Brush Back

“Likely not,” I agreed dryly. “The mother, Stella, is claiming she found a diary that her daughter kept, and that A

Pierre laughed. “That is impossible to picture. If you are imagining Boom-Boom as Bluebeard, no, you know him better than that. Yes, if you were against him in a game, then you should defend yourself against attacks from all sides, but Boom-Boom and women—there were so many, and they all had a good time with him, no one ever walked away from Boom-Boom weeping because he had frightened her, surely you don’t need me to tell you that. As for a girl and a diary, how can I know about that? But if she wrote it, it came out of her own imaginations. This mother, this salope, she has maybe made her daughter to be afraid of every man in the world.”

That was a shrewd insight, plausible, given Stella’s obsession with sex, but not something I had any way to prove. I led the conversation around to Bernie, how well she was doing, how much I enjoyed her company.

“Yes, she’s loving Chicago,” Pierre agreed. “When she comes back to us next month, you must come with her. A week in the Laurentians, that will put all this tracasserie out of your mind.”

When we hung up, I felt better than I had since Murray’s text came in yesterday afternoon. I took an espresso out to the back porch. I had promised Freeman not to go near Stella or her house or her current lawyer. But what about her old lawyer, the useless baby who didn’t bring up Boom-Boom’s relationship with A

When I’d looked up Stella’s trial last week, they hadn’t given the baby’s name. For that I would have to go to the County building, to the more complete records that had been kept on microform.

I was heading to the bathroom to shower and change when my doorbell rang. Bernie was sleeping deeply. I walked behind the couch to peer out at the street. I swore under my breath: three TV vans were double-parked on Racine. The early birds waiting for their prey: vultures are birds, too.

I shook Bernie awake, no easy task. When I’d finally roused her, I explained we were under siege. “If you go out, use the back door. Otherwise the wolves from cable-land are going to jump you, okay?”

Her eyes lit up: at last, a chance to take action against Boom-Boom’s enemies. “This will be fun.”

“No, Bernie. It won’t be. They’ll make mincemeat out of you. Please believe I know what I’m talking about, or if you won’t believe me, please at least promise me that you will stay away from them. Okay?”

She gave a reluctant agreement, but she still tried to rehash last night’s argument: we needed to act, not bury ourselves in libraries, doing research.

“Bernie, if I discover that someone planted that diary, I’m not going to tell you, unless I can trust you not to run headfirst into trouble.”

“Okay, okay, I’ll do it your way for two days. If you don’t find out anything and start acting on it—”

“You will return to Canada so that you don’t get arrested and deported.” It took an effort not to shout at her. For the first time I began to see how hard it had been on my mother when Boom-Boom and I went roaring off without a thought of the consequences. “What would you do if I showed up at one of your games and started telling you how to play?”

“You don’t know enough about hockey to tell me anything.”

“Exactly. And you don’t know enough about the law, and evidence, and how to uncover secrets to tell me what to do.”

Her small vivid face bunched up into a gargoyle grimace, but she finally gave a reluctant nod, a reluctant promise to do as I’d asked.

I ran down the back stairs. Mr. Contreras’s kitchen light was on. I owed it to him to explain what was going on, even though conversations with him are never short. He’d seen the story, of course, and was appropriately indignant.

“Bernie is up in arms, and thinks we ought to be out shooting or at least whacking people. I don’t want her going to South Chicago. It’s gang territory and she has no street smarts, only ice smarts. Can you waylay her, get her involved with the dogs, the garden, keep her from doing something that will get her hurt?”

“I never been able to keep you from getting hurt, doll,” the old man said, truculent, “no matter what I say or do. Talking to my tomatoes gets me better results.”

I felt my cheeks flame, but meekly said he was right. “But she’s seventeen, she’s been left in my care.”

“And what are you going to get up to?” he demanded.

“Exactly what I said to Bernie, and what I promised both Lotty and my lawyer. Looking for information, nothing physical, I promise.”

I kissed his cheek, told the dogs they could swim when I got home tonight, and jogged down the alley so I could come to my car from behind. One of the reporters had been enterprising enough to find the Mustang. He was facing my apartment and I startled him when I unlocked the car and jumped in. He tried to hold on to the door, but I was maneuvering out of the parking space and he had to let go.

I might have been a worm slithering away from the early birds, but my reward was the morning rush hour. Lake Shore Drive at this hour is pretty much a parking lot. It may be the most beautiful parking lot in the world, with the waves on nearby Lake Michigan dancing and preening in the sunlight, but it was still slow and tedious going.

I was early enough to find street parking three blocks from the County building and took the stairs up to the records room, where I paid twenty dollars for a chance to look at the microform. It didn’t include the trial transcript—those are expensive. Only the lawyers involved in a trial order up copies, so if Stella’s lawyer hadn’t done so, there was no transcript available. I did find a list of the exhibits used at the trial, and the names of both the state’s attorney and the defense counsel. Stella had been represented by a Joel Previn.

CALLING TIME

Previn is one of those names you think is common, maybe because of André and Dory, but there aren’t very many of them. I’d only ever heard of one in Chicago: Ira.

Ira Previn’s about ninety now and at least according to local lore, still goes into court once or twice a month. He’d been a legend as a labor and civil rights lawyer in my childhood, when he battled the Daley Machine from his storefront practice on the South Side. He’d taken on the Steelworkers over racial discrimination, gone after the fast-food industry for wage discrimination, supported equal pay for women and African-American janitors at City Hall. The fact that he’d lost many of his battles didn’t make him any less heroic, at least not to me.

I looked up Joel. Sure enough, he was Ira’s son. He was about my age, had attended Swarthmore College, then Kent Marshall School of Law. Never married. Lived in an apartment in the Jackson Park Highlands in the same building as Ira, worked out of Ira’s office. They must be a tight-knit family. Joel would have handled Stella’s defense when he was new to the bar; surely he’d remember one of his first cases.

Traffic had eased by the time I finished at the County building: I made the run from Buckingham Fountain to Seventy-first Street in twelve minutes. The route led past the South Shore Cultural Center. It’s run now by the park district, which can barely afford to maintain the main building, but when I was growing up, it was an exclusive country club with guards at the gates and horses stabled near the private beach. In those days, Jews were ba

The South Shore Club could handle living cheek by jowl with Jews, but the arrival of African-Americans had been too much for everyone: white Chicagoans looking in fear at black neighbors had fled to the suburbs like a pack of jackals smelling a lion. The Catholics mostly bolted westward while Jews ran north. Only Ira stayed on.