“This is gorgeous,” I said, overwhelmed. “Did you fix it up yourself?”

He nodded. “Carpentry is kind of my hobby—makes a good switch from mucking about with the stunads I spend my days with. The furniture is all stuff I picked up at area flea markets.”

He led me into a little kitchen with Italian tile on the floor and countertops and gleaming copper-bottomed pots on the walls. I perched on a high stool at one side of a tiled island while he made coffee at the burners on the other.

“So who asked you to investigate Nancy’s death? Her mother? Not sure the cops will buck the politicos down here and see that justice runs its inexorable course?” He cocked an eye at me while deftly assembling an infusion pot.

“Nope. If you know Mrs. Cleghorn at all, you must realize her mind doesn’t run to vengeance.”

“So who’s your client?” He turned to the refrigerator and laid out cream and a plate of muffins.

I absentmindedly watched the seat of his trousers tighten across his rear while he bent over. The seam was fraying; a few more deep bends could create an interesting situation. I nobly refrained from dropping a plate at his feet, but waited to answer until he was facing me again.

“Part of what my clients buy when they hire me is confidentiality. If I blabbed their secrets to you, I could hardly expect you to blab yours to me, could I?”

He shook his head. “I haven’t got any secrets. At least not relating to Nancy Cleghorn. I’m the counsel for SCRAP. I work for a number of community groups—public interest law’s my specialty. Nancy was great to work with. She was organized, clearheaded, knew when to fight and when to drop back. Unlike her boss.”

“Caroline?” It was hard to picture Caroline Djiak as anyone’s boss. “So all your dealings with Nancy were purely professional?”

He pointed a coffee spoon at me. “Don’t try to trip me up, Warshawski. I play ball with the big boys. Cream? You ought to, you know—binds with the caffeine and keeps you from getting stomach cancer.”

He set a heavy porcelain mug in front of me and stuck the plate of muffins into the microwave. “No. Nance and I had a brief fling a couple of years back. When I started at SCRAP. She was getting over a heavy thing and I’d been divorced about ten months. We cheered each other up, but we didn’t have anything special to offer each other. Besides friendship, which is special enough that you don’t screw it up. Certainly not by banging your friends on the head and dropping them in a swamp.”

He took the muffins out of the oven and climbed onto a stool at the end of the counter on my left. I drank some of the rich coffee and took a blueberry muffin.

“I’ll let the cops take you through your paces. Where were you Thursday afternoon at two P.M. and so on. What I really want to know, though, is who Nancy thought was following her. Did she think she’d got Dresberg’s back up? Or did it really have anything to do with the recycling plant?”