Thelma began saying that Mr. Zapateca would be available at two. I was startled, then realized she was talking to her device; she wore one of those clips that look like a beetle is trying to burrow into your ear.
When she finished she said there was nothing she could do to help, she hadn’t been part of Mandel & McClelland—another interruption for the beetle, this time about Ludo’s bail hearing—no one remembered that far back, and no, I couldn’t talk to Nina Quarles—“Sorry, not you, Mrs. Bialo, talking to someone in the office, please hold for one minute”—because Nina was in Paris.
The beetle had her full attention at this point. I stifled the impulse to yank it out of her ear and stalked out of the office, unreasonably annoyed. What had I really expected, after all?
The elderly couple who’d been with the guy in the rumpled suit were leaving as well. I held the door for them and put my ill temper to one side to offer an arm down the stairs—although the woman held herself erect, the man was bent over and walked with a slow shuffle.
“There is an elevator,” I suggested when they insisted they were fine on their own.
“It’s out of order, but they say climbing stairs is good for the heart,” the woman said brightly.
“We can’t afford to get dependent on anyone, young lady,” the man said. “Especially since we have to pay the lawyer bill now on top of everything else. Sounds as though you got the lady at the front desk kind of upset.”
“Hard to know why,” I said. “I was just asking a few questions. You buy your insurance here?”
“Oh, yes. The lawyer sends you down to the agency, and they give you a special rate if you’re a customer with the lawyer. And then, if you need a lawyer, the insurance man sends you up here. That’s why we were here, we were hoping to cash in our life insurance now that we need extra help. But the fine print, that’s what always does you in, isn’t it.” He pronounced the word as IN-surance.
I walked down in front of them, slowly, in case the couple changed their minds about wanting help. They were murmuring softly to each other. When we got to the front entryway, they stopped beside the inner door to Scanlon Insurance.
“We heard you asking about Stella Guzzo,” the woman said.
“Do you know her?” I tried to sound casual.
“No.” The woman looked up the stairs, to see if anyone was watching. I noticed the camera eye in the entryway ceiling, and ushered the couple outside.
“It was the girl,” the husband said. “Annie. She was a clerk in the office, a bright little thing. We still remember her being killed. Gangs. You’re always reading about children killed by gang violence, but when your own mother murders you—awful, awful!”
The woman squeezed her husband’s hand. “Don’t get so worked up, Harold: it all happened a long time ago. But Sol Mandel took it to heart, her working for him and so on. We were surprised that he gave the job of defending the mother to Ira Previn’s son.”
“It surprised me, too,” I said. “Do you know why he did it?”
“Sol had some explanation,” Harold said. “He felt responsible because the girl had planned on running away to college without telling her mother and he told her to stand up to her mother, be an adult. It didn’t seem like much of a reason, but that’s what he said.”
“How do you know so much about it?” I asked.
“Oh, we all belonged to the same temple, back when Har HaShem was down here,” the woman said. “Poor Joel.”
“What do you mean, ‘poor Joel’?” Harold snorted. “It’s poor Ira.”
“Poor Joel,” the woman repeated. “He could never live up to Ira’s reputation. He shouldn’t have gone into the law, but he so wanted Ira to pay attention to him, to admire him. Ira never could see it. All his emotional life, it was focused on the courts, and what wasn’t there, he felt he owed to Eunice. He knew how much talk there was, he felt he needed to protect her.”
“Even at the temple,” Harold said mournfully. “It’s an embarrassment to know how mean-spirited your own kind can be.”
“Yes, it caused quite a stir back when they married,” the woman sighed, “her not being a Jew, plus her being a Negro. African-American, we should say now. Oh, Harold! Look at the time, I’m running on, and we have to see about the payments before we go home.”
I handed her a card, asking her to call if anything else occurred to her. “And would you give me your phone number? I’m a detective, I’m inquisitive by nature and I might have more questions.”
Her husband objected sharply: the world was full of scam artists, she shouldn’t tell me their names. She patted his arm sympathetically but spelled it for me, slowly, Harold and Melba Minsky. They lived in Olympia Fields now, but they’d kept their legal affairs with Mandel for so long they didn’t feel like shifting when he died, even after Mr. McClelland sold the practice to Nina Quarles.
“Not that it’s much of a practice here in South Chicago anymore. If it’s a big case, they send it to the people who bought Sol Mandel’s downtown office, of course, but they can take care of the little things we need help with, not that they helped us much today.”
“They must have big cases, if Nina Quarles has to be in Paris to handle them,” I said.
Melba laughed, the sound like a rustling of paper. “I doubt that Nina has ever been in court, dear, unless she was trying to get out of a traffic ticket. She goes to Paris to buy clothes. But Thelma Kalvin is a first-rate office manager and the gentleman who looks after us knows his business. We don’t mind.”
She waited until Harold, clucking at her impatiently, pushed open the door to Scanlon’s office. “One person you might talk to is Rabbi Zukos’s son. The rabbi, may his name be a blessing, died after the congregation moved to Highland Park, but his son Rafael was in the same bar mitzvah class as Joel Previn. Good luck, dear.”
FLEEING THE LIONS
It was past two. I’d been too agitated by the television invasion to eat breakfast this morning and I was suddenly ravenous. I was standing in the street to see what restaurants were nearby when a car honked right behind me. I jumped and scrambled back to the curb. A late-model silver SUV pulled into the spot where I’d been standing.
Two men climbed out, laughing about someone named Robbie. The driver said, “You go on in, Wally, I’ll follow you in a sec.”
He came over to me, a white-haired man wearing a red-checked shirt, a leather bomber jacket slung over one shoulder.
“Is your life insurance paid up, young lady?”
He laughed at my startled expression. “If you stand in the middle of a busy street, better make sure your family is taken care of. What can we do for you?”
“Are you Mr. Scanlon?” I asked.
“Guilty as charged. And you are?”
“V. I. Warshawski.”
He’d been laughing, his cheeks pushing his eyes into twinkling slits, as if he were practicing for a role as Santa. At my name the twinkling vanished and I could see his eyes, blue and cold.
“I knew the hockey player,” Scanlon said. “Who’s back in the news these days.”
“Yes, indeed he is. I remember the night you chartered buses to take the neighborhood up to watch his debut at the Stadium. Or was that your father?”
He laughed, delighted that I remembered, but the laugh didn’t thaw his eyes. “That was me, a very young me. In those days I loved throwing big parties, getting people together, watching them have a good time. I still love a good party but can’t take the hours anymore. Warshawski wasn’t married. Let’s see—you’re a sister?”
“Cousin,” I said.
I could almost see zeros and ones shifting in his face as he calculated who I was, where I fit into his files.