Unfortunately that corner is also the edge of the hottest new gallery and retail part of the city. I had to go to the underground streets to find a vacant meter. Even though I was confident I’d lost my tail, I still felt uneasy in the labyrinth of truck routes and loading docks. Someone could jump me here and no one would ever notice. These macabre fantasies made my heels tingle with nervousness. I ran up Kinzie toward daylight with more speed than I thought my legs had left in them.

An hour with the library’s computer specialist reinforced my need to buy my own machine. Not that the specialist wasn’t helpful—she was, very. But the amount of information available at the end of a phone line was so great, and my need for it so strong, that it didn’t make sense to be dependent on the hours the library was open.

I carried the sheaf of printouts to a crowded table in the periodicals room, one of the few places in the building where one could actually sit and read. My immediate seatmates included a small gray man with a thin mustache who was poring over Scientific American and keeping up an anxious commentary under his breath. It wasn’t clear whether he was reacting to the article or life in general. On my other side a bigger man was reading the Herald-Star one word at a time, running a finger under the sentences as he moved his lips. I hoped the new library would include showers in the rest rooms. It would be a big help, if not for my seatmate at least for anyone who had to sit near him in the future.

Blotting out the smell as best I could, I began reading about Jason Felitti, owner of Diamond Head Motors. He was Peter’s brother, younger by three years (born in 1931), educated at Northwestern (business), dabbling in politics and entrepreneurship. Peter, one clip mentioned, had also attended Northwestern, taking an engineering degree. Jason, who’d never married, lived in the family home in Naperville, while Peter had moved to Oak Brook with his wife and two daughters in ’68. A portentous year in lives around the world—why not for Dick’s father-in-law as well?

Amalgamated Portage, the family business, had been founded by Tiepolo Felitti in 1888. It had started as a simple operation—a single pushcart for hauling away scrap. By Tiepolo’s death in the 1918 flu epidemic Amalgamated had become one of the region’s largest cartage firms.

The First World War had helped their rail line enormously. In the thirties they saw the future and it looked like long-distance trucking. They were one of the earliest carriers to build a fleet. Since the Second World War they had diversified into mining and smelting, at first with great success and then with what sounded like equally great disaster.