Brush Back (V.I. Warshawski #17)

by Sara Paretsky

Even if it’s a painful place at times, you grow up learning how to navigate it.

when I didn’t feel the anguish of people whose lives had come uncoupled from their dreams.

Pet coke, sounds like a bottle of the Real Thing that follows you down the street. Really, it’s the residue of superheated coal that gets reused as industrial fuel.

Father Gielczowski, had ruled his parish with an iron fist. He’d set up one of the infamous block clubs, an effort started by a priest named Lawlor to keep Chicago’s South Side parishes all-white.

“A god who cares more about a little water on the head than my daughter’s character is not a deity I want her to spend eternity with.”

Father Gielczowski’s picture was on the wall facing the windows, along with the other priests who’d served the parish. Their names, German, Polish, Serbian, Italian, reflected the waves of immigrants who’d come to the South Side to work the mills.

you know as well as I that the dead can’t bring a cause of action for defamation. Nor can their angry relatives.

when I was growing up, it was an exclusive country club with guards at the gates and horses stabled near the private beach. In those days, Jews were banned from membership along with African-Americans, even though the club sat smack in the middle of what used to be a vibrant Jewish community. The South Shore Club could handle living cheek by jowl with Jews, but the arrival of African-Americans had been too much for everyone: white Chicagoans looking in fear at black neighbors had fled to the suburbs like a pack of jackals smelling a lion. The Catholics mostly bolted westward while Jews ran north.

your aunt is a pipe carrying

water in two directions. Don’t pour into it at this end; it will only bring satisfaction to Signora Guzzo if she thinks her spiteful words bother us.”

It’s depressing how often school bullies become successful CEOs or politicians.

she could carry a grudge until the grudge took on a life of its own and carried on without her.

“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.

“No,” I said, “when you’re struggling to survive, no one gets to label you a coward, not even you yourself in your private thoughts.”

Police don’t get paid much, but power is a job benefit most of the rest of us don’t have.

For the next day, every time I sneezed or coughed I left a gray residue on the Kleenex. Thank goodness the Pollution Control Board had assured us there was no known individual health risk to coal dust. Like black lung or epithelial cancer.

The only difference between Mob-run juice loans and the payday business was that payday loans are legal. Interest tops out at 355 percent a year under current laws halfheartedly designed to curb usury.

Money changes hands, and sometimes there’s physical violence, too. Like the first Mayor Daley—he had goons who went around breaking

windows on people’s cars or houses if they put up posters for candidates running against him. Death threats—I’m

But the biggest thing is having to give a lot of money to politicians if you want to do business, or h...

didn’t he remember Gideon v. Wainwright?”

“It was a famous lawsuit, where the Supreme Court ruled everyone has a right to counsel, even those too poor to pay for

a lawyer them...

was white, so I was the woman who climbed the fence. Adelaide was dark, which made her a gal. Was that a step up or down from being a girl?

Being confrontational had transformed me from a woman into a gal. Interesting.

Pretty much nothing in Illinois fund-raising is illegal,

The brave person isn’t the one who feels no fear, but the one who continues to act, even in the middle of fear. I know your brave heart and I know you will not let fear disable you.

Of course she would have. She was seventeen, with a high sense of adventure and a low sense of consequences.