define very differently. I couldn’t deal with him while flat on my back. By the time his heavy tread sounded in my hall, I’d pulled on a sweatshirt and the pants I’d borrowed from DuPage County last night.

He started talking before he got to the bedroom door. “Doll, you okay? Your car’s out front and you ain’t been out all day, but Mr. Graham, he just sent over a messenger with a letter for you. When you didn’t even come to the door, I got kinda worried.”

“Yeah, I’m okay.” My voice sounded like Poe’s raven after a night mainlining chloroform.

“You sick, doll? What happened to you? It was on the news, you being out in wherever diving into a pond after a dead guy. You have pneumonia or what?”

The dogs pelted down the hall and circled around me with delighted yips. All was forgiven in the three days since I’d last force-marched them down Lake Michigan to the Loop-they were ready for action. I fondled their ears.

“Just a cold. I didn’t get home until four this morning-been sleeping. ‘Scuse minute.” I snuffled down to the bathroom, blenching at the sight of my face in the mirror. I looked worse than I sounded. My eyes were puffy. I had a bruise across my cheekbone and more on my arms and legs. I hadn’t noticed banging myself up so badly when I was hefting bodies around the Larchmont estate last night.

I turned the hot water on in the shower and steamed myself for a few minutes. When I emerged, clean, and, thankfully, dressed in my own clothes, my neighbor had produced a large mug of tea with lemon and honey. Unlike Geraldine Graham’s gilt eggshells, mine were real mugs, thick, clunkyand cheap.

“When I heard the news, them saying you’d been brought in to DuPage County for questioning about this dead man, I thought maybe you’d been arrested. You been fighting? You got some case that’s gonna kill you and you ain’t said nothing to me?” His brown eyes were bright with hurt. “Nothing like that.”

When I’d croaked out enough explanation to satisfy him, he suddenly remembered Darraugh’s letter. The blistering prose raised welts on my fingers.

I have been trying to reach you all day to find out why you sent the police to my mother without informing me first. Since you aren’t answering your phone or e-mail I am sending this by hand. Call immediately on receipt of this message.

How nice to be the man in charge and bulldoze your way through people as if they were construction sites. I checked in with my answering service. Christie Weddington, the operator I’ve known longest, answered. “Is that really you, Vic? Just to be safe I’d better do our security check. What was your mother’s maiden name?” When I’d spelled “Sestieri” she added severely, “When you’re going to hole up, can you let us know? Now that Mary Louise has left your company, you don’t have any backup person to call for emergencies. We got like eleven calls from Darraugh Graham’s office, and five from Murray Ryerson.”