Brush Back (29 page)

“That’s the voice of envy and insecurity speaking,” Ira puffed. “You imagine because you couldn’t—”

“I don’t have a good imagination, as you’ve kindly told me many times. A big case came into the office, the kind of thing we hardly ever had a crack at, a class-action case involving the women at the local Buy-Smart warehouse. I stayed late to work on my pitch.” Joel’s lip curled into a sneer. “I didn’t talk to you about it—I thought if I could make the winning pitch without your help it would prove to you that I wasn’t a loser and a whiner and a crybaby and a drunk and whatever other epithets you like to use about me.”

An elderly woman came up the street, using a cane herself. She stopped to greet Ira, reminded him they had an appointment.

“Let Ms. Murchison into the office, Joel,” Ira rasped, “and let’s not hear more of this nonsense.”

“Ms. Murchison, go inside and make yourself comfortable. Ira will be in soon.”

Joel spoke to the older woman with unexpected gentleness, took her arm while he unlocked the door. Once she was inside, he stood with his back against the door, facing his father, who was stumping up the walk toward him. Bernie was silent, her vivid face turning from father to son, her brow puckered with trouble at their argument. I put a comforting arm around her.

“This isn’t nonsense,” Joel said. “This is something you haven’t wanted to hear all these years, but you can hear it now. Your friend Sol, he wasn’t a nice man, and neither was his partner. You can say all you want about South Chicago being a hard place, and lawyers needing to be tough to stand up to the grime and corruption, but those two
enjoyed
seeing associates like me humiliated. They wouldn’t get their hands dirty themselves, but they liked having someone like Spike on board to make it a fun game for them!”

“That’s—that’s such a perverted version of the lives of two good men,” Ira puffed. “You couldn’t handle the job and so someone else had to be in the wrong, never you! You’ve been like that since a child. I golfed with Sol Mandel a hundred times, we were on the board of Har HaShem together—”

“I know. He was a saint and I have a dibbuk in me,” Joel said. “You said you don’t believe McClelland fed Spike, but I’m telling you, I witnessed it. Pay attention. Stand up straight and listen.”

That seemed to be a repetition of words he’d heard from his father more than once; Ira turned red, but subsided.

“The night I stayed late putting together an argument for the Buy-Smart women, Spike was working late, too. Every now and then he’d make some crude crack about how even if I got the case, I’d be a fool in the courtroom—fall over my feet because I was too fat to see them, or get a mistrial for making a pass at the judge—like you, Spike and Mandel and the others assumed I was queer and they loved to rub it in. By and by, McClelland came in. He went to his office and Spike, giving me this shit-eating grin, went in with him. McClelland’s office shared a wall with the women’s toilet, but Annie and Thelma, they were the only two women on staff and neither of them was in, so I went in and heard their whole conversation through the grate.”

“Sneaking into the women’s toilet, no, not even that was beneath you,” Ira said.

“I heard McClelland feed Spike his presentation,” Joel shouted. “I heard that, and then I got to be part of the process of watching Spike win the chance to take the case to trial. Which he lost, even with McClelland in the second chair, and then I realized, after he ran for office and became our state rep, that Spike
wanted
to lose the case. Buy-Smart gave him campaign contributions. The whole thing was a fucking racket.

“And that’s what happened with Stella. We all had to make our case, and I didn’t want to take part. Was I a crybaby? A queer crybaby, not big enough to play in the big leagues? Didn’t I know about
Gideon v. Wainwright
? Stella might be an unpleasant defendant, but she deserved counsel. This was how lawyers proved themselves, but if I wanted to sit in a corner and masturbate over Annie instead of pulling my weight in the firm—apparently I could be queer and in love with Annie at the same time! And so on it went and so of course, whiny crybaby that I am, I caved under the pressure. Not like you: you would have stood up to Spike and Mandel and McClelland like you did to Richie Daley and the Machine when they came after you. Just like you did to George Wallace in Selma. But not me. And now, by God, I am going to have a drink, and fuck you, Ira Previn. Fuck you and fuck all those like you.”

IT AIN’T BEANBAG

“That was terrible,”
Bernie said when we were back in the car.

“Yes, I’m sorry you heard all that. It’s the bad part about my job—trying to find out what happened tears scabs off wounds and you see people at their rawest.”

“But who was right? Joel
is
a crybaby, like his father says. Maybe he was wrong about the people he used to work for?”

“I don’t think so. For one thing, I don’t know Spike Hurlihey personally, but I know how he operates, running the House of Representatives in Illinois. He does bully people and pressure people, and force them to give him money if they want to do business in the state.”

“What was this machine that the father stood up to?”

I tried to give Bernie a one-paragraph primer on Illinois politics and power. “Politics is a way dirtier game than hockey.”

“Hockey isn’t dirty!”

“Enforcers?” I quizzed her. “Trying to whack people in the ankles to get them out of your way?”

“Oh, that—it’s what you have to do if you want to win.”

“Maybe you’ll become a U.S. citizen after you finish with Northwestern: you’d be perfect in a state legislature. Congress, for that matter. Money changes hands, and sometimes there’s physical violence, too. Like the first Mayor Daley—he had goons who went around breaking windows on people’s cars or houses if they put up posters for candidates running against him. Death threats—I’m sure Ira wasn’t exaggerating when he said he got those. But the biggest thing is having to give a lot of money to politicians if you want to do business, or have laws passed in your favor. It’s a terrible system. And it sounds as though Spike Hurlihey got his training in a nice nest of vipers.”

“Hockey is definitely not so dirty as that. And it’s easier to understand. Does anything the crybaby said make you know if he was lying about Uncle Boom-Boom and the diary?”

“He made me know about someone else who was lying, or at least holding back on the truth. I want to talk to her while I’m still south, but I can drop you at the Metra station to catch a train back to the Loop.”

Bernie elected to ride over to Ninetieth and Commercial with me, to Rory Scanlon’s building, where Thelma Kalvin held the fort for the Paris-shopping Nina Quarles.

It was nearly the end of the business day when we pulled up in front of Scanlon’s building and Thelma Kalvin was not happy to see us.

“We’re about to close the office. If you make an appointment for later in the month we will find a way to fit you in.”

“We won’t take much of your time,” I said, perching on the edge of her desk. “This young woman is a connection of my cousin Boom-Boom, by the way, and she’s concerned about the slander against him.”

“I told you before that I admired his playing but that I don’t know anything about the accusations brought against him by that woman who murdered her daughter.”

“That’s an interesting phrase, isn’t it? ‘That woman who murdered her daughter.’ You don’t remember the meeting in which the partners decided that Joel Previn would represent Stella Guzzo? You worked here then, Annie Guzzo put your nose out of joint. I’d think her and her mother’s names would have stuck in your head even after all this time.”

I spoke loudly enough for people at the other desks to hear. Except for two people on the phone, everyone stopped what they were doing to watch, including a young couple consulting a man at a desk near the windows. The couple, who’d been arguing softly with each other when I came in, stopped their bickering to watch me.

“It was painful, so painful that I suppressed the names,” Thelma said. “If you’d ever worked with—”

“Lame,” I said, looking at Bernie. “Would you agree, a pretty lame excuse?”

Bernie was startled, but she picked up the cue and nodded. “For Uncle Boom-Boom I expect a good lie, a creative one that is interesting to hear.”

“So you chose not to talk to me about Stella and Annie or Spike Hurlihey or how the partners liked to pit the associates against each other. Is that a practice that Nina Quarles has continued? Oh, right. She doesn’t really work here, just spends the profits. Which must be considerable to send her on shopping sprees to Europe. Who were the other associates in the firm at the time?”

Thelma’s look would have stripped the blades from a pair of ice skates. “Get out of this office now, or I’ll call the police and have you removed.”

“Judge Grigsby, he couldn’t have been here,” I mused, “he would have recused himself from trying the case. At least, I think he would have. It’s Illinois, you never know.”

Thelma looked at the staff and the two clients, all unabashedly eavesdropping: it didn’t look like a group of people eager to back her up. “I keep telling you to leave because we’re shutting down for the day. This isn’t a safe place for people to be after dark; I can’t keep the office open for you when you don’t have an appointment.”

“That’s okay,” I said. “I’ll be glad to drive you home so we can finish the conversation in safety.”

The young couple laughed, but the staff stared owlishly, waiting to see how the story would unfold. Thelma bit the tip of her index finger: she wasn’t the boss, just the office manager—she might run the place for Nina Quarles, but she couldn’t order the lawyers around.

When Thelma didn’t make a move, I asked, “Why does everyone from you to Ira Previn to Judge Grigsby still care about Stella Guzzo? Why did the firm care about her in the first place?”

“Everyone has a right to counsel,” Thelma said.

“Now, that is interesting,” I said to Bernie. “Do you remember what Joel said when he was describing what the partners said when they were pressuring him to take on Stella’s defense?”

Bernie blushed. “It was something nasty about him and Annie.”

“That, but also they said, didn’t he remember
Gideon v. Wainwright
?”

“But I don’t know what that is,” Bernie protested.

“It was a famous lawsuit, where the Supreme Court ruled everyone has a right to counsel, even those too poor to pay for a lawyer themselves. What’s interesting is that
Gideon
became the party line here at Mandel & McClelland. Everyone repeated the phrase so many times: we are representing Stella Guzzo, who murdered our young clerk, because we are such noble lawyers, we believe in
Gideon
.”

I continued to speak exclusively to Bernie, as if Thelma and the rest of the group weren’t in the room. “We don’t know why the partners wanted to represent Stella, but Thelma has proved that they coached the people who worked for the firm all to give the same story. It makes me wonder if someone in the firm knew more about Annie’s death than they ever let on. Thelma, for instance. She’s the office manager now, but back then she was a clerk-secretary, and Annie Guzzo muscled her out of the way. Annie was better, faster, maybe even cuter—that shouldn’t count, but apparently it did with one of the senior partners—”

“She wasn’t better or faster, she just knew how to flirt with old Mr. Mandel!” Thelma interrupted, spots of color burning her cheeks.

“You didn’t like her, Joel said.”

“Joel—he was pathetic. He was in love with Annie, he would have done anything for her. She made fun of him behind his back but he was such a stupid guy he never caught on.”

“It sounds as though the person Joel killed would have been Stella, if he’d do anything for Annie. But maybe you or Spike or Judge Grigsby told Joel that Annie made fun of him and that unhinged him to the point he beat her to death.”

“Her mother beat her,” Thelma said. “Stella admitted it, right in court.”

“Maybe Annie was still alive when Stella left the house. Maybe you stopped by and got into such a ferocious fight with Annie that you ended by finishing her off. After all, you were furious that she’d cheated you out of a prime job, personal secretary to the managing partner.”

I was sounding like Hercule Poirot in a particularly ludicrous movie scene, but Thelma was so angry that she forgot she had an audience. “Stella Guzzo murdered her daughter, but I didn’t shed a single tear. Annie Guzzo almost ruined this office, this practice. She was like a little cat, purring around Mr. Mandel, until he lost all sense of decency. Giving her presents, giving her money, she was going to be a star, he’d tell me, she was going off to some fancy eastern college where she’d go on to be a dazzling light in the law, another Sandra Day O’Connor.

“Annie’d come here after high school and go into his office. He’d lock the door and after a while she’d come out, purring and adjusting her bra straps. And the way Joel Previn looked at her! It was like working in a porn shop to come in here some days.”