“What can we do for you here?” Her voice quavered slightly with age, but the assessing look she gave me, taking in everything from my faded jeans to my expensive boots, was shrewd.
“My name is V. I. Warshawski. I’m a private investigator and I was hoping to speak to Mr. Joel Previn about a woman he represented some years ago.”
“Is he expecting you? He had an early meeting outside the office.”
I looked at my watch. Nine-thirty. I said I could wait half an hour.
“He doesn’t—I don’t know what time he might get here. Tell me what you want; I’m familiar with most of the cases the office handles.”
“Stella Guzzo. She—”
“Oh, yes.” The woman’s face took on an expression I couldn’t interpret, sadness, maybe, or wariness. “She murdered her daughter. I remember it well.”
“Hnnh. Stella Guzzo. What kind of business are you doing with her?”
I turned, startled. Ira Previn had come into the room through a door behind me. Age had shrunk him. His missing inches had settled around his midriff, which looked like the mound in the middle of the boa constrictor that ate the elephant. His face and hands were covered with dark age spots, but his voice was still deep and authoritative.
I repeated my name.
“Hnnh. Warshawski. You connected to the hockey player?”
“His cousin,” I said. “His goalie when he was ten and couldn’t get on a rink. His executor when he died.”
“Eunice, did you already look at her ID?”
I took out my wallet and showed them my PI and driver’s licenses. Ira looked at them, grunted again and moved to a desk on the far side of the room. His gait was uneven: it was hard for him to move his right leg, but he frowned at Eunice when she reached for a cane propped against her desk. When he was seated in the old-fashioned swivel chair, he took his time getting settled—patting his forehead with a handkerchief, refolding the cloth and putting it back in his breast pocket, lining up a couple of pencils next to a legal pad. These were his courtroom strategies, buying him time, annoying opposing counsel, but they’d probably become second nature now.
“Saw your cousin play a few times, back in the old Stadium, when your eardrums could burst from the sound. So you were his goalie. And now you think you need to block shots aimed at him after death.”
I couldn’t help smiling at the metaphor. “Something like that, sir.”
“And what are you planning on doing?”
“That depends on what kind of information I can get about Stella Guzzo’s trial. I’m thinking she invented the story about my cousin when she was doing time, but if I could see the transcript, there might be something to suggest she’d already thought about it when she was arrested.”
Doing time, what a strange expression. You and time behind bars, you’re suspended in time, or passing time. Time is doing things to you, not you to it.
Eunice and Ira exchanged looks. They were a team with a lot of years of shorthand between them. Eunice said, “If you’re thinking of suing Joel for malpractice, the statute of limitations—”
“No, ma’am!” It hadn’t occurred to me, but of course, that was one reason a stranger might be nosing around the case. “I’m trying to figure out why Stella Guzzo is making this preposterous claim. She’s saying Annie—her daughter—kept a diary that she only stumbled on now, long after the murder. I find it hard to believe it’s genuine, but I wondered if she said anything to Mr. Joel Previn at the time. About Annie and my cousin, or Annie and a diary, or another possible suspect.”
“Did your cousin in fact date her?”
“Not as far as I know.”
“Either Stella Guzzo has evidence, or she has an animus,” Previn pronounced. “Which is it?”
I shrugged. “It could be both, but it’s definitely an animus. Annie adored my mother. Most people did, but to Annie, Gabriella represented, oh, sanity, I guess. And a window to a larger world. Stella Guzzo decided that my mother was deliberately undermining her authority as a parent. She responded with some vile statements, so I can’t say I’ve ever been a fan.”
What Stella had said was that Gabriella used the secret sexual arts of Jewish women to seduce her husband, Mateo. We got chapter and verse on this from my aunt Marie, Boom-Boom’s mother, who was one of Stella’s cronies. Marie loved conflict, and she was at perpetual loggerheads with my mother. Gabriella, Italian, Jewish, a singer, was way too exotic for the sulfurous air of South Chicago. Marie was happy to report Stella’s insults to us when she and Uncle Bernard came over for Sunday dinner.