Free Windy City Blues by Sara Paretsky Page A

imperturbably urbane, but when he inspected the music his face flushed and his eyes glittered unnaturally.
    “What is it?” I cried.
    “If it’s what I think—no, I’d better not say. I have a friend who can tell us. Let me give it to her.”
    Vico’s blows to my stomach made it hard for me tomove, otherwise I might have started pounding on Max. The glitter in his eye made me demand a receipt for the document before I parted with it.
    At that his native humor returned. “You’re right, Victoria: I’m not immune from cupidity. I won’t abscond with this, I promise, but maybe I’d better give you a receipt just the same.”

XI
    It was two weeks later that Max’s music expert was ready to give us a verdict. I figured Bobby Mallory and Barbara Carmichael deserved to hear the news firsthand, so I invited them all to dinner, along with Lotty. Of course, that meant I had to include Mr. Contreras and the dogs. My neighbor decided the occasion was important enough to justify digging his one suit out of mothballs.
    Bobby arrived early, with his wife Eileen, just as Barbara showed up. She told me her father had recovered sufficiently from his attack to be revived from his drug-induced coma, but he was still too weak to answer questions. Bobby added that they’d found a witness to the forced entry of Fortieri’s house. A boy hiding in the alley had seen two men going in through the back. Since he was smoking a reefer behind a garage he hadn’t come forward earlier, but when John McGonnigal assured him they didn’t careabout his dope—this one time—he picked Ranier’s face out of a collection of photos.
    “And the big guy promptly donated his muscle to us—a part-time deputy, who’s singing like a bird, on account of he’s p-o’d about being fingered.” He hesitated, then added, “If you won’t press charges they’re going to send Verazi home, you know.”
    I smiled unhappily. “I know.”
    Eileen patted his arm. “That’s enough shop for now. Victoria, who is it who’s coming tonight?”
    Max rang the bell just then, arriving with both Lotty and his music expert. A short skinny brunette, she looked like a street urchin in her jeans and outsize sweater. Max introduced her as Isabel Thompson, an authority on rare music from the Newberry Library.
    “I hope we haven’t kept dinner waiting—Lotty was late getting out of surgery,” Max added.
    “Let’s eat later,” I said. “Enough suspense. What have I been lugging unknowing around Chicago all this time?”
    “She wouldn’t tell us anything until you were here to listen,” Max said. “So we are as impatient as you.”
    Ms. Thompson grinned. “Of course, this is only a preliminary opinion, but it looks like a concerto by Marianne Martines.”
    “But the insertions, the writing at the end,” Max began, when Bobby demanded to known who Marianne Martines was.
    “She was an eighteenth-century Viennese composer.She was known to have written over four hundred compositions, but only about sixty have survived, so it’s exciting to find a new one.” She folded her hands in her lap, a look of mischief in her eyes.
    “And the writing, Isabel?” Max demanded.
    She grinned. “You were right, Max: it is Mozart’s. A suggestion for changes in the horn line. He started to describe them, then decided just to write them in above her original notation. He added a reminder that the two were going to play together the following Monday—they often played piano duets, sometimes privately, sometimes for an audience.”
    “Hah! I knew it! I was sure!” Max was almost dancing in ecstasy. “So I put some Krugs down to chill. Liquid gold to toast the moment I held in my hand a manuscript that Mozart held.”
    He pulled a couple of bottles of champagne from his briefcase. I fetched my mother’s Venetian glasses from the dining room. Only five remained whole of the eight she had transported so carefully. One had shattered in the fire that destroyed my old