Brush Back (V.I. Warshawski Novels Book 17)

by Sara Paretsky

  For once, I slept dreamlessly, no nightmares about tar pits or Stella Guzzo. It was only when I woke the next night, feeling Lotty’s fingers on my wrist, that the fears came tumbling back in on me. Bernie, Mr. Contreras—I’d watched him collapse—but I’d passed out instead of helping him. The dogs, the thugs.

  Lotty looked at me with wry sadness. “I’m tempted to put you under again, Liebchen, if you’re only going to wake up to frenzy. Your neighbor is recovering. He was dehydrated and exhausted—he went through a heavy workout for a man his age. For anyone of any age, even for you. As for Bernadine, she, too, is on the mend. She isn’t my patient, but the doctors at the University of Chicago who have been treating her tell me she is tormenting herself with guilt over putting you and your neighbor in peril.”

  Lotty sat on the edge of the bed, brushing my hair back from my face, her black eyes glittering with unshed tears. “When you come to me like this, wounded, my heart stops: I don’t want to be the one to outlive you. But if you hadn’t torn yourself apart, Bernadine would be dead. I’ll never be able to balance what you do to yourself to save others with my own need for you to save yourself, but I promise to stop adding to your torment by chastising you for it.” She stopped, smiled wryly and added, “I will try to stop.”

  I squeezed her fingers. “What happened to my dogs?”

  “The dockworkers who saved you before the police arrived seemed to have taken charge of the dogs, as well. Your neighbor wouldn’t let me hospitalize him until he knew they were safe. Jake went to South Chicago to collect them. He’s boarding them in the place he says you always use.” She made a face. “He said it’s called doggie day care—because you are convalescing, I will spare you my opinion of that.”

  I laughed weakly and fell back into sleep while she sat next to me. When I woke again, Lotty was gone; a nurse had roused me to warn me that the police and an FBI agent were on their way up to my room.

  I felt at a disadvantage in my hospital gown, grubby and unkempt. I made them wait while I wobbled into the bathroom and rinsed my face and hair. Jake had brought over some clean clothes, a pair of his own jeans, since I’d trashed all three of mine, and a rose cotton top, which made me look almost soft, graceful—a useful piece of misdirection in speaking to the law.

  Conrad looked ostentatiously at his watch when I emerged. “You can spare a few minutes now? Must be nice to take off for R and R when you feel like it, instead of sleeping standing up the way I’ve been doing.”

  “Like an elephant.” I sat cross-legged on the bed.

  Derek Hatfield, from the FBI, looked startled. “Elephant?”

  “They sleep standing up. I expect if you’d been shot in the head and kept going so you could rescue a kidnap victim, the department would let you take a break. At least twenty minutes. Take it up with Captain Mallory. What can you tell me?”

  “Wonder Woman saves the city again.” Conrad was only half jeering. “You got some major bad boys way out on a limb they can’t climb back from. The Sturlese brothers and Boris Nabiyev, they were the goons who tried killing you and the Fouchard girl. Their alibis—the flu, being on job sites—unraveled like my mother’s knitting, once we flashed some warrants around. They didn’t really have any interest in any ancient papers, just wanted to get a couple of meddling women out of the way.”

  “Did they reveal who paid them?” I asked.

  “The Sturlese boys say it was all about the muscle they tried to put on the facilities VP at Wrigley. They were deep in debt after the downturn, Nabiyev got money for them from the Grozny Mob, but they had to earn it out. The Grozny goons wanted to pour all the new concrete in the Wrigley reno, and when the Cubs wouldn’t talk to them, the Uzbekis sent Fugher in to try to bribe or batter a guy named Brineruck in the Cubs organization. He was the person talking to Fugher in the recording you turned up.”

  “How’d you smoke him out?” I asked.

  Conrad yawned. “Your friend Villard, the guy who was shot up in Evanston, he made it through surgery. He ID’d the punk speaking to Fugher. Villard called him after you played the recording and the creep panicked, called Brian Sturlese for advice. Sturlese and Nabiyev weren’t going to take any chance on being named in a potential bribery case; they drove up to the Villard mansion with Brineruck, used him as their stalking horse, and shot Villard. The Cubs fired Brineruck on the spot, of course, but we arrested him for conspiracy to commit murder. Bribery, too, but attempted murder always plays well with a jury.”

  “What about Sebastian Mesaline?” I asked. “Did he ever show up?”

  Conrad made a face. “Punk was hiding in his uncle Jerry’s garage down in Lansing. He dissolved like the soggy piece of Kleenex he is. Sniveled about the loan he’d been forced to take out to cover his embezzlement. His sister, who must have ‘Born to be a Martyr’ tattooed on her someplace, is insisting that he didn’t do anything wrong—even though he locked the Fouchard girl behind a steel barricade and left her to die there. Sis is putting aside money for his legal defense. She tried hiring your mouthpiece, but Freeman Carter apparently told her there’d be a conflict of interest.”

  “Was there any sign that Vince Bagby was involved in the Fugher murder?”

  “You have a hard-on—”

  “Disgusting expression, especially when talking to me,” I said. “The Sturlese brothers didn’t have an interest in anything Annie Guzzo may or may not have hidden under Wrigley Field. I’m trying to find out who planted that in their tiny minds, or in the Grozny Mob’s brains. If it was Vince Bagby—”

  “I’m not digging into Bagby on your say-so,” Conrad said coldly.

  “He was at Say, Yes! the night that Bernadine and I were beaten up, and he’s been popping up every time something dramatic happens. I don’t know if it’s coincidence, or because he’s keeping an eye on me for Scanlon.”

  “I can’t help you there. Maybe he knows you’re an unguided missile and he’s trying to make sure you don’t land on his trucks.”

  Derek swallowed a grin.

  I curled my lip. “I suppose mocking me is the easiest way to assuage your guilt over not getting to the Sturlese brothers before they dragged Bernadine Fouchard to South Chicago. Thank goodness Mr. Contreras and I rescued her before she died.”

  Conrad shifted in his chair. “Sorry. Out of line. But I’m still not going after Scanlon, or Bagby, because you have an itch you want to scratch.”

  I sucked in a breath, held it for a count of ten, waited for the red to fade from in front of my eyes. “There’s the business of Annie Guzzo, and what she was hiding in the tunnel at Wrigley, and why she was murdered. And all of that leads back to Rory Scanlon.”

  “There’s no connection to Scanlon. And definitely not one to Bagby, who wasn’t even running the trucking company when Annie was killed.”

  “Bagby and Scanlon are cousins, and Bagby is the younger one. He wanted the big boys to let him play with them when he was little, so he’d do whatever they said. It got to be ingrained. Now that they’re all grown, Bagby still does what the older boys want so he can be part of the gang.”

  “What, now you’re a family therapist? They’re cousins, they do things together, so Bagby helps support Say, Yes! I’ll admit you were a big help two days ago in South Chicago, but I’ve got enough real crime in the Fourth to keep me going until my granddaughter’s in college—and I don’t have a kid of my own yet. I’m not going to start inventing crimes where the system is running smoothly.”

  “The system is exactly what runs smoothly only for the people running it!” I cried, exasperated. “Scanlon is funneling money through that Say, Yes! foundation to stuff that’s either illegal or would get his insurance license revoked. Back when Annie Guzzo worked for Mandel & McClelland, she uncovered evidence that Scanlon was using the kids in his Say, Yes! foundation to beat up local businesses and push them into buying their insurance through his agency. Joel Pre
vin overheard Scanlon and Mandel talk about using foundation funds to bankroll Spike Hurlihey’s first political campaign.”

  I told them what I’d learned from Joel, from Frank Guzzo, from Mr. Villard and from the photographs themselves.

  Conrad rubbed his forehead. I could see past my anger to the fatigue lines gouged in his face.

  “I am not a fan of Stella Guzzo,” I added, “but the night Annie Guzzo was murdered, two other people came to the house while Stella was off playing bingo: first, Joel Previn, and after he left, Sol Mandel.”

  Conrad sat upright. “What? What crystal ball spat that detail out twenty-five years after the fact?”

  Derek interrupted to ask who we were talking about.

  “Joel told me he was there,” I said after Conrad and I had explained the Guzzo murder story. “I never could understand why Mandel & McClelland took the case, or why poor Joel, who had a crush on Annie, agreed to represent Stella, but he told me Mandel saw his car outside the Guzzo house and threatened to turn him over to the cops if he didn’t defend Stella. It had never occurred to him that Mandel could have been Annie’s killer.”

  “Maybe because Joel had already killed her himself,” Conrad snarled.

  “Yeah, right, that’s a possibility. I don’t believe it after spending a lot of time with Joel.”

  “Convenient to blame it on the dead partner.” Derek chipped in his two cents.

  “Yes, but there’s a living person who had a stake in what Annie had uncovered,” I said. “I’m betting he came along for the ride, if not for the deed.”

  Conrad stared at me. “You’re back on Scanlon’s ass. God damn it, Warshawski—”

  I bared my teeth in a ferocious grin. “I have a handwritten note to my dad, rubbing his face in the fact of his transfer to West Englewood. Whoever wrote it implied that he put word out that Tony snitched on his brother officers—in order to make sure Tony was in maximum danger on the street. My father was almost killed, not once but many times, because the boys at the Seventh didn’t get him backup. The stress—he might still be part of my life today if it weren’t for whoever made sure he got put there!”

  Conrad said, “And you think it was Scanlon? What proof, Ms. W.? What proof?”

  “The letter! I’ve sent it to my lawyer for safekeeping, but—”

  “We could run forensics on it,” Derek offered.

  “I don’t want to risk it evaporating while it’s out of my custody,” I said coldly. “But I’m betting Conrad can at least ID who wrote it, even if not the taunting message to my dad. A facsimile is up on the Annie Guzzo’s Murder website.”

  Conrad’s copper skin darkened to mahogany. “You did what? You set up a murder site on your own without talking to the police? And you complain when I say you take the law into your own hands?”

  “We were working against the clock. I was keeping in touch with you, but the police apparatus, you couldn’t move on this as fast as I could.”

  Conrad gave me a withering look, but buried himself in his smartphone, looking up the URL. I gave him and Derek the password Mr. Contreras and I had created.

  Conrad looked up after reading the letter, anguish in his eyes. “I know that handwriting: Oswald Brattigan. He was my watch commander at the Fourth when I was first transferred in there. If that sentence to your father was written by Scanlon—” He broke off, his chin collapsing against his chest.

  “I don’t want to believe this, or deal with it,” he mumbled after a moment. “Rory Scanlon—if he’s been using the kids in Say, Yes! to extort or intimidate—my God—it’s going to be an unholy war down there. He’s so connected, Vic: he’s got the Speaker in his pocket, the local parish—”

  “But if Joel’s report on what he overheard Scanlon and Mandel talk about is correct, they were using both client accounts and foundation money to fuel political campaigns. Spike Hurlihey owes his Speaker’s gavel to illegal money.”

  Conrad smacked his thigh. “That doesn’t mean he knew the money was illegal. Assuming it was illegal, which is a big ‘if.’ An overheard conversation twenty-five years ago by an alkie who couldn’t cut it at the firm? I don’t believe it and neither will a jury.”

  “The prosecutor for the Northern District is going to want to take a look,” Derek said. “If the paper trail is there—we can subpoena records from Continental Illinois. Do a handwriting check on this ‘FYI, Law and Order Man’ scrawl. Maybe we can roll on one of the Say, Yes! kids to wear a wire.”

  “They’re used to prison,” Conrad said. “It doesn’t frighten them. They build new gang networks there, they learn new street skills.”

  “Okay, someone in the law office, or someone in Hurlihey’s office,” Derek said. He looked sympathetically at Conrad. “I don’t have to work there every day, it won’t bother me any.”

  “And Annie’s murder,” I said stubbornly.

  Conrad thought it over. “There’s no forensic evidence, Vic. I told you I had the files sent up when the story broke about Boom-Boom. It looked so cut and dried, girl dies from bleeding into the brain after mom beats her on the head, we didn’t look for other prints at the scene. There’s nothing to tie anyone—not even Previn—to the murder scene now.”

  I let it go at that. He was right, for one thing, and for another, I was too exhausted to argue any further.

  Conrad held the door open for Derek, but came back to my bed after the Fed had left. “You know that call, warning you away from South Chicago after the Dragons attacked you? I found out that Sid Gerber did it.”

  “Sid?” My dad’s old pal who was the desk sergeant now down in the Fourth. “Conrad—no, he can’t have been part of—”

  “No, he wasn’t, stupid old goat. He was worried about you, thought he’d be doing your old man a favor by scaring you away. When he saw what had happened down in Dead Stick Pond, he talked it over with one of the boys, who came to me with the news. I decided to pretend I hadn’t heard about it—guy is six months from retirement. I just told him that the quickest way to get you stung by a thousand wasps was to tell you to stay out of their nest.”

  He turned on his heel and marched out before I could respond. I went back to sleep, but was awakened an hour later by Murray Ryerson, who’d bullied or charmed his way past the nursing staff, demanding an exclusive. He’d found photos from Mr. Contreras’s and my rescue at Dead Stick Pond that one of the hard hats had posted on Facebook and wanted my story.

  I gave him most of what I knew but didn’t tell him that Derek might get the Feds to look into the Say, Yes! foundation accounts—I didn’t want to short-circuit a potential investigation with a media broadside. Instead, I told him my growing doubts about Stella’s guilt in her daughter’s death. For Murray, an old crime reporter, this was like a gazelle wandering in front of a lion. He agreed there wasn’t enough to print yet, and also no way to get evidence linking either Mandel, Scanlon or one of the juniors in Mandel’s firm to Annie’s death.

  “Why did Previn have to be reckless enough to go up to Wrigley to find the papers and then such a twitcher that he fled as soon as someone confronted him?” Murray grumbled.

  “Doesn’t matter,” I yawned. “The documents wouldn’t have survived the damp, let alone the rats, after all this time. The unbelievable thing is that the binder itself was still there for that prize idiot Sebastian to discover.”

  Jake arrived after lunch to bring me home. I spent the afternoon listening to him rehearse the Martinsson concerto, and in the evening went with Lotty and Max to hear him perform.

  All my houseplants had died from neglect. The next day, I went to my office so that my practice didn’t suffer a similar fate. In the evening I went back up to the hospital to collect Mr. Contreras, and to bring the dogs home from the doggy B&B where they’d been boarding. While we rehashed our glorious rescue mission over a picnic supper, Pierre and Bernadine showed up.

 
“We’re flying home tomorrow,” Pierre said, “but—I called you a lot of bad names when this petite monstre was cracking my life apart. I need to say that I am sorry.”

  Bernie flushed and drew a semicircle on the floor with the toe of her boot. “I’m sorry, too, Vic, I—I almost died. Twice in one night and two times you almost died to save me.”

  Mitch bounded over, pushed his big nose between Bernie and me, turning the awkward moment into a laugh.

  “You had a horrific time,” I said. “Does it mean you’re going to turn your back on Northwestern’s scholarship?”

  Bernie made a moue. “Cornell, Syracuse, they want me, too. I will decide after I visit them, but—”

  “But only with Arlette,” Pierre said. “This tourbillon goes nowhere alone until she is forty.”

  “Papa!” Bernie protested.

  “Very well. If you behave and endanger no one’s life for ten years, I will reduce the sentence to age thirty-five.” Pierre smiled, but he pulled his daughter to him in a ferocious hug.

  LOADING THE BASES

  Life began returning to a semblance of normal: clients, concerts or dancing with Jake, helping Mr. Contreras get his handkerchief garden in shape. TV and Web media rushed in to cover the drama of Bernie’s rescue, but it was easy to deflect them to the dockworkers who’d come to our aid.

  The spring continued cold and wet, but I ran the lakefront with the dogs, played basketball with my friends on Sunday mornings. I spent time with Mr. Villard, visiting him first at the rehab place where he went after surgery, and then in his assisted living apartment when he was strong enough to go home. Adelaide continued to look after him: the daughters had tried to fire her, but Mr. Villard insisted that he was to blame for getting shot:

  “I should have told Ms. Warshawski it was Gil Brineruck’s voice on that recording, instead of thinking I could confront him alone. He was a terrible disgrace to baseball and to the Cubs. Adelaide knows how to look after me without turning me into a three-year-old. Adelaide stays.”