Brush Back by Sara Paretsky

space on Sheridan Road and left my jacket in the car. Nothing makes you look less professional than food on your clothes.
    When I got to the tiny street—a mere half-block leading to Lake Michigan—I saw that Zukos had gutted the building, replacing most of the brick in the upper two stories with glass. The third floor was recessed, with glass panels leading to a wide balcony, where Zukos could stand and stare at the lake.
    The building was secluded, good for privacy, good, too, for thieves, but all the right security devices were in place: cameras, laser gates, manual locks to override the electronic ones. Very sensible if Zukos’s Japanese art collection was valuable.
    “Yes? What do you want?”
    A man was calling down from the balcony. I squinted at him but couldn’t make out his face against the sun.
    “I’m V. I. Warshawski. Are you Rafael Zukos? Melba Minsky suggested I talk to you.”
    “Rafe!” the man called, turning away.
    A few minutes went by. I practiced my scales: I was terribly breathy still, but getting firmer through the diaphragm.
    A man appeared around the corner of the building. He was short, stocky, balding, wearing a kind of Japanese jacket over khaki pants.
    “I’m Rafe Zukos. Ken didn’t get your name.”
    “V. I. Warshawski. Melba Minsky suggested I talk to you.”
    “Melba,” he repeated softly. “I haven’t heard from her in years, didn’t know she was still alive. Harold?”
    “Frail but mobile,” I said. “I don’t really know them—we met this morning in South Chicago.”
    “So they stayed south when the rest of us fled to a new reservation. They were braver than their rabbi.”
    “Your father was a coward, you think?” I asked.
    “Jews stayed in Minsk and Slonim during pogroms, but a black family buying a house next door? You’d think a whole regiment of Cossacks was sweeping through the neighborhood. Rabbi Zukos wasn’t very brave, but then, neither was I. Why did Melba send you to me?”
    I gave him my story, the truth. Not the whole truth, not Frank’s and my history, but Annie’s murder, my cousin, trying to find out what happened at the criminal courts all those years ago.
    “Melba thought you might know why Mr. Mandel assigned the case to Joel,” I finished. “She thought Joel might have talked to you about the trial.”
    Rafe stepped back a few paces. “She did? She was wrong. I don’t know what either of you hoped to gain by her sending you here.”
    Ken, the man who’d called down to me from the balcony. Joel. Rafe’s belief he’d been a coward. These old stories, these old dramas, they wore me out. I sat on a boulder and spoke tonelessly.
    “You and Joel were lovers, or at least the people at your dad’s synagogue thought you were. You didn’t come out directly to your father, so you think you were a coward.”
    “How do you know?” Rafe said fiercely.
    “It’s what I do for a living, Mr. Zukos, put fragments of stories together into a narrative that makes sense. I’m not always right, but I need a narrative to work with. Lies, secrets and silence. Everyone’s clutching them to their chests as if there were some value in being tightly bound and fearful.”
    “Don’t preach to me. You don’t know what it was like growing up down there. The hypocrisy, the fear, not knowing who was part of what clique, who might beat you up after school because you were Jewish, or black, or a nerd who liked Japanese art.”
    I looked up. “I grew up near Ninetieth and Commercial, Mr. Zukos. You can’t tell me much I don’t know about being a child down there. My middle name is Iphigenia. Kids used to dance around me shrieking ‘Iffy Genius’ at me because my mother had college ambitions for me.”
    “It’s not like being beaten up because the other boys think you’re a pansy or a sissy,” he said, his voice low, shaking with passion.
    “Maybe not. I’m afraid my reaction was to do as much damage as possible as fast as possible to anyone mocking