We were collecting an audience. The medical resident who lives on the first floor across from Mr. Contreras stormed out, saying that if I didn’t stop making all that racket she was calling the cops. When she saw the uniformed men, she blinked a few times, then demanded that they write me a ticket or impound the dogs.

The four lawmen were knocked off balance, but the federal agent recovered first and began intoning the fact that he was not here as part of a canine complaint unit. Before he could finish his first paragraph, a pair of guys from the second floor leaned over the stairwell and hollered down at the resident to shut up and get a life-they had an ongoing feud with her because she’d sicced the law on their late-night parties several times.

“Those dogs are well trained, they never bother anyone,” they yelled. The Chicago cops were now uncomfortable. When neighbors start to gather, simple situations turn complex in a hurry. The cops shushed the Fed and hustled our party up the stairs, sped along by the pair on the second floor who were singing “God Bless America” loudly enough to bring out the young Korean family from the facing apartment. As I undid the dead bolts on my door, I could hear their four-year-old ask, “Is it a parade?”

It didn’t take the law long to hunt through my apartment for the obvious: you can’t hide a body in four rooms without it coming to light pretty fast. Mitch and Peppy helped: every time someone opened a cupboard or looked under something, they were on his heels. I kept the dogs on short leashes, made sure they never actually touched one of the men, but a hundred-twenty-pound half Lab can make even a federal agent turn a few hairs. Mitch was also pulling on my sore shoulder hard enough to make me wince, but I pretended not to feel it.

During the search, Mr. Contreras kept up a running commentary on

men who hid behind badges as an excuse for doing work no decent person would undertake: “Let me tell you, I saw plenty of that in Europe in ‘forty-four, never thought I’d watch it in my own country. I risked my life on the beaches at Anzio, I know what real fire feels like coming at you out of real artillery, I saw my buddies cut up in pieces around me. If I’d known I was doing that so you could break into any house in America because you felt like it, they couldn’t a got me on that landing boat.”

That did sting the Fed: no manly man likes to be reminded that searching a woman’s apartment for a runaway youth isn’t as dangerous as facing real fire. He kept breaking off his search to try to rebut Mr. Contreras, but the beat cops told the Fed they were under orders to get me to Thirtyfifth and Michigan pronto, and to finish up.