I put the letter into my briefcase so I could take it downtown and get it framed. As I put it away, I wondered what my good-natured, peaceable father had ever done that he regretted enough to mention in this letter. I couldn’t bear the notion that it had to do with Steve Sawyer.

I looked quickly through a cardboard box that held my father’s memorabilia. I had kept his citation for bravery from an armed robbery he’d stopped in 1962, his wedding ring, and a few other odds and ends. There was also a baseball. I held it for a moment. Like Mr. Contreras and his wife’s false teeth, I hadn’t remembered putting it away. Funny, my dad’s game had been Chicago slow-pitch. I didn’t think he’d ever even played hardball. I realized as I turned the ball over in my hands it was autographed by Nellie Fox. That made it even stranger, because Fox had played for the Sox, and my dad had been a Cubs fan.

South Side still means White Sox. When Tony was young, you could be beaten to a pulp for showing Cubs paraphernalia south of Madison Street. Comiskey Park was a few blocks from the stockyards where my dad grew up. His high school buddies were all Sox fans. Only Tony Warshawski and his brother Bernie, sick of the stench of blood and burning carcasses, decided to risk their lives by taking the El up to Wrigley Field.

So why had Tony kept a Sox ball? It was weather-beaten, with holes in the horsehide. Maybe he’d used it for target practice, although the holes were too small for bullets.

I jumped as I heard footsteps in my entryway, and then a man’s voice calling to ask if anyone was home. Petra had left my front door open on her way out, and Jake Thibaut, wandering down to check his mail, had noticed. I got to my feet, looking guiltily at my watch. I’d been mooning over family mementos far too long.

“What are those old reel-to-reels?” Thibaut pointed at the faded Scotch boxes on the floor.

“My mother’s old tapes. She was a singer who was trying to reclaim her voice after twenty years of breathing iron dust. I was hoping to find a place that would put them on a CD. But, then, I don’t know, my mother is dead. Maybe her voice won’t sound as wonderful as I remember it. Maybe I should just let these lay.”

“Iron dust?” Thibaut asked doubtfully.

“I grew up down by the old mills.” I looked at my watch again, and bent to pick up the tapes and the Nellie Fox ball.

“Give me the tapes. I have a friend with a studio. Even if you’ve romanticized your mother’s voice, don’t you want to hear it again?”

Of course I did. He took the tapes while I stuffed the ball into my briefcase with my papers and Tony’s letter. I tried to curb my impatience while Jake ambled to the hall, talking about the better quality of sound you got with some of the old eight-tracks than with digital equipment. He was helping me. I didn’t need to be belligerent over a few more minutes’ delay. I could curb my pit bull personality for three more minutes.

I tried to flash a Petra-type smile of thanks, with an apology for needing to run, and tore down the stairs, running to Roscoe to flag a cab.

WHEN I GOT HOME THAT EVENING, I FOUND A MASSIVE bouquet of peonies and sunflowers on my doorstep. A handmade card showed Petra sticking her head out of Snoopy’s doghouse. I couldn’t help laughing at such an apology. I called to tell her all was forgiven.

“Then can we go out tomorrow and look at the old family homes?”

“I suppose so, little cousin, I suppose so.”

I felt let down, as though she’d sent the flowers to manipulate me into taking her around town, not because she had genuinely wanted to reach out to me. I hung up and went out on my little back landing with a glass of wine and the day’s newspapers.

It had been another long, tiresome day. After my morning meeting downtown, I’d looked up Johnny Merton’s daughter, Dayo. She proved easy to find: she was working as a reference librarian for one of the big downtown law firms.

When I called, she was understandably cautious, but she did agree to meet for coffee in the downstairs lobby of the building where her firm had its offices. Talking to a private eye about her dad didn’t make her all warm and friendly, but I felt she was reasonably honest with me.

“I can’t tell you anything about the people in my parents’ old neighborhood,” she said when I explained that I was trying to find anyone who could talk to me about Lamont Gadsden or Steve Sawyer. “My mother left my dad when I was little. All I remember is, they had some huge fight after he locked us out of the apartment. It was that big blizzard, you know, and he wouldn’t let us in. She said he was in there with his other women doing drugs and she wouldn’t put up with it. So she took me to Tulsa to live with my grandmother and my aunties. All they ever did was talk about him like he was Satan in the flesh, and I got so sick of it. I came back here a few years ago to make up my own mind.”

That had been right before he was tried on the charges that sent him to Stateville. Dayo had used her training to do pro bono research for her father’s defense team. She’d been unimpressed with Greg Yeoman, but he was from the old neighborhood, and Johnny could no longer afford downtown counsel.

“I don’t think my father’s a saint, but he’s not the devil everyone wants me to believe. He did all this good for the community back in the sixties, and, if the cops and the FBI hadn’t railroaded him, he might have been a community organizer instead of a gang leader. Maybe then I could have led an ordinary family life instead of suffocating with my mother and my aunties in Oklahoma.” She gave a painful smile. “Maybe he’d be president today, starting out as a community organizer.”

When I asked how often she visited Johnny, I got the feeling that the gap between what she wanted him to be and the person he’d become was too big for her to bridge easily. She mumbled that she made the trip to Joliet for Christmas and Easter, sometimes Thanksgiving.

I brought the conversation back to Lamont and Steve Sawyer to see if she’d be willing to try to talk to Johnny about them. “They’ve been missing forty years now. Your dad is the one person who might know what happened to them, but he doesn’t trust me.”

She shook her head. “I’m not doing any work for the police. Maybe my dad did some things he shouldn’t have, but he’s sixty-seven. I don’t want him dying in prison because I helped tack another twenty-five years onto his sentence.”

“Maybe his old buddies aren’t dead,” I suggested. “Or maybe if they are, he didn’t kill them but knows where their bodies are.”

She was resolute. “Enough ‘maybes’ build a whole hive of bees, and I don’t want to be part of it.”

We left it at that. The conversation sent me home depressed. The only helpful news I’d gotten today was a text message from Karen Lennon’s friend, the nun who’d been with Harmony Newsome when she died. Sister Frances wrote that she’d be back in Chicago Sunday night and asked that I meet her at her apartment on West Lawrence after supper on Monday.

On Saturday, in response to Petra’s wheedling, I got up early to take her on a tour of our family’s South Side history. We started in Back of the Yards. Nowadays, nothing is left of the massive meat-packing houses that used to cover two city miles except for one small kosher shop, which provides lamb to Muslim and Jewish butchers around the Midwest.

Petra and I parked on Halsted and walked through the giant gates where drovers used to register their cattle shipments. It was hard for either of us to imagine the days when tens of thousands of cattle were unloaded every day and the drainage ditches ran with blood and offal.

“My dad used to tell me that during the Depression, when he was growing up here, the yards were the most popular tourist attraction in the city,” I told Petra. “When the World’s Fair was held along the lakefront in 1934, more people lined up here to watch cattle being killed than went to the fair.”