At first I was too angry to think, but I made myself calm down, hobbled around the apartment, studied Lotty’s art collection. Including an alabaster figurine of Andromache that I’d recovered for her by the same methods she and Mary Louise were criticizing in me today. No, dwelling on that was only making me angry all over again.

I drank a glass of water and went back to the balcony to stare at the lake. At the edge, the line where lake meets sky, a cluster of sailboats looked like bits of white paper glued to a child’s collage. I wanted to be on that remote horizon, but I had no way to reach it.

What didn’t I see and know about Baladine? Of course it was Poilevy who got him that contract out in Coolis, you didn’t have to be Sherlock Holmes’s smarter brother to figure that out. But bury a body, no questions asked, as Mary Louise had said, meant Poilevy had mob ties in Du Page County. One of her old pals must have warned her about him while I was in Georgia—probably Terry Finchley.

It also didn’t take a genius to figure that Detective Lemour could do mob work on the side, not after what I’d seen of him on Saturday. And he could do it in the suburbs. Chicago cops were required to live inside the city limits, but no ordinance forbade their moonlighting in the collar counties if they wanted to. We’d had two police superintendents with ties to the mob in recent years, and I guess you have to start somewhere.

Lemour must be on Poilevy’s payroll. No, not Poilevy’s. The House Speaker wasn’t going to get his hands dirty in a way that a reporter like Murray—like Murray used to be—could uncover. Lemour was on someone’s payroll. But I already knew that. It was obvious Saturday afternoon when his unnamed boss had phoned, told him to let me go.

What I couldn’t make sense of was how all this had mushroomed out of Nicola Aguinaldo’s death. What did Lucian Frenada know that mattered to Baladine or Poilevy? Something about the Mad Virgin T–shirt dress Aguinaldo was wearing when she died. Would Lacey Dowell know? And would she tell me if she did?

I looked up the Hotel Trianon number. The operator asked me to spell my last name, put me on hold for a moment, and then said Ms. Dowell wasn’t available. Had Ms. Dowell returned from Santa Monica I asked.

“All I can tell you is that Ms. Dowell isn’t available.” She hung up crisply.