Brush Back

I leashed up the dogs and returned them to the car, still dragging my feet. I waited through three lights before turning south again, then drove so slowly that people were honking and shouting abuse out their windows as they roared around me.

“Yeah, right,” I muttered. “You’re mad, but no matter what you say, it won’t be a patch on what lies ahead.”

SLUGGER

The landmarks had changed since my childhood, the giant USX Southworks plowed under to make an extension for Highway 41. What hadn’t changed was the pollution. The air used to be stained yellow by sulfur from the mills. Now it was black, dust blowing from the pet coke mountains along the Calumet River. I started sneezing as soon as I hit Ninetieth Street. Pet coke, sounds like a bottle of the Real Thing that follows you down the street. Really, it’s the residue of superheated coal that gets reused as industrial fuel. They don’t allow it to be stored out in the open across the river in Indiana, but everything is easier in Illinois. Down here, the city didn’t look like the most beautiful place on earth.

I turned onto Commercial Avenue, the retail heart of the neighborhood. When I was a child, the street was always crowded. It used to be filled with shops, anchored by Goldblatt’s, one of Chicago’s great department stores. The grand Beaux Arts building, where everyone shopped for everything from socks to refrigerators, was still there, but most of the windows in its three stories were boarded over. The ground floor had been divided into small shabby storefronts.

The Navral Building, where our doctor and dentist had had their offices, was gone as well, replaced by weeds and broken asphalt. Discount beauty stores, wig shops filled with luridly colored hair, jostled with bars and carry-out joints. In between were too many boarded-over buildings, and a handful of general stores that looked like garage sales—unmatched kitchen chairs and racks of dusty clothes filled the sidewalks outside the doors, next to carts holding boxes of DVDs and shoes. A little boy was playing with the heel to a black stiletto. He’d almost ripped it free when his mother, who’d been inspecting shirts, smacked him.

His howls were drowned by the surround sound from the car next to me, a bass so loud the car was rocking on its axles. At least it inspired me to start moving faster, across the tracks to Buffalo, where the Guzzos lived. Like Commercial Avenue, Buffalo was a mix of run-down buildings and empty lots—the city was bulldozing vacant houses in an effort to cut back on drug centers. The open green spaces gave the neighborhood a curious semirural feel.

One thing about the sorry streets of South Chicago—besides sinkholes, drunks, addicts and garbage—they hold easy parking options. No pay machines and you had your choice of spaces. I pulled up directly in front of Stella’s bungalow.

It was almost eleven now, and the few people in the area with jobs were long gone. Boys flashing gang signs and showing off their tattoos were gathering on the corners. They watched me go up the walk to Stella’s front door, but no one tried to stop me.

Stella’s bungalow and the Jokich place next to it were twins, down to the peeling paint on the wooden window frames. Age and poor maintenance had caused them to lean into each other, like an elderly couple clinging together to stay upright.

The house sported a heavy steel door with a peephole. I rang the bell. The chime echoed inside. Nothing happened. After the second ring, I was ready to walk away when I heard a heavy step coming to the door. After another moment, where Stella stared at me through the peephole, a series of locks tumbled back.

She opened the door a crack. “Who are you and what do you want?”

“V. I. Warshawski. Answers.”

She stared at me, frowning as she tried to co

“Good to see you, too, Stella,” I said. So Frank hadn’t had the guts to tell her I was coming.

I was going to keep my temper if I had to swallow my tongue to do so. Or at least I wasn’t going to blow up in front of her; I figured nothing would bring her a greater sense of perverse pleasure.

“You might want to lock up while we talk. Lot of Communists out there.” I pushed past her into the house.

“What are you talking about?” She peered down the walk. “Those are just the Mexicans that started littering this neighborhood while I was away. Breed like flies, the lot of them.”

“Gosh, I remember what they used to say about the Irish.” Stella had been a Garretty before her marriage. “Weren’t you one of nine?”

“Eight,” she snapped. “And we all worked our fingers to the bone. Me, especially, keeping house for my father and my brothers after Ma passed. Not like these wetbacks, wouldn’t know a job if it jumped out of the beer bottle and waved a paycheck under their noses.”

“It was a little easier to find work when the mills were ru

She glowered at me, but decided I was too big for her to throw out. She shut the door with a bang and turned one of three dead bolts. “That’s not my fault. If they wanted to work—”

“I know. They could sell appliances at Goldblatt’s or work for one of the doctors in the Navral Building.”

“Neither of those even exists anymore, Miss Smartmouth.”

“Yeah, kind of my point, Stella.”

The entryway was so small that we were touching each other. I went into the living room. I moved automatically, not because I’d spent a lot of time there—even when Frank and I were dating, we always met someplace else—but because the layout was identical to my childhood home.

The house wasn’t as run-down inside as out, which was probably true for much of the neighborhood. Keep yourself looking too poor to rob. The floors were clean, the flat-screen TV was new, and so were the two armchairs that faced it.

“What do you want?” Stella rasped.

She’d kept her height even after all the years of bad diet and poor exercise. Her hair had gone that iron shade of gray that makes the face beneath it look hard—or harder, in her case—but her eyes were still a bright blue, like the sky over the lake as I’d driven south, and her arm muscles remained firm. She must have been attractive when she was young, in an athletic kind of way. In a different era she might have become a sports star herself.

“Frank asked me to talk to you.”

“That’s a flat-out lie.”

“He came up to my office yesterday. He says—”

“Oh, so we have an office now, do we, Miss Hoity-Toity. Frank drives a truck, but you have an office. Frank would have an office, too, if you hadn’t destroyed his chances.”

“Me? Please. You bullied Frank into breaking up with me thirty years ago. Don’t tell me that made him so depressed he stopped trying to make a success out of life.”

“No one ever got depressed when they got the Warshawskis out of their lives, but your family, they lived to bring mine down. Your whore of a mother broke up my marriage—”

“I thought Mr. Guzzo was still married to you when he died,” I objected. “Had he divorced you? Is that why USX tried to deny the comp claim?”

She swung an arm back, a reflexive urge to hit me. I took her wrist, not hard, just firm.

“Beating people up is what got you into trouble to begin with. You’re not going to hit me, Stella, so calm down.”

“Don’t you tell me what to do or not to do. I didn’t take shit from guards and wardens and bitches of drug dealers all those years to come home and take it from a Warshawski.”

She had a point. I perched on the arm of one of the easy chairs. “Let’s leave Gabriella and Mateo out of the discussion. They’ve both been dead a lot of years and can’t defend themselves. Tell me what I did to ruin Frank’s chances.”