“I don’t think I could do that, Miss Warshawski. Payroll information is confidential.”

“Janet, wouldn’t you like Boom Boom’s murderer caught?”

“Well, I’ve been thinking that over. I don’t see how he could have been murdered. Who would want to do it, anyway?”

I counted to ten in Italian. “Someone on your case about the information you’ve been getting me?”

Not exactly, she explained, but Lois had started asking her what she was doing in the office while everyone else was at lunch. Yesterday she’d come in just seconds after Janet closed the drawer where Mr. Phillips’s home address was filed. “If I stay late today, she’s sure to hang around to spy on me.”

I tapped my teeth with a pencil, trying to figure out some way she could get Phillips’s salary without getting into trouble. Nothing occurred to me.

“How often do you get paid?”

“Every other week. Our next paycheck is due Friday.”

“Is there any chance you could look in his wastebasket at the end of the day? A lot of people just toss their pay stubs; maybe he does, too.”

“I’ll try,” she said dubiously.

“That’s the spirit,” I said heartily. “One other thing. Could you call over to the Pole Star Line and find out where the Lucella Wieser will be in the next couple of days?”

She sounded more reluctant than ever but copied the information down and said she would get back to me.

Bouchard was out; I left a message with his wife. After that I didn’t have anything to do but pace. I didn’t want to leave the apartment and risk missing Janet’s call. In the end, to pass the time, I worked on some vocal exercises. My mother had been a singer and she had trained me as a musician, hoping I would have the operatic career Hitler and Mussolini deprived her of. That never worked out, but I know a lot of breathing exercises and can sing all the main arias from Iphigénie en Tauride, the only opera my mother sang in professionally before she left Italy in 1938.

I was halfway through Iphigenia’s second-act entrance, creaking like a windy parlor organ, when Janet phoned back. The Lucella would be in Thunder Bay Thursday and Friday. They were unloading coal in Detroit today and would leave there this evening.

“And really, Miss Warshawski, I can’t help you anymore. I’m calling you now from a pay phone at the 7-11 but Lois was all over me about calling Pole Star. Now that Mr. Warshawski’s gone, I’m just back in the typing pool and there isn’t any reason for me to do things like that, you see.”