“And you think Stella could derail him? No, Frank. She’s old, she’s still got a temper”—I rubbed the place on my shoulder where her punch had landed—“but she doesn’t have power, except the power you let her have in your life.”
“You of all people, I’d think you’d know that when she gets a head of steam she can do anything.”
“Yes, and that’s what’s telling me there’s nothing for me to find out about your sister’s death. Your mother is angrier than ever after all those years inside, and she’s looking for targets, not evidence.”
Frank tried to get me to say I’d get the police to dig his sister’s file out of the warehouse, but his arguments lacked punch. The sadness in his voice made me brusque: I didn’t like the feeling that I had to pity him. I told him to send me the St. Eloy’s schedule so I could watch his kid play when the scouts were there and hung up.
I started to write down the conversation, but it was hard. If it hadn’t been me talking to him, he probably would have cursed my cousin. Maybe he would have gotten a piece of a ball if Boom-Boom hadn’t been there, who knows? The star taking all the attention, that probably made Frank try too hard, tense up at the wrong moment.
“Oh, Boom-Boom,” I said out loud. “You meant well, you were doing a good deed. I bet the Hawks fined you for skipping the Oilers game, too. No one got anything good out of that tryout.”
The throwaway line about Gielczowski making Frank lower his pants, that was sickening, the whole story was sad and painful and sick. I’d never heard allegations about Gielczowski. Maybe he’d been caning boys, beating immorality out of them. When I think of immorality I think of the payday loans and hidden bank fees, the failure to pay a living wage, the preference for crappy schools in poor neighborhoods. I don’t think about sex.
My morning with Stella, and now this—I felt dirty, so dirty that I went into the shower room behind my lease-mate’s studio. Her steelwork means she needs a place to clean up at the end of a long day. She’d put in a shower with those multi-head scrubbers, and I stood under them for a good ten minutes, wishing the needles of water could get inside my head and clean it out. Even scrubbed and in a clean T-shirt, I still felt rumpled.
FORCE PLAY
It was the second week of the regular season, that brief window when Cubs fans forget the eleven-month winter of their discontent and imagine that the glories of New York or St. Louis will become ours. The team was away, playing in Cincinnati, but the front offices would be well staffed.
The ballpark is walking distance from my apartment. I parked at home so I could change into presentable clothes, including my Lario boots, which always make me feel important. Bernie arrived as I was coming back down the front walk.
“You look tough, Vic, where are you going?”
“Wrigley Field—want to come with me?”
“Oh, baseball. Merci, non, trop ennuyant. Since you won’t be home, I can take a proper bath.” We’d had a bit of a tussle over whether an hour in the bathroom was really essential for proper hygiene. “And, no worries, I will take my hair out of the tub when I’m done.” Another discussion.
Even when the team is away, even when the baseball season is over, the doors at Clark and Addison are open for guided tours. I paid twenty-five dollars to join a group. While they were admiring the spot where Harry Caray used to lead fans in “Take Me Out to the Ball Game,” I slipped away, until I found a door labeled Media Relations.
A woman was on the phone, a bright smile on her face as she answered questions about rumors of an injury to Enrique Velasquez’s left knee. When she hung up, she flashed another smile in my direction.
“I’m V. I. Warshawski. I was looking for Will Drechen.” I’d looked up the front office staff before leaving my apartment; Drechen was assistant director of media relations.
The smile turned into regret; Will wasn’t in, but she was Natalie Clements, his assistant. Could she help?
“I’m on a wild-goose chase. I’m writing a biography of Boom-Boom Warshawski.”
“I’m new to the organization,” Natalie said apologetically. “I don’t know all the old players’ names yet.”
I shook my head. “Boom-Boom played for the Blackhawks, tied Gretzky for most goals in 1990. And right about that time, he spent an afternoon here at Wrigley, during one of the amateur tryouts. I know it’s a long shot, but I’d love to find someone who was at the tryouts that year. If there was a photo, that would be a plus, but mostly I want background and color on how the day went. He could be a bit of a hot dog—I’m wondering if he tried to hit a ball or field or anything.”
Natalie held up a finger while she answered her phone; two more calls came in and I wandered to the window to look out. Frank was right: that perfect grass under a spring sky, you did think heaven might look like this.
Natalie finished her calls and apologized again. She took down a detailed message for Mr. Drechen, who was in a meeting, and noticed my last name. Yes, I was related—I pulled out my iPad and showed her the photo of Boom-Boom and me with the Stanley Cup the day it was his turn to have it. He and I had rented a convertible and driven the length of the city, me at the wheel and Boom-Boom sitting on the trunk, holding the Cup.
“Gosh, wish I’d been the press officer that day,” Natalie said. “Great photo op. Anytime your cousin wants to bring the Cup to Wrigley Field—”
He was dead, I said, but added that the Blackhawks were always game for publicity opportunities. Maybe when I’d finished the project we could work something out.
I wondered if I’d ever hear back from the Cubs, wondered, too, what had made me go up there. Maybe I wanted reassurance that Boom-Boom hadn’t jinxed Frank’s tryout.
Bernie was still in the bath when I got home. It was only mid-afternoon—still time to do some actual paying work. I drove to my office, where I put my Guzzo notes into a hanging file before turning to the fires my regular clients needed help extinguishing. That night, Jake took me dancing at Hot Rococo, where friends of his were playing. Maybe he couldn’t sucker punch a punk in an alleyway, but no one else had ever made me feel lighter than air on a dance floor.
Jake was having his own problems—congressional failure to act on a federal budget had set cuts for everything from roads to military equipment. Arts budgets had been slashed to the bone. Below the bone—funding had already been chopped many times over. His High Plainsong group might have to dissolve: they’d laid off their administrator and were scrambling for free rehearsal space.
When his friends’ gig at Hot Rococo ended, we all went out for pizza. The musicians grumbled, then imagined the opera they could write about starving artists.
“It would be like La Bohème, except Congress would be watching Mimi and Rodolfo and laughing their heads off,” the drummer explained. “As Mimi dies of malnutrition in the last act, a chorus of Congress members sings the spirited finale, ‘She got what she deserved for not being born rich.’”
We all laughed, but there was a bitter undercurrent to it. They worked hard, they took multiple gigs, but the music that lay at the core of their beings kept getting shoved to the sidelines.
Over the next week, the Guzzos disappeared nicely into the tar pits where they belonged. And then came the afternoon I was preparing sea bass alla veneziana for Max, Lotty and Jake. Bernie was going out with a couple of young women she’d met through her peewee hockey coaching, Mr. Contreras had a regular poker date with his retired machinist buddies.
I whipped the egg whites and coated the fish and was laying them in their salt bed when my phone barked at me, the signal that a preferred contact had sent me a text.