Despite the lateness of the hour, small boys were racing after a soccer ball in the heavily fenced schoolyard. A stocky man with sparse white hair punctuated their screams with shouted directions in Spanish. After a minute or two he saw me at the locked gate and came over, asking in Spanish what I wanted.

“Ando buscando a el Padre.” I stumbled through the phrase in my schoolgirl Spanish.

He waved an arm toward the back of the church and said something so fast that I couldn’t follow it. Before I could ask for a repetition, two little boys ran over to tug at his arm and demand—as far as I could tell—a ruling on some dispute. I was immediately forgotten in the more important business of the moment.

I walked past the front of the church and found a narrow walkway leading to the rear. Chunks of pavement were missing, but someone had made a gallant attempt to spruce up the area. Scraggly rosebushes surrounded a dejected–looking statue that I assumed was St. Remigio himself. I picked an empty bottle of Four Roses from behind him and looked for a garbage bin. Finally, not wanting to present myself to the priest carrying a bottle, I tucked it into my handbag and rang a bell labeled FATHER LOU.

After a longish wait, when I was thinking the soccer coach might have been explaining that Father Lou was away, a harsh squawk startled me. I hadn’t noticed the intercom to the left of the door.

“This is V. I. Warshawski. I want to talk to the priest about one of his parishioners.” I didn’t think I could explain my errand intelligibly at a shout through a speaker.

After another long wait, the dead bolt snapped back and an old man in a T–shirt and slippers stood in the doorway. His upper body and neck had the thickness of a weight lifter. He looked at me as if assessing whether to pick me up and throw me off the stoop.

“Father Lou?”

“Are you with the police or the press?” He had the gravelly voice of the old Irish South Side.

“No. I’m a private investigator—”

“Whether you’re private or public, I won’t have you digging around in that boy’s past, trying to prove some slander about him.” He turned back inside and started to shut the door.

I put out a hand to brace the door; it took all my strength to keep a big enough crack open for me to cry out, “I’m not slandering Lucian Frenada. I’ve been trying to stop the Herald–Star from running their story on him and drugs. I’ve been trying to talk to Lacey Dowell, because she knows something about the true reason he was killed, but she won’t talk to me. I was hoping you might know something.”