He flashed a grin. “At the time, I was ready to break my cello over their heads. The only thing that stopped me was its age. Now I can shrug them off with good grace. Or’ and I will play her concerto at the Albert Hall this winter. She should get the response she deserves then. We raised a good-sized amount for Chicago Settlement; I keep reminding myself that that’s the only reason we did it anyway.”

“If I’d known my ex-husband was going to be filling the place with lawyers and tycoons, I could have warned you what the audience would be like. At least I can promise you he won’t be in London.”

He laughed and waited by the edge of the drive until I’d backed into the street. He didn’t look much like Max, but he’d inherited his father’s beautiful manners.

I honked at a maroon Honda that had suddenly decided to turn into traffic from a driveway. I turned the radio back on in time to hear Ellen Coleman’s nausea again over finding the bloated body in the Sanitary Canal. I suddenly remembered Mitch Kruger. With the emotion I’d packed into worrying about Harriet Frizell I hadn’t had a thought to spare today for the missing machinist.

Stickney. That was miles west of Kruger’s hangouts around Damen. It couldn’t possibly be he. But the old man could have fallen into the water, wandering around drunk and disoriented. I didn’t know if the canal had a current. How far could a body travel in it in the course of the week since Kruger had last been seen?

I made the turn from Sheridan onto Lake Shore Drive. The traffic around me quickly speeded up to sixty, a good fifteen miles over the limit, but I dawdled along in the right-hand lane, trying to calculate how far away Stickney was and how fast the water would be moving to get a body down there. It wasn’t a straight run, though. A corpse might get caught in the pilings going round a bend and be hung up for a few days.

I realized I didn’t have the data to make any kind of analysis. Checking the traffic I moved the Trans Am into a higher gear. A Honda hovered a sedate two lengths behind me on the left; everyone else was zooming past at a good clip. I watched the Honda for a second to make sure it wasn’t gaining on me, flashed my signal, and gave the car some gas.

It’s stupid to buy a car whose cruising speed is one-twenty when the limit in your area is fifty-five or under. Stupider still to nose it toward its maximum without checking for blue-and-whites. One of them brought me down a few blocks north of Belmont. I pulled over to the verge and got out my license and bond card.