By the time I found a place to park near the Federal Building it was after ten. The Loop has been attacked by a development fervor the last few years that has turned the business district into a jammed, honking copy of New York. Many of the public garages have been scrapped to make way for skyscrapers taller than city code permits, so we have four times the traffic we used to vying for half as much parking.

My temper wasn’t the best by the time I made it to the sixteenth floor of the Dirksen Building. It wasn’t helped by the attitude of the receptionist, who looked briefly my way before returning to her typing with the curt announcement that Jonathan Michaels wasn’t available.

“Is he dead?” I snapped. “Out of town? Under indictment?”

She looked at me coldly. “I said he’s not available and that’s all you need to know.”

The door leading to the offices was kept locked. The receptionist or someone on the other side could buzz you in, but this woman clearly wasn’t going to let me wander back among the cubicles to find Jonathan. I sat in one of the plastic straight-backed chairs and told her I’d wait.

“Suit yourself,” she snapped, typing furiously.

When a business-suited black man came in she made a big play of friendliness with him, cooing over him and flirting a little. She flashed him a sugary smile and a wish for a nice day while releasing the lock. When I went in behind him she was too taken aback even to squawk.

My escort raised his brows at me. “You belong in here?”

“Yeah,” I said. “I pay your salary. And I’m here to talk to Jonathan Michaels about it.”

He looked momentarily startled, trying to figure out which Washington bureaucrat I might be. Then my meaning dawned on him and he said, “Well, maybe you’d better wait outside until Gloria tells you to go in.”

“Since she never bothered to find out my name or my business, I can’t imagine her interest in serving the taxpaying public is enormous.”

I knew where Jonathan’s office was and quickened my pace to move ahead of my attendant. I could hear him speeding up on the carpet behind me calling, “Miss-uh, miss,” as I opened the comer door.

Jonathan was standing in the outer office next to his secretary’s desk. When he saw me his rosy face lightened into a smile. “Oh, it’s you, Vic.”

I grinned at him. “Gloria call to tell you the Weather Underground was heading in to smash up your office and tear your golden hair out by the roots?”

“What’s left of it,” he said plaintively. He had gone partly bald, which made him look like a youthful Father William.

Jonathan Michaels had been a quiet idealist in my law school class. While students like me-locked in our liberal straitjackets, as one conservative JD put it-rushed off to become public defenders, Jonathan had surveyed social issues quietly. He had clerked in a federal circuit court for two years and then moved to the Department of Labor. He was now senior counsel for the Chicago district.

He took me into his office and shut the door. “I’ve got a dozen attorneys from St. Louis in the conference room. Can you do your business in thirty seconds?”

I explained fast. “I want to know if there’s any trail-through OSHA, the NLRB, the Contract Compliance people, or maybe Justice-of Ferraro and Pankowski. The sabotage and the suit.”

I wrote their names on one of his yellow pads and added Louisa Djiak. “She might have been a party. I don’t want to tell you the whole story now-there isn’t time-but I had the news personally from Gustav Humboldt. He’s not anxious to have it made public.”

Jonathan picked up his phone while I was still talking. “Myra, get Dutton over here, will you? I’ve got a research job.” He spelled it out in a few words and hung up. “Vic, next time, do me a big favor and do what the ad says-phone first.”

I kissed his cheek. “I will, Jonathan. But only if I can afford to spend two days playing phone tag before I talk to you. Ciao, ciao, bambino.”

He was back in the conference room before I had made it out the outer door. When Gloria saw me return to the reception area, she started typing furiously again. In a spirit of malice I waited outside for a minute, then peered around the door. She had picked up the Herald-Star.

“Get busy,” I said sternly. “The taxpayers expect value for their money.”

She gave me a glance of loathing. I went to the elevator laughing lightly to myself. I hope someday to outgrow such juvenile pleasures.

I walked the four blocks to my office. When I checked in with my answering service I learned that Nancy Cleghorn had been trying to reach me. Once early this morning, when I was out feeling sorry for myself along the lakefront, and again ten minutes ago. In the tiresome way that people have, she hadn’t bothered to leave a phone number.

I sighed aggrievedly and pulled my city directory from under a stack of papers on the windowsill. The Wabash el runs under my windows and the directory had a fine layer of soot on it, which I smeared on the front of my green wool dress.

Nancy was the environmental affairs director for Caroline’s community development group. I looked up SCRAP, which was a waste of time, since of course it was under South Chicago Reawakening Project. And that was a waste of time because Nancy wasn’t in, she hadn’t been in all day, and they didn’t know when to expect her. And no, they wouldn’t give me her home phone number, especially if I said I was her sister, because everyone knew she had four brothers, and if I didn’t stop harassing them, they’d get the police.

“Can you at least take a message? Without bringing the police into it, I mean?” I spelled my name slowly, twice, not that it would make any difference-it would still probably come out as Watchski or some other hideous mutation. The secretary said she’d see Nancy got the message in that tone that tells you they’re trashing the paper as soon as you hang up.

I turned back to the directory. Nancy wasn’t listed, but Ellen Cleghorn was still living on Muskegon. Talking to Nancy’s mother made a welcome change to the way I’d been greeted today. She remembered me perfectly, loved reading about me when my cases made the papers, wished I’d come down and have dinner with them sometime when I was in the neighborhood.

“Nancy bought herself a place in South Shore. One of those huge old mansions that’s falling to bits. She’s fixing it up on her own. Kind of a big place for a single woman, but she likes it.” She gave me the number and hung up with repeated dinner invitations.

Nancy wasn’t home. I gave it up. If she wanted me that badly, she’d call again.

I looked at the dirt on the front of my dress. My suit was still in the car. If I drove home now, I could change into jeans, dump the lot at the cleaners, and spend the rest of the afternoon on myself

It was close to five-as I was happily working my way through the syncope of “In dem Schatten meiner Locken,” without Kathleen Battle’s voice-when the phone rang. I left the piano unwillingly, and was even sorrier as soon as I picked up the receiver: it was Caroline.

“Vic, I need to talk to you.”

“Talk away,” I said resignedly.

“In person, I mean.” Her husky voice was urgent, but it always was.

“You want to drive up to Lake View, be my guest. But I ain’t trekking down to South Chicago this afternoon.”

“Oh, fuck you, Vic. Can you ever talk to me without being a total snot?”

“Can it, Caroline. You want to talk to me, speak. Otherwise I’m going back to what I was doing when you interrupted.”

There was a pause during which I could picture her gentian eyes smoldering. Then she said, so quickly I almost didn’t understand, “I want you to stop.”

I was confused for a minute. “Caroline, if you ever realized how upsetting I find it to have you spin me around in circles, you might understand why I sound like a snot to you.”