Slipping in through the back entrance, I managed to sidestep Mr. Contreras and the dog. I stopped in the kitchen to inspect the food supply. Still grim. I fixed a bowl of popcorn and took it into the living room with me. Popcorn and corned beef—um-um good.

Four-thirty is a terrible time to find anything on TV—I flipped through game shows, Sesame Street, and the beaming face of The Frugal Gourmet I finally turned off the set in disgust and reached for the phone.

The Chigwells were listed under Clio’s name. She answered on the third ring, her voice distant, unyielding. Yes, she remembered who I was. She didn’t think her brother would want to speak to me, but she went to see, anyway. He didn’t.

“Look, Ms. Chigwell. I hate having to be such a pest, but there’s something I want to know. Has Gustav Humboldt called him in the last few days?”

She was surprised. “How did you know?”

“I didn’t. His secretary passed on some information that Humboldt supposedly got from your brother. I wondered if Humboldt made it up.”

“What did he say Curtis told him?”

“That Joey Pankowski was Caroline Djiak’s father.”

She asked me to explain who they were, then went off to confront her brother. She was gone for a quarter of an hour. I finished the popcorn and did some leg raises, lying with the phone near my ear so I could hear her return.

She came back on the line abruptly. “He says he knew about the man, that the girl’s mother had told him all about it back when they hired her.”

“I see,” I said weakly.

“The trouble is, you can’t spend your whole life with someone without knowing when they’re lying. I don’t know what part of it Curtis is making up, but one thing I can tell you—he’d say anything Gustav Humboldt told him to.”

While I struggled to add this news to my pickled brain, something else struck me. “Why are you telling me this, Ms. Chigwell?”

“I don’t know,” she said, surprised. “Maybe after seventy-nine years, I’m tired of having Curtis hide behind me. Good-bye.” She hung up with an abrupt click.

I spent Saturday stewing about Humboldt and Chigwell, unable to think of any reason why they would concoct a story about Louisa and Joey, unable to think of a way to get a handle on them. When Murray Ryerson, head of the Herald-Star’s crime bureau, called me on Sunday because one of his gofers had dug up the news that Nancy Cleghorn and I went to high school together, I even agreed to talk to him.

Murray follows De Paul basketball. Or slobbers over it. Although I live—and die—with the Cubs every year, and maintain a wistful love for the Bears’ Otis Wilson, I don’t really care whether the Blue Demons ever score another basket. In Chicago that’s extreme heresy—equivalent to saying you hate St. Patrick’s Day parades. So I agreed to truck out to the Horizon and watch them scrap around with Indiana or Loyola or whoever.