We were going under the post office, where six lanes had been carved out the building’s foundations, Paige gave a satisfied nod. “And you must call me Paige.” She changed lanes, nosed the Audi around a garbage truck, and turned left on Wabash. She dropped me at my office—the Pulteney Building on the corner of Wabash and Monroe.

Overhead an el train thundered. “Good-bye,” I yelled above the din. “See you tomorrow at two.”

Chapter 2

Love’s Labors Lost

The Hawks had paid Boom Boom a lot of money to play hockey. He’d spent a fair amount of it on a condo in a slick glass building on Lake Shore Drive north of Chestnut Street. Since he bought it five years ago I’d been there a number of times, often with a crowd of drunken friendly hockey players.

Gerald Simonds, Boom Boom’s lawyer, gave me the building keys, along with those to my cousin’s Jaguar. We spent the morning going over Boom Boom’s will, a document likely to raise more uproar with the aunts—my cousin left the bulk of his estate to various charities and to the Hockey Widows Pension Fund; no aunts were mentioned. He left me some money with a request not to spend it all on Black Label. Simonds frowned disapprovingly as I laughed. He explained that he had tried to keep his client from inserting that particular clause, but Mr. Warshawski had been adamant.

It was about noon when we finished. There were a couple of things I could have done in the financial district for one of my clients but I just didn’t feel like working. I didn’t have any interesting cases going at the moment—just a couple of processes to serve. I was also trying to track down a man who had disappeared with half the assets in a partnership, including a forty-foot cabin cruiser. They could all wait. I retrieved my car, a green Mercury Lynx, from the Fort Dearborn Trust’s parking lot and headed over to the Gold Coast.

Like most posh places, Boom Boom’s building had a doorman. A pudgy, middle-aged white man, he was helping an old lady out of her Seville when I got there, and didn’t pay much attention to me. I fumbled with the keys, trying to find the one that opened the inner door.

Inside the lobby, a woman got off the elevator with a tiny poodle, its fluffy white hair tied in blue ribbons. She opened the outer door, and I went inside, giving the dog a commiserating look. The dog lurched at its rhinestone-studded leash to smell my leg. “Now, Fifi,” the woman said, pulling the poodle back to her side. Dogs like that aren’t supposed to sniff at things or do anything else to remind their owners they’re animals.