It was close to five o’clock when I finally pulled off the road at the top of Queen Anne’s Lace Lane and walked down to Alito’s house. He lived in a yellow split-level shoehorned onto a tiny lot, his neighbors as close as they would have been on the South Side of Chicago. But here, he was just a few steps from the water.

As I’d sat in the tollway traffic, I’d tried to come up with a strategy for getting Alito to talk to me. At one of my PI training seminars, we’d reviewed “techniques for conducting a successful interview.” Get your subject to think you’re on his side. Don’t be confrontational. Establish some common ground that he has to assent to. “So, Larry, did you torture Steve Sawyer?” would not be a good opening gambit. Instead, try, “So, Larry, let’s agree that it was a necessary and good thing to torture Steve Sawyer.”

Alito’s wife answered the door. She was about her husband’s age, somewhere in her sixties, in khaki cargo pants, with faded red curls that reminded me a little of the aging Gwen Verdon. She didn’t smile or greet me with any warmth, but she didn’t slam the door in my face, either. When I explained that I was the daughter of one of her husband’s old partners on the force and hoped Detective Alito and I could talk, her expression lightened minimally.

“Larry just got back from golf. He’s showering. He’ll be down in a minute or two. I’m making supper right now …”

The sentence trailed away vaguely, as if she were afraid I might want to be fed. I assured her that I didn’t need food, or even very much time. Should I wait in my car? That galvanized her into inviting me to come out back, where she was getting ready to put burgers on the grill.

The cramped family room made me think of Miss Ella. Like her home, this one was filled with small china figurines. Ms. Alito seemed to collect angels and kittens rather than African jungle creatures, but everything was clean and carefully arranged, down to little dishes of play milk in front of the kittens. I felt my scalp twitch. There was a sense of desperation in the displays. Still, as I trailed after her through the family room to the kitchen, I made appropriate noises about charm and so on.

“It’s small, of course, but it’s just Larry and me. We have the one son, but he lives in Michigan, and, when he comes to visit, we just put the grandkids in bunk beds on the sunporch. You sit out here on the deck, and I’ll go tell Larry you’re here.”