Given the condition of most of Bev and Callie’s cars, one that wasn’t much was going to be a real clunker. Beggars can’t be choosers though. I gave her a twenty as a down payment and took the keys to an old Nova. The odometer was on its second lap and the steering had been devised to train the Bulgarian weight-lifting team, but Bev assured me it would still do eighty if it had to. She gave us cushions to cover the lumpy seats and held the back gate open until we had cleared the alley.

“You want to go home?” I asked Mr. Contreras.

“Now, look here, Vic Warshawski: you are not going to drag me all over Chicago and then dump me at home like you think I was senile and couldn’t understand a few English sentences. I want to know why you left that Impala down by Barney’s and what all the fuss is. And if you’re up to something else tonight you’d better either plan on me coming with you or just sitting in the car till the sun comes up, ’cause you ain’t pushing me out of here. Unless you’re planning on hooking up with Conrad.” The last word was laced with an adolescent ugliness.

“As a matter of fact, I’d be just as happy for Conrad not to catch up with me again tonight.” I wrenched the steering wheel hard to the right and pulled over to the curb, where I gave him a thumbnail sketch of the problems I’d been pondering during the cab ride north. On top of those I was wondering what Vinnie or the Picheas might do now that I’d discovered their slick pitch to the old people in the neighborhood. This was the first chance I’d had to tell Mr. Contreras about it. He was shocked and angry and we got diverted for a bit by a sermon against those who prey on the elderly.

“Vinnie’s a spiteful kind of guy,” I said when he’d wound down. “Who knows what he might think up to get even. Anyway, I don’t know why I’m still walking around if Milt Chamfers would shoot Eddie just so as to keep him from talking to me. I’m worried that you could be in danger, too, just because you’ve been hanging out with me—calling Eddie Mohr, going with me to see him, all those things.”

“Oh, don’t worry about me, doll,” he said roughly. “Not that I want to die, but if someone shoots me it’s not like I didn’t have a good life. What are you going to do tonight?”

“I need to find a place with a phone. But what I really need is to get into Dick’s office.”

“ ‘The first Mr. Warshawski,’ ” the old man repeated with relish. “But what for?”