Free Brush Back by Sara Paretsky Page A

his son, trying to ward off the pain of the words.
    “Did you keep a transcript of the trial?” I asked.
    “No. When I left Mandel & McClelland, they kept all my files.” He looked at Eunice. “Someone wants to rent 206. I came back to get a lease.”
    “Someone you met at the Pot of Gold? Can I talk to them first?” Her eyes were pleading with him not to have a tantrum, but he went to a filing cabinet, pulled out a couple of forms and slammed out of the office, saying he was tired of being treated like a mental incompetent.
    I followed him quickly—the pain in his mother’s face was hard to take. Joel was disappearing into a tavern half a block up the street.
    The Pot of Gold was a small room, with a narrow bar running its length, a couple of minute tables squeezed against the wall, the requisite TV hung in the middle where people could sort of see it. It was tuned this morning to a rerun of an old Notre Dame football game.
    Joel was sliding onto a stool when I walked in. Three other people were in the room, a heavy woman tending the bar and two men, seated on adjacent stools near the back. They were older. Every now and then one of them would say something, the other would respond, then they’d relapse into silence.
    Joel looked up when I sat next to him, but his expression wasn’t welcoming. “You can tell my mother that the rental prospect took off before I could show him the lease. She doesn’t need to guard the assets any longer.”
    “I’m not interested in that. I’m curious about how Stella behaved at the trial.”
    “It was a long time ago. I don’t remember.” He signaled to the heavyset woman, who came over with a bottle of vodka. She looked at me questioningly, but I shook my head.
    “She’s like one of those unstable chemical reactions they teach you about in school. You have to keep her behind a bulletproof shield so you don’t get acid in your eyes when she explodes,” I said. “At least, that’s the way she seemed when I was a kid. When I saw her last week, she slugged me. Even though she’s eighty, she would have killed me if she’d connected just right. I could believe she murdered Annie in a fit of rage. Did you ever think of pleading insanity?”
    “ I did, but the priest and Mr. McClelland jumped on me like I was a cockroach on the bathroom floor. But, Christ, she was so fucking out of control that Judge Grigsby kept cautioning me. It wasn’t the worst thing that happened to me, just one of the bad ones. He said if I couldn’t control my client’s behavior in court, he’d have to fine me.”
    “You can’t tell a judge your client is uncontrollable,” I agreed. “How did you handle it?”
    “I talked it over with Mr. Mandel and Mr. McClelland, and Mr. McClelland got the priest at Saint Eloy’s to talk to her. Old man, mean guy, but Stella thought he walked on water. I guess that did the trick.”
    “Why did you agree to represent her?”
    “You had to be there. The partners decided. Probably because they knew it was a losing case and they wanted the biggest loser in the practice to have it on his record, not one of the go-getters.”
    “Who were the go-getters?” I asked, more to move him away from his bout of self-flagellation than because I cared.
    “Connor Hurlihey was there.”
    “Spike Hurlihey?” I said, my eyes widening.
    “Yeah. He was one of the East Side boys, he was a pet of old Mr. McClelland. He rode up, I rode down.”
    Connor “Spike” Hurlihey. Speaker of the Illinois House. Maybe the most powerful man in the Land of Lincoln, although of course in the pit where Illinois vipers writhe and hiss, it’s kind of hard to tell the top snake. I knew his district was south, but I’d always assumed it was the south suburbs, Flossmoor or Olympia Fields. I didn’t realize he’d grown up across the Calumet River from me.
    “You and Hurlihey get along?”
    Joel gulped down his drink and held up his glass to the bartender. “Hurlihey was three years