Despite the pity I’d felt for Frank, I still made him sign my standard client contract. Even though I was giving him a free hour and a reduced fee structure, he tried to fight it.
“Boom-Boom would be ashamed of you, charging someone you grew up with.”
“Boom-Boom would have high-sticked you and laughed about it if he knew you wanted to stiff me.”
Frank grumbled some more, but finally signed both copies. He had a hard time figuring out how to leave the office, but I solved that problem by telling him I had a client meeting. “You came in between a couple of conference calls, Frank, but I have to get back to work.”
“Yeah.” He tortured his copy of the contract, folding it into ever tinier squares. “Yeah, me too. They dock me for time away from the route. Yeah, I’d better get back to it.”
I smiled sadly, for him, for me, and put up a hand to touch the tight dark curls around his bald spot. It wasn’t until the end of the afternoon, when I had time to look up Stella’s trial, that I got angry with myself for giving in to the emotional soup Frank had stirred up in me.
Illinois v. S. Guzzo had been a minor proceeding. No appeal had been filed, which meant that only a minimum of information was available in the archive—the indictment, the names of the jurors and the sentence. Unless Stella’s attorney had ordered, and kept, transcripts, there wouldn’t be a record of her testimony.
I knew there wouldn’t be any police files I could look at, not after all this time, but I double-checked with the Fourth District, which serves South Chicago. Conrad Rawlings, the watch commander, wasn’t in, but the desk sergeant who took my call was willing to answer my questions: A twenty-five-year-old murder? Was I joking? Those papers had gone to the warehouse a long time ago.
The next morning, I got up while Bernie was still sacked out on the pullout bed in the living room. That, actually, was the one negative about her staying with me. She was a teenager, she slept late, and she did it in my public space. If she stayed for the next two months, I’d have to find her someplace else to live.
I packed the dogs into my car and drove south, before I had a chance to think about it. Getting to South Chicago and back would take most of an hour. I hated to give Stella anything, but I’d eat the time and expense of the drive.
It was one of those early spring days in Chicago that turns the city into the most beautiful place in the world: sunlight glinting on little waves on Lake Michigan, the sky the soft clear blue that makes you imagine you could take up painting. I sang “Vittoria, Vittoria, mio core” as I passed Grant Park and moved on to the South Side. True, it’s a love song, but the melody and the beat are martial, and I, too, would be victorious. Victoria, vanquisher of villains.
At Seventy-fourth Street, I turned off and went to Rainbow Beach so the dogs could have a workout. Rainbow had been the nearest beach to my home when I was growing up and we often came up here in the summer, my parents and I and some of their friends, for a Sunday picnic, or Boom-Boom and I on our bikes. It used to be packed with people, but today the dogs and I had it to ourselves.
Only a couple of women, one African-American with a short ’fro, the other a gray-haired white woman, were out, deep in conversation at the far end of the bike path. A mixed-race duo would have been assaulted in my childhood. Not all change is bad.
Stopping had been a mistake. Throwing tennis balls for the dogs gave me time to think about Stella, to anticipate my conversation. She’d done the full sentence, unusual for an older woman. She must have been an angry and uncooperative prisoner, and I couldn’t imagine her personality would have changed much now she was out.
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 connect me to my adolescent face. “The whore’s daughter.”
“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.