“Little Petra’s talked about you—her big cousin, Vic, the detective. You’re Tony’s girl, right? Tony Warshawski was the staid and steady guy on the street,” he explained to his friends. “Bailed me and Peter out more than once, back when we were wilder than we can afford to be these days. Bet you don’t know that old Gage Park neighborhood, do you, Vic? Not much to detect there these days, except a boatload of poverty and crime a pretty gal like you shouldn’t touch.”

“Warshawski used to work for me in the PD’s Office, Harvey,” Arnie Coleman said. “She was always getting her hands dirty up to her nose.”

Krumas was surprised to have Coleman turn his party chitchat into something so venomous, and I was astonished, too. Who knew his animosity ran as deep as that after all this time?

“We had a pretty rough crew as clients, Mr. Krumas,” I said. “People like Johnny ‘the Hammer’ Merton. I don’t know if you remember him from the roaring sixties, but I guess he was quite a figure on the South Side in his day.”

“Merton?” Krumas frowned. “Name rings a bell, but I can’t …”

“Head of a street gang, Harvey,” Coleman said. “You probably saw his name in the papers when we finally got him locked up good and proper. After Vic here kept him loose for too many more years.”

“Is that the man you went to see yesterday?” Petra had popped up next to Krumas. “Vic drove out to the prison to visit him, and he’s, like, covered with snakes or something, didn’t you say?”

“Tattoos,” I explained to a startled Harvey.

“You haven’t taken up the baton again for Merton, have you, Vic? He’s locked up for a reason. No maverick investigator is going to come up with any evidence that will overturn his convictions.” Coleman announced.

“Oh, she’s not trying to get him out of jail,” Petra said. “She’s just working on a case that goes back to when you and Daddy lived in Gage Park, Uncle Harvey, some guy who went missing in a snowstorm or something. I made her drive me down to see the house Daddy lived in, and I couldn’t believe it! Like, it would totally fit into our basement in Overland Park.”

“A guy who went missing in a snowstorm?” Krumas was bewildered.

“The big snow of ’sixty-seven,” I explained, wondering at my cousin’s capacity for burbling forth disjoint news. I looked at Coleman and added, just to be malicious, “Black guy, a friend of Johnny Merton’s. They were protecting Dr. King from the rioters in Marquette Park in ’sixty-six. Were you already with the PD then, Judge? Did you make sure those good boys who threw bricks and stuff got acquitted?”