While I was wasting dimes and adding to the risk of a ticket, I checked in with my answering service. Both Ryerson and Pierre Bouchard had called.

I tried Murray first. “Vic, if you’d lived two hundred years ago they would have burned you at the stake.”

“What are you talking about?”

“That Arroyo hiking boot. Mattingly was wearing them when he died, and we’re pretty sure they’re a match for the footprint the police found in Boom Boom’s place. We’ll have the story on the front page of the early editions. Got any other hot tips?”

“No. I was hoping you might have something for me. Talk to you later.”

Bouchard wanted to tell me that he had checked around with Mattingly’s cronies on the team. He didn’t think Howard knew how to dive. Oh, and Elsie had given birth to a nine-pound boy two days ago. She was calling him Howard after the worthless snake. The members of the team were pitching in to make a donation to her since Howard had died without a pension and left very little life insurance. Would I give something from Boom Boom? Pierre knew my cousin would want to be included.

Certainly, I told him, and thanked him for his diligence.

“Are you making any progress?”

“Well, Mattingly’s dead. The guy who I’m sure pushed Boom Boom in the water was killed Sunday. Another few weeks like this and the only person left alive will be his murderer. I guess that’s progress.”

He laughed. “I know you will have success. Boom Boom told me many times how clever you are. But if you need some muscle, let me know. I’m a good man for a fight.”

I agreed with him wholeheartedly—I’d watched him cutting people’s heads open on the ice with good-natured enthusiasm many times.

I sprinted back to my car, too late. A zealous meter maid had already filled out a parking ticket for letting the meter run out. I stuck it into my shoulder bag and inched my way across the Loop to Ontario Street, the closest entrance to the Kennedy Expressway.

The weather had finally warmed up slightly. Under a clear blue sky, trees along the expressway put out tentative, pale green leaves toward the sun. The grass was noticeably darker than it had been the week before. I started singing some Elizabethan love songs. They suited the weather and the chirping birds better than Fauré’s moodiness. Off the Kennedy to the Edens, past the painfully tidy bungalows of the Northwest Side where people balanced their paychecks with anxious care, up to the industrial parks lining the middle-class suburbs of Lincolnwood and Skokie, on to the Tri-State Tollway and the rarefied northern reaches of the very rich.