Brush Back

Bernie flushed and drew a semicircle on the floor with the toe of her boot. “I’m sorry, too, Vic, I—I almost died. Twice in one night and two times you almost died to save me.”

Mitch bounded over, pushed his big nose between Bernie and me, turning the awkward moment into a laugh.

“You had a horrific time,” I said. “Does it mean you’re going to turn your back on Northwestern’s scholarship?”

Bernie made a moue. “Cornell, Syracuse, they want me, too. I will decide after I visit them, but—”

“But only with Arlette,” Pierre said. “This tourbillon goes nowhere alone until she is forty.”

“Papa!” Bernie protested.

“Very well. If you behave and endanger no one’s life for ten years, I will reduce the sentence to age thirty-five.” Pierre smiled, but he pulled his daughter to him in a ferocious hug.

LOADING THE BASES

Life began returning to a semblance of normal: clients, concerts or dancing with Jake, helping Mr. Contreras get his handkerchief garden in shape. TV and Web media rushed in to cover the drama of Bernie’s rescue, but it was easy to deflect them to the dockworkers who’d come to our aid.

The spring continued cold and wet, but I ran the lakefront with the dogs, played basketball with my friends on Sunday mornings. I spent time with Mr. Villard, visiting him first at the rehab place where he went after surgery, and then in his assisted living apartment when he was strong enough to go home. Adelaide continued to look after him: the daughters had tried to fire her, but Mr. Villard insisted that he was to blame for getting shot:

“I should have told Ms. Warshawski it was Gil Brineruck’s voice on that recording, instead of thinking I could confront him alone. He was a terrible disgrace to baseball and to the Cubs. Adelaide knows how to look after me without turning me into a three-year-old. Adelaide stays.”

I even went back to working on my voice. My mother had once presented me with a music list for my birthday: songs about Victoria or Victory or music by women named Victoria. I was trying to learn madrigals by the Renaissance composer Vittoria Aleotti, with Jake playing the counterpoint. Love songs often ended with a practice session in bed, which helped make my hellish twenty hours in tu

Jake and Lotty both urged me to stop thinking about South Chicago, despite the many open ends to the business. I knew I didn’t have the time or the money to dig into the Say, Yes! foundation’s records, or Scanlon’s old accounts at Continental Illinois. Perhaps the federal prosecutor for the Northern District was doing so, as the FBI’s Derek Hatfield had suggested. No ripples were surfacing on the street yet, so either the Feds were moving very cautiously, or they weren’t moving at all. I didn’t have any way of finding out.

The problem that gnawed at me—that made me so restless that Jake sent me home to my own bed more than once—was A

But much as I disliked Stella Guzzo, much as I knew she’d beaten her children many times, and A

I’d become convinced she’d been set up. It wasn’t only Joel’s revelation that he and Sol Mandel had both been at the Guzzo house the night that A

Conrad was right: no physical evidence existed to prove one way or another if Mandel or Scanlon, or even Spike Hurlihey, had been in the Guzzo house the night A

I started with Frank Guzzo; he and I had already violated the restraining order, so I figured I could do it again without risking arrest.

We agreed to meet in Grant Park—halfway between north and south—next to the Christopher Columbus statue. Chicago’s Italian community had raised money for the statue; maybe it would make us remember Frank’s Italian father, my Italian mother, and bring us closer together.

Frank arrived half an hour after me. He was nervous, demanding I show whether I was recording him, looking around to make sure no one was videotaping him. He finally stood still long enough for me to say I’d come around to thinking his mother had been railroaded.

He was suspicious, not gratified. “What are you trying to trick me into saying?” he demanded.

“I’m trying to talk sense to you, Frank,” I said.

I told him about Joel Previn coming to the house and seeing A

“That means that Previn killed A

“Could mean it, but I doubt it. Sol Mandel and Rory Scanlon were the people who had the most to lose if A

“No, Tori! No, don’t you see—you ca

“Or what?” I demanded. “He’ll send Stella back to prison? He’ll get Bagby to fire you?”

“I—oh, damn you, Tori, why can’t you leave well enough alone? The diary, that was supposed to make you go away, the mugging, nothing would stop you. Do you want them to kill you?”

“Frank, what is it? What have you done that has you doing whatever they want?”

“It’s not me,” he burst out. “It’s Frankie, my boy!”

A couple out walking their dog stared at us with open curiosity. I waved at them and they scurried on.

“What has Frankie done? Is he ru

“No. It’s baseball.”

“Baseball?” I repeated. “Oh. Scanlon has told you that if you rock the boat about Stella, he’ll make sure Frankie doesn’t get a shot at the big time.”

Frank didn’t say anything, just looked at his hands, his face holding such a naked display of helplessness that I had to look away.

“Frank, why did you come to me to begin with, then, if you were worried about Frankie? As soon as you asked me to investigate what your mother was up to, that whole string of lies was likely to unravel.”

“I didn’t know,” he said. “I came to you for the reason I said, I didn’t know what Ma was up to or what she was going to do. I was afraid if she started acting too wild in public, it would hurt Frankie. You know, baseball today, the family has to make a good impression. Scouts see there’s a crazy grandma bouncing around in public, they got a thousand other talented boys they can look at whose grandmothers didn’t beat or kill their own kids. Mr. Scanlon, he had promised he’d make sure no one found out about Ma killing A

“He came to you, told you this?” I asked.

“No, I’m too far down the food chain. He talked to Bagby. Bagby came to me, said Scanlon had a bee in his bo

“And then, the lady at the law firm, Thelma, she found A