Brush Back

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 pla

“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 ru

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.

“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 A

“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 A

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.