“Hard to know why,” I said. “I was just asking a few questions. You buy your insurance here?”
“Oh, yes. The lawyer sends you down to the agency, and they give you a special rate if you’re a customer with the lawyer. And then, if you need a lawyer, the insurance man sends you up here. That’s why we were here, we were hoping to cash in our life insurance now that we need extra help. But the fine print, that’s what always does you in, isn’t it.” He pronounced the word as INsurance.
I walked down in front of them, slowly, in case the couple changed their minds about wanting help. They were murmuring softly to each other. When we got to the front entryway, they stopped beside the inner door to Scanlon Insurance.
“We heard you asking about Stella Guzzo,” the woman said.
“Do you know her?” I tried to sound casual.
“No.” The woman looked up the stairs, to see if anyone was watching. I noticed the camera eye in the entryway ceiling, and ushered the couple outside.
“It was the girl,” the husband said. “Annie. She was a clerk in the office, a bright little thing. We still remember her being killed. Gangs. You’re always reading about children killed by gang violence, but when your own mother murders you—awful, awful!”
The woman squeezed her husband’s hand. “Don’t get so worked up, Harold: it all happened a long time ago. But Sol Mandel took it to heart, her working for him and so on. We were surprised that he gave the job of defending the mother to Ira Previn’s son.”
“It surprised me, too,” I said. “Do you know why he did it?”
“Sol had some explanation,” Harold said. “He felt responsible because the girl had planned on running away to college without telling her mother and he told her to stand up to her mother, be an adult. It didn’t seem like much of a reason, but that’s what he said.”
“How do you know so much about it?” I asked.
“Oh, we all belonged to the same temple, back when Har HaShem was down here,” the woman said. “Poor Joel.”
“What do you mean, ‘poor Joel’?” Harold snorted. “It’s poor Ira.”
“Poor Joel,” the woman repeated. “He could never live up to Ira’s reputation. He shouldn’t have gone into the law, but he so wanted Ira to pay attention to him, to admire him. Ira never could see it. All his emotional life, it was focused on the courts, and what wasn’t there, he felt he owed to Eunice. He knew how much talk there was, he felt he needed to protect her.”
“Even at the temple,” Harold said mournfully. “It’s an embarrassment to know how mean-spirited your own kind can be.”
“Yes, it caused quite a stir back when they married,” the woman sighed, “her not being a Jew, plus her being a Negro. African-American, we should say now. Oh, Harold! Look at the time, I’m running on, and we have to see about the payments before we go home.”
I handed her a card, asking her to call if anything else occurred to her. “And would you give me your phone number? I’m a detective, I’m inquisitive by nature and I might have more questions.”
Her husband objected sharply: the world was full of scam artists, she shouldn’t tell me their names. She patted his arm sympathetically but spelled it for me, slowly, Harold and Melba Minsky. They lived in Olympia Fields now, but they’d kept their legal affairs with Mandel for so long they didn’t feel like shifting when he died, even after Mr. McClelland sold the practice to Nina Quarles.
“Not that it’s much of a practice here in South Chicago anymore. If it’s a big case, they send it to the people who bought Sol Mandel’s downtown office, of course, but they can take care of the little things we need help with, not that they helped us much today.”
“They must have big cases, if Nina Quarles has to be in Paris to handle them,” I said.
Melba laughed, the sound like a rustling of paper. “I doubt that Nina has ever been in court, dear, unless she was trying to get out of a traffic ticket. She goes to Paris to buy clothes. But Thelma Kalvin is a first-rate office manager and the gentleman who looks after us knows his business. We don’t mind.”
She waited until Harold, clucking at her impatiently, pushed open the door to Scanlon’s office. “One person you might talk to is Rabbi Zukos’s son. The rabbi, may his name be a blessing, died after the congregation moved to Highland Park, but his son Rafael was in the same bar mitzvah class as Joel Previn. Good luck, dear.”
FLEEING THE LIONS
It was past two. I’d been too agitated by the television invasion to eat breakfast this morning and I was suddenly ravenous. I was standing in the street to see what restaurants were nearby when a car honked right behind me. I jumped and scrambled back to the curb. A late-model silver SUV pulled into the spot where I’d been standing.
Two men climbed out, laughing about someone named Robbie. The driver said, “You go on in, Wally, I’ll follow you in a sec.”