However modestly Big Art kept his office, he hadn’t stinted on his home comforts. The lot to the right had been annexed and converted into a beautifully landscaped yard. At one end stood a glass building that might have housed an indoor swimming pool. Since a forest preserve ran along the back of the property, one had the sensation of being out in the country while only half a mile from some of the world’s busiest manufacturing sites.

I trotted up the flagstone walk to the entrance, a porticoed porch whose columns looked a little incongruous against the modern brick. A faded blond woman stood in the doorway. The setting had some claim to grandeur but she was pure South Side in her crisply ironed print dress and the starched apron covering it.

She greeted me nervously, without trying to invite me in. “Who—who did you say you were?”

I pulled a card from my bag and handed it to her. “I’m a friend of young Art’s. I wouldn’t be bothering him at home but they haven’t seen him at the ward offices and it’s pretty important that I get in touch with him.”

She shook her head blindly, a movement that gave her a fleeting resemblance to her son. “He—he’s not home.”

“I don’t think he’d mind talking to me. Honestly, Mrs. Jurshak. I know the police are trying to get in touch with him, but I’m on his side, not theirs. Or his father’s,” I added with a flash of inspiration.

“He really isn’t home.” She looked at me wretchedly. “When Sergeant McGonnigal came around asking for him Mr. Jurshak got really angry, but I don’t know where he is, Miss—uh. I haven’t seen him since breakfast yesterday morning.”

I tried to digest that. Maybe young Art hadn’t been fit to drive last night after all. But if he’d been in an accident, his mother would have been the first to know. I shook away an unwelcome vision of Dead Stick Pond.

“Can you give me the names of any of his friends? Anyone he trusts enough to spend the night with uninvited?”

“Sergeant McGonnigal asked me the same thing. But—but he never had any friends. I mean, I liked him to stay here at night. I didn’t want him running around the way so many boys do these days, getting involved in drugs and gangs, and he’s my only child, it’s not like there are others if you lose one. That’s why I’m so worried now. He knows how upset I get if I don’t hear from him and yet here he is, gone all night.”

I didn’t know what to say, since none of the comments I wanted to make would have kept her speaking to me. I finally asked if it was the first time he’d ever stayed away from home.

“Oh, no,” she said simply. “Sometimes he has to work all night. On important presentations to clients or something. He’s been doing a lot of those in the last few months. But never without calling me.”