“East is a golf course. South, the complex where my mother lives.” At the best of times, Darraugh is a wintry, distant man. It was hard to picture him in normal situations, like being born.

“Mother’s ninety-one. She manages on her own with help, and, anyway, I don’t want-she doesn’t want to live with me. She lives in a development here-Anodyne Park. Town houses, apartments, little shopping center, nursing home if she needs medical help. She seems to like it. She’s gregarious. Like my son-sociability skips generations in my family.” His bleak smile appeared briefly. “Ridiculous name for a development, Anodyne Park, offensive when you think about the Alzheimer’s wing at the nursing home-Mother tells me the word means something like `soothing’ or `healing.

“Her condo overlooks the grounds of Larchmont Hall. One of the grand mansions, big grounds. It’s been empty for a year-the original owners were the Drummond family. The heirs sold the place three years ago,

but the new buyers went bankrupt. Felitti was talking about buying, so he could keep more developers out of the area, but so far that’s fallen through.” He stopped. I waited for him to get to the point, which he is never shy about, but when a minute went by I said, “You want me to find a plutocrat to buy the place so it doesn’t get divided up for the merely affluent?” He scowled. “I didn’t call you in for ridicule. Mother thinks she sees people going in and out of the place at night.”

“She doesn’t want to call the police?”

“The police came out a couple of times, but found no one. The agent that manages the place for the holding company has a security system in place. It hasn’t been breached.”

“Any of the neighbors seen anything?”

“Point of the area, Vic: neighbors don’t see each other. Here are the houses, and all this is hundred years’ worth of trees, gardens, so forth. You could talk to the neighbors, of course.” He snapped his finger on the map again, showing me the distances, but his tone was uncertain-most unlike him.

“What’s your interest in this, Darraugh? Are you thinking of buying the place yourself?”

“Good God, no.”

He didn’t say anything else, but walked to the windows to look down at the construction on Wacker Drive. I stared in bewilderment. Even when he’d asked me to help his son beat a drug rap several years ago, he hadn’t danced around the floor like this.

“Mother’s always been a law unto herself,” he muttered to the window. “Of course people in her-in our-milieu always get better attention from the law than people like-well, than others. But she’s affronted that the police aren’t taking her seriously. Of course, it’s possible that she might be imagining-she’s over ninety, after all-but she’s taken to calling me every day to complain about lack of police attention.”

“I’ll see if I can uncover something the police aren’t seeing,” I said gently.

His shoulders relaxed and he turned back to me. “Your usual fee, Vic. See Caroline about your contract. She’ll give you Mother’s details as well.”