I was sounding like Hercule Poirot in a particularly ludicrous movie scene, but Thelma was so angry that she forgot she had an audience. “Stella Guzzo murdered her daughter, but I didn’t shed a single tear. Annie Guzzo almost ruined this office, this practice. She was like a little cat, purring around Mr. Mandel, until he lost all sense of decency. Giving her presents, giving her money, she was going to be a star, he’d tell me, she was going off to some fancy eastern college where she’d go on to be a dazzling light in the law, another Sandra Day O’Connor.

“Annie’d come here after high school and go into his office. He’d lock the door and after a while she’d come out, purring and adjusting her bra straps. And the way Joel Previn looked at her! It was like working in a porn shop to come in here some days.”

“Was she any good at her job?”

“She could type,” Thelma said contemptuously. “Like that’s a skill no one else could muster. I suppose because she played the piano she was faster than some of us.”

“None of this explains what really lay behind the partners’ decision to represent Stella,” I said. “Those were the days before massive budget cuts took the stuffing out of Legal Aid; Stella could have had a decent public defender, probably one who did a better job than Joel. If Annie had killed Stella, I can see how Mandel and the others would have rallied around, but why defend Stella? Mandel and McClelland must have felt culpable in some way.”

“They thought she wouldn’t get a fair trial,” Thelma said.

“Get off your high horse,” I said. “Tell me the truth. What was going on that made them protect Annie’s murderer?”

“She wasn’t a saint,” Thelma shouted. “Can’t you understand that? She made Spike Hurlihey and some of the others look bad with the partners because she was always correcting their briefs. She made me look bad because she could type faster than me, because she’d let Mr. Mandel—touch her. She wasn’t smarter, she didn’t file any better or keep on top of phone calls, she just had those little fingers that moved fast. The only people who thought she was wonderful were Joel and Mr. Mandel. The rest of us were counting the days until she left town for college.”

“It still doesn’t answer the question. I can see that you would have sympathized with Stella, though—did you persuade the partners that Stella needed help?”

“They wouldn’t have listened to a word I had to say. Maybe Spike did, I don’t know. He was close to Mr. McClelland. What difference does it make after all this time, anyway?”

“Anatole Szakacs is helping Stella with her exoneration claim. He’s not cheap; he must think there’s some doubt about Stella’s guilt.”

“But she was guilty. She admitted to beating Annie. The medical examiner explained how someone can have a head injury and look perfectly fine, then start bleeding into the brain and die. We all knew Stella was guilty. I don’t know why Anatole is working for her now.”

I got off the edge of her desk, which had been cutting into my butt in an unpleasant way. “Do you know why Stella decided to point a finger at Boom-Boom?”

“It was in Annie’s diary,” Thelma said.

“But it’s a lie, it’s not true,” Bernie burst out.

“Then Annie wrote lies in her diary. Why wouldn’t she? She lied to everyone around her, why not to herself?” Thelma shrugged, her anger dying into contempt, and started locking her desk drawers.

“Did Annie date Boom-Boom while she was working here?”

“If Boom-Boom Warshawski had come into this office twenty-five years ago, everyone would have been talking about it. If Annie ever dated him, she kept it a secret, which she might have done if she thought it would stop the flow of money from Mr. Mandel into her hot little hands.”

Thelma walked over to the desk where the young couple were sitting. I heard her apologize to them for letting an unruly client disrupt their meeting. She even promised not to bill them for their visit this afternoon. She wasn’t a bad person, just someone trying to stay afloat in a shark tank.

GAMER GATE

“Now what are you going to do about this Stella?” Bernie demanded when we were back outside.

“Not much I can do.”

“She told lies about Uncle Boom-Boom that reporters published all over the world—you said so to Joel this afternoon. And this woman upstairs, she agreed Boom-Boom never dated Annie.”

“No, babe: she said if Annie had dated Boom-Boom, she did it very secretively.”

“You let this Thelma talk you out of doing anything. You believe her reasons, but they are lame, like you said upstairs. You’re making excuses for not doing, and excuses are lame.”

When I was seventeen, everything was equally clear to me: who was right, who was wrong, no shading between the two. I patted Bernie sympathetically on the shoulder, which made her jerk angrily away. She climbed into the Mustang, slamming the door as hard as she could.

I got into the driver’s seat, but took a moment to check my texts and e-mails before turning on the car. While I was scrolling through the messages, the young couple came out of the building and got into a Saturn whose muffler needed replacing. Their lawyer trudged up the street toward the Metra stop. A few of the other staff members emerged, but Thelma was still inside, perhaps making sure everything was locked up and tidy at the end of the day.

A few kids came out of the building, too, and a handful of others went in, some holding baseball gloves. The youth program on the third floor was apparently having some kind of after-school event today.

In the welter of client and personal messages was one from Murray Ryerson:

ME completed autopsy on Fugher. He’d been badly beaten but death due to suffocation: he was alive when he went into the pet coke.

It wasn’t a surprise, but it was still a shock. Uncle Jerry hadn’t been one of Nature’s darlings, but such a horrific end shouldn’t come to anyone.

“What is it?” Bernie asked anxiously.

I was starting to answer when a silver Jeep Patriot pulled up in front of us. Vince Bagby hopped out and went into the Scanlon building—not into the insurance office, which was still full of activity, despite the unsafe neighborhood and the end of business hours, but through the door that led to the law offices. Thelma still hadn’t come out, so maybe she’d summoned Vince.

“Bernie, it’s true I’m a coward, but I want to see what that guy is up to, and I want you to stay in the car with the doors locked. If anyone tries to bother you, lean on the horn. I’ll hear you and come running.”

“Who is he?”

“His name is Vince Bagby and he owns a trucking company. He may be as pure and wholesome as the flowers in spring, but I saw the man who died in the coke mountain get into one of Bagby’s trucks. He was with someone whose face turned my hair white. Lock the doors.”

I was halfway up the first flight of stairs when I heard footsteps behind me: Bernie had followed me inside.

“I don’t want to wait in the car,” she said. “It feels too—too open.”

“Bernie, I’ve already exposed you to more unpleasantness this afternoon than I should have. Please—”

She shook her head, her lower lip out—half-stubborn, half-fearful. I told Bernie she could come on one condition. “If I tell you to run, you run. Understood?”

She nodded and clutched my arm.

At the second-floor landing I signaled to Bernie to hang back while I ducked and sidled to avoid the security camera. I listened at the law office door but didn’t hear any voices. On the other hand, the kids on the third floor were laughing and horsing around enough for the noise to come down the stairwell.

I sidled back to the landing and took Bernie up to the third floor. The door to Say, Yes! wasn’t locked; we walked in on a kind of party in progress. A refreshment table along one wall held soft drinks and chips, but the center of action, if you could call it that, was the facing wall, where a long counter held some dozen computers and Xboxes.