She trotted out to the entryway. While she dealt with the caller I flipped through a magazine devoted to the solid-waste-disposal industry, wondering if I was really insane enough to look for Caroline’s father. I was staring at a picture of a giant incinerator when she came back into the room. Nancy Cleghorn, my old basketball pal who now worked for SCRAP, was trailing behind her.

“Hi, Vic. Sorry to barge in, but I wanted to fill Caroline in on a problem.”

Caroline looked at me apologetically and asked if I’d mind waiting a few minutes to finish up.

“Not at all,” I said politely, wondering if I was doomed to spend the night in South Chicago. “Want me to go to the other room?”

Nancy shook her head. “It’s not private. Just annoying.”

She sat down and unbuttoned her coat. She’d changed from her basketball uniform to a tan dress with a red scarf, and she’d put on makeup, but she still managed to appear disheveled.

“I got to the meeting in plenty of time. Ron was waiting for me—Ron Kappelman, our lawyer”—she put in an aside to me—“and we found we weren’t on the agenda. So Ron went up to talk to that fat moron Martin O’Gara, saying we’d filed our material in plenty of time and talked to the secretary this morning to make sure she included us. So O’Gara makes this big show of not knowing what the hell is going on, and calls the board secretary and disappears for a while. Then he comes back and says there were so many legal problems with our submission, they’d decided not to consider it this evening.”

“We want to build a solvent recycling plant here,” Caroline explained to me. “We’ve got funding, we have a site, we have specs that have passed every EPA test we can think of, and we have some customers right on our doorstep—Xerxes and Glow-Rite. It means a good hundred jobs down here, and a chance to make a dent in the crap going into the ground.”

She turned back to Nancy. “So what can the problem be? What did Ron say?”

“I was so mad I couldn’t speak. He was so mad I was afraid he’d break O’Gara’s neck—if he could find it underneath the fat rolls. But he called Dan Zimring, the EPA lawyer, you know. Dan said we could come by his place, so we went over there and he looked through everything and said it couldn’t be in better shape.”

Nancy fluffed out her frizzy hair so that it stood up wildly around her head. She helped herself absently to a piece of chicken.

“I’ll tell you what I think the problem is,” Caroline snapped, cheeks flushed. “They probably showed the submission to Art Jurshak—you know, professional courtesy or some shit. I think he blocked it.”

“Art Jurshak,” I echoed. “Is he still alderman down here? He must be a hundred and fifty by now.”

“No, no,” Caroline said impatiently. “He’s only in his sixties somewhere. Don’t you agree, Nancy?”