I folded my clips into a tidy square, stuck them in my shoulder bag, and left. I couldn’t resist glancing back to see if he’d returned to his magazine, but he was still hiding behind the Sun-Times. I wished I had that much effect on Dick, or even on the goons staking out my apartment.

It was past five by the time I jogged back down Kinzie to the Impala. Too late to tackle Chamfers again. I sat in the car massaging the small of my back; it had kinked up during my research. Jason Felitti sat on the board of U.S. Met and—probably—had steered Du Page County funds there. Now, three years later, Mrs. Frizell had closed her account at the Bank of Lake View and opened one at U.S. Met.

“You only want there to be a connection,” I said sharply to the dashboard. “But it’s a pretty thin thread from Jason Felitti to Todd Pichea.” Although it did run through Richard Yarborough. Maybe Freeman was right—that I did harbor a grudge against Dick—for being a supersuccess while I still struggled to make ends meet. Or for preferring a younger, prettier woman to me?

I didn’t think I minded Teri: she was so much more suited to Dick’s combination of ambition and weakness than I was. But perhaps it did rankle that I had been the promising graduate, third in our class, with a dozen job offers, and now I couldn’t afford a new pair of running shoes. I’d made my own choices, but one’s resentments are seldom rationally grounded. At any rate, I didn’t want to risk proving Freeman right by starting a vendetta against Dick over the kind of business he did.

On that moral high note I started the car and joined the congealing traffic leaving the Loop. It wasn’t until I found myself driving past west side exits on the Stevenson that I figured out where I was going: Naperville, to the Felitti family home.

29

Drinking with the Idle Rich

Naperville, about thirty miles west of the Loop, is one of Chicago’s fastest-growing suburbs. It’s ringed by genteel tract houses on sizable lots—home to the middle managers of Chicago, and to a depressing amount of concrete. Mighty tollways crisscross the southwest suburbs, eating up farmland and leaving steep, jagged cols in their wake.

Inside the concrete stilts and the endless succession of malls, fast-food places, and car dealers sit the remains of the town. A hundred years ago it was a quiet farm community, without much connection to Chicago, beyond a river that carried freight between the city and the Mississippi. A number of people, rich either from the land or the water, built themselves solid Victorian homes there. One of those had belonged to Tiepolo Felitti.