Brush Back by Sara Paretsky Read Free Book Online

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.
    I peered at the screen. The Boom-Boom story is going out on our six o’clock local news. Any comment? M.R.
    Murray Ryerson. Murray had been a great investigative journalist until Global Entertainment bought the Herald-Star , slashed the number of reporters by two-thirds, and left him doing odd jobs on their cable news network.
    I washed my hands and called him. “What Boom-Boom story?”
    “Ah, V.I., you’re restoring my faith. Can she have been sitting on this all these years and not shared it with her closest comrade in the fight for truth and justice? No, I thought, but then I remembered the time you left me at a party to cover a homicide and didn’t bother to call. I remembered when you were outing the Xerxes Chemical CEO for malicious misconduct and didn’t call, and I thought, the Girl Detective is two-timing you again, Ryerson, but I’ll give her the benefit—”
    “Murray, do you have a point, or has TV made you think everyone around you is a captive audience?”
    “I was just trying to lighten your mood,” he complained. “Did Boom-Boom kill Annie Guzzo and let her mother spend twenty-five years in the Big House for said murder?”
    “What?” Fury was rising in me. I struggled to keep it at bay, to make sense of what Murray was saying. “Is this some creepy made-for-TV movie that Global is confusing with reality?”
    “You really didn’t know?” Murray said. “It’s about to be all over the airwaves. And the Internet.”
    “Global is putting that out, with no digging, no verification?”
    “Of course they’re not,” Murray said. “They’re asking me to do some fact-checking. Which is why I’ve called you for a comment. In the meantime, though, people have been tweeting about it all day. It went viral this afternoon, so Global has to look as though we’re ahead of the story. Boom-Boom may have been dead a lot of years, but his name is still news in this town. What can you tell me?”
    “That your involvement in this cesspool means you will never get another break from me again. Ever.” I