“You know what they teach us at the academy, Ms. W.—stay out of domestic quarrels unless you absolutely can’t avoid ’em. You never told me what you were doing to get this Chamfers so agitated.”

“Oh—that was Mr. Contreras.” I explained about him and Mitch. “Terry Finchley’s handling the case for Area One. I haven’t talked to him for a few days. Maybe he’s found someone who saw Mitch go into the canal.”

“If the Finch is on it, don’t you think you could leave it in his hands?” Rawlings asked dryly. “He’s quite capable, you know.”

Finchley and Rawlings were active together in an African-American police fraternity. Each took a D’Artagnan-Athos view of slights toward the other.

“Your turn to give me a break, Sergeant. I know Finchley’s a good detective, but I do wonder how much time he has to investigate a drunk rolling. And that seems to be how the department has tabbed it.”

“And you don’t?” Rawlings asked sharply.

“I don’t have any evidence, Sergeant, of any kind, about anything.”

But I had a lot of nagging questions, with the attack on Lotty heading the list. I was desperate to find some lever for prying Chamfers’s mouth open. Someone down there had seen Mitch, someone knew what he was mumbling on about. Something they didn’t want me to find out bad enough that they’d hire thugs to beat me up? Something so potent they knocked Mitch on the head and rolled him into the canal?

I looked up to see Rawlings staring at me narrowly. “You’d better not be concealing something I want to know.”

“I know you well enough to like you, Sergeant, but not nearly well enough to figure out what kinds of things you want to know.”

“Yeah, bat your baby blues at me. I think I’ll just check in with the Finch, see what he’s dug up on Kruger.”

He busied himself with his lapel mike; a couple of minutes later Lotty’s phone rang. Max, on his way back from the bedroom, reached to answer it. His face registered annoyance when Rawlings snatched the receiver from him, but he moved over to Audrey without saying anything.

Max and Audrey kept up a low-pitched conversation while Rawlings told Finchley about the attack on Lotty. Officer Galway got up to look at Lotty’s books. With Rawlings’s attention on his phone conversation much of her stiffness left her; she seemed young and rather frail for the weight of her equipment belt.

I moved restlessly to the bedroom to look at Lotty myself. She was breathing evenly, if deeply; her skin felt a little hot to my touch. When I came back to the living room Rawlings was still on the phone.