When I returned to my room, I found Conrad Rawlings in the visitor’s chair. Conrad is a cop. We’ve been friends, enemies, lovers, collaborators, off and on for over a decade.

I was happier to see him than I would have thought possible a few days earlier. “Have you been transferred up here?”

“Nope. Still down in your old ’hood. You and fire: you can’t leave it alone, can you?” The words were harsh, but his tone was sympathetic enough to take the sting out of them. “Your eyes going to be okay?”

“They tell me,” I said gruffly.

“I read the report. Nasty fire, that, killing a nun and all.”

“Was there any word about the accelerant?” I demanded. “It looked like it had to be rocket or jet fuel, it burned so fiercely and so fast.”

He shook his head. “Early days for forensic results. But fires are tricky. Gasoline could get the job done if the perp was lucky, you know that. So don’t go starting a conspiracy theory, trying to put cops or the FBI in your sights just because some woman from OEM rubbed you the wrong way.”

“Is that why you came up here?” I demanded. “To tell me to pull back from holding the feds accountable? Damn it, Conrad, they’ve been watching the Freedom Center. They could have done something besides watching it all unfold for them on their-”

“Whoa, there, Ms. W.! I’m not here on anybody’s business but my own.”

I looked at him, puzzled. Nothing I’d been working on lately involved South Chicago, but I waited for him to speak. Make the interrogation come to you, don’t race out to meet it. That was advice I’d always given my clients in my public defender days, and it’s the hardest advice to follow.

“You and fire, Ms. W.,” he repeated. “I don’t know if it follows you around or you bring it with you.”

He waited for a while. But when I still didn’t respond, he said, “You were in South Chicago last Saturday.”

In the trauma and drama of the last few days, I’d forgotten taking my cousin around the South Side. “How nice of you to come all the way up here to tell me.”

He smiled briefly, not warmly. “You stopped at a house on Ninety-second and Houston. You wanted to get inside.”

I watched him through my dark glasses.

“Any particular reason?” Conrad asked.

“I am damned tired of cops and feds asking me to justify every step I take. Is this Iran or America? Or isn’t there any difference anymore?”

“They had a fire Sunday night. When we got there, the lady, a Señora Andarra, told us two women had been there, and they said they had grown up in the house and wanted to look around. She was afraid they were from a rival gang to her grandson’s. She was afraid they set the fire to punish her for not letting them into the house.”

“That sounds like me, all right, gangbanger torching an old lady’s house.”

Conrad leaned forward. “You showed me the house once, the place where you grew up, your ma’s tree and everything.”

That was true. In the spring, before I left for Italy, I’d been coaching a basketball team in my old high school, and Conrad and I had occasionally had a drink together after the games. One evening, in a fit of nostalgia, I’d shown him my home, along with the place on the breakwater where Boom-Boom and I used to jump into Lake Calumet, and various other high points of my childhood.

I sat up. “I have a young cousin who’s spending the summer in Chicago. She wanted a tour of historic Warshawski family sites. If you go to Back of the Yards and Gage Park, you’ll find we’ve been there, too. If those two places have been torched, I’ll start to get seriously interested in your questions. Was anyone hurt at the Houston Street fire?”

“Nope. Old lady got herself, her daughter, her grandkids out. And, not only that, in a rare moment of civic cooperation the fire department came before things got out of hand. Anyway, there never really was a fire, so the structure is okay.”

“That’s a mercy.” I lay back down again.

“You going to ask me how it started?”

“Faulty wiring? Geraldo doing reefer in bed?”

“Smoke bomb. Someone broke a window and threw it into the living room while they were eating supper. Everyone ran out the back door, and a couple of lowlifes came in through the broken window and helped themselves while the family was waiting for the fire department.”

“Scum,” I agreed. “I’m very sorry to know this, of course, especially if they broke one of those windows with the prisms across the top. Those prisms were what made my mother feel she could tolerate living in South Chicago.”

“You don’t know anything about this, Ms. W.?”

I knew I was furious, but I was still so tired, and lethargic from the residue of morphine in my system, that I couldn’t feel the anger. “Conrad, I’m tired, I’m in pain, I held a burning woman in my arms a few nights ago and couldn’t save her life. Don’t make me play twenty questions. And don’t accuse me of things you know are simply beyond me. One more innuendo about this, about how I might be implicated in an attack on the people who live in my childhood home, and you will never speak to me again. Even if you want to buy me World Series tickets, you’ll funnel your invitation through my attorney.”

He sucked in a breath. “The lady says she saw you. She says she went around to the front of the house to wait for us and the fire department and saw you across the street watching it all.”

I made a face. “Oh, please. It was dark, right? And she’d seen me once through an inch-wide chain bolt. She saw someone else and is confused. Or she knows who really did it and is so frightened of that person that she wants to finger a stranger.”

Conrad stood up and looked down at me. “I believe in you, Vic. I really do. I’m the only person in the Fourth District who knows you grew up in that house, and I’m keeping it that way. For now. But I’d like to put you in a lineup for Señora Andarra… for my own peace of mind, if nothing else.”

THE NEXT FEW DAYS WERE A TIME OF FRUSTRATING INACTION while I let my eyes heal enough that I could get to work. Lotty took me home with her, and I continued to build up my strength, using the gym in her building’s basement, making phone calls during the day while she was at her clinic or the hospital.

My first day at Lotty’s, Mr. Contreras came over in the morning before Lotty left for work. He brought a small suitcase with clothes that Petra had packed; he would have been embarrassed to rummage in my underwear drawer himself. He also brought the dogs, which annoyed Lotty because her apartment is full of glass tables and museum-quality artwork, including a small statue of Andromache salvaged from the ruins of her grandparents’ art collection. Mitch’s exuberant energy made her so tense that she terminated the visit quickly, on grounds that I didn’t have the stamina for it.

“You mean you don’t,” I said. But I took the dogs out to the hall behind the kitchen, where we waited for the service elevator.

“Peewee wants to visit,” Mr. Contreras said. “I told her I was sure you’d want to see her.”

“Absolutely. The sooner, the better. Can you go up to my place and collect my phone charger so she can bring it with her?” I couldn’t tie up Lotty’s phone but I needed to start connecting myself to the land of the living. “And here are my car keys. Get her to drive you over to pick up my car on Kedzie before I get a hundred meter violations and twenty boots.”

I didn’t think I could stand to use my old handbag again. When I had stuck my hand in to fish out my keys, it came out covered in ash. Sister Carolyn had known I was a PI only because my license had been the plastic on top when she looked at my wallet. The credit cards underneath it had fused together with my driver’s license. I called my card companies for replacements, but I’d have to go in person to the Secretary of State’s Office for a new PI license.