I fished around on the backseat for a Kleenex and found a towel I’d used at the beach last summer. After wiping a peephole in the windshield I finally put the car into gear and headed for the expressway. I was torn between calling Caroline to tell her the deal was off and the elephant child’s ‘satiable curiosity to find out what had rattled Chigwell so badly.

In the end I did nothing. When I had fought my way through the noontime Loop traffic to my office, messages from several clients awaited me—inquiries I’d let slide while I mucked around in Caroline’s problem. One was from an old customer who wanted help with computer security. I referred him to a friend of mine who’s a computer expert and tackled the other two. These were routine financial investigations, my bread and butter. It felt good to work on something where I could identify both problem and solution, and I spent the afternoon burrowing through files in the State of Illinois Building.

I returned to my office around seven to type the reports. They were worth five hundred dollars to me; since both clients paid promptly, I wanted to get the invoices into the mail.

I was rattling along on my old standard Olympia when the phone rang. I looked at my watch. Almost eight. Wrong number. Caroline. Maybe Lotty. I picked up the phone on the third ring, right before the answering service kicked in.

“Ms. Warshawski?” It was an old man’s voice, fragile and quavering.

“Yes,” I said.

“I want to speak to Ms. Warshawski, please.” For all its quavering, the voice was confident, used to managing people on the phone.

“Speaking,” I said as patiently as I could. I had missed lunch and was dreaming of a steak and whiskey.

“Mr. Gustav Humboldt would like to see you. When would it be convenient to schedule an appointment?”

“Can you tell me what he wants to see me about?” I backspaced and used white-out to cover a typo. It’s getting harder to find correction fluid and typewriter ribbons in these days of word processors, so I capped the bottle carefully to save it.

“I understand it’s a confidential matter, miss. If you’re free this evening, he could see you now. Or tomorrow afternoon at three.”

“Just a minute while I check my schedule.” I put the phone down and got Who’s Who in Chicago Commerce from the top of my filing cabinet. Gustav Humboldt’s listing covered a column and a half of six-point type. Born in Bremerhaven in 1904. Emigrated in 1930. Chairman and chief stockholder of Humboldt Chemical, founded in 1937, with plants in forty countries, 1986 sales of $8 billion, assets of $10 billion, director of this, member of that. Headquarters in Chicago. Of course. I’d passed the Humboldt Building a million times walking down Madison Street, an old no-nonsense structure without the attention-getting lobbies of the modern giants.

I picked up the phone. “I could make it around nine-thirty tonight,” I offered.