“I know—I passed her on the road. Now I want to know why you were spying on my property.”

“Honest Injun, Mr. Grafalk—I wasn’t spying. If I were, I wouldn’t do it right outside your front door like that. I’d conceal myself and you’d never know I was here.”

The blaze died down a bit in the blue eyes and he laughed. “What were you doing here, then?”

“Just passing through. Someone told me you lived here and I was gawking at it—it’s quite a nice place.”

“You didn’t find Clayton at home, did you?”

“Clayton? Oh, Clayton Phillips. No, I expect he’d be at work on a Monday afternoon, wouldn’t he?” It wouldn’t do to deny I’d been at the Phillipses—even though I’d used a fake name, Grafalk could check that pretty easily.

“You talked to Jeannine, then. What did you think of her?”

“Are you interviewing her for a job?”

“What?” He looked puzzled, then secretly amused. “How about a drink? Or don’t private eyes drink on duty?”

I looked at my watch—it was almost four-thirty. “Let me just move the Chevette out of the way of any further Lake Bluff menaces. It isn’t mine and I’d hate for something to happen to it.”

Grafalk was through being angry, or at least he had buried his anger below the civilized urbanity I’d seen down at the Port last week. He leaned against one of the brick pillars while I hauled at the stiff steering and maneuvered the car onto the grass verge. Inside the gates he put an arm around me to guide me up the drive. I gently disengaged it.

The house, made from the same brick as the pillars, lay about two hundred yards back from the road. Trees lined the front on both sides, so that you had no clue to how big the place really was as you approached it.

The lawn was almost completely green—another week and they’d have to give it the season’s first mowing. The trees were coming into leaf. Tulips and jonquils provided bursts of color at the corners of the house. Birds twittered with the business of springtime. They were nesting on some of the most expensive real estate in Chicago but they probably didn’t feel snobbish toward the sparrows in my neighborhood. I complimented Grafalk on the grounds.

“My father built the place back in the twenties. It’s a little more ornate than we care for today—but my wife likes it, so I’ve never done anything to change it.”

We went in through a side door and back to a glassed-in porch overlooking Lake Michigan. The lawn sloped down steeply to a sandy beach with a little cabana and a couple of beach umbrellas. A raft was anchored about thirty yards off-shore but I didn’t see a boat.