The spring continued cold and wet, but I ran the lakefront with the dogs, played basketball with my friends on Sunday mornings. I spent time with Mr. Villard, visiting him first at the rehab place where he went after surgery, and then in his assisted living apartment when he was strong enough to go home. Adelaide continued to look after him: the daughters had tried to fire her, but Mr. Villard insisted that he was to blame for getting shot:
“I should have told Ms. Warshawski it was Gil Brineruck’s voice on that recording, instead of thinking I could confront him alone. He was a terrible disgrace to baseball and to the Cubs. Adelaide knows how to look after me without turning me into a three-year-old. Adelaide stays.”
I even went back to working on my voice. My mother had once presented me with a music list for my birthday: songs about Victoria or Victory or music by women named Victoria. I was trying to learn madrigals by the Renaissance composer Vittoria Aleotti, with Jake playing the counterpoint. Love songs often ended with a practice session in bed, which helped make my hellish twenty hours in tunnels and swamps recede to the background of my brain.
Jake and Lotty both urged me to stop thinking about South Chicago, despite the many open ends to the business. I knew I didn’t have the time or the money to dig into the Say, Yes! foundation’s records, or Scanlon’s old accounts at Continental Illinois. Perhaps the federal prosecutor for the Northern District was doing so, as the FBI’s Derek Hatfield had suggested. No ripples were surfacing on the street yet, so either the Feds were moving very cautiously, or they weren’t moving at all. I didn’t have any way of finding out.
The problem that gnawed at me—that made me so restless that Jake sent me home to my own bed more than once—was Annie’s death. I could let Scanlon’s and Mandel’s financial skulduggery go—almost.
But much as I disliked Stella Guzzo, much as I knew she’d beaten her children many times, and Annie on the last night of her daughter’s life, I couldn’t stop trying to imagine a way to prove she was innocent.
I’d become convinced she’d been set up. It wasn’t only Joel’s revelation that he and Sol Mandel had both been at the Guzzo house the night that Annie died, but the whole load of laundry that unfolded after I started asking questions. Every time I got close to a piece of the story, a new drama erupted, forcing my attention elsewhere. The diary implicating Boom-Boom, that had been designed to keep my attention away from Stella. The beating Bernie and I had experienced had roused my suspicions, but in a different direction.
Conrad was right: no physical evidence existed to prove one way or another if Mandel or Scanlon, or even Spike Hurlihey, had been in the Guzzo house the night Annie died. But there was another route, actually two other routes, and in the end, I decided—against Freeman Carter’s advice, and to Jake’s dismay and Lotty’s fury—to pursue both of them. The fact that both Mr. Contreras and Murray Ryerson supported me didn’t improve the atmosphere with Jake and Lotty.
I started with Frank Guzzo; he and I had already violated the restraining order, so I figured I could do it again without risking arrest.
We agreed to meet in Grant Park—halfway between north and south—next to the Christopher Columbus statue. Chicago’s Italian community had raised money for the statue; maybe it would make us remember Frank’s Italian father, my Italian mother, and bring us closer together.
Frank arrived half an hour after me. He was nervous, demanding I show whether I was recording him, looking around to make sure no one was videotaping him. He finally stood still long enough for me to say I’d come around to thinking his mother had been railroaded.
He was suspicious, not gratified. “What are you trying to trick me into saying?” he demanded.
“I’m trying to talk sense to you, Frank,” I said.
I told him about Joel Previn coming to the house and seeing Annie alive with all her wits about her the night she died, and he finally started paying serious attention to me.
“That means that Previn killed Annie?”
“Could mean it, but I doubt it. Sol Mandel and Rory Scanlon were the people who had the most to lose if Annie kept on the way she was going, and Mandel at least was at the house after Joel left. He had other people with him, possibly Spike Hurlihey, possibly Scanlon—”
“No, Tori! No, don’t you see—you cannot go around accusing Scanlon. You can’t, you mustn’t!”
“Or what?” I demanded. “He’ll send Stella back to prison? He’ll get Bagby to fire you?”
“I—oh, damn you, Tori, why can’t you leave well enough alone? The diary, that was supposed to make you go away, the mugging, nothing would stop you. Do you want them to kill you?”
“Frank, what is it? What have you done that has you doing whatever they want?”
“It’s not me,” he burst out. “It’s Frankie, my boy!”
A couple out walking their dog stared at us with open curiosity. I waved at them and they scurried on.
“What has Frankie done? Is he running with the Insane Dragons?”
“No. It’s baseball.”