The two looked enough alike to be brothers—white men in their mid-thirties with blow-dried, carefully cut hair and square, conventionally good-looking faces now flushed in righteous anger. My neighbor and I had enjoyed, if that’s the word, a rapprochement while he’d been having an affair with a set designer I liked. But when Rick left him, Vinnie and I went back to a more natural hostility. So far I hadn’t found anything that brought me closer to Todd Pichea, even for an afternoon.

Hovering behind Pichea were a couple of women I recognized vaguely from the block. One was a plump blonde in her fifties or sixties, wearing black stretch pants that revealed the sags of time. The second woman made the pair an ad for “Then and Now on Racine Avenue.” Her spandex leggings hugged a body toned to perfection in a gym. The diamond drops in her ears showed up the clunkiness of the older woman’s faux pearls, and the impatient frown marring her perfect complexion contrasted sharply with the other’s expression of plain worry.

Pichea’s scowl deepened when he heard me. “Look, Warshawski, I know you don’t give a damn about the value of your property, but you ought to respect the rights of others.”

“I am. I do. It’s been a while since I studied constitutional law, but isn’t there at least an implication in the Fourth Amendment that Mrs. Frizell has the right to be secure in her own home?”

Pichea tightened his lips into a thin line. “As long as she isn’t creating a public nuisance. I don’t know why you have such a hot spot for the old bag, but if you lived across the street and had those damned dogs keeping you awake you’d change your tune fast enough.”

“Oh, I don’t know. If I knew you were on her case I could probably bring myself to tolerate the barking. You work for some big downtown firm, you’ve got a lot of connections in the courts, and you want to use all your muscle to smash some helpless old woman. She’s been living here a long time, you know—forty or fifty years. She didn’t try to stop you coming in and ruining the street for her. Why don’t you engage in a little reciprocity?”

“That’s the thing,” the older woman broke in in an anxious voice. “Hattie—Harriet—Mrs. Frizell—has never been an easy neighbor, but she minds her own business as long as you mind yours. Only, I’m kind of worried, I haven’t seen her since yesterday morning, so when I saw this gentleman ringing her bell I went over to see what the problem was—”