He looked at me doubtfully. “I sure hope this isn’t what you almost got yourself killed for, doll. It looks like a whole bunch of nothing. ’Course, it meant something to Mitch, and some of it’s got sentimental value, his union card and stuff, but the rest … It’s not much, and it don’t mean sh—Well, anyway, see for yourself.”

I felt a sinking in my diaphragm. I’d been expecting too much. I picked up the stack of documents, grimy from the intense handling they’d had lately, and went through them one at a time.

Mitch’s union card. His social security card. A form to send the feds showing his change of address, so he could continue to collect social security. Another for the local. The Sun-Times story on Diamond Head’s change of ownership, so worn it was barely legible. A newspaper photo of a white-haired man, smiling widely enough to show his back molars, shaking hands with a well-fed man of perhaps fifty. The inscription to this had been thumbed over to the point it was also illegible. Picking it up by one of its top corners, I showed it to Mr. Contreras.

“Any idea who either of these gents is?”

“Oh, the guy on the left is the old president of our local, Eddie Mohr.”

“Eddie Mohr?” A prickle ran up the back of my neck. “The man whose car was used to attack Lotty?”

“Yeah … What’re you getting at, doll?” He stirred uneasily in his chair.

“Why did Mitch carry his picture around with his most cherished possessions?”

Mr. Contreras shrugged. “Probably he wasn’t used to seeing people he knew in the paper. Sentimentality, you know.”

“Mitch didn’t strike me as sentimental. He lost track of his son and his wife. He didn’t have one scrap of paper that showed he cared about a soul anywhere on earth. And here, along with the article about Jason Felitti buying Diamond Head, is a photo of Diamond Head’s old local president. But if Mohr was photographed for a newspaper, he couldn’t possibly be doing something he didn’t want known,” I added, more to myself than to the old man.

“That’s just it, doll. You want it to mean something. Heck, I do too. We’ve been scratching around for the better part of two weeks without finding anything—I know how bad you want this to be important.”

I swallowed my whisky and pushed myself away from the table. “Let’s have dinner. Then I’m going to take this down to my office. If I make a copy, the text may show up more clearly: it does sometimes.”