He grunted. “I won’t be here, which maybe is just as well. But I’ll fix you up with Lydia Cooper. Just ask for her when you get to the second floor.”

It’s hard to have a professional relationship that turns personal, although maybe the other way round is worse. When Murray and I first met a decade or so ago we’d felt a mutual attraction and had become lovers for a time. But our competition over the financial crime we both cover soured our private life. And now the memory of our love life gave a sour tinge to our professional dealings. Maybe I needed to invite him out for dinner and talk it through. That would certainly be the mature thing to do, but I was still a year from forty; I didn’t have to be mature yet.

I stuck the gun in my shoulder holster and went down to Mr. Contreras’s place. He was dismayed by the news about Lotty. I went through the details with him several times; on the third recital he suddenly realized I might be in danger.

“And you’re just going to romp around the streets with no one looking after you.”

“No one can look after me,” I said. “Even a bodyguard can’t protect you if someone is determined to get you. Look at whatsisname—the mobster who was gunned down in Lincolnwood.”

“Alan Dorfman,” he supplied. “But even so, doll—”

“Even so, I don’t see the point of you coming along and getting hurt too. You’ve taken a bad hit on the head and a bullet in the shoulder from getting too close to my problems. The next time someone assaults you I’m going to have to hand in my license and find a new career.”

“I just hate sitting on the sidelines,” he muttered.

I put a sympathetic arm around him—I sure knew that feeling. “There is something you could do.” I told him about the guy who’d come by Mrs. Polter’s claiming to be Mitch’s son. “Can you talk to Jake about that?”

He brightened somewhat. It wasn’t as good as the possibility of slugging someone with a pipe wrench, but at least it was action. I told him I’d be out all day, but I’d check in around five.

“Mind you do, doll. Maybe you could call me around one or something—I don’t want to spend the whole day wondering if someone took after you with a bulldozer.”

Normally his protectiveness makes me prickly, but the attack on Lotty had shaken me. I could see how you could sit around worrying about someone you loved. I promised, kissed him on the cheek, and took off.