“Yeah, okay. Stay here with her, Yosano. I don’t have an extra deputy to keep an eye on this gal, and I don’t trust her.”

Yosano squirmed in embarrassment. “Really, Lieutenant. It’s not as though Ms. Warshawski has a criminal record. She’s working for the Graham family.”

“Or says she is,” Schorr snapped. “Every time something fishy has happened out here this week, this Chicago dickette has been in a front-row seat. I’d kinda like to know why.”

“Is it all right if I use the bathroom?” I asked in a meek little voice. “There’s one just off the pantry here and my cramps are starting to get the better of me. You don’t have a tampon, do you? Mine are in my car.”

Like many he-men, Schorr was disgusted by talk of real women’s real bodies-he was out of the kitchen before I finished speaking. I went into the bathroom, switched on my diver’s lamp and climbed up onto the toilet seat to undo the window locks. There was an extra bolt in the window for security, but that was to keep outsiders away: the key was on a hook next to the frame.

The bottom sash was stuck through years of disuse; flushing the toilet a couple of times covered the sound I made forcing it open. The alarm would definitely go off now, but since it rang in Lebold, Arnoff’s office, and they already had their dogsbody on the scene, I hoped they’d think the deputies had tripped it looking around on the upper floors. I took a quick look out: the window faced south, toward the road. The deputies were searching the north.

Back in the kitchen, Yosano was fiddling with a handheld, trying to play some game by the computer’s backlight. I didn’t know how long Benjamin

could keep quiet in that oven; I needed some strategy for getting the lawyer out of the kitchen.

“They interrupt your private life to bring you over here tonight?” I asked.

He nodded. “But I’m only on call one week a month. And usually we don’t have such dramatic crises: usually it’s just a client wanting to change a will, or being lonely in the night.”

“Did Mr. Taverner call you in out of loneliness?”

He continued fiddling with the keys; the computer binged every time he made a score. “Oh, yes. And like many of the old ones, he thought of me as a servant. Oh, they all think the lawyers are their servants, but being a Japanese-American, I’m like a gardener in their eyes. They need to pee, I’m supposed to help them with their bottles and bedpans.”

“Sounds horrible. Surely you could get a less demeaning job.”

He shrugged. “The money is incredible. And some of it’s interesting: we work for such powerful people, you’re sort of part of history sometimes. Like these papers that Taverner had, it’s been so long since Mr. Arnoff’s done dayto-day work with the clients, he probably wouldn’t know about them, but Taverner was a lonely old guy. He’d tap that locked drawer and say he knew people in New York who’d pay ten million bucks to get their hands on them.”