However, Dr. Chigwell came to the door in person this time, not trusting his sister with the marmalade. With his thin neck bobbing forward, he looked like a harassed turkey.

“Listen here, young lady. I don’t have to take these threats. If you’re not away from this door in thirty seconds, I’m calling the police and you can explain to them why you’ve started a persecution campaign.”

He had me. I could just imagine trying to tell a suburban cop—or even Bobby Mallory—that one of Chicago’s ten wealthiest men was lying to me and getting his old plant doctor to collude. I bowed my head in resignation.

“Consider me gone. The reporter who’ll be calling you in the morning is named Murray Ryerson. I’ll explain to him about your old medical cases and so on.”

“Get out of here!” His voice had turned to a hiss that chilled my blood. I left.

17

Tombstone Blues

Nancy’s funeral was scheduled for eleven Monday morning in the Methodist church she had attended as a child. I seem to spend too much time at the funerals of friends—I have a navy suit associated so strongly with them that I can’t bring myself to wear it anywhere else. I dawdled around in panty hose and a blouse, unable to shake a superstitious dread that putting on the suit would make Nancy’s death final.

I couldn’t set my mind to anything, to Chigwell or Humboldt, to organizing a plan to beat the police to Nancy’s killer, or even to organizing the spreading papers in my living room. That was where I had started the morning, thinking with a few hours on my hands I could get things put away. I was too fragmented to create order.

Suddenly at ten of ten, still in my underwear, I looked up the number for Humboldt’s corporate offices and phoned. An indifferent operator switched me through to his office, where I reached not Clarissa Hollingsworth but her assistant. When I asked for Mr. Humboldt, after a certain amount of dickering I got Ms. Hollingsworth.

The cool alto greeted me patronizingly. “I haven’t had a chance to speak to Mr. Humboldt about seeing you, Ms. Warshawski. I’ll make sure that he gets the message, but he doesn’t come in every day anymore.”

“Yeah, I don’t suppose you call him at home for consultations, either. In case you do, you might add to my other message that I saw Dr. Chigwell last night.”

She finished the conversation with a condescending speed that left me shouting into a dead phone. I finished dressing as easily as I could with my hands shaking and headed south once more.

Mount of Olives Methodist dated to the turn of the century, its high-backed dark pews and giant rose window evoking a time when it was filled with women in long dresses and children in high-buttoned shoes. Today’s congregation couldn’t afford to keep up the stained-glass windows showing Jesus in Calvary. Places where Jesus’s brooding ascetic face had been broken were filled in with wired burglar glass, making him look like a sufferer from an acute skin disease.