He came over to me, a white-haired man wearing a red-checked shirt, a leather bomber jacket slung over one shoulder.
“Is your life insurance paid up, young lady?”
He laughed at my startled expression. “If you stand in the middle of a busy street, better make sure your family is taken care of. What can we do for you?”
“Are you Mr. Scanlon?” I asked.
“Guilty as charged. And you are?”
“V. I. Warshawski.”
He’d been laughing, his cheeks pushing his eyes into twinkling slits, as if he were practicing for a role as Santa. At my name the twinkling vanished and I could see his eyes, blue and cold.
“I knew the hockey player,” Scanlon said. “Who’s back in the news these days.”
“Yes, indeed he is. I remember the night you chartered buses to take the neighborhood up to watch his debut at the Stadium. Or was that your father?”
He laughed, delighted that I remembered, but the laugh didn’t thaw his eyes. “That was me, a very young me. In those days I loved throwing big parties, getting people together, watching them have a good time. I still love a good party but can’t take the hours anymore. Warshawski wasn’t married. Let’s see—you’re a sister?”
“Cousin,” I said.
I could almost see zeros and ones shifting in his face as he calculated who I was, where I fit into his files.
“Your father was the cop, right? They said he couldn’t be bribed, right? One of the pillars of justice in an unjust world.”
“I’m glad people knew that about him,” I said formally: Scanlon’s voice had held an undercurrent that sounded close to scorn.
“And you went off to school someplace, left the neighborhood.”
“Guilty as charged,” I echoed him.
“So what brings you back to South Chicago?”
“Stella Guzzo.” I waited a beat, to let him fill in the blanks.
“Right, it was on the news, she claims Warshawski terrified her daughter. And so you’ve hotfooted it down here to clear his name. It’s what I love about this neighborhood, families in it stick together. What did you think we could do for you here?”
“Not you, Nina Quarles’s office. They took over Mandel & McClelland’s business.” I knew he knew that. “I was hoping they might have a trial transcript.”
“Oh? And did they?”
“No one seems to have one. Poor Annie—her death wasn’t considered important enough for anyone to record all the details.”
“She was a bright kid. Too bad it had to end that way.”
“Had to end that way? That makes it sound as if her mother was preordained to kill her.”
“Oh, these South Side Irish families, with their outsized voices and quarrels squeezed into tiny houses, they’re tinderboxes. I know them well—I grew up in one of those families.”
Scanlon started to open the door but stopped when I asked how he knew Annie Guzzo.
He shrugged impatiently. “How we all know each other. She was a bright kid in my lawyer’s office—Sol Mandel used to handle my family’s business. Nina does now. Keep it all in the neighborhood, that’s what I tell people.”
“Did Mr. Mandel ever tell you why he pressured Joel Previn into defending Stella? It seems so strange, defending the killer of his young clerk.”
“We all hoped something would put some spine in Joel. He had chances most people down here never come close to, but he was a whiner and a crybaby. Sol wanted to see if he could buck up, act like a man, and sad to say, it didn’t happen. Good talking to you, Warshawski the cousin, but stay out of the street—people drive like lunatics.”
He laughed again, clapped my shoulder and went into his office. I stared after him thoughtfully, wondering what that conversation had been about. And the meeting itself—it had seemed like a chance encounter, but it was odd that he’d stopped to talk to me. Was it possible that Thelma Kalvin had sent him a message—detective in the office asking about Stella Guzzo? Or had the Guzzo business gotten me so off-balance that I was seeing conspiracies under every streetlamp?
One thing I was sure about: I was still hungry. I found a taco stand up the street with some bar stools set up on the sidewalk for customers. After hours of slogging around the South Side, my anger about the slander against Boom-Boom was waning, but everything about Stella’s story was so odd I couldn’t leave it alone.
Maybe Scanlon’s theory as to why Mandel had asked Joel Previn to defend Stella was correct: tough love. Make the boy grow a spine or balls or whatever. It was possible—there’d definitely been a culture of bullying in the Mandel & McClelland office, with Spike Hurlihey, now the House Speaker, leading the pack. Would the partners have participated in the bullying to such a degree that they’d taken on Stella’s defense just to humiliate Joel?