A week ago I might have driven out to the Baladine home, middle of the night or not. But only someone who had daring without judgment would do that. Or someone whose hamstrings weren’t so sore that she couldn’t run if she had to. Anyway, before leaping into action I should find out what man Robbie had seen on the news. There wasn’t any local television coverage this time of night, but if it was important—or grisly—the radio would carry the story.

“It’s midnight and hazy in Chicago, seventy–nine at O’Hare, eighty–one at the lakefront, going down to a low of seventy, with another muggy scorcher in store for us tomorrow. Sammy Sosa capped a sparkling June with his twentieth home run, the most in a month in major league history, but the Cubs dropped another one at Wrigley today, going two and eight over their last ten games.”

I drummed my fingers impatiently through another update of the Starr chamber’s slow grind; through the pious hypocrisies of the House Speaker and the President’s sincere bombast, through more mass murders in ex–Yugoslavia and riots in Indonesia.

“In local news, the drowning victim found late yesterday at Belmont Harbor has been identified as local Hispanic entrepreneur Lucian Frenada. It is not known when or how Frenada came to be in the water; the sister with whom he lived had reported him missing Saturday morning. Mrs. Celia Caliente says she does not know what would have taken her brother to Belmont Harbor, but that he was unable to swim. In other local news, accused killer—”

I snapped off the set. Lucian Frenada was dead. That’s why he hadn’t been answering his phone. I wondered how you got a man who didn’t know how to swim into the lake. I wondered how long it would be before I joined him.

I pulled on a shirt and tiptoed into the living room. If Baladine had one of those fancy listening devices tuned on my building, could it pick up the faint tap of Peppy’s toenails as she followed me? I slipped a finger between two slats of the blind and squinted at the street.

This part of Racine is close to the trendy bars of Wrigleyville, which means we get a lot of people trying to find parking. Even late on a Monday night, occasional knots of young men, made loudly cheerful by beer, swayed up the street. I stood for twenty minutes but didn’t see the same people pass twice.