I have no memory of leaving the Internet café to go to my car or of driving to the South Side. I don’t remember if I stayed on Damen or went to the Ryan. I didn’t look for tails. I was an automaton moving through space. It wasn’t until I was walking away from the car that I came back to earth. I leaned against a light pole and sang a few vocal exercises, forcing myself to breathe, to get some semblance of calm for the hard interview ahead.

When I reached Fit for Your Hoof, Kimathi-Sawyer wasn’t on the street. I opened the door to the shop and parted the ropes to the interior. I’d forgotten the whistle and the recorded “Welcome to Chicago” announcement and flinched as they sounded.

The chess players were sitting at their board. The balding man with the paunch was still wearing his Machinists T-shirt; the skinny, darker one had on an outsize lumberjack’s shirt. Curtis Rivers stood behind the counter watching them play, a toothpick jutting at a jaunty angle from his mouth.

The Sun-Times was on the counter. My cousin’s picture had made the front page. HAVE YOU SEEN ME? the screamer headline read. The radio was still tuned to NPR. It was Worldview time in Chicago. The men had been talking, but when they looked up and saw me, the room became so quiet that even Jerome MacDonald seemed to sink to a whisper.

“You’re not welcome here,” Rivers said.

“Gosh, and you’ve been so subtle up to now I never would have guessed. Tell me about Steve Sawyer.”

“I’ll tell you all I’ve said before, which is you’ve got a hell of a nerve to come here and ask about him.”

“He changed his name legally to Kimathi, didn’t he, before the trial? But Lamont never went that far. He was Lumumba only to the inner Anaconda circle.”

Rivers shifted the toothpick from one side of his mouth to the other but didn’t speak. I saw a red handbag on one of the ropes made of the kind of leather that I love, a soft, supple calfskin.

“At his trial, Kimathi-Steve was expecting Lamont to show up with some pictures, wasn’t he? And Lamont never arrived.” I stuck up an arm and unclipped the bag.

“Ask your daddy about that, Ms. Detective. Oh, right, your daddy is dead. Pretty convenient, isn’t it?”

I looked inside the handbag. There was a zip compartment where you could put your wallet and a pocket that would just hold your cellphone. I was not going to lose my temper. And I wasn’t going to start yelling about my father.

“You remember George Dornick, of course, since you remember Tony Warshawski,” I said, still peering into the bag.

The cold eyes on the far side of the counter didn’t give anything away.