“He got thrown out of Guatemala,” I said. “I don’t know him well.”

Father Lou had met him during the Reagan years, when American churches sometimes gave sanctuary to El Salvadoran refugees. St. Remigio’s had sheltered a family that fled to Humboldt Park, and Morrell had come to do a story on them.

“Does a lot of good, Morrell. Not surprised he got thrown out of Guatemala. He’s always covering underdogs of one kind or another. If you were meeting him for a meal I suppose you must be hungry.”

He took me down a long unlit corridor to his kitchen, a cavern of a room, with a stove even older than the rotary phone. He didn’t ask me what I wanted, or even what I wouldn’t eat, but fried up a pan full of eggs with an expert hand. He ate three to my two, but I kept even with him on the toast.

When Lacey still hadn’t arrived at nine, we watched Murray’s show on a set in the parish hall. It was so old that Murray’s face danced around in a wavy line of reds and greens. The report was subdued and lacked Murray’s usual punch: he’d apparently been rattled by my information, however angrily he’d tossed me out this morning. Most of the report focused on the Mexico–Chicago drug route, with only ninety seconds on Lucian Frenada, “an up–and–coming entrepreneur whose untimely death means a lot of questions with no answers. Was he the point man for a drug ring, as the five kilos of coke found in his shop last week suggest? Was he murdered by associates he’d run afoul of? Or was he the innocent bystander his sister and other friends claim?”

Murray segued from that to footage of the shop, footage of the coke inside a bolt of T–shirting, and some old footage of Lacey and Frenada in front of the very church where I was sitting. “Father Lou Corrigan, who trained Lucian Frenada as the city champion lightweight boxer in this building, wouldn’t talk to Channel Thirteen, either about Frenada or his other prizewinning student, Lacey Dowell.”

He went on with details of Lacey’s life, showed footage of his two–week–old interview with her, and closed with a summary that seemed lame to me. Father Lou was furious, but I thought it was a much more muted report than Murray would have made without my input. Of course, the priest had known Frenada for thirty years. It was a personal story to him.