When I rang Mr. Contreras’s bell, Peppy barked sharply from behind the door, but the old man didn’t appear. I bit my lip in momentary indecision. He had the same right to his privacy that I demanded for myself. Unfortunately the attack on Lotty had made me too jumpy about the welfare of my friends to leave room for Ninth Amendment debates. I ran upstairs to my own place, dug my state-of-the-art picklocks from the jumble in the basket by my front door, and made my first illegal entry of the day.

Peppy kept up a steady, extremely fierce barking while I worked on the locks. I hoped she would frighten off a genuine housebreaker—even though Mr. Contreras had two locks, they were woefully easy to undo. As soon as she realized it was me, she wagged her tail perfunctorily and returned to her squealing offspring.

The old man wasn’t in the building. I checked the back in case I’d made a fool of myself while he was nurturing his tomatoes, but he wasn’t outside, either. Peppy came to the back door with me while I looked.

“Where’d he go, huh? I know he told you.”

She gave an impatient bark and I let her out briefly. He hadn’t been attacked and dragged from the building by force—there were no signs of battle. I gave it up. Something had come up and I’d hear all about it in due course. I checked Peppy’s water bowl, then left a note on top of his phone telling him I’d been by and would see him tonight.

After relocking his door I stopped in my own place for a glass of water and a sandwich. I also left the Smith & Wesson—I didn’t think anyone was going to take potshots at me on Racine.

Marjorie Hellstrom was in her backyard doing something to a rose bush. Except for Mrs. Frizell and me, the block was infested with fanatical gardeners. I couldn’t grow parsley in a window box, while Mrs. Frizell’s yard was returning to native prairie—native prairie replete with hub caps and beer cans, just the way it was when the Indians lived here.

Mrs. Hellstrom came over to the fence separating her hand-clipped turf from the dump. “Are you going into Hattie’s place, Miss … uh? I washed some of her clothes yesterday and took them over to the hospital, but she didn’t know who I was. I don’t think they’d been laundered since she bought them. Mr. Hellstrom didn’t like me washing them, he was afraid I’d catch something from touching them, but you can’t leave your neighbors in the lurch, and we’ve lived next door for thirty years.”

“How did Mrs. Frizell seem?” I interrupted.