I lifted my right leg out of the water and ran a soapy sponge over it while I considered. “This is V. I. Warshawski,” I said, spelling it for him. “Tell him that Mr. Argus’s auditors will want to know where the missing invoices are.”

The boy repeated the message back to me dubiously. “You got it.” I gave him both my and Lotty’s phone numbers and hung up.

The pasta was bubbling nicely and I took it into the bedroom with me while I got dressed—black velvet pants with a high-necked blouse and a form-fitting red and black velvet toreador jacket. High heels and very dangly earrings and I was set for an evening at the theater. Or the end of an evening at the theater. By some miracle I hadn’t spilled tomato juice on the white blouse. My luck really was turning.

I got to the Windy City Balletworks just at ten-thirty. A bored young woman in a leotard and stretchy wraparound skirt told me the performance would end in ten minutes. She gave me a program and let me go in without paying.

The tiny theater was filled and I didn’t bother trying to find a seat in the dim light. I lounged against the back wall, taking off my shoes to stand in my stocking feet next to the ushers. A spirited pas de deux from a classical ballet was in progress. Paige was not the female dancer. Whoever it was, she seemed technically competent but lacked the special spark with which Paige infused her performance. The whole company appeared on stage for a complex finale, and the show was over.

When the lights came on, I squinted at the program to make sure Paige was, indeed, dancing tonight. Yes, Pavane for a Dope Dealer had been performed right before the second act of Giselle, which we’d just seen.

I went back out the hallway and followed a small group down to the door leading directly to the dressing rooms. Rather than accost Paige in her shared dressing room, I sat on a folding chair outside to wait. The dancers began coming out in twos and threes, not sparing me a glance. I’d provided myself with a novel, remembering the forty-five-minute wait here the last time I’d tried talking to Paige, and flicked through the pages, looking up in vain every time the door opened.

Fifty minutes went by. Just as I was thinking she might have left at the end of the Pavane, she finally emerged. As usual, her exquisite good looks made me feel a little wistful. Tonight she had on a silvery fur coat, possibly fox, which made her resemble Geraldine Chaplin in the middle of the Russian winter in Dr. Zhivago.

“Hello, Paige. I’m afraid I got here too late to see the Pavane. Perhaps I can make the matinee tomorrow.”