Free Brush Back by Sara Paretsky Page B

older than me. When I was in fifth grade and he was in eighth, he used to give me wedgies in the hallway. The teachers looked the other way, the other kids laughed because he was a popular bully, and I was a mixed-race kid in a neighborhood with a low tolerance for difference. I begged my parents to send me to a different school and they finally did for ninth grade, but neither of us forgot the other.
    “When I joined Mandel & McClelland, he started saying things to Annie: he knew I admired her, and he was pretending to draw her attention to that, but really he was using it as a way to make fun of me.”
    It’s depressing how often school bullies become successful CEOs or politicians. “Annie was an ardent soul. I can understand why you responded to her.”
    “Ardent. That describes her. She was ambitious, she wanted to leave South Chicago, but she was sweet. She was the smartest girl in her school, probably the smartest person in the firm, but she never complained if one of the lawyers dumped a stack of photocopying on her at the end of the day. She’d stand at the Xerox machine with her history book propped up on the shelf, reading while she fed documents in. In those days I thought I was ambitious, too.”
    “Did you believe Stella when she said Annie had attacked her?”
    He fidgeted with his glass. “I went over there one night, on the spur of the moment, I wanted to see if Annie would go to a show with me. She and her mother were shouting at each other, they didn’t even hear the doorbell.”
    “It was a family that fought and shouted a lot,” I said. “When Stella’s brothers would come over with their wives and kids, my dad couldn’t even hear the game on the radio and there was an alley between us. When old Mrs. Jokich—Stella’s neighbor—was dying, the family had to call the cops to shut up the braying at the Guzzo place.”
    Stella was sure it was my dad who’d called the district station, and nothing could convince her otherwise. That was probably why she was squawking now that Tony had suppressed evidence during her trial—she could carry a grudge until the grudge took on a life of its own and carried on without her.
    I put my card on the bar next to Joel. “Even if you’re fifty, you can make other choices, change directions. Your parents don’t own you.”
    “Spare me the pep talk. I’ve had plenty and they make my head hurt.”
    “Maybe, but I’m betting it’s all that vodka before lunch.”
    I walked back to my car, which had a sporty orange envelope under the windshield wiper. My second in a week, and I couldn’t expense Frank, not without crossing the line Freeman had warned me against.
    I hadn’t noticed the pay-to-park sign. The cash-strapped city was handing out sixty-five-dollar fines even on the city’s more derelict streets. I guess it meant someone had a job in this dismal economy, but somehow that thought didn’t cheer me.
    I couldn’t understand why Mandel & McClelland had agreed to assign someone from the firm to represent Annie’s killer, and why that someone had been Joel, young, green, obviously with a crush on the victim. They should have left Stella to the public defender. I’d been one, I’d worked hard. Like all Cook County PD’s, my caseload had been too big, but I still gave each client careful attention—by working the long hours that made my husband scowl and complain during the fourteen months of our marriage.
    It occurred to me that if Stella had drawn a PD, it might have been me being cautioned by Judge Grigsby. I laughed, picturing Stella’s horror if I’d been assigned to her defense.
    The other side of the question was the client side—why had Stella let Joel represent her? She didn’t suffer ordinary people gladly; she’d have eviscerated an inexperienced young man. Or maybe the shock of Annie’s death and her own arrest had silenced her.
    None of the story made any sense. Maybe Mandel or McClelland was still alive and could recall what