Brush Back

I told them what I’d learned from Joel, from Frank Guzzo, from Mr. Villard and from the photographs themselves.

Conrad rubbed his forehead. I could see past my anger to the fatigue lines gouged in his face.

“I am not a fan of Stella Guzzo,” I added, “but the night A

Conrad sat upright. “What? What crystal ball spat that detail out twenty-five years after the fact?”

Derek interrupted to ask who we were talking about.

“Joel told me he was there,” I said after Conrad and I had explained the Guzzo murder story. “I never could understand why Mandel & McClelland took the case, or why poor Joel, who had a crush on A

“Maybe because Joel had already killed her himself,” Conrad snarled.

“Yeah, right, that’s a possibility. I don’t believe it after spending a lot of time with Joel.”

“Convenient to blame it on the dead partner.” Derek chipped in his two cents.

“Yes, but there’s a living person who had a stake in what A

Conrad stared at me. “You’re back on Scanlon’s ass. God damn it, Warshawski—”

I bared my teeth in a ferocious grin. “I have a handwritten note to my dad, rubbing his face in the fact of his transfer to West Englewood. Whoever wrote it implied that he put word out that Tony snitched on his brother officers—in order to make sure Tony was in maximum danger on the street. My father was almost killed, not once but many times, because the boys at the Seventh didn’t get him backup. The stress—he might still be part of my life today if it weren’t for whoever made sure he got put there!”

Conrad said, “And you think it was Scanlon? What proof, Ms. W.? What proof?”

“The letter! I’ve sent it to my lawyer for safekeeping, but—”

“We could run forensics on it,” Derek offered.

“I don’t want to risk it evaporating while it’s out of my custody,” I said coldly. “But I’m betting Conrad can at least ID who wrote it, even if not the taunting message to my dad. A facsimile is up on the A

Conrad’s copper skin darkened to mahogany. “You did what? You set up a murder site on your own without talking to the police? And you complain when I say you take the law into your own hands?”

“We were working against the clock. I was keeping in touch with you, but the police apparatus, you couldn’t move on this as fast as I could.”

Conrad gave me a withering look, but buried himself in his smartphone, looking up the URL. I gave him and Derek the password Mr. Contreras and I had created.

Conrad looked up after reading the letter, anguish in his eyes. “I know that handwriting: Oswald Brattigan. He was my watch commander at the Fourth when I was first transferred in there. If that sentence to your father was written by Scanlon—” He broke off, his chin collapsing against his chest.

“I don’t want to believe this, or deal with it,” he mumbled after a moment. “Rory Scanlon—if he’s been using the kids in Say, Yes! to extort or intimidate—my God—it’s going to be an unholy war down there. He’s so co

“But if Joel’s report on what he overheard Scanlon and Mandel talk about is correct, they were using both client accounts and foundation money to fuel political campaigns. Spike Hurlihey owes his Speaker’s gavel to illegal money.”

Conrad smacked his thigh. “That doesn’t mean he knew the money was illegal. Assuming it was illegal, which is a big ‘if.’ An overheard conversation twenty-five years ago by an alkie who couldn’t cut it at the firm? I don’t believe it and neither will a jury.”

“The prosecutor for the Northern District is going to want to take a look,” Derek said. “If the paper trail is there—we can subpoena records from Continental Illinois. Do a handwriting check on this ‘FYI, Law and Order Man’ scrawl. Maybe we can roll on one of the Say, Yes! kids to wear a wire.”

“They’re used to prison,” Conrad said. “It doesn’t frighten them. They build new gang networks there, they learn new street skills.”

“Okay, someone in the law office, or someone in Hurlihey’s office,” Derek said. He looked sympathetically at Conrad. “I don’t have to work there every day, it won’t bother me any.”

“And A

Conrad thought it over. “There’s no forensic evidence, Vic. I told you I had the files sent up when the story broke about Boom-Boom. It looked so cut and dried, girl dies from bleeding into the brain after mom beats her on the head, we didn’t look for other prints at the scene. There’s nothing to tie anyone—not even Previn—to the murder scene now.”

I let it go at that. He was right, for one thing, and for another, I was too exhausted to argue any further.

Conrad held the door open for Derek, but came back to my bed after the Fed had left. “You know that call, warning you away from South Chicago after the Dragons attacked you? I found out that Sid Gerber did it.”

“Sid?” My dad’s old pal who was the desk sergeant now down in the Fourth. “Conrad—no, he can’t have been part of—”

“No, he wasn’t, stupid old goat. He was worried about you, thought he’d be doing your old man a favor by scaring you away. When he saw what had happened down in Dead Stick Pond, he talked it over with one of the boys, who came to me with the news. I decided to pretend I hadn’t heard about it—guy is six months from retirement. I just told him that the quickest way to get you stung by a thousand wasps was to tell you to stay out of their nest.”

He turned on his heel and marched out before I could respond. I went back to sleep, but was awakened an hour later by Murray Ryerson, who’d bullied or charmed his way past the nursing staff, demanding an exclusive. He’d found photos from Mr. Contreras’s and my rescue at Dead Stick Pond that one of the hard hats had posted on Facebook and wanted my story.

I gave him most of what I knew but didn’t tell him that Derek might get the Feds to look into the Say, Yes! foundation accounts—I didn’t want to short-circuit a potential investigation with a media broadside. Instead, I told him my growing doubts about Stella’s guilt in her daughter’s death. For Murray, an old crime reporter, this was like a gazelle wandering in front of a lion. He agreed there wasn’t enough to print yet, and also no way to get evidence linking either Mandel, Scanlon or one of the juniors in Mandel’s firm to A

“Why did Previn have to be reckless enough to go up to Wrigley to find the papers and then such a twitcher that he fled as soon as someone confronted him?” Murray grumbled.

“Doesn’t matter,” I yawned. “The documents wouldn’t have survived the damp, let alone the rats, after all this time. The unbelievable thing is that the binder itself was still there for that prize idiot Sebastian to discover.”

Jake arrived after lunch to bring me home. I spent the afternoon listening to him rehearse the Martinsson concerto, and in the evening went with Lotty and Max to hear him perform.

All my houseplants had died from neglect. The next day, I went to my office so that my practice didn’t suffer a similar fate. In the evening I went back up to the hospital to collect Mr. Contreras, and to bring the dogs home from the doggy B&B where they’d been boarding. While we rehashed our glorious rescue mission over a picnic supper, Pierre and Bernadine showed up.

“We’re flying home tomorrow,” Pierre said, “but—I called you a lot of bad names when this petite monstre was cracking my life apart. I need to say that I am sorry.”