I sat up. “I have a young cousin who’s spending the summer in Chicago. She wanted a tour of historic Warshawski family sites. If you go to Back of the Yards and Gage Park, you’ll find we’ve been there, too. If those two places have been torched, I’ll start to get seriously interested in your questions. Was anyone hurt at the Houston Street fire?”

“Nope. Old lady got herself, her daughter, her grandkids out. And, not only that, in a rare moment of civic cooperation the fire department came before things got out of hand. Anyway, there never really was a fire, so the structure is okay.”

“That’s a mercy.” I lay back down again.

“You going to ask me how it started?”

“Faulty wiring? Geraldo doing reefer in bed?”

“Smoke bomb. Someone broke a window and threw it into the living room while they were eating supper. Everyone ran out the back door, and a couple of lowlifes came in through the broken window and helped themselves while the family was waiting for the fire department.”

“Scum,” I agreed. “I’m very sorry to know this, of course, especially if they broke one of those windows with the prisms across the top. Those prisms were what made my mother feel she could tolerate living in South Chicago.”

“You don’t know anything about this, Ms. W.?”

I knew I was furious, but I was still so tired, and lethargic from the residue of morphine in my system, that I couldn’t feel the anger. “Conrad, I’m tired, I’m in pain, I held a burning woman in my arms a few nights ago and couldn’t save her life. Don’t make me play twenty questions. And don’t accuse me of things you know are simply beyond me. One more innuendo about this, about how I might be implicated in an attack on the people who live in my childhood home, and you will never speak to me again. Even if you want to buy me World Series tickets, you’ll funnel your invitation through my attorney.”

He sucked in a breath. “The lady says she saw you. She says she went around to the front of the house to wait for us and the fire department and saw you across the street watching it all.”

I made a face. “Oh, please. It was dark, right? And she’d seen me once through an inch-wide chain bolt. She saw someone else and is confused. Or she knows who really did it and is so frightened of that person that she wants to finger a stranger.”