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my Glock into my over-the-shoulder rig and slipped on my jacket, leaving the cash on my desk. The lights at the end of the hall said the elevator was at the fourth floor and heading down. A sign warned that if you opened the door to the emergency stairwell next to the elevator shaft an alarm would ring. It was a lie. I took the steps two at a time.

NINE
    ROBERT AND JARIK DROVE fast through the morning traffic, shifting lanes just before delivery trucks put on their brakes in front of them, accelerating through intersections. I followed a few car lengths back. There’s no such thing as an invisible tail. If a driver is looking for you, you’ll be seen. Apparently Robert and Jarik weren’t looking.
    We went west out of the Loop, glided across three lanes onto the entrance ramp to the Dan Ryan, and sped south. Ten minutes later we exited into Beverly, a tree-lined neighborhood, once middle-class Irish, now mostly middle-class black.
    I figured the money that Robert and Jarik put on my desk came from someone who’d ordered them to persuade me to take it as a payoff. Who was backing them? Who wanted Judy Terrano’s murder to be pinned on Greg Samuelson? The real killer?
    Robert and Jarik pulled up next to a large, yellow house and climbed out of the SUV. I drove past and, a half block away, swung to the curb. I gave them a minute and walked back tothe yellow house. The yard was clean and neat, the lawn raked and green, the trees bright with fall color. An autumn wreath hung on the front door.
    I knocked on the door.
    After a long time a very dark-skinned housekeeper in her eighties opened it. The edges of her eyes drooped like they’d been weighed down by a century of tears. She said, “Yeesss?”
    â€œI’m here to see Robert and Jarik,” I said.
    Her jaw hardened. “Are you certain?”
    I said I was.
    â€œVery well.” She stood aside, let me in, and closed the door.
    The front hall was bright and tiled with slate. The air smelled like cedar smoke. A heavy mahogany sculpture of a naked girl stood to the left inside the entrance with breasts so perky you could hang hats on them.
    The housekeeper led me up the hall and knocked on a closed door. The door opened a crack and the head of a kid in his late teens appeared. The woman said, “A man is here for Robert and Jarik.”
    The kid disappeared behind the door. I was tired of the show, so I reached for the knob, but the woman stepped in my way and hissed, “Patience.”
    The kid opened the door again.
    A tall black man, dressed all in gray, his broad head shaved bald, stood by a large, dark-wood desk. He looked ninety or ninety-five years old at least, but his chest was broad and he stood straight and solid. Robert and Jarik stood behind the tall man. If they were surprised to see me, they didn’t show it. Another man, about forty years old, sat in a wheelchair. He was an enormous man in vertically striped pants and a horizontally striped shirt. He stared at the tall man with dull eyes anda dull smile, and slowly and silently clapped big long hands. Saffron drapes, bunched at the bottom, were pulled shut over what must have been a large window. A black-and-gold-patterned mud cloth hung on the wall behind the desk. A stick of cedar incense wafted into the air from a tray on a sideboard. The room looked like a movie set for a 1970s film about an island dictator.
    â€œAh, Mr. Kozmarski,” said the old man with a warm smile, as if he’d expected me.
    I nodded. “And you are?”
    â€œI’m William DuBuclet.”
    His name flashed back to me from when I was a kid. William DuBuclet had been a controversial leader in black Chicago from the early sixties until the eighties, starting in the civil rights movement when he’d pushed for a mix of violent and peaceful action, mostly violent. Later, if I remembered right, DuBuclet had gone back to school and written a book on ghetto politics. He’d