She started shadowboxing me, and pretty soon we were chasing each other around the park, the dogs in hot pursuit and the two boys screaming with excitement from seeing grown–ups act like children. When we flopped back on the grass, gasping for breath, the conversation moved in a new direction.

Nonetheless, her wisecrack felt as though it were coming close to some truth that I wasn’t willing to face in myself. I wondered about it as I was driving home with Mr. Contreras and the dogs. Maybe Alex Fisher was right, that my blue–collar roots defined me. Would it make me feel guilty to enjoy a material success that my parents hadn’t achieved? In fact, that might have saved my mother’s life? She had died of cancer, a uterine cancer that metastasized because she hadn’t sought treatment when her symptoms first appeared.

Mr. Contreras’s conversation made it possible to defer any more serious self–examination. “Those two boys are awful cute, and the little one might make an athlete. They see anything of their old man?”

“Meaning that growing up with only a foster mother may make him a sissy?” I asked, but when he started coughing with embarrassment I let him off the hook and told him that Fabian was not exactly the athletic type. “He’s got a new girlfriend, some student half his age. Maybe she’s idealistic enough to think she wants to take on his first wife’s children, but I don’t know that they’d be better off.”

Chapter 16: A Friend of the Family

16 A Friend of the Family

The sun was still well above the midsummer horizon when we got back to the city. It was early enough and light enough to go down to the Trianon to check on Lacey. I knew Mary Louise was right, that touching anything Global was involved in was an invitation to disaster, but I needed to find out if they were actively trying to set me up. I dropped my neighbor and the dogs at the apartment and went south, first to my office to tack together a letter authorizing me to make inquiries, then on to the Gold Coast.

The doorman at the Trianon sent me to the head of the hotel’s security detail, since he was in checking his duty rosters for the upcoming week. I couldn’t believe my luck when I was ushered into the office: Frank Siekevitz had been a rookie who rode with my dad for a year right after my mother died. With the ethnic insularity of some Chicagoans, Siekevitz had clung to a mentor named Warshawski. That made him doubly delighted to see me; we spent a half hour catching up not just on our lives, but on the contemporary situation in Poland.

“You didn’t lose that big diamond tiara of yours at our reception for the French president, did you, Vicki?” he asked with a wink.