Brush Back (9 page)

“We all knew Ms. Guzzo’s temper,” I said to Ira and Eunice. “The fact that you remember her, remember the case after all this time, makes me wonder if something special went on at the trial.”

Ira and Eunice looked at each other again: Should we trust her?

Ira made an impatient gesture, but he said, “We didn’t want Joel to take the case. We didn’t think he had enough experience, certainly not for criminal law. It was hard on him, it took a toll.”

“Why did you let him do it, then, instead of handling it yourself?” I asked.

Eunice shook her head. “Joel wasn’t working here—we thought he should have wider experience, and if he’d been here, he’d have always been in Ira’s shadow. Joel started with Mandel & McClelland, doing general law. The girl, Anne Guzzo, worked as a file clerk there part-time. Making money to help pay for college, if I remember correctly. When she was killed, Mr. Mandel felt responsible, felt they should do something.”

“And that something included providing her mother with a defense attorney?” I was puzzled, not to say incredulous, but I tried to keep my tone one of polite inquiry.

“It’s a tight-knit neighborhood, or it was. You should know that, having grown up there.”

“Yes, but—”

“Mr. McClelland went to the same church as the Guzzo family,” Eunice said. “He thought, at least I believe he thought, that the murder, including the mother’s defense, was the community’s business. Ms. Guzzo couldn’t afford an attorney, and he probably believed that even someone as inexperienced as Joel would be better for her than an overworked, underprepared public defender.”

There was a scrabbling at the lock as she was speaking. Joel Previn came in before she finished.

“And of course, we all know how wrong he was,” Joel said. “Why are we rehashing my earliest failure? There are so many others, more recent, that would be worth recounting.”

MINOR LEAGUE

Joel Previn was taller
than his father, but he had the same heavy cheeks. On Ira they were sagging, like kangaroo pouches, but Joel’s were still upright, pushing his eyes up so that he almost had to squint. The likeness between father and son was remarkable, but so was the resemblance to his mother: Joel had Eunice’s high round forehead, her short flat nose, her biscuit-colored skin. What belonged to Joel alone was the unhealthy beading of sweat across his face. His appointment outside the office had been with a bottle.

I walked over to him, holding out my hand and introducing myself. He ignored the hand. I felt foolish, as one does.

“Did you know Stella Guzzo had been released from prison?” I asked.

Joel looked from Eunice to Ira, not the silent signals his parents shared, but as if he were seeking guidance. If they’d sent him to another law firm to keep him out from under Ira’s shadow, the strategy hadn’t worked well.

“I knew, yes,” he said. “Her parole officer told me, in case Stella wanted any legal advice.”

“Did she?”

“Not from me. Why would she? I’m the guy who couldn’t keep her out of prison in the first place.” He had his father’s baritone, too, but in him the undertone held a whine.

“So would you be surprised to learn she’s thinking about trying to get exonerated?”

“Am I on the stand here? Do I know, am I surprised, do I care? No, no and no.”

“I know it was a long time ago, Mr. Previn, but I’m wondering what she said during the trial to help with her defense.”

“She was impossible,” Joel cried. “I wasn’t the right attorney for her. Like my mother said, I was too inexperienced, not even for the crime so much as for working with someone like her. Annie, her daughter, she was nothing like that. When Mr. McClelland and Mr. Mandel asked me to handle the defense, I didn’t want to: Annie was so special, she kept the whole office bright, and I didn’t want to work for anyone who’d killed her, but I never in a million years imagined how different her mother would be from her.”

“I grew up with Annie,” I said. “I know she wanted to get away from South Chicago, get away from all the fighting that went on in her home. And I know Stella used to beat her children, but back when you were prepping her for the trial, did she ever suggest that someone else killed Annie?”

“She said it must have been an intruder, but she also told me she’d hit Annie that night. She claimed it was self-defense. Would you have believed that? She said Annie came at her with a knife, which I couldn’t credit. Little Annie attacking someone with a knife? And Stella was twice her size. I did my best, but Stella already told everyone she’d had to hit Annie, to protect herself. But she also said that Annie was still alive when she left for her bingo game, so someone else must have come to the house while she was at Saint Eloy’s.”

“Was there any sign of forced entry?”

“It was so long ago,” Joel said. “I don’t remember all the police evidence. Dad would, of course, if it had been his case. And if he hadn’t been tied up with some big federal suit, he’d have been in court and made sure I asked all the right questions. Or leapt up and asked them himself.”

“Joel, please,” Eunice said. “Please don’t bring all that up now. We know it was an impossible situation, one which we should have tried to stop—”

“What difference does it make now? Mr. Mandel, Dad—the two of them tutted about it at shul. Mr. Mandel and Mr. McClelland both said— Oh, never mind what they both said. In the end, we all agreed I’d be happier elsewhere. Mr. Mandel sent me to a downtown firm as an associate, but after a few years we all once more agreed I’d be happier elsewhere. Ira feels the same way, but there’s no other elsewhere for me these days.”

Ira held up a hand, not trying to stop his son, trying to ward off the pain of the words.

“Did you keep a transcript of the trial?” I asked.

“No. When I left Mandel & McClelland, they kept all my files.” He looked at Eunice. “Someone wants to rent 206. I came back to get a lease.”

“Someone you met at the Pot of Gold? Can I talk to them first?” Her eyes were pleading with him not to have a tantrum, but he went to a filing cabinet, pulled out a couple of forms and slammed out of the office, saying he was tired of being treated like a mental incompetent.

I followed him quickly—the pain in his mother’s face was hard to take. Joel was disappearing into a tavern half a block up the street.

The Pot of Gold was a small room, with a narrow bar running its length, a couple of minute tables squeezed against the wall, the requisite TV hung in the middle where people could sort of see it. It was tuned this morning to a rerun of an old Notre Dame football game.

Joel was sliding onto a stool when I walked in. Three other people were in the room, a heavy woman tending the bar and two men, seated on adjacent stools near the back. They were older. Every now and then one of them would say something, the other would respond, then they’d relapse into silence.

Joel looked up when I sat next to him, but his expression wasn’t welcoming. “You can tell my mother that the rental prospect took off before I could show him the lease. She doesn’t need to guard the assets any longer.”

“I’m not interested in that. I’m curious about how Stella behaved at the trial.”

“It was a long time ago. I don’t remember.” He signaled to the heavyset woman, who came over with a bottle of vodka. She looked at me questioningly, but I shook my head.

“She’s like one of those unstable chemical reactions they teach you about in school. You have to keep her behind a bulletproof shield so you don’t get acid in your eyes when she explodes,” I said. “At least, that’s the way she seemed when I was a kid. When I saw her last week, she slugged me. Even though she’s eighty, she would have killed me if she’d connected just right. I could believe she murdered Annie in a fit of rage. Did you ever think of pleading insanity?”

“
I
did, but the priest and Mr. McClelland jumped on me like I was a cockroach on the bathroom floor. But, Christ, she was so fucking out of control that Judge Grigsby kept cautioning me. It wasn’t the worst thing that happened to me, just one of the bad ones. He said if I couldn’t control my client’s behavior in court, he’d have to fine me.”

“You can’t tell a judge your client is uncontrollable,” I agreed. “How did you handle it?”

“I talked it over with Mr. Mandel and Mr. McClelland, and Mr. McClelland got the priest at Saint Eloy’s to talk to her. Old man, mean guy, but Stella thought he walked on water. I guess that did the trick.”

“Why did you agree to represent her?”

“You had to be there. The partners decided. Probably because they knew it was a losing case and they wanted the biggest loser in the practice to have it on his record, not one of the go-getters.”

“Who were the go-getters?” I asked, more to move him away from his bout of self-flagellation than because I cared.

“Connor Hurlihey was there.”

“Spike Hurlihey?” I said, my eyes widening.

“Yeah. He was one of the East Side boys, he was a pet of old Mr. McClelland. He rode up, I rode down.”

Connor “Spike” Hurlihey. Speaker of the Illinois House. Maybe the most powerful man in the Land of Lincoln, although of course in the pit where Illinois vipers writhe and hiss, it’s kind of hard to tell the top snake. I knew his district was south, but I’d always assumed it was the south suburbs, Flossmoor or Olympia Fields. I didn’t realize he’d grown up across the Calumet River from me.

“You and Hurlihey get along?”

Joel gulped down his drink and held up his glass to the bartender. “Hurlihey was three years older than me. When I was in fifth grade and he was in eighth, he used to give me wedgies in the hallway. The teachers looked the other way, the other kids laughed because he was a popular bully, and I was a mixed-race kid in a neighborhood with a low tolerance for difference. I begged my parents to send me to a different school and they finally did for ninth grade, but neither of us forgot the other.

“When I joined Mandel & McClelland, he started saying things to Annie: he knew I admired her, and he was pretending to draw her attention to that, but really he was using it as a way to make fun of me.”

It’s depressing how often school bullies become successful CEOs or politicians. “Annie was an ardent soul. I can understand why you responded to her.”

“Ardent. That describes her. She was ambitious, she wanted to leave South Chicago, but she was sweet. She was the smartest girl in her school, probably the smartest person in the firm, but she never complained if one of the lawyers dumped a stack of photocopying on her at the end of the day. She’d stand at the Xerox machine with her history book propped up on the shelf, reading while she fed documents in. In those days I thought I was ambitious, too.”

“Did you believe Stella when she said Annie had attacked her?”

He fidgeted with his glass. “I went over there one night, on the spur of the moment, I wanted to see if Annie would go to a show with me. She and her mother were shouting at each other, they didn’t even hear the doorbell.”

“It was a family that fought and shouted a lot,” I said. “When Stella’s brothers would come over with their wives and kids, my dad couldn’t even hear the game on the radio and there was an alley between us. When old Mrs. Jokich—Stella’s neighbor—was dying, the family had to call the cops to shut up the braying at the Guzzo place.”

Stella was sure it was my dad who’d called the district station, and nothing could convince her otherwise. That was probably why she was squawking now that Tony had suppressed evidence during her trial—she could carry a grudge until the grudge took on a life of its own and carried on without her.

I put my card on the bar next to Joel. “Even if you’re fifty, you can make other choices, change directions. Your parents don’t own you.”

“Spare me the pep talk. I’ve had plenty and they make my head hurt.”

“Maybe, but I’m betting it’s all that vodka before lunch.”

I walked back to my car, which had a sporty orange envelope under the windshield wiper. My second in a week, and I couldn’t expense Frank, not without crossing the line Freeman had warned me against.

I hadn’t noticed the pay-to-park sign. The cash-strapped city was handing out sixty-five-dollar fines even on the city’s more derelict streets. I guess it meant someone had a job in this dismal economy, but somehow that thought didn’t cheer me.

I couldn’t understand why Mandel & McClelland had agreed to assign someone from the firm to represent Annie’s killer, and why that someone had been Joel, young, green, obviously with a crush on the victim. They should have left Stella to the public defender. I’d been one, I’d worked hard. Like all Cook County PD’s, my caseload had been too big, but I still gave each client careful attention—by working the long hours that made my husband scowl and complain during the fourteen months of our marriage.

It occurred to me that if Stella had drawn a PD, it might have been me being cautioned by Judge Grigsby. I laughed, picturing Stella’s horror if I’d been assigned to her defense.

The other side of the question was the client side—why had Stella let Joel represent her? She didn’t suffer ordinary people gladly; she’d have eviscerated an inexperienced young man. Or maybe the shock of Annie’s death and her own arrest had silenced her.