“We won’t take much of your time,” I said, perching on the edge of her desk. “This young woman is a connection of my cousin Boom-Boom, by the way, and she’s concerned about the slander against him.”
“I told you before that I admired his playing but that I don’t know anything about the accusations brought against him by that woman who murdered her daughter.”
“That’s an interesting phrase, isn’t it? ‘That woman who murdered her daughter.’ You don’t remember the meeting in which the partners decided that Joel Previn would represent Stella Guzzo? You worked here then, Annie Guzzo put your nose out of joint. I’d think her and her mother’s names would have stuck in your head even after all this time.”
I spoke loudly enough for people at the other desks to hear. Except for two people on the phone, everyone stopped what they were doing to watch, including a young couple consulting a man at a desk near the windows. The couple, who’d been arguing softly with each other when I came in, stopped their bickering to watch me.
“It was painful, so painful that I suppressed the names,” Thelma said. “If you’d ever worked with—”
“Lame,” I said, looking at Bernie. “Would you agree, a pretty lame excuse?”
Bernie was startled, but she picked up the cue and nodded. “For Uncle Boom-Boom I expect a good lie, a creative one that is interesting to hear.”
“So you chose not to talk to me about Stella and Annie or Spike Hurlihey or how the partners liked to pit the associates against each other. Is that a practice that Nina Quarles has continued? Oh, right. She doesn’t really work here, just spends the profits. Which must be considerable to send her on shopping sprees to Europe. Who were the other associates in the firm at the time?”
Thelma’s look would have stripped the blades from a pair of ice skates. “Get out of this office now, or I’ll call the police and have you removed.”
“Judge Grigsby, he couldn’t have been here,” I mused, “he would have recused himself from trying the case. At least, I think he would have. It’s Illinois, you never know.”
Thelma looked at the staff and the two clients, all unabashedly eavesdropping: it didn’t look like a group of people eager to back her up. “I keep telling you to leave because we’re shutting down for the day. This isn’t a safe place for people to be after dark; I can’t keep the office open for you when you don’t have an appointment.”
“That’s okay,” I said. “I’ll be glad to drive you home so we can finish the conversation in safety.”
The young couple laughed, but the staff stared owlishly, waiting to see how the story would unfold. Thelma bit the tip of her index finger: she wasn’t the boss, just the office manager—she might run the place for Nina Quarles, but she couldn’t order the lawyers around.
When Thelma didn’t make a move, I asked, “Why does everyone from you to Ira Previn to Judge Grigsby still care about Stella Guzzo? Why did the firm care about her in the first place?”
“Everyone has a right to counsel,” Thelma said.
“Now, that is interesting,” I said to Bernie. “Do you remember what Joel said when he was describing what the partners said when they were pressuring him to take on Stella’s defense?”
Bernie blushed. “It was something nasty about him and Annie.”
“That, but also they said, didn’t he remember Gideon v. Wainwright?”
“But I don’t know what that is,” Bernie protested.
“It was a famous lawsuit, where the Supreme Court ruled everyone has a right to counsel, even those too poor to pay for a lawyer themselves. What’s interesting is that Gideon became the party line here at Mandel & McClelland. Everyone repeated the phrase so many times: we are representing Stella Guzzo, who murdered our young clerk, because we are such noble lawyers, we believe in Gideon.”
I continued to speak exclusively to Bernie, as if Thelma and the rest of the group weren’t in the room. “We don’t know why the partners wanted to represent Stella, but Thelma has proved that they coached the people who worked for the firm all to give the same story. It makes me wonder if someone in the firm knew more about Annie’s death than they ever let on. Thelma, for instance. She’s the office manager now, but back then she was a clerk-secretary, and Annie Guzzo muscled her out of the way. Annie was better, faster, maybe even cuter—that shouldn’t count, but apparently it did with one of the senior partners—”
“She wasn’t better or faster, she just knew how to flirt with old Mr. Mandel!” Thelma interrupted, spots of color burning her cheeks.
“You didn’t like her, Joel said.”
“Joel—he was pathetic. He was in love with Annie, he would have done anything for her. She made fun of him behind his back but he was such a stupid guy he never caught on.”
“It sounds as though the person Joel killed would have been Stella, if he’d do anything for Annie. But maybe you or Spike or Judge Grigsby told Joel that Annie made fun of him and that unhinged him to the point he beat her to death.”