Dick rated a suite with a waiting room, a small sanctum for his secretary, and a large office whose curved windows overlooked the Chicago River. Mr. Contreras busied himself in the waiting area, unpacking some businesslike cables from his toolbox and snaking them across the floor. He had also brought a small power screwdriver, with which he undid a vent along the floorboards, exposing an interesting nest of wires.

“You go on inside and look at papers, doll. If anyone shows up I’ll start buzzing away with this guy.”

I found myself tiptoeing into Dick’s office, as if my steps on his Kerman could raise his hackles out in Oak Brook. The room didn’t run to filing cabinets. He had several shelves of the legal casebooks he felt he needed every day, a slab of burled blond wood that apparently was a desk, and an elaborate sideboard housing German ceramics and a wet bar. Teri and their three blond offspring beamed at me from the burled slab.

A door on one side led to a private bath. A second door opened on a shallow closet. A few clean shirts hung there. I couldn’t resist looking through them; at the back hung the one I’d flung coffee on. He’d forgotten to take it home for Teri to look after. Or maybe he couldn’t bring himself to explain to her how it got that way. I grinned in rather childish triumph.

I tiptoed back across the Kerman to his secretary’s office. Harriet Regner had hitched her star to Dick’s when he was starting out and had to share a secretary with five other men. She’d been his executive secretary now for ten years and managed a small staff of clerks and paralegals for him. If Dick was involved in something truly illegal, would he trust it to Harriet? I thought of Ollie North and Fawn Hall. Men like Dick always seem to find women so enthusiastic in their devotion that they consider their bosses more important than the law. Harriet would take care of anything questionable herself. The clerical grunts she supervised would handle her routine filing elsewhere.

On that fine logic I approached her filing cabinets. Their blond burl matched Dick’s desk, although I suspected in here it was just veneer. Without my picklocks it took a certain amount of force to unlock the cabinets: I had to get Mr. Contreras to come in and blast them with his power driver. I didn’t really care, though, if Dick knew I’d been here—I hadn’t even bothered to wear gloves. It was one thing to find out what he was up to, and quite another to figure out how to confront him with it. If he thought I’d been burglarizing him it might force his hand.