After three hours of steady work on my paying customers’ concerns, I took the dogs for a walk down Milwaukee to the nearest branch of Fort Dearborn, where I opened an account. On the way back we stopped for falafel, which I took to the office to eat while setting up Internet banking for my new account.
Security questions: mother’s date of birth, street where I grew up, my first-grade teacher. All questions I could answer if I was looking at Frank Guzzo’s account, but not his mother’s. How creepy did I want to be on my quest? I called the Streeter brothers, who help fill in the blanks for me when my workload gets out of hand.
“Hey, V.I.” It was Kimball Streeter, the brother I almost never saw, who answered the phone. “I see you got your face in the news again.”
I gritted my teeth for another conversation about my cousin and Annie’s murder.
“No, not that. They say you’re writing the story of his life. About time someone did that, but I didn’t know you could write.”
“I didn’t, either,” I agreed feebly. “I’m not sure I can make it happen.”
While we spoke, I looked up my name in the daily news. Natalie Clements, the woman in the Cubs media office, had been so enthusiastic about my project that she’d put out a press release, including the photo of Boom-Boom on the mound with Mitch Williams.
Local Detective Takes on a New Case: Investigating a Sports Legend’s Life, was how the Herald-Star pitched it. They quoted Mr. Villard, the retired media relations man who’d dug up the photos, on what a great sports town Chicago was, and how he knew the Cubs would be delighted to cooperate with me and the Blackhawks on writing Boom-Boom’s life story.
The Star had dug up their own old story of the day of the open tryouts. Boom-Boom had apparently led both the press and the official Cubs photographer on a merry chase around the ballpark, trying to get into all the parts of the stadium that were normally closed to the public.
Warshawski loved to play pranks, on the press and on his teammates, but the Cubs asked us not to publish the photos at the time—they didn’t want kids or other fans to get ideas about how to get into closed-off sections of Wrigley. The paper got rid of a lot of print archives in the transition to new media. Those tryout shots were never digitized, so we can’t show you what he was up to, but the book itself should help fans remember what Boom-Boom Warshawski did for this city besides his practical jokes: three Stanley Cups, and endless goodwill with local charities.
My cheeks turned hot: with this kind of publicity, I would have to write the book.
I realized I’d been carrying on some kind of conversation with Kimball Streeter, but not paying attention to the words. I had to drag my mind back to the reason I’d called: I wanted to hack into Stella Guzzo’s bank account—but I didn’t tell Kimball that.
Kimball agreed to be a researcher for the Hibernian Genealogical Society and to try to get answers to the questions I e-mailed him.
He called back forty minutes later to report that Stella had hung up on him, but that Betty had been very chatty. She didn’t know her mother-in-law’s first-grade teacher, but she knew Stella’s mother’s date of birth: March 29, when the family had to go to Grace O’Rourke Garretty’s grave and pray the rosary.
“Betty was peevish because now that Stella is out of prison, they had to go to Resurrection Cemetery again this year, when there was still snow on the ground, and kneel there doing the decades. Oh, and Stella grew up on Oglesby.”
No sooner had Kimball Streeter hung up than Murray called. He was fuming that I’d started a book project without consulting him.
“Warshawski, the only thing you know how to write is a case report. You’re clueless about narrative, story arc, building suspense. You got a ghost writer?”
“Don’t start by insulting me, or I’ll make you read my senior thesis, which won top honors in the Social Sciences Division the year I graduated.”
“Sorry, sorry,” Murray said hastily. “I know you’re mad at me, Warshawski, but honestly, it’s hard to learn about something like this in my own paper when everyone knows how tight you and I are.”
I sighed. “Murray, if I tell you something off the record, you had better keep it off the record, or I will post candid pictures of you on your Facebook page.”
He promised, but when I told him, he was enthusiastic. “Let me do it, V.I.—it’s the perfect refutation for the diary story, and anyway, the city still loves him.”
“Maybe, Murray, maybe. Let me get out from under the Guzzos first.”
When I hung up, my eye caught the engraving of the Uffizi on the wall to my right. It had been my mother’s. I could feel the sternness of her disapproval as I dialed Fort Dearborn’s Internet help line.