“Baseball?” I repeated. “Oh. Scanlon has told you that if you rock the boat about Stella, he’ll make sure Frankie doesn’t get a shot at the big time.”
Frank didn’t say anything, just looked at his hands, his face holding such a naked display of helplessness that I had to look away.
“Frank, why did you come to me to begin with, then, if you were worried about Frankie? As soon as you asked me to investigate what your mother was up to, that whole string of lies was likely to unravel.”
“I didn’t know,” he said. “I came to you for the reason I said, I didn’t know what Ma was up to or what she was going to do. I was afraid if she started acting too wild in public, it would hurt Frankie. You know, baseball today, the family has to make a good impression. Scouts see there’s a crazy grandma bouncing around in public, they got a thousand other talented boys they can look at whose grandmothers didn’t beat or kill their own kids. Mr. Scanlon, he had promised he’d make sure no one found out about Ma killing Annie, but when you started asking questions, he got mad.”
“He came to you, told you this?” I asked.
“No, I’m too far down the food chain. He talked to Bagby. Bagby came to me, said Scanlon had a bee in his bonnet about you digging up old dirt, that you look down on the rest of us, you think people like me are idiots or fools for staying on in the old neighborhood.
“And then, the lady at the law firm, Thelma, she found Annie’s diary in an old desk. Vince told me maybe stick it in Annie’s dresser and have Betty go over and suggest to Ma that they get rid of Annie’s clothes. They thought if there was evidence against Boom-Boom, you’d want to bury it, and so you’d stop asking questions.”
“Oh, Frank. The law of unintended consequences. It turned up so conveniently that once I stopped seeing red, white and blue, I was sure it was a fake. The diary goaded me into asking more questions.”
“They told me it was the real thing. They said they wouldn’t ask me to plant a fake in my own ma’s house,” Frank said.
“But when you looked at it—you must have known it wasn’t Annie’s writing.”
Frank flung up his hands, exasperated. “I don’t know Annie’s writing. She didn’t write me letters, we lived in the same house! I wasn’t reading her school homework and even if I had been, it’s so long ago I wouldn’t know if it was her or you or the Pope who wrote it.”
He had a point. Besides, he’d wanted to believe in the diary: it was an easy way out of his problems. And given his lingering jealousy of Boom-Boom, he’d probably felt a certain Schadenfreude at the thought of fingering my cousin.
I pulled out a photocopy of the condolence letter Annie had written my dad when Gabriella died. “Does this look like her writing to you?”
He read it, hunched a sullen shoulder. “I guess, if you say so.”
“Yep. I say so. The original is in a safe, but if I can get a subpoena, I am going to force your mother to produce the book you hid in Annie’s dresser drawer. And then it will be an ugly court battle.”
“Just leave it alone. Ma, her doctor made her start taking lithium. She’s not going to bother you anymore.”
I glared at him. “I am not going to let the boys in the old Mandel & McClelland office get away with framing your mother for murder. I don’t know which one killed your sister, but I’m going to have a shot at forcing him—them—into the open. However—” I held up a hand, demanding silence, as Frank started to protest.
“I’ll make sure they know you didn’t have anything to do with it. I promise you that I will not leave you and Frankie out to dry.”
“Oh, your promises, you can promise anything, your life isn’t going to be hurt by you digging up dirt left, right and center.”
“What do you mean, my life won’t be hurt?” A red mist swam in front of my eyes. “I was nearly killed by the Sturlese brothers and their gorilla. You cost me weeks of income, asking me to work for you and then not paying me. I have legal fees from dealing with this insane order of protection your mother filed. Boom-Boom has been slandered. And all so you can protect the remote chance of Frankie making it to the show. I have bills, just like you. I work for a living, just like you. You’re lucky I don’t sue your sorry ass.”
“Yeah, well, you can’t get blood out of a turnip.”
“Maybe not, but you can get enough turnip juice to make soup.”
Frank kicked a hole in the grass with the heel of his work boot. He muttered something that might have been an apology, but when he had started back toward his truck, he couldn’t resist turning around to yell, “If you’d ever had any kids, you’d know you do anything to protect them.”
“Yeah, Frank, right, whatever.”
I watched him drive off before I got into my car—actually Jake’s Fiat—and headed north to Rafe Zukos and Kenji Aroyawa’s home in Rogers Park.
MONEY PITCH