Brush Back

“Tori, don’t get mad, but Ma thinks—Ma says—she thinks—she says—”

I waited while he fumbled for words.

“Ma is sure she was framed.”

“Yeah, that doesn’t surprise me.”

“You know she was?” His face lightened.

“No, Frank. But I believe she wants to rewrite the story of her life. She always set herself up as the most moral, pious woman in South Chicago, then she does time, can’t face the women she used to look down on. Of course she has to change the past so she’s the martyr, not the villain.”

He pounded his thighs in frustration. “She could have been framed, it could have happened. I never believed she would have hit A

“I am not going to spend time and energy trying to prove your mother’s i

“Did I ask you to do that? Did I? That isn’t what I want.” He sucked in a deep breath. “She can’t afford a lawyer, a real lawyer, I mean, not a public defender, and—”

“And you thought of me?” I was so angry I jumped to my feet. “I don’t know what the gossip about me is in South Chicago, but I did not become Bill Gates when I moved away. And even if I did, why would I help your mother? She always thought Gabriella was some kind of whore, that she cast a spell over your dad and then stole A

“I—I know she said all that stuff. I’m not asking you to be her lawyer. But you could ask questions, you’re a detective, and people know you, they’d trust you the way they wouldn’t trust a cop.”

By now his face was so scarlet that I feared he’d have a stroke on the spot.

“Even if I wanted to do this, which I don’t, I don’t know the neighborhood anymore. I’ve been away as long as Stella has. Longer.”

“You were just back there,” he objected. “I heard about it at Sliga’s, that you’d been to the high school and everything.”

I shouldn’t have been surprised. South Chicago and the East Side are like a small town. You sneeze on Ninetieth Street, they whip out a handkerchief on Escanaba Avenue.

Over the weekend, I’d taken Bernadine Fouchard, Boom-Boom’s goddaughter, on a tour of my cousin’s old haunts. I showed her the place near Dead Stick Pond where he practiced skating in the winter, and where I’d help him hunt for the puck when it went into the nearby marsh grasses. We’d gone to the breakwater in Calumet Harbor where Boom-Boom and I used to dare the freighters by jumping in to swim. I’d taken her to the public high school where I played on the state champion basketball team, picked up tacos at Estella’s on Commercial Avenue. We hadn’t gone to Sliga’s bar, but probably someone at the high school mentioned it over a boilermaker.

“I went as a tourist, Frank. I can’t help your mother.”

He came over to me, gripping my arms. “Tori, please. She went to, well, to a lawyer, who told her there wasn’t any evidence.”

I pulled away. “Of course there isn’t. If she’d had any evidence when A

“Tori, come on, you know what it’s like, you go to court, it’s all confusing, she never pled guilty but the lawyer, he was inexperienced, he didn’t know how to run the case.”

Frank was right: a trial is bewildering for inexperienced defendants. I didn’t like Stella, but I could imagine how unbalanced she must have felt. She’d never been to court, not even to fight a traffic ticket. She wouldn’t have known the first thing about how evidence is presented, how everything you say on the stand, or before you ever get to trial, is taken apart and put together again in a way you’d never recognize.

“Even so, I am not wasting time and energy on problems Stella brought on herself.”

“Can’t you let go of that old grudge? Ma’s had a hard life. Dad died in the mill, she had to fight the company for his workers’ comp, then A

“Frank, listen to yourself. She murdered A

Frank grabbed my hands. “Tori, that’s why I thought—hoped—don’t you remember, that was the night—A

My mother’s funeral was a blur in my mind. My father and I, uncomfortable in our dress-up clothes. The pallbearers—my uncle Bernie; Bobby Mallory, my dad’s closest friend on the force; other cops, all in their dress uniforms; a police chaplain, since my unreligious mother hadn’t known a rabbi. Gabriella had been a wisp by the time she died; her coffin couldn’t have taken six big men to lift it.

Mr. Fortieri, my mother’s vocal coach, fought back tears, twisting a silk handkerchief over and over, but Eileen Mallory wept openly. I could feel the tightness again in my throat—I had vowed I wouldn’t cry, not in front of my aunt Marie. A

And then Stella roared in, beside herself. Mouth flecked white with spit, or was that a detail I was adding? At home that night I’d sat alone in the dark in my attic room, staring at the street, unable to move, leaving my dad to deal with his drunk sister Elena and the stream of neighbors, of cops, of my mother’s piano and voice students. And then—

Frank had appeared at the top of the steep flight of stairs, come to say how sorry he was, for my loss, for his mother’s behavior. In the dark, sick with loss, tired of the adult world on the ground floor, I’d found a comfort in his embrace. Our teenage fumblings with clothes and bodies, neither of us knowing what we were doing, somehow that got me through the first hard weeks of Gabriella’s death.

I squeezed Frank’s fingers and gently removed my hands. “I remember. You were very kind.”

“So will you do this, Tori? Will you go back to South Chicago and ask some questions? See if there’s something that didn’t come out at the trial?”

Past the naked, unbearable pleading in his face, I could see him as he’d been at seventeen, athletically slender, red-gold curls covering his forehead. I’d brushed them out of his eyes and seen the lump and bruise on his forehead. I got it sliding into second, he’d said quickly, scarlet with shame, pushing my hand away.

My mouth twisted. “One free hour, Frank. I’ll ask questions for sixty minutes. After that—you’ll have to pay like any other client.”

HOME BASE

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