I nodded gloomily. “It sounds as though Stella beat Annie to death for bragging about being on the Pill. But something Betty said to me today seems very odd.”
“Everything about Miss Betty sounds odd to me, but what in particular?” Sal nodded at Erica, and then at the corner. A couple who’d been holding hands under one of her Tiffany lamps had been trying to get a bill for thirty seconds—take it up to forty-five and they’d think they were having a bad night out.
“It sounds as though someone cut a deal with Stella, some kind of deal. Betty said no one thought she’d do all that time. She said, ‘They told us she’d be out in three years.’ When I pushed her to tell me who, she uttered what sounded very much like a death threat.”
“You seriously think this Betty murdered her husband’s sister?” Sal raised one beautifully sculpted eyebrow. “She sounds more like a whiner than a doer.”
“Yeah, it was probably just babble. I’m thinking more along the lines of bribery gone wrong. The first Greylord indictments were coming in when Stella was being tried. Maybe she or Frank made a down payment but the judge got cold feet.”
It used to be that a big enough bribe in Cook County could get almost anyone off any hook, including murder, but Operation Greylord netted about fifty judges, another fifty attorneys, deputies and assorted small fry. I knew of one guy who’d appealed a murder conviction, arguing that he’d paid the judge twenty thousand to have it overturned and the judge hadn’t delivered. The justices on the Seventh Circuit had a good long belly laugh over that.
“If she has enough money to bribe a Cook County judge, why is she still in South Chicago?” Sal asked.
“There’s that,” I agreed. “The money is a big question mark in the middle of this. Stella kept up payments on the house while she was in Logan. Frank told me she used his dad’s insurance to cover the mortgage—Mateo Guzzo’s pension disappeared when the mill went bankrupt. Mandel or McClelland, or Rory Scanlon, are the folks who would have known how to bribe a judge.”
“Maybe Annie had more than two thousand in her bra drawer,” Sal suggested. Her mind was on the room: the pre-theater crowd was starting to build, people who can’t get through the first act without a double something. “I don’t really see what it has to do with you, girlfriend.”
She swept off, her long feather earrings bobbing in rhythm with her stride. I put the rest of my second drink back on the bar—I’d breathalyze myself if I had any more whisky, as tired as I was.
Jake said something similar when I got home, not about the whisky, but the investigation: even if Betty had murdered Annie and blackmailed or bullied Stella into taking the rap, why was it my business? We were on my back porch with a bottle of Torgiano, watching Mr. Contreras and the dogs down in the garden.
“But this is good news,” Bernie objected. She’d come home from her first day of work so filled with caffeine that I’d sent her out for a run with the dogs. When she brought them back forty minutes later, she still had energy to burn. “I thought you were doing nothing, but I see you are working hard. Now this man, this Uncle Jerry, he is so scared of you he goes running to his priest.”
After another minute of energetic speculating on what Stella would do next and how we could retaliate, Bernie ran down the back stairs to rejoin Mr. Contreras and the dogs.
“You scare me, too, V.I.,” Jake grumbled. “If I thought running to a priest would do me any good I’d be on my way to church right now. I wish you’d give up on these Guzzos. You’re not getting paid, and when these people get into your dreams, I’m the one who gets punched.”
“I’ll put Mitch into bed between us,” I offered. “He’s tough enough to wrassle with me.”
Mitch seemed to know I was talking about him—he lifted his great black head and grinned up the stairs at me.
“Do that, Warshawski, and you will be startled by how fast I can wrap a bass string around your neck.”
“Those strings set you back six hundred dollars,” I said. “You sure you can afford to strangle me?”
“Yep, you’re right, best use my hands.”
We put the matter behind us and went out to catch a show with a friend of his who played oboe. One thing led to another and we ended up dancing at Hot Rococo until after midnight.
The Guzzos got into my sleep, not enough that I started punching Jake, but enough that I woke around six the next morning. When I realized I wasn’t going back to sleep I stared enviously at Jake. He was beautiful in sleep, his black hair falling over his forehead, his long fingers curled around the corner of his pillow. I stroked his shoulder and his muscles rippled, but he didn’t wake up.
I gave it up and went next door into my own place, where Bernie, of course, was heavily asleep in the living room. She also didn’t stir, not even when I rummaged noisily in my bag for my laptop.
While my espresso machine heated, I looked up Stella’s trial again. The street kids had interrupted me yesterday and I’d forgotten to go back to look for the judge’s name. It had been a guy named Elgin Grigsby, not one I’d ever encountered, but there are some five hundred judges in Cook County.
Grigsby had survived the Greylord scandal and had taken an honorable retirement from the bench four years ago. He was “of counsel” at the downtown firm where he’d started his career before joining the bench. Grigsby wintered in Arizona, but had returned to his Chicago condo a few weeks ago. I did a double take when I saw the address: the judge was living in the Pulteney building on Wabash where I used to have my office.
When I rented at the Pulteney, the elevator worked about half the time, the wiring was so old that you needed special battery interfaces to run a computer, and I could have retired if I’d been able to charge union scale for repairing the women’s toilet.
After the owners forced out me and the other hardy renters—by cutting off utilities while still holding on to our rent money—they’d gutted the place and turned it into high-end condos.
It was Saturday, not a day for business cold calls. I put work behind me for the weekend, but Monday morning, I took the L to the Loop. Maybe because of the iron girders down the middle of the block, this stretch of Wabash still looked tawdry. Arnie’s Steak Joynt was still flashing its neon on one corner, and the bar that used to make me think I was catching some bad disease was still in business across the street from it.
This made the rehabbed lobby of the Pulteney all the more striking when I went inside. I’d always wondered what lay under the decades of grime that crusted the mosaic floor. Pharaohs, elongated cats, boats on the Nile. The Pulteney apparently went up in the 1920s, at the height of the Egyptian craze that followed the discovery of King Tut’s tomb.
In addition to legal odd jobs, Judge Grigsby worked as a docent for the Chicago Architecture Foundation; his shift started at ten, his wife had told me when I’d called earlier. He could give me forty-five minutes before strolling over to Michigan Avenue to start his tour.
The doorman, in white gloves so as not to smudge the Art Deco figurines when he held the brass elevator doors open for me, phoned upstairs to confirm the appointment. White gloves, polished brass, even an indie coffee bar in the lobby, while management had sucked up my rent money for fifteen years without bringing the electrics up to code. I rode to the seventeenth floor, trying not to let sour grapes make me sour-faced.
I had done as much research on Grigsby as I could without talking to anyone. I didn’t want him to know I was asking questions, since even a retired judge in Cook County has a lot of people owing him favors. Grigsby had been elected—over and over—with a “Qualified” rating from the Illinois Bar Association. Sort of like being a reliable C or B student. He and his wife, Marjorie, had been married forty-seven years next month; they had five children and seven grandchildren. Besides his judge’s pension, he had a nice little portfolio that brought in almost four hundred thousand a year, letting him maintain condos in Scottsdale and Chicago.