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and the cheap bars, so they attract clients like me: detectives on shoestring budgets, bail bondsmen, inept secretarial services.
    I put the car into a lot on Adams and walked the block north to the Pulteney. The snow, or rain, or whatever it was had stopped. While the skies were still sullen, the pavement was almost dry and my beloved Magli pumps were free from further insults.
    Someone had left a bourbon bottle in the lobby. I picked it up and carried it with me to throw out in my office. My long-awaited oil-tanker billionaire might show up and be put off by empty whiskey bottles in the lobby. Especially if he saw the brand.
    The elevator, working for a change, clanked lugubriously down from the sixteenth floor. I stuck the bottle under one arm and slid open an ancient brass grille with the other. If I never worked out I’d stay in shape just by coming to the office every day—between running the elevator, repairing the toilet in the ladies’ room on the seventh floor, and walking up and down the stairs between my fourth-floor office and the bathroom.
    The elevator grudgingly stopped at the fourth floor. My office was at the east end of the corridor, the end where low rents sank even further because of the noise of the Dan Ryan L running directly underneath it. A train was clattering by as I unlocked the door.
    I spend so little time in my office that I’ve never put much into furnishing it. The old wooden desk I’d bought at a police auction. That was it, except for two straight-backed chairs for clients, my chair, and an army-green filing cabinet. My one concession to grace was an engraving of the Uffizi over the filing cabinet.
    I picked up a week’s accumulation of mail from the floor and started opening it while I called my answering service. Two messages. I didn’t need to get in touch with Hatfield; he’d called me and would see me in his office at nine the next morning.
    I looked at a bill from a stationery company. Two hundred dollars for letterhead and envelopes? I put it in the trash and dialed the FBI. Hatfield wasn’t in, of course. I got his secretary. “Yes, please tell Derek I won’t be free tomorrow morning but three tomorrow afternoon will be fine.” She put me on hold while she checked his calendar. I continued through the mail. The Society of Young Women Business Executives urged me to join. Among their many benefits was a group life and health insurance plan. Derek’s secretary came back on the line and we dickered, compromising on two-thirty.
    My second message was more of a surprise and much more welcome. Roger Ferrant had called. He was an Englishman, a reinsurance broker whom I’d met the previous spring. His London firm had underwritten a ship that blew up in the Great Lakes. I was investigating the disaster; his firm was protecting its fifty-million-dollar investment. We hadn’t seen each other since a night when I’d fallen asleep—to put it politely—across from him at a posh steakhouse.
    I reached him at his firm’s apartment in the Hancock Building. “Roger! What are you doing in Chicago?”
    “Hello, Vic. Scupperfield, Plouder sent me over here for a few weeks. Can we have dinner?”
    “Is this my second chance? Or did you like my act the first time so well you want an encore?”
    He laughed. “Neither. How about it? Are you free this week anytime?”
    I told him I was free that very night and agreed to meet him at the Hancock Building for a drink at seven-thirty. I hung up in much better spirits—I deserved a reward for messing around in Rosa’s affairs.
    I quickly sorted through the rest of my mail. None of it needed answering. One envelope actually contained a check for three hundred fifty dollars. Way to pick your clients, Vic, I cheered silently. Before leaving, I typed out a few bills on the old Olivetti that had been my mother’s. She subscribed firmly to the belief that IBM had stolen both the Executive and Selectric designs from Olivetti and would have been