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January 21

Joel was working late tonight, accused me of having sex with Mr. M, with Boom-Boom, said he thought I was too precious a person (can you believe that? Precious a person?) to sell myself even for college. Finally told him I found these financial papers about what Mr. M and Mr. S are doing with the client accounts. Told him I hid them in Wrigley Field and they can’t touch me. I’m free.

April 13

Learned today that Bryn Mawr accepted me. Told Ma and everyone at school, full scholarship, but they only gave me half of what I need. I’ll still have to work, but even with that, it’s SO expensive—need Mr. M’s support. I AM GOING TO PHILADELPHIA IN AUGUST & NO ONE CAN STOP ME!!!!

April 15

Told Mr. M I know what he and Rory Scanlon are up to, told him I’d found the bank statements from Continental for the
Say, Yes!
foundation. Said I hoped the foundation could help pay my college tuition when I go away next year. He said he’d talk to R.S.

He asked, what did I do with the papers, told him they were in a
very safe
place. Scary look on his face.

April 18

Ma beat me so bad tonight I want to kill her! Betty, busybody hypocrite Betty told her I’m on the Pill. Ma said I was stabbing the Blessed Mother through the womb. Went through my private things! Found the money Mr. M gave me, stole it, said it was immoral, time I learned she would never let me leave Chicago for college. I picked up kitchen knife, said, “You want to see what it’s like to stab someone through the womb, try this!” and she went insane, hit me with a frying pan. I blacked out. Came to with goose egg on head, woozy, throwing up.

Mr. W keeps saying I can stay in Vic’s room until it’s time to leave for college. Maybe I will, Ma will go insane, she hates all the Warshawskis, most of all my beloved Mrs. W.

Joel came over. I was in bathroom cleaning sick off my face. He saw my goose egg and freaked, begged me to let him marry me so he could protect me against Ma. Told him I don’t need protecting, just need to leave Chicago!!

Then he said he’d gone to Wrigley Field and found my book of papers, but he freaked when a maintenance man came in. He dropped them in the mud! They’re gone. All but one page from the Continental Bank which doesn’t mean shit on its own. I sat down in the middle of the floor and bawled my eyes out. He tried to put his arms around me and kiss me, tried to say he was in love with me. I told him to leave, to leave me alone, he ruined my plan. Anyway no man will ever own me. Not him, not Mr. M or Rory or Spike, none of them.

Joel looked so sad, slouching off down the sidewalk, almost forgave him for losing my papers, but what will I do without them?

I saw Rory Scanlon’s Buick across the street. I’m watching Joel, R.S. is watching the house like he does two or three times a week, maybe he thinks he can find something to blackmail me with. Like, if he said Joel was sleeping with me, I’d give him and Mr. M their papers back.

CLUTCH HITTER

Dead teen,
and beautiful at that, life cut short, missing documents, sex with powerful men. It was a story made for TV; it went viral in an hour. By mid-morning, I was once again fielding media inquiries from as far away as Kazakhstan.

How and where had I found the diary?

It had come to me in the mail, in an anonymous envelope, no return address and according to the private forensic lab I use, no fingerprints.

How sure was I that this was really Annie’s handwriting?

I had the condolence letter Annie had written to my father; I was willing to let an independent lab compare that to the diary I was looking at—but only if Stella Guzzo would submit her diary to the same lab for the same tests.

The Kazakh media, obsessed with hockey, were more interested in Boom-Boom—did my copy of the diary vindicate him?

Other reporters had other questions, of course, about the drama at Dead Stick Pond, about the Sturlese brothers, but the main focus was on Annie’s death. Did I believe Rory Scanlon was responsible?

“I don’t know who killed Annie Guzzo. Twenty-five years ago, it seemed obvious that Stella Guzzo murdered her daughter, so no forensic evidence was taken from the crime scene. Now it’s a wide-open field. We know Annie was alive when her mother left to play bingo, but we only have these pages to suggest other names. It’s tantalizing, but we probably will never have the truth.”

In the middle of the media push, a cop came to my office, one of Bobby Mallory’s personal staff. The captain would like a word; could I ride with him to Thirty-fifth and Michigan.

Bobby had Conrad and a forensic tech with him. “I need to know about these documents, Vicki.”

Bobby was getting old; his jowly face had deeper lines around the mouth and eyes. At least he was no longer so red in the face—Eileen and his doctor had finally persuaded him to change his diet, take some blood pressure meds.

“I don’t know anything about them, other than what’s up on the
Herald-Star
website. They came to me in an anonymous envelope, and I don’t know if they’re real or fake. And they are in a vault right now until Stella Guzzo produces hers for comparison. Or you produce a subpoena.”

“The envelope?” Bobby held out a hand.

I took it from my briefcase: a plain manila 10x14, available at every office supply store in America. Postmarked three days ago, date-time stamped “Received” by me yesterday.

“What proof do you have that this is the envelope that held the so-called diary?” Bobby asked.

I shook my head. “I don’t open my mail expecting to have to prove I got it. When I saw what was in the envelope, I drove up to Cheviot Labs with it. They checked for fingerprints, and for DNA on the gummed label, but whoever sent it used tap water, not saliva, and apparently handled it with gloves.”

I held out the notarized report from Cheviot’s fingerprint specialist. Bobby grunted and handed it, with the envelope, to his forensic tech.

“A written receipt, please,” I said. “Or I can photograph your expropriation.”

I switched on my phone camera, but Bobby, with an exaggerated scowl, called to his secretary to bring me a receipt. I was supposed to feel guilty for making them do extra work while seizing my property.

Conrad and Bobby exchanged glances; Bobby nodded at Conrad.

“Vic, whether what you’ve put out is really Annie Guzzo’s diary or if it’s a forgery, you could be lighting a fuse on a powerful piece of dynamite,” Conrad said.

Meaning, I was in serious danger. “You think it’s a forgery?” I asked.

“With you, I think anything is possible,” Bobby said. “You and the law know each other well, but you don’t always respect the acquaintance.”

“Unlike people with money and with access to the Illinois Speaker,” I said. “They are
sans reproche
. That’s comforting.”

“I’m not going to argue that with you,” Bobby said. “You know Illinois politics better than you know the law. Rawlings and I are just saying, it would have been better to bring those pages to us, instead of publishing them first.”

“Got it.” I stood to leave, but Bobby asked Conrad and the tech to step outside.

“Vicki, Rawlings told me about the letter the old Fourth District watch commander wrote, saying he’d sent someone off to the Seventh District. He said you assume that was Tony, right?”

“Right.”

Bobby fingered the fold of skin above his necktie, as if the knot were too tight. “It might have been. Say it was, say Brattigan did send your dad off to face the danger of—well, the dangers he did face in the Seventh. Say it was Rory Scanlon who put him up to it. This diary you’ve conjured wouldn’t be payback for that, would it?”

“Conjure. That is a very loaded word. No one used it when Stella burst forth with a diary of Annie’s that mysteriously appeared in a drawer twenty-five years after her sister-in-law had been pawing through the same place looking for cash.”

“Tap-dance around, clown around, but did you hire someone to create a forgery so you could try to get at Rory Scanlon? If you’re framing him as punishment for upending Tony’s life, you are playing a dangerous game.”

“Tap-dancing, clowning and playing a dangerous game? Way more energetic than I’m up to after getting my nose broken and a whole lot of other injuries.” I leaned forward and kissed Bobby’s cheek. “You know my parents’ memories are sacred to me, Bobby, so anything is possible, but I’m more concerned about someone getting a green light for murder just because he put a new piece of stained glass over a church altar.”

Bobby’s staff officer drove me back to my office. It wasn’t until he dropped me off that I started to feel that prickle along the back of the neck, that fear you get when someone is following you or is training a sniper’s rifle on your neck.

I went through the day with as much focus as I could manage, met with Darraugh Graham and a couple of other Loop clients, took the dogs to the lake, borrowed Jake’s Fiat to go grocery shopping—Luke Edwards had reclaimed the Subaru after our shoot-out near Dead Stick Pond—he’d seen the damage to the rental Taurus on YouTube and hadn’t wanted to risk the Subaru in my hands a day longer.

They struck in the middle of the night. Fast, ruthless, jimmying open the building door, hydraulic ram on my apartment’s steel front door, thugs at the kitchen exit when I tried to escape through the back. The dogs were barking ferociously from Mr. Contreras’s place, but the goons had me bound, gagged, a hood on my head, and flung into a pickup bed before the old man could get them outside. I’d gone to sleep in my clothes, just in case, but they’d moved so fast I didn’t have time to put on shoes.

Three in the morning, couldn’t tell where we were going. Expressway, maybe. South, maybe. Wind whipped underneath the hood, rubbing against my face. After a time I smelled the lake through the sack, and then my eyes were tearing, I was coughing and choking behind the gag. Pet coke dust. We were close to the Guisar slip.

The air changed overhead. A closed space. Hands dragged me from the back of the truck, thumped me down onto a chair. Tied me to it.

When the hood was unbuckled and pulled off, the light blinded me. I blinked and a wall of metal filing cabinets came into focus. Metal desks. A locked grate with a pay window and a safe behind it. The office for Bagby & Family Haulage. Vince Bagby was leaning against one desk, Rory Scanlon was seated in the chair where Delphina Bagby had been playing solitaire. Three solid-looking youths in the green T-shirts of
Say, Yes!
lounged by the door, faces blank.

“So those flowers and dinner invitations and stuff, they weren’t because of my beautiful eyes,” I said.

Bagby squirmed, shrugged, gave a fake-hearty laugh.

“One last Warshawski,” Scanlon said. “One last person thinking they don’t have to play by the rules.”

“Depends on the rules,” I said. “I guess Tony’s mistake was thinking the law meant something besides pay to play.”

Scanlon nodded at one of the
Say, Yes!
youths, who walked over and hit me in the face. I was able to move my head away from the blow, but it still hurt.

“Where did you get that diary you put out?” Scanlon asked.

“Funny,” I said, “Captain Mallory asked me the same question only twelve hours ago. You probably have your own stooges inside the CPD, although I hope they don’t include Conrad Rawlings. But in case the information is slow drifting south, I’ll tell you the same thing I told the captain: someone mailed it to me. No return address, no prints, no DNA.”

“I don’t believe it’s real,” Scanlon said flatly.

“It’s on the Global Entertainment website,” I said. “It looks pretty real.”

“I want to see it,” Scanlon said. “I think you hired someone to forge it.”

“If it is a forgery, I bet it’s way better than the one you had Frank put in his sister’s underwear drawer. It actually looks like Annie’s handwriting, at least like the one letter of hers that I still have.”

“Pretty convenient, how it showed up,” Scanlon said, his lips a flat, ugly line.

“Yeah, that’s how I felt when Stella’s version showed up. It will be fun to get both diaries vetted by experts.”

“Not any kind of fun you’ll ever have,” Scanlon barked. “You could have died in your bed if you’d kept your goddam nose out of my business. But no, just like your parents, all of you thinking you were too good for this neighborhood. I do a lot for people down here, I did a lot for your family, but I never got any gratitude.”

“Thank you,” I said. “Thank you for getting my dad transferred to the Seventh, for putting a bad rap out on him so that he was sent without backup into gang shootings. Does that help?”

Scanlon nodded again at his pet, who smacked me again. I didn’t move as fast this time; my nose started to bleed. Bagby winced. He didn’t like seeing me beaten? Maybe my beautiful eyes had played a small role.