Bitter Medicine by Sara Paretsky

Ryan El rattled by. I got up stiffly and hung my jacket on an old coatrack in the corner. All my officefurniture is used. The big oak desk and the coatrack came from a police auction. The manual Olivetti had been my mother’s. Behind the desk was a khaki metal filing cabinet, a gift from a printing company in lieu of a fee they couldn’t afford to pay.
    The cabinet holds every piece of paper I’ve touched since passing the bar over a decade ago. When I left the public defender’s office, my case files stayed with the county. But I’d saved all my notes and receipts, motivated by an obscure fear that the county—a jealous god if ever there was one—might audit my expense reports and demand reimbursement for my car mileage. As time passed, it didn’t seem worth the trouble to sort them out. I put the dead plant and the scattered pages of a report for a case just ending into the corner and dumped the contents of the cabinet’s bottom drawer onto the desktop.
    I found old gasoline receipts, names and addresses of witnesses whose identities now meant nothing to me, a detailed brief defending a woman who had killed the man who raped her after he was released on bond. My hands turned black and grimy from the decade-old dust and my silk shirt changed from pale beige to gray.
    At one o’clock I went to the corner deli for a corned-beef sandwich—not the best choice on a hot muggy day. I brought two cans of diet soda back with me to cut the salt. Finally, toward the end of the afternoon, I found the scrap I was looking for, stuck between two pages listing my bond-court assignments for February 1975.
    Sergio Rodriguez, boy punk. He’d been arrested numerous times in his young life, for progressively more antisocial acts. Finally at eighteen he’d made it into adult court on aggravated assault charges. It had been my happy job to defend him. He was a good-looking youth with a lot of charm and a lot of violence. What I had was his mother’s phone number. She’d believed the charm, not the violence, but felt I’d done the best I could for her poor railroaded baby.
    We’d gotten the sentence down from ten years to two-to-five as a so-called first offense. Sergio came out from Joliet about the time I went into business for myself.
    When I defended him he’d been a lowlife in a Humboldt Park gang called the Venomous Aliens. When he got out of jail, with his graduate prison degree in gangs and violence, he’d moved quickly into a position of power. He’d helped change the Aliens’ name to the Latin Lions, and claimed that they were a private men’s club like the Kiwanis and the non-Latin Lions. I’d seen his picture in the
Herald-Star
a few months ago entering a courtroom where he was suing the paper for libel in calling the Lions a street gang. He’d been wearing a three-piece suit whose expensive fabric even newsprint couldn’t hide. In the meantime, under his guidance, the Lions had branched out to the Wrigley Field area. Most recently, as Rawlings had said, they’d moved into the Hispanic part of Uptown.
    I put Mrs. Rodriguez’s phone number into my purseand surveyed the mess on my desk. Maybe it was time to ditch it all. On the other hand, I might need another obscure note someday. I swept everything back into the drawer, locked the cabinet, and left.
    During the afternoon the sky had clouded over with heavy, sullen clouds that seemed to shut all oxygen from the city. My beige-gray shirt became a sodden mass of sweat by the time I got home. Never wear silk in the summer, especially not for heavy cleaning jobs. I was tempted to throw it out—it looked beyond salvation.
    After a cold shower, and comfortable in cutoffs and a short-sleeved shirt, I felt up to talking to Mrs. Rodriguez. A young child answered the phone; after a few minutes of my shouted questions she called for her grandmother.
    Mrs. Rodriguez’s heavily accented voice came on the line. “Miss Warshawski? Ah—ah, the lawyer who worked so hard for