She held out a folder to me. “I was hoping I’d catch you—I made a print of your cousin for you. And Will wanted to give you a pass to next week’s game against New York.”
She darted back inside on my thanks, running in high heels without tripping, which ought to be an Olympic event. I walked along, bent over my cousin’s face, and ran into someone.
“Sorry!” I looked up, smiling my apologies.
The man I’d bumped scowled and growled at me in a thick Slavic accent. “Watch where you put your feet.”
It wasn’t his hard-lined, cold-eyed face that wiped the smile from my mouth, but his companion: a short wide man who bore an amazing resemblance to Danny DeVito.
“Uncle Jerry,” I exclaimed.
“Who told you my name?” Uncle Jerry glanced involuntarily at the hard-faced man.
“No one. That’s what the woman you were with called you when I saw you in the church.”
“I wasn’t in church.” He looked again at the other man, whose eyes seemed even colder.
I don’t like to see people in fear, even rude angry men. “I must be confusing you with someone else,” I agreed.
“What church Jerry was in?” the hard-faced man asked. His syntax was Slavic but his accent was gravel in any language.
“I said I mistook him for someone else,” I said. “Let’s all just get on with our day, okay?”
“What woman he was talking to?”
“I don’t know,” I said. “I don’t know you, I don’t know him, I don’t need this interrogation for the simple misdemeanor of not looking where I was going.”
“You know his name is Jerry. Where are you meeting him?”
“Tell you what,” I suggested. “You give me your name and tell me why you want to know, and I’ll answer the question.”
“When I ask question, I expect answer, no smart broads making funny. Got that?”
He bent over me, breathing garlic down my shirt. Beads of sweat stood out on Uncle Jerry’s forehead and my own throat felt tight, as if I were being strangled. I started to cross Clark, but the man grabbed my shoulder in a steel grip. I kicked hard against his exposed shin and twisted away, running into Clark Street.
Cars honked and swerved around me. Mr. Gravel-voice was trying to get at me but the street was lively with cabs; one stopped when I pounded on the door.
“Drive around the ballpark,” I said. “I want to see which way those two creeps are going.”
“He going to shoot me?” the cabbie asked, watching Gravel stick a hand inside his jacket.
“He’s going to realize he’s in the middle of a busy street with a thousand cops around him.”
The cabbie accelerated and turned left across the northbound traffic. As we turned, I saw a cop blowing a furious whistle at Gravel, forcing him back to the sidewalk. Hands on his hips, Gravel swiveled to keep an eye on the cab I was in.
I lost sight of him when we turned up Sheffield. The cabbie made the next left onto Waveland. I stopped him at the corner, handed him a ten for the three-dollar fare, stopped a cab from a different company and got him to drive me back down to the corner I’d just left. We were in time to see Gravel and Uncle Jerry climb into the Bagby truck. I took pictures as best I could from the moving taxi, but photos couldn’t begin to convey the menace in Gravel’s face or the fear in Uncle Jerry’s.
EJECTED
Joel was actually at his desk when I got to Ira’s office, typing on an old-model Dell. One thing about habitual heavy drinkers, they can stay upright and even function when the rest of us would be comatose. Ira wasn’t there, but Eunice was talking with an African-American woman around her own age. They were going through a thick stack of documents, checking them against an old calendar.
Eunice had buzzed me in, but her face was stiff with disapproval. Joel wasn’t ecstatic at seeing me, either.
“Are you here to nag some more about Stella? I told you yesterday that I know I fucked up her defense. There’s nothing else to say.”
He spoke loudly, belligerently, and Eunice froze in the middle of her own conversation.
“Joel, please take Ms. Warshawski into the office. Mrs. Eldridge’s affairs are complicated and we need quiet to focus on them.”
Joel muttered under his breath that he wasn’t a baby, he was tired of being bossed around, but he got to his feet and clumped his way to a small room at the back, not bothering to see if I was following.
“Well?” He stood just inside the door, arms folded across his chest, the edges of his full cheeks stained red.
“I talked to Melba Minsky yesterday and she sent me to Rafael Zukos.”
The red spread across his face. “Melba Minsky, she always was a goddam buttinsky. Minsky Buttinsky. She tell you the boy wonder’s amazing success stories, or did she fill your head with smutty gossip?”