Previn’s office was on Jeffery, in a building like the one with the fancy shops of my childhood: little stores on the street level, two floors of apartments overhead. I didn’t see the entrance at first and passed two bars, “Flo’s Clothes, All Dresses $10 or Under,” and five storefronts for rent before I found it tucked between a fried fish outlet and a wig shop.
It looked as though Previn maintained his own cleaning crew: the bottles and fast-food detritus on the sidewalk stopped where his office started. The sign on the window, Previn & Previn, Attorneys at Law, had been painted recently; a phone number and a website were both listed underneath.
The Previns weren’t blind to the risks of the area: white circles indicating an alarm system were mounted on the windows. They had installed a security camera in the doorway. Its red eye took me in when I rang the bell. After a long moment, a buzzer sounded, an old-fashioned noise like a school fire bell. I pulled the door open.
An African-American woman who seemed eighty or ninety herself was alone in the small room. Under the low-hanging fluorescent lamps, her face showed a network of lines, like the cracked patina of an ancient oriental vase. She wore a severely tailored suit, which might have come from France. Certainly not from Flo’s. The pearls in her ears looked real.
“What can we do for you here?” Her voice quavered slightly with age, but the assessing look she gave me, taking in everything from my faded jeans to my expensive boots, was shrewd.
“My name is V. I. Warshawski. I’m a private investigator and I was hoping to speak to Mr. Joel Previn about a woman he represented some years ago.”
“Is he expecting you? He had an early meeting outside the office.”
I looked at my watch. Nine-thirty. I said I could wait half an hour.
“He doesn’t—I don’t know what time he might get here. Tell me what you want; I’m familiar with most of the cases the office handles.”
“Stella Guzzo. She—”
“Oh, yes.” The woman’s face took on an expression I couldn’t interpret, sadness, maybe, or wariness. “She murdered her daughter. I remember it well.”
“Hnnh. Stella Guzzo. What kind of business are you doing with her?”
I turned, startled. Ira Previn had come into the room through a door behind me. Age had shrunk him. His missing inches had settled around his midriff, which looked like the mound in the middle of the boa constrictor that ate the elephant. His face and hands were covered with dark age spots, but his voice was still deep and authoritative.
I repeated my name.
“Hnnh. Warshawski. You connected to the hockey player?”
“His cousin,” I said. “His goalie when he was ten and couldn’t get on a rink. His executor when he died.”
“Eunice, did you already look at her ID?”
I took out my wallet and showed them my PI and driver’s licenses. Ira looked at them, grunted again and moved to a desk on the far side of the room. His gait was uneven: it was hard for him to move his right leg, but he frowned at Eunice when she reached for a cane propped against her desk. When he was seated in the old-fashioned swivel chair, he took his time getting settled—patting his forehead with a handkerchief, refolding the cloth and putting it back in his breast pocket, lining up a couple of pencils next to a legal pad. These were his courtroom strategies, buying him time, annoying opposing counsel, but they’d probably become second nature now.
“Saw your cousin play a few times, back in the old Stadium, when your eardrums could burst from the sound. So you were his goalie. And now you think you need to block shots aimed at him after death.”
I couldn’t help smiling at the metaphor. “Something like that, sir.”
“And what are you planning on doing?”
“That depends on what kind of information I can get about Stella Guzzo’s trial. I’m thinking she invented the story about my cousin when she was doing time, but if I could see the transcript, there might be something to suggest she’d already thought about it when she was arrested.”
Doing time, what a strange expression. You and time behind bars, you’re suspended in time, or passing time. Time is doing things to you, not you to it.
Eunice and Ira exchanged looks. They were a team with a lot of years of shorthand between them. Eunice said, “If you’re thinking of suing Joel for malpractice, the statute of limitations—”
“No, ma’am!” It hadn’t occurred to me, but of course, that was one reason a stranger might be nosing around the case. “I’m trying to figure out why Stella Guzzo is making this preposterous claim. She’s saying Annie—her daughter—kept a diary that she only stumbled on now, long after the murder. I find it hard to believe it’s genuine, but I wondered if she said anything to Mr. Joel Previn at the time. About Annie and my cousin, or Annie and a diary, or another possible suspect.”
“Did your cousin in fact date her?”
“Not as far as I know.”
“Either Stella Guzzo has evidence, or she has an animus,” Previn pronounced. “Which is it?”
I shrugged. “It could be both, but it’s definitely an animus. Annie adored my mother. Most people did, but to Annie, Gabriella represented, oh, sanity, I guess. And a window to a larger world. Stella Guzzo decided that my mother was deliberately undermining her authority as a parent. She responded with some vile statements, so I can’t say I’ve ever been a fan.”
What Stella had said was that Gabriella used the secret sexual arts of Jewish women to seduce her husband, Mateo. We got chapter and verse on this from my aunt Marie, Boom-Boom’s mother, who was one of Stella’s cronies. Marie loved conflict, and she was at perpetual loggerheads with my mother. Gabriella, Italian, Jewish, a singer, was way too exotic for the sulfurous air of South Chicago. Marie was happy to report Stella’s insults to us when she and Uncle Bernard came over for Sunday dinner.
“Mateo never would have thought about music for the girl if the Jewish whore hadn’t gone to work on him. Me, I’ve worn the same dress to Mass for six years running, but the Jew bats those big eyes and he shells out money we don’t have so the girl can pretend to study music. He doesn’t think about me, his own wife, let alone Frankie, who’s the one with the future in this house. Frankie could play in the big leagues, that’s what Mr. Scanlon told us. No, it’s what the whore wants; Mateo takes bread from my mouth so she can buy those fancy Italian shoes.”
“My mama doesn’t buy fancy shoes,” I started to say at one meal, but Gabriella hushed me in Italian.
“Carissima, your aunt is a pipe carrying water in two directions. Don’t pour into it at this end; it will only bring satisfaction to Signora Guzzo if she thinks her spiteful words bother us.”
What really enraged Stella Guzzo wasn’t the waste of money on something as frivolous as music, but the way Annie began quoting my mother on every conceivable subject.
“Mrs. Warshawski says the sky is bigger than what we see in South Chicago and we girls should go where we can see the stars at night. Mrs. Warshawski tells Victoria if she gets a bad grade from laziness that’s more of a sin than saying a lie, because being lazy is acting a lie. Mrs. Warshawski says smoking hurts the heart but dishonesty kills it, she says—” until Stella smacked her and said if she heard Gabriella Warshawski’s name one more time, she wasn’t going to be responsible for what happened next.
“We all knew Ms. Guzzo’s temper,” I said to Ira and Eunice. “The fact that you remember her, remember the case after all this time, makes me wonder if something special went on at the trial.”
Ira and Eunice looked at each other again: Should we trust her?
Ira made an impatient gesture, but he said, “We didn’t want Joel to take the case. We didn’t think he had enough experience, certainly not for criminal law. It was hard on him, it took a toll.”