Jill always asked and Ted always refused. Usually he took the 7 train to Broadway, where he could grab a gypsy cab. It beat sitting in a Town Car waiting to get out of the parking lot for half an hour or paying blackmail rates to an Uber driver. But that night Ted had a different plan. He wanted to see the site of the planned La Bella Casa tower, to walk those streets, and to get a feel for what the project would mean to the community. And maybe find a clue to understanding how and why Barbara Miller had let her real estate portfolio drift away.

“I need to stretch my legs,” he answered. “Can you get away again anytime soon? Tomorrow?”

She scrunched her face into a show of disappointment. “Not likely and definitely not tomorrow—Jacqueline’s back tomorrow, and I hate to push it. She does not approve of our shared passion for baseball.”

“Your wife does not approve of me,” Ted said.

“True,” Jill said with a sad smile. “But call me.”

He did not point out, as he had many times before, that phone calls could be made in both directions. “I will. Give my regards to the family.”

She rolled her eyes in response. Wasn’t going to happen.

Citi Field sits a few blocks north of Flushing Meadows Corona Park, an expanse larger than Manhattan’s Central Park but only a third the size of Pelham Bay Park across the East River. The park is the showpiece of Queens, with facilities for a wide variety of sports, both professional and amateur. It is surrounded, bisected, and overlooked by highways and subway and railroad lines. The remaining structures from the 1964 World’s Fair, still standing, though showing some signs of age and neglect—a mammoth globe, the pavilion, a skating rink, and the odd mushroom-shaped towers—are features deliciously out of time.

Ted saw Jill safely into the chauffeured Town Car and gave a short wave before walking out of the lot. Roosevelt Avenue crossed over the Grand Central Parkway with the occasional train rattling overhead, drowning out the honking horns of disgruntled drivers heading home. He found himself sharing the sidewalk with a mixed group of tired fans—all men or teenage boys, all smiling in the wake of an unexpected win. From snatches of conversations he overheard, he thought there had to be three or four continents and a dozen countries represented, all on a ten-foot length of New York sidewalk.