cement plays a role in this, and there’s a mobster who has a stake in Sturlese. I saw him outside the ballpark almost two weeks ago. I’m wondering if they were meeting with someone in the team’s organization.”
She didn’t like what I was doing, but she told Mr. Villard I was telling the truth. “Probably telling the truth,” she amended.
He picked up his glass with his distorted fingers and took a deep swallow. “I’m old. My hearing is crap. Can you leave that recording here? I want to check with someone else before I say for sure.”
I hesitated. “There are a lot of ugly players in this game, sir. The way they disposed of Jerry Fugher is proof of that. Quite possibly this unusual makeup I have on my left eye came from them as well. I can’t let you put yourself in danger.”
Adelaide nodded. “She’s right, Mr. Villard. You know what your daughters would say.”
“My daughters, God love them, think their job is to swaddle me in baby blankets so that nothing bruises me between now and my funeral.” He put the glass down with a snap. “I’m ninety-one. I’m tired of no one thinking I’m good for anything besides being a grinning ornament at Cubs CARE dinners. Give me the recording and I’ll get it back to you tomorrow.”
I explained that I needed to copy it to an electronic device—I couldn’t hand over my cell phone. Adelaide didn’t have a smartphone, but the daughters had given their father one and Adelaide knew the basic technology; she’d help him listen to it if I forwarded the file to his e-mail.
DINNER PARTY
By now I was cutting it close for collecting Bernie so we could meet Pierre’s flight at O’Hare. The Subaru was a sturdy beast, not built for speed. That didn’t really matter, given the thick traffic, but I missed the Mustang’s ability to maneuver.
I found Bernie and Mr. Contreras having a sad farewell. The old man tried to persuade me that he and Mitch could take care of anyone who came after Bernie.
“Her parents are the ones who are summoning her home,” I said, “and after the attack last week, I agree it’s the right decision.
“Let’s go,” I added to Bernie. “Your dad’s flight lands in under an hour and he will be very disappointed if you’re not there to meet him.”
We stowed her backpack and suitcase in the Subaru along with her hockey stick. She and Pierre were spending two nights at the Trefoil Hotel. They would detour back to Florida for the Canadiens’ next playoff game, then fly to Quebec.
Mr. Contreras brought the dogs out to see us off. While Bernie knelt on the sidewalk to clutch Mitch’s neck, I told Tom Streeter, who was on duty this afternoon, that the brothers could end their surveillance for now.
“No one’s been sniffing around that I could see, Vic, but a young woman tried to get into your place this afternoon—”
“Right, Viola Mesaline. Kind of a client.”
“Yes, Mr. Contreras told me. There may have been someone on her tail, someone on a Hog. I wasn’t a hundred percent sure, and I didn’t want to follow them in case they’d been sent to smoke out Bernie’s protection detail.”
My stomach turned to ice. If someone was tailing Viola—Nabiyev? Bagby? Scanlon?—it was because—how could I know why? Not because they thought she’d be easier to track than me—I had done nothing to cover my trail lately. Then because they thought she’d lead them to someone? To her brother? Which meant he was probably still alive.
“Do you want us to check in with her, see if we can spot the Hog again?” Tom Streeter asked.
I didn’t like to think how much the Streeters’ bill might run. The last few weeks, all I’d incurred was overhead, not income, but I couldn’t leave Viola naked if the Grozny Mob was after her. I agreed, but said they didn’t need to stay on her during business hours, assuming she went to her job at Ajax.
“Got it, Vic. I’ll cover you as far as the expressway.”
That was helpful, too: once we were on the glue called the Kennedy, it would be impossible to check for tails.
We seemed clean, unless the pursuit was doing it with multiple vehicles, which implies both a security team with a lot of resources—think NSA—and a target worth spending them on. The Uzbeki Mob’s finances might rival the NSA’s, but I wasn’t that kind of target. I’d be easy to take out the old-fashioned way, a good marksman with one bullet to the head. I rubbed my forehead reflexively.
I glanced over at Bernie, but she had her earbuds in and the volume turned up. She was texting friends, ignoring me, leaving me to send my brain uselessly around a maze that didn’t seem to have a center.
Where did Sebastian and the Cubs fit into this scenario? Villard had been briefly angry when I played Sebastian’s recording for him, accusing me of knowing who was on the other end of the conversation before I played it. Someone I’d met when I’d been at the ballpark? Will Drechen in Media Relations was the only man I’d talked to, and it didn’t sound like his voice.
“What are you thinking?” Bernie asked as we finally reached the airport exit. “You look angry.”
“Not angry, frustrated.”
“Are you glad I’m leaving? Uncle Sal told me I was making you worried.”
“I worry because I can’t keep you safe. When you come back in July for Northwestern’s hockey camp, I hope all this Guzzo business will be resolved so you can run from my home to the lake without my worrying that someone might hurt you.”
“And me, I am sad to leave without clearing Uncle Boom-Boom’s name. And of course, I am happy that we have met,” she added as a formal afterthought. “Also the dogs and Uncle Sal. And Jake. I know Uncle Sal is sorry I’m going.”
“Yes, you’ve brightened his life,” I agreed.
When we reached the O’Hare parking garage, I passed up the first few open spaces to make sure that none of the cars following us up the ramp was sticking with us.
Pierre’s plane was on time, a miracle on the route between O’Hare and the Northeast. He ran through the revolving doors at the security exit, bag over his shoulder, and scooped his daughter into his arms.
As soon as she saw him, Bernie’s animation returned. Father and daughter exclaimed in French for a moment until Pierre turned to embrace me. “Ah, so good to see you, Victoire, much too long since we were last together. Thank you for caring so tenderly for our tourbillon.”
He brushed Bernie’s hair from her forehead, saw the fading bruises where she’d scraped her face against the concrete. “Yes, petite, you’ve had far worse injuries on the ice rink, that is for sure. As for you, V.I., you look much more like Boom-Boom with that nose and your face all green, but it’s a badge of courage. Arlette and I, we don’t forget that you saved our darling’s life.”
“After putting it at risk,” I said dryly.
He made a dismissive gesture. “Bernadine has a gift for mischief, so enough of that. Now—you must be my guest for dinner. Not much of a thanks—for that, as soon as the hockey season ends—as soon as the Canadiens defeat the Blackhawks for the Stanley Cup—you will come for a week or a month or a summer to the Laurentians, right?”
“Canadiens beating the Hawks?” I said. “Not only Boom-Boom’s ghost but the Golden Jet will come for you, you renegade.”
“Americans are so greedy,” Bernie said. “The Blackhawks have won for years and the Canadiens not since 1993, before I was even born! If Vic is coming downtown to dinner, then can we ask Uncle Sal? He’s so very sad that I am leaving and I am sad to be going.”
The upshot was that we collected both Mr. Contreras and Jake on our way into the city. I changed out of jeans into gray silk trousers and my favorite rose-colored top and the five of us went into the Loop in a festive mood. The bartender at the hotel restaurant, who remembered Pierre from the Blackhawks glory days, sent over a bottle of wine, while the hostess, who knew Jake’s playing, put together an off-menu meal.
The first bottle disappeared quickly, the second one only slightly less so, and we were partway through a third by the time the hostess presented us with a cart of artisanal cheeses. Bernie was drinking her share and more besides, but her father didn’t object, and thankfully she was no longer my worry.
As Jake sliced a pear, twirling it around and laying uniform sections out on the cheese board, Bernie brought up her complaint, or perhaps concern, that I was letting Boom-Boom down by paying too much attention to that “dreary woman’s missing brother,” and not enough to the slander against my cousin.
Jake said he was just as happy if something had taken my mind off getting beaten up in South Chicago. “Dreary is good. Dreary is low-risk.”
I decided it would be prudent not to mention that the dreary woman’s brother might have a connection to the Uzbeki Mob.
“But what is happening with this history of Boom-Boom?” Pierre said. “His name has not been in the news since ten days. I thought this tracasserie about a girl being terrified of him had died down.”
“It has, in a way,” I said. “And up until two days ago, I’d become convinced that Stella Guzzo, or maybe her handlers, had invented her daughter’s diary. Then I saw some photos that made me think the diary might actually have existed.”
I pulled out my phone and showed Pierre the photographs from Mr. Villard’s collection. “This is the young woman who was murdered. Did you ever see Boom-Boom with her? Or did he ever talk about the day he went to Wrigley Field with his boyhood friend?”
Pierre beckoned to the hostess to bring over a better lamp. “Vic, you know this is many years in the past. What do I remember of the thirty thousand times your cousin and I spoke? The camaraderie, not the details. Especially no details of Boom-Boom’s love life. Me, I was always with Arlette, but for Boom-Boom, in those early years, it was a new love every three or four months.”
Still, he took his time going through the photos, tilting the phone so the light hit the screen at the best angle. When he put the phone down, Bernie snatched it and looked through the file herself.
“That man, the drunk one with the soft hands, he thought I was this girl, but me, I don’t see it at all.”
Mr. Contreras leaned over her shoulder. “No, I see what he meant, Peanut. You both have a kind of liveliness in you. Reckless, maybe.”
I looked at Mr. Contreras with respect. He was right: it was that quality that Joel Previn had been responding to, not the fact that the two had the same coloring or were the same age.
“And this was the girl whose mother murdered her?” Bernie said. “And now I see, she was playing hide-and-seek with Uncle Boom-Boom—where? At the baseball stadium? And she is holding—quoi?—pas une pochette. A little book, no? You didn’t tell me this, Vic, you didn’t tell me you saw this girl with the diary in her hand.”
“I’m not sure that’s what it is,” I said. “It’s not clear—”
“When it quacks, and waddles, and drops white feathers on the grass, you still say, it is not a duck?” Bernie slapped the phone back on the table, throwing up her hands to emphasize her sarcasm.
“Bernadine! You are jumping to conclusions like a kangaroo. Pas plus de vin.” Pierre moved the third bottle out of her reach, adding to me, “As for this poor girl—so terrible to think she was soon to be dead, she is so—so vivace in the photo. But I never saw her with your cousin.”
He tapped the screen. “In these pictures, if anyone was afraid it was Boom-Boom, after all. Look at his face—it’s not a game for him. She’s leading him in the dance all over this stadium.”
Mr. Contreras and Jake took their turn to look at the pictures. “Whatever she was carrying, she don’t have it when she comes out of that tunnel, or wherever she went off to,” my neighbor said.
Bernie grabbed the phone again. “Uncle Sal, you are right. This Annie left the diary behind, and then the mother saw the pictures and went back and found it as soon as she got out of prison.”
“Nobody knew the pictures existed until after the story about the diary surfaced,” I objected. “And then—”
I stopped.
“What are you thinking?” Bernie demanded.
“Mr. Villard’s house was burgled and some of his Cubs memorabilia were taken. I was going to say, maybe the thieves were looking for these pictures. Well, not these specifically, but the break-in happened soon after the story ran about Boom-Boom being at Wrigley. Maybe I’m wrong—maybe the break-in was random and not connected to Boom-Boom or Stella’s quest for exoneration.”
“These pictures prove the diary!” Bernie cried, cheeks flaming.
“This conversation proves that you cannot have more than one glass of wine, Bernadine,” Pierre said. “You are behaving as if you were with your teammates, not at a dinner party. You and I, we are going up to our room and let these people have some peace and quiet.”
He took my hand and kissed it. “Tomorrow, Bernadine and I will see the sights of Chicago, including a chance to watch the Blackhawks skate against St. Louis. You must come, too. The Blackhawks, they will be thrilled to have Boom-Boom’s cousin in the house. And these gentlemen?”
Mr. Contreras was torn, but decided he needed a night at home. Jake seemed thankful to plead a rehearsal, but I accepted happily.
HIGH AND INSIDE
Between the wine, my cold and my lingering injuries, I was ready for bed within minutes of getting home. It was a luxury to stretch out in Jake’s clean sheets, not to have my brain on partial alert for Bernie sliding out of the building.
Jake had recently been selected to play the Martinsson Double Bass Concerto with the Chicago Symphony and wanted to practice fingering. I fell asleep to the soft rumbling of his playing and for once managed a full night with no intrusions from Guzzos or mobsters or tar pits.
I woke to yet another cold cloudy day in the city that spring forgot, but finally felt well enough to run the lakefront with the dogs. My muscles were loose, I was moving easily, I was happy.
At the Fullerton Avenue beach, I returned phone calls while the dogs swam after their tennis balls. I was just finishing a conversation with one of Darraugh Graham’s financial officers when Vince Bagby phoned.
“How’s the nose?”
“Almost well enough to smell the peonies you sent.”
“And the girl you’re looking after?”
> “Back in Canada with her parents. Why?” I kept my voice friendly, but I didn’t trust him with the truth.
“I’m a friendly guy, Warshawski, who’s trying to make conversation. I’d be glad to show you face-to-face—you free for dinner?”
“Not until after I find Sebastian Mesaline, and even then, no guarantees.” I found myself checking the gun in my tuck holster.
“Come on, Warshawski, you can’t be interested in a wussy kid like him.”
“I’ve never met him,” I said. “Tell me what’s so wussy about him.”
Mitch and Peppy, sensing my attention was elsewhere, started wandering up the beach. I whistled to them sharply.
“You have to do that into the mike? You damn near broke my eardrums.”
“What’s so wussy about Mesaline?” I repeated.
“Word on the street. When you meet him, you can let me know. I hope it happens soon—I’m going to hold you to that dinner date.”
I pocketed my phone while I went after the dogs. Why had Bagby called? To see how much I knew or because he actually had taken a liking to me? I guess there was no reason it couldn’t be both; he was a friendly guy, as he himself agreed: he got along with everyone, from the security manager at the Guisar dock to me.
Mitch was cleaning up after the Canada geese. I brought him to heel and jogged the rest of the way to the car.
It was interesting that Bagby knew about Sebastian Mesaline. I’d never mentioned Sebastian around him, but Bagby also knew Jerry Fugher, Nabiyev and, presumably, the Sturlese brothers, the people on the Virejas Tower project, perhaps even the contractor who had placed Sebastian there.
“Too wide a field to analyze,” I told the dogs, unlocking the Subaru. “But Bagby is definitely playing with a very rough crowd.”
They showed their agreement by shaking hard and covering me with wet sand. I guess that was a good thing—it meant less sand for me to vacuum out of the Subaru before I returned it to Luke.
Back home, I changed into office clothes and brought espressos over to Jake’s. He was still asleep, but when I sat cross-legged on the bed, he stuck a hand out from under the covers for one of the cups.
Brush Back (V.I. Warshawski Novels Book 17) Page 31