He covered his face, his voice dropping so low I had to lean over the steering wheel to hear him above the engine. “I—if all this derails Frankie—I don’t know what I’ll do.”

The driver behind us leaned on her horn. Frank saw he’d done the unpardonable—left a big gap in front of him. He drove up to the mike and ordered a double cheeseburger with extra-large fries and a super-sized shake.

“Scanlon told you to stop your mother?” I asked.

“Not like that. He said no one cared about a crime that old anymore, unless she made them care, don’t you see? He came up to me at Saint Eloy’s when I was watching Frankie and said he’d heard through the grapevine what Ma was doing. He was going to get one of his lawyer pals to look after her interests so she wouldn’t feel like we were giving her the brush-off, but if I could talk her into letting it lie it would be better for Frankie. And then, everything got out of control. Like it always does in my life.”

He pulled over to the curb with his order and started eating moodily, shoving a great handful of fries into his mouth.

“What did Scanlon say after all the press brouhaha began?”

“I was sweating bullets. I talked to Vince and asked him what I should do, but he spoke to Scanlon for me, and he told me Scanlon saw I wasn’t to blame; he still is willing to sponsor Frankie.”

I turned sideways in the seat to look at him squarely. “Frank: someone sicced a trio of Insane Dragons on me when I left Scanlon’s office the other night. Do you know anything about that?”

“What the fuck are you trying to say?”

“Bagby or Scanlon or Thelma Kalvin, they were all there when I went up to visit his youth program, and so was Father Cardenal. Did any of them talk to you, tell you that I was bringing too much attention to your family?”

“Crap, Tori.” He set his box of food on top of the dashboard so violently the fries jumped out of the box onto the gearshift. “You cannot go around accusing people of stuff like that. There are so many gangbangers in South Chicago I bet every person you pass on the street has at least one in their family. You were in the wrong place at the wrong time. Don’t go accusing Scanlon of this: everyone knows your old man couldn’t get along with him, but he’s the person who—”

“I know,” I cut him off. “Believe me, I hear that script every time I cross the border.”

He gaped at me.

“Only making a feeble joke. So many people have told me I don’t know anything about the South Side that it’s starting to seem like you guys think you live in a different country than the rest of the city.”

“We do,” Frank said. “We live in the land of the dead.”

That shut me up for a moment: it was poignant, but also an unexpected image to hear on his lips. I couldn’t let his previous comment rest, though.

“What do you mean, everyone knew Tony couldn’t get along with Scanlon? When I saw Scanlon last week, he passed a comment about my dad—what does the whole neighborhood know that I don’t? Did Rory get Tony shipped off to Englewood?”

“You are like a goddam squirrel trying to get into a birdfeeder, Warshawski. I don’t know who did what to whom, but everyone knows that Tony wouldn’t ride to Boom-Boom’s first game in Scanlon’s buses. Everyone talked about it, back at the time, I mean. Don’t ask me what that was about because I fucking do not know.”

“If Tony didn’t trust Rory Scanlon, then Scanlon was up to something. What was it?”

“Why can’t you grow up? Everyone else learns their parents are human, that they make mistakes. Your father wasn’t a saint. He wasn’t a moral bloodhound, either, who could smell good and evil in people. He was wrong about Scanlon.”

My left eye was starting to throb, fatigue and anger pushing too much blood to my face. I massaged the bruise with my fingertips. What would Scanlon have been up to that Tony didn’t trust? I kept coming back to the sex that swam around this history, Annie with Sol Mandel, the old priest from St. Eloy’s making Frank pull his pants down, no one wanting to rock Scanlon’s boat for fear he’d cut them loose.

I let the atmosphere in the cab calm down for a minute, then went back to the day of the Wrigley Field tryouts.

“Do you remember anything Annie said that day? Anything that might give me a hint about what she was carrying with her? At first I wondered if it was something to do with your baseball career, press clippings or something.”

He curled his lip. “Annie never gave a rat’s ass about my baseball career. So-called. Your ma, music, her college life, that’s all she thought about. Sometimes you or your dad. Anyway, that day she was higher than ten kites—I couldn’t bear to be around her! She had no sympathy for the fact that I’d blown my shot at the big time. No interest. No wonder I blocked it out of my head that she was there.

“I’m doing my best not to burst into tears in front of Warshawski—Boom-Boom, I mean—and Annie keeps saying, ‘No one can touch me now, no one can touch me now.’ It’s a horrible thing to say, knowing what Ma did to her, but I came close to whacking her myself. Only good thing out of it is that I remember that afternoon every time I come close to hitting one of my own kids. Remember where that led with Annie and Ma. Remind myself to act more like my dad, keep it calm.”

“And Boom-Boom? How did he react, to you or your sister?”

“I don’t know! I couldn’t bear to be near him! I didn’t want his fucking sympathy—Chicago’s golden boy, can’t you understand that? He wanted to drive me home, go out for a beer in that damned ’Vette he was hotdogging in at the time. I couldn’t fucking bear it.

“Bagby’s had the car waiting to take all us losers home, but I didn’t want to be with them, either. I snuck off to the L and got myself back to the South Side. Back to the slime where I belonged.”

“Sounds like a day in hell, Frank. Sorry to make you revisit it . . . On a completely different subject, I’d like to play a recording for you. Tell me if you know either of these voices.”

While he ate his way through three thousand calories, I took out my cell phone and downloaded the recording from the Cloud.

“God, who is that scuzzball?” Frank said at the end. “Who’s he trying to threaten?”

“I don’t know. I hoped you would recognize one of the voices.”

“Wish I could help you, Tori, because then maybe you’d let go of that goddam bill your lawyer put through my mailbox.”

I was feeling sorry for Frank, but not sorry enough to say I’d forgive the bill. I jumped down from the cab and walked back to the Subaru.

STICKBALL

I drove north in a melancholy mood. Nothing in my so-called life, Frank had said. Nothing worked out the way he wanted it to.

That might be true, but how much else of what he said could I believe? His forgetting that Annie had been at the ballpark for the open tryouts, that sounded credible. He’d needed support and sympathy, but he didn’t want them from Boom-Boom, and his sister was so wrapped up in her own affairs that she didn’t have room for her brother.

Growing up, like so many only children I’d fantasized about siblings, someone to confide in, play with. Boom-Boom had been a kind of surrogate brother, but we saw each other only once or twice a week. It seemed painful that Frank and Annie had squandered their relationship in the short time they’d had together, but perhaps that had been the inevitable outcome of growing up with a mother as turbulent as Stella.

While I waited at the long light at Damen and Milwaukee, I dictated a summary of the conversation for my files. As an afterthought, I sent a copy to Freeman.

Sorry to violate the r-o, but I had to ask him about the pix.

You did not have to ask him about the pix, Freeman typed back sharply. You don’t need to know about the damned pictures. Unless you want to spend 30 days in County, you will respect the order.