She was frustrating enough for me to want to find out what she was doing at Larchmont Hall. But I couldn’t ask Harriet Whitby to pay me to pursue a teenager for no reason except that she’d made me feel foolish.

I switched on the radio to see if they had anything on Olin Taverner’s death. More bombing runs outside Kandahar, dissension among the Afghan warlords, Illinois cutting funds for schools and health care to balance the state budget. Since September 11, just about every public figure in America has been declaiming that we’re a Christian nation; I guess that’s why widows and orphans carry the load for fiscal responsibility here.

During the interminable commercial breaks, I began to doze, but I jerked back awake at Taverner’s name.

One of Chicago’s most prominent figures, and one of its most controversial, is gone. Olin Tavernergained notoriety in the fifties when he served as counsel to Illinois congressman Walker Bushnell on the House Un-American Activities Committee. For two decades, Taverner was one of the most important voices of American conservatism. Of late years, he had been living quietly, almost reclusively, in a retirement home near Naperville. His personal attendant found Taverner in his armchair this morning, dead of an apparent heart attack. He has left no immediate survivors. Again, Olin Taverner, dead at ninety-one.

Are you sick of turning to your ten-year-old every time you want to cruise the Web? Well, here’s a perfect solution. I switched off the sound. Dead in a retirement home near Naperville? Could that have been Anodyne Park? Maybe Taverner had been Geraldine Graham’s neighbor in that exclusive little retirement resort. Maybe I could talk to her about him. And find out whether by some remote chance Catherine Bayard was telling the truth when she said her grandfather had a key to Larchmont Hall.

A Chicago cop started purposefully down the street, ready to give me a second ticket. I put the car in gear and drove to my office. I should check a few things, anyway, before seeing Ms. Graham again. Come to think of it, I could get a detailed report on Taverner from the Web.

As I let myself into the building, Tessa was locking her studio door. She

backed away from me when she saw I had a cold: she’s a bit of a nut about germs. I made a show of covering my mouth with my scarf. She laughed, but still edged quickly out the front door.

I went down the hall to the back of the building, switching on the tiny cooktop we put back there. We share a shower room and a refrigerator, too, but we meter our gas and electricity separately because Tessa’s metal sculpting is so power-demanding. I scrounged one of Tessa’s tea bags, conscientiously leaving an IOU: one ginger-lemongrass tea bag, and took it into my office.

On an impulse, while my system came up, I phoned Morrell’s editor in New York. Don Strzepek and Morrell had known each other for years, since their Peace Corps days in Jordan, and I hoped Don might know what Morrell was up to. When I only reached his voice mail, I didn’t bother to leave a message.