Darraugh, or his PA, Caroline, had started in at ten and kept it up every half hour. Geraldine Graham had phoned four times herself, the first time at a quarter of ten. So the DuPage sheriff had been to see her by nine. At least they were taking it seriously. Murray had called early, before eight, presumably when he’d looked at the morning wires. I got back to him first, in case he knew something that would help me in my conversation with Darraugh. Murray was indignant that I hadn’t called him when the blood was fresh enough to lick.

“Have they ID’d the guy yet?” I croaked into his barrage of questions. “You sound like a frog in a cheese grater, Warshawski. So far the DuPage sheriff is clueless. I gather they’re running your John Doe’s prints through AFIS. And they’ve put his picture on the wires.”

“They have a cause of death?” I wheezed.

“He drowned. What were you doing, Warshawski, turning up so pat minutes after the guy plunged to his watery death?”

“You should write for the Enquirer, with prose like that. You drive out to Larchmont? No one could plunge to a watery death in five feet of water. Either he did like me, tripped and fell, or-” A coughing fit interrupted me. Mr. Contreras leaped up to pour me more tea, and to mutter that Murray was an inconsiderate jerk, keeping me talking when I was sick.

-or he went in on purpose or he was put there,” Murray finished for me. “What’s your theory? Did it look as though he’d struggled?”

I shut my eyes, trying to remember the body as I’d found it. “I only had my flashlight to augment the moon, so I can’t say whether he had unusual bruises or scratches. But his clothes were tidy-no undone buttons, and his tie was still neatly knotted. I undid it when I was trying CPR.”

“Cross your heart, you never saw him before?” Murray demanded. “Hope to die,” I coughed.

“So you didn’t go out there to meet him?”

“No!” I was getting impatient. “He’s what Professor Wright used to call a `stochastic excursion’ in my physics class.”

“Then what about the `Warshawski excursion’?” Murray asked. “What were you doing in the land of hope and glory?”

“Catching the cold of a lifetime.” I hung up as a cough started racking me again.

“You oughta go back to bed, cookie,” Mr. Contreras fussed over me. “You can’t talk, you won’t have any voice at all you keep at it. That Ryerson, he just uses you.”

“Street runs both ways,” I choked. “I have to call Darraugh.”

Darraugh interrupted a meeting on the fate of his Georgia paper division to take my call. “Mother had the police with her this morning.” “That must have pleased her,” I said.

“Excuse me?” The frost in his voice turned the phone to dry ice against my ear.

“She likes people to attend to her. You don’t visit her enough, the cops didn’t respond when she told them about intruders in your boyhood home. Now she’s gotten the attention she thinks is her due.”