“Your father was the cop, right? They said he couldn’t be bribed, right? One of the pillars of justice in an unjust world.”
“I’m glad people knew that about him,” I said formally: Scanlon’s voice had held an undercurrent that sounded close to scorn.
“And you went off to school someplace, left the neighborhood.”
“Guilty as charged,” I echoed him.
“So what brings you back to South Chicago?”
“Stella Guzzo.” I waited a beat, to let him fill in the blanks.
“Right, it was on the news, she claims Warshawski terrified her daughter. And so you’ve hotfooted it down here to clear his name. It’s what I love about this neighborhood, families in it stick together. What did you think we could do for you here?”
“Not you, Nina Quarles’s office. They took over Mandel & McClelland’s business.” I knew he knew that. “I was hoping they might have a trial transcript.”
“Oh? And did they?”
“No one seems to have one. Poor Annie—her death wasn’t considered important enough for anyone to record all the details.”
“She was a bright kid. Too bad it had to end that way.”
“Had to end that way? That makes it sound as if her mother was preordained to kill her.”
“Oh, these South Side Irish families, with their outsized voices and quarrels squeezed into tiny houses, they’re tinderboxes. I know them well—I grew up in one of those families.”
Scanlon started to open the door but stopped when I asked how he knew Annie Guzzo.
He shrugged impatiently. “How we all know each other. She was a bright kid in my lawyer’s office—Sol Mandel used to handle my family’s business. Nina does now. Keep it all in the neighborhood, that’s what I tell people.”
“Did Mr. Mandel ever tell you why he pressured Joel Previn into defending Stella? It seems so strange, defending the killer of his young clerk.”
“We all hoped something would put some spine in Joel. He had chances most people down here never come close to, but he was a whiner and a crybaby. Sol wanted to see if he could buck up, act like a man, and sad to say, it didn’t happen. Good talking to you, Warshawski the cousin, but stay out of the street—people drive like lunatics.”
He laughed again, clapped my shoulder and went into his office. I stared after him thoughtfully, wondering what that conversation had been about. And the meeting itself—it had seemed like a chance encounter, but it was odd that he’d stopped to talk to me. Was it possible that Thelma Kalvin had sent him a message—detective in the office asking about Stella Guzzo? Or had the Guzzo business gotten me so off-balance that I was seeing conspiracies under every streetlamp?
One thing I was sure about: I was still hungry. I found a taco stand up the street with some bar stools set up on the sidewalk for customers. After hours of slogging around the South Side, my anger about the slander against Boom-Boom was waning, but everything about Stella’s story was so odd I couldn’t leave it alone.
Maybe Scanlon’s theory as to why Mandel had asked Joel Previn to defend Stella was correct: tough love. Make the boy grow a spine or balls or whatever. It was possible—there’d definitely been a culture of bullying in the Mandel & McClelland office, with Spike Hurlihey, now the House Speaker, leading the pack. Would the partners have participated in the bullying to such a degree that they’d taken on Stella’s defense just to humiliate Joel?
What had Stella said, when I called on her last week? Something about Annie rotting in hell if she’d died with her last words to her mother on her lips. Maybe Sol Mandel had also seen something malicious in Annie that made him silently sympathize with Stella.
I tried to picture it, but that image wouldn’t come into focus. The Annie I’d known was hardworking, but not malicious. I’d been jealous of her sometimes when I was young because of the way she attached herself to my mother—I wanted Gabriella’s love all to myself and when Annie practiced her music harder than I ever did, I felt she was showing off. I had a couple of embarrassing memories of my own malicious acts, but not of Annie’s. Even so, it wouldn’t surprise me to know she’d fought with Stella. When you grow up in a violent household, you tend to lash back.
If Annie had kept a diary, I wanted to see it. “Sorry, Freeman,” I muttered, “I know you told me to keep away from the Guzzos, but I’m calling Frank.”
He wasn’t ecstatic at hearing from me, so I spoke with extra heartiness to make up for it.
“Frank! Your mom’s all over the news, so is Boom-Boom, and I’m even getting a shout-out. This is so cool—is this why you came to me? To help me with publicity?”
“I’m driving. What do you want?”
“Annie’s diary. It’s so amazing that it showed up like this out of the blue. Where was it all these years?”
“How should I know? I only know Ma said she found it while she was cleaning out the dresser in Annie’s bedroom. No one did that after Annie died, and all those old clothes, they’d been sitting in there for twenty-five years.”
“You and Betty never went in there?”
He didn’t say anything. Betty hadn’t seemed like the kind of person to sit idly by while someone else’s possessions were waiting for a home, and Frank’s long silence confirmed it.
“So after Stella went to prison, Betty went through Annie’s things, took what she wanted and left the rest,” I said, ignoring the indignant sputter from the other end of the phone. “Did she remember seeing this alleged diary?”
“Come on, Tori, it’s been a long time ago. Betty doesn’t remember one way or the other.”
“Of course not.” I made my tone soothing. “But you—when you looked at the diary they flashed on TV, did you recognize the handwriting? Did your heart turn over in your chest as you saw Annie’s last words on the page? Did you curse Boom-Boom for terrifying your baby sister?”
Again he was quiet, so I nudged him. “Your mother did show it to you, didn’t she, Frank?”
He cut the connection without saying anything. I studied my tostada. Either Frank hadn’t seen the diary, or he had seen it and knew it wasn’t Annie’s. This wasn’t evidence, nothing I could take to court, but it worked for me.
While I sat there, Melba and Harold came out of Scanlon’s. I watched their slow progress down the street toward the train station, Melba clutching her handbag tightly to her side, Harold bent over his cane.
Rafael Zukos, the rabbi’s son. Melba had told me to talk to him.
I finished the tostada, noticing to my annoyance that the wheat-colored jacket I’d put on for my visit to Ira Previn’s office now sported a glob of green.
I patted it off with a napkin dipped in fizzy water, which left a damp patch and pilling on the lapel. Nuts.
I wiped off my fingers and looked up Rafael Zukos on my iPad. There wasn’t much about him, except that he collected Japanese art, specializing in work from the middle Edo period. An article in the Herald-Star described an eighteenth-century painting of a geisha crossing a street that Zukos had presented to the Japanese consul.
The article also mentioned Zukos’s father, Rabbi Larry Zukos, who’d led Temple Har HaShem for forty years, first on the South Side and then for eight years when they moved to Highland Park. Rafael apparently had not been called to the spiritual life, at least not to the conventionally religious life. He didn’t have a listed number, but a subscription search engine gave me an address in Rogers Park on Chicago’s northeast edge. There was no sign that he worked for a living. Maybe I could just drop in.
As I followed the twists of the northbound road, I’d been trying to decide what story might get Zukos to let me in. The truth was simplest. I found a parking space on Sheridan Road and left my jacket in the car. Nothing makes you look less professional than food on your clothes.
When I got to the tiny street—a mere half-block leading to Lake Michigan—I saw that Zukos had gutted the building, replacing most of the brick in the upper two stories with glass. The third floor was recessed, with glass panels leading to a wide balcony, where Zukos could stand and stare at the lake.