When Mr. Contreras started to chime in on modern-day manners, I cut both of them off.

“Can you hold off on the repairs? The Graham family may want to press

charges, or at least get their insurance company to look at it. Nothing to do with the club, I promise you, but they’re concerned about reckless endangerment and want to talk to Sheriff Salvi about the cart.”

Janicek didn’t like it, didn’t like the thought of the club being involved in a serious legal problem, but he reluctantly agreed to talk to his mechanics in the morning and ask them to wait on the cart.

Before we left, I showed Janicek Marc Whitby’s photograph. He called a couple of the valets over, but no one remembered seeing him, and they would have: the club’s only black member was August Llewellyn and he hadn’t been out for months. Black guests were rare.

Had Edwards Bayard been in the club last week? No, neither he, his mother nor anyone else from the Bayard household.

Mr. Contreras and I walked back to the Mustang while I thought this over. Anyone who knew about the culvert could have used it to get into Anodyne Park, and from there used the park’s private path to the golf course to borrow a cart. They might even have parked it next to the culvert on the Coverdale Lane side. Whitby was in the pond, dead, by the time I got there. If I’d only gone to Larchmont an hour or two earlier last Sunday night!

It was frustrating, to come on one piece of the solution, and yet not be able to follow it. On the drive home, I mulled over the story of the cart with Mr. Contreras without coming to any satisfactory answer. When we got back to Lakeview, I dropped my neighbor in the alley with the dogs.

“I need to face the law-I’ve been putting it off for five hours. It’s eight o’clock now. If I’m not home by eleven, call Freeman, okay? And also, until this business is cleared up, we’ll talk every day between five-thirty and six-thirty. If you don’t hear from me-call Freeman. Under this Patriot Act, if the law gets pissed off enough, they may be able to take me away without letting me talk to my lawyer.”

I squared my shoulders and drove around to the front of our building.

CHAPTER 33

Patriot Acts

I feigned surprise when the Chicago cops followed me into my building, but I didn’t have to pretend anything when two other men jumped out of adjacent cars and hurried in after them. One was a federal agent who flashed a quick badge the way they’re taught in G-man movies, the other a DuPage sheriff’s deputy. I clearly was no superhero, since I hadn’t noticed them earlier.

The four men weren’t pals-there was a lot of pushing and shoving in the entryway as they all tried to speak to me. The DuPage deputy said he had orders to deliver me to Wheaton, and since I had “fled the jurisdiction where a crime was committed,” he had first dibs. The Chicago cops said they had told him already his orders had been superseded, that I was to go to Thirtyfifth and Michigan with them as soon as the federal agent had finished with me.