Brush Back by Sara Paretsky Page A

to the main entrance. He hadn’t gone to the party Scanlon sponsored at Rafters afterward.
    “Too old for drunken crowds, Tori. And don’t you need to be studying?”
    I’d been surprised—his usual concern about my work was that I kept at it too hard. He was worried, too, about leaving me on my own, which he also never did—at least not out loud.
    “Boom-Boom’s signed on for a rough life, but I don’t want that for you, and you know your mama didn’t want it, either.”
    My mama wouldn’t have wanted a lot of the things I choose to do. Maybe if she’d lived, I wouldn’t keep tempting fate by skating so close to the edge. Perhaps my recklessness was what destroyed my brief marriage. Or perhaps it was because Richard Yarborough had been a money-obsessed bore.
    I went into Scanlon’s building, and looked up a flight of steep stairs. A sign in Spanish and English said there was an elevator behind the stairs. A security camera, the tiny modern kind that is almost invisible to the thief in a hurry, had been installed high on the stairwell wall. Another was set in the lintel above Nina Quarles’s door. It glowed red when I approached, presumably taking my picture. I must have looked honest and sincere: the lock clicked open before I rang the bell.
    The walls of the original apartment had been removed to create a long room that stretched from the windows overlooking Commercial Avenue to the alley behind. It wasn’t divided into cubicles, but the desks were far enough apart that people could have private conversations if they kept their voices down. Two doors stood open along the north wall, showing private offices beyond in what probably used to be bedrooms. A third door at the back provided the staff with a toilet.
    As in Scanlon’s office, the staff here were hard at it on the phones. Most of them were middle-aged and solidly built, a few wrinkles, hair turning gray—not the lean, workout-obsessed youth that might repel people like the elderly couple conferring in the near corner with a man in a rumpled suit.
    I looked around but didn’t see any sign of Nina Quarles. I was on my way to the offices, to see if that’s where she was, when a woman came up behind me and asked what I needed. She was about my age, tall, angular, wearing a shapeless cardigan over beige slacks and spiked heels, which put her about three inches over my head.
    “V. I. Warshawski,” I said, putting out a hand.
    The angular woman’s eyes widened. “Warshawski? There was something about Boom-Boom Warshawski on the news this morning.”
    “Yes, I’m his cousin.”
    She said the usual things: she’d grown up on the East Side, she adored Boom-Boom, his death had been a terrible tragedy. In the middle of the outpouring I was able to get her name, Thelma Kalvin.
    “What can we do for you?” Kalvin asked.
    “I don’t know if you paid attention to the whole story, but my cousin was in the news today because someone is trying to link him to Annie Guzzo’s death.”
    Thelma shook her head. “If the name is supposed to mean something to me, it doesn’t. I’m sorry we can’t help you.”
    “Stella Guzzo was convicted of killing her daughter Annie a number of years ago,” I said. “Nina Quarles bought this practice from Mandel & McClelland, the firm that handled Stella’s defense. If Ms. Quarles kept files of old Mandel cases, I’d like to read Stella’s trial transcript.”
    Thelma shook her head. “Nina doesn’t actually practice here. Our lawyers mostly work on job or property issues—a lot of this community got slammed in the mortgage crisis. And we have a criminal defender. But there isn’t room to store old case files here—they’re in a facility down in Indiana. Anyway, I doubt Nina would let you look at confidential files.”
    “It’s not a confidential document,” I said, trying to keep frustration out of my voice. “Just a rare one. I want to see if Stella Guzzo made any effort to blame my cousin for her