The Title Office is where you go to register ownership of buildings in Chicago. Maybe all of Cook County. Like other city offices, this was filled with patronage workers. Henry Ford could study a city office and learn something about the ultimate in division of labor. One person gave me a form to fill out. I completed it, copying Paige Carrington’s Astor Street address out of Boom Boom’s address book. The filled-in form went to a second clerk, who date-stamped it and gave it to a heavy black man sitting behind a cage. He, in turn, assigned the form to one of the numerous pages whose job it was to fetch out the title books and carry them to the waiting taxpayers.

I stood behind a scarred wooden counter with other title searchers, waiting for a page to bring me the relevant volume. The man who finally filled my order turned out to be surprisingly helpful—city workers usually seem to be in a secret contest for who can harass the public the most. He found the entry for me in the heavy book and showed me how to read it.

Paige occupied a floor in a converted apartment building, an old five-flat built in 1923. The entries showed that there was some kind of dwelling on that site as far back as 1854. The Harris Bank had owned the current building until 1978 when it was converted to condominiums. Jay Feldspar, a well-known Chicago land developer, had acquired it then and done the conversion. Paige’s unit, number 2, was held as a trust by the Fort Dearborn Trust. Number 1123785-G.

Curiouser and curiouser. Either Paige owned the thing herself as part of a trust, or someone owned it for her. I looked at my watch. I’d already been here forty minutes; might as well take a little more time and risk a parking ticket. I wrote the trust number down on a piece of paper in my shoulder bag, thanked the attendant for his help, and went out to find a pay phone. I’d been to law school with a woman who was now an attorney on the Fort Dearborn’s staff. She and I had never been friends—our aspirations were too different. We’d never been enemies, either, though. I thought I’d call her and give a tug on the old school tie.

It took more than a tug—trust documents were confidential, she could be disbarred, let alone thrown out of the bank. I finally persuaded her that I’d get the Herald-Star to come in and suborn the clerical staff if she didn’t find the name of the person behind the trust number for me.

“You really haven’t changed a bit, Vic. I remember how you bullied everyone during moot court in our senior year.”

I laughed.

“I didn’t mean it as a compliment,” she said crossly, but she agreed to call me at home that night with the information.