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ten, I decided to tune back in to the city by turning on the least offensive of Chicago’s TV news shows.
    Mary Sherrod’s sophisticated black face filled the screen. Serious look. Top-breaking story is sad. I poured the last drops of wine into my glass.
    “Police tonight say they have no suspects in the brutal murder of Chicago doctor Malcolm Tregiere.”
    It took the close-up of Malcolm’s thin, fine face—his medical-school graduation photo—and the next few sentences for the news to register. A close-up of Malcolm’s apartment. I had been there, but it hadn’t looked anything like this. His family was Haitian and the place he’d rented on the fringes of Uptown had been furnished with many artifacts from his homeland.On the television screen, it looked like the aftermath of Tet—the few pieces of furniture were smashed, the masks and pictures had been pulled from the walls and shattered.
    Sherrod’s voice continued mercilessly. “Police suspect that housebreakers surprised young Dr. Tregiere, who had spent a grueling twenty-four hours on call at Beth Israel Hospital in Uptown and was home sleeping during the day, at a time when most apartments are vacant. He was found beaten to death at six this evening by a friend who expected to join him for dinner. By air time at ten tonight, no arrests had been made.”
    The picture changed to an anorectic, hysterical woman excited about lean sausage patties. Malcolm. This didn’t happen. I made it up—it was as real as the grinning woman and her frenzied children eating sausages. I turned off the TV and turned on WBBM, Chicago’s all-news station. The story was identical.
    My right leg felt damp. I looked down and saw I had dropped my wineglass. Champagne had soaked my jeans and the glass lay in chunks on the floor—cheap five-and-dime crystal, it didn’t shatter, just fell apart.
    Lotty wouldn’t know, not unless the hospital had called her. She had a streak of European intellectual arrogance in her—she never read Chicago papers, never listened to Chicago news. All the information she had about the world came from
The New York Times
and
The New Statesman.
We’d argued about it before—that’s swell if you live in New York or Manchester. But Chicagodoesn’t exist around you? You walk around with your nose in the air and your head in the clouds because you’re too good for the city that gives you your living?
    I realized with a start that I was screaming at Lotty in my head, screaming with rage that had nothing to do with her and little to do with the
Times.
I had to be angry with someone.
    Lotty answered on the first ring. Dr. Hatcher had phoned her from Beth Israel a few minutes earlier. The news had taken a while to reach the hospital because the friend who found him was an artist, not part of the medical community.
    “The police want to talk to me in the morning. I was his supervising physician, I and Dr. Hatcher together—I guess they want to talk to us about whom he knew—but how could this be done by anyone he knew? Are you free? Can you come with me? Even on such a matter I do not like talking to the police.”
    Lotty had grown up in Nazi-dominated Vienna. Somehow her parents had managed to ship her and her brother to English relatives in 1938, but men in uniform still made her uneasy. I agreed reluctantly—not because I didn’t want to help Lotty, but because I wanted to stay far from the Alvarados and the dead baby, and that meant from Malcolm, too.
    Just as I was climbing into bed my phone rang. It was Carol, troubled about Tregiere. “Diego and Paul and I have been talking, Vic. We need your ideas. You don’t think it could have been Fabiano, do you? He wasso crazy the other night. You don’t think he would kill Malcolm because of Consuelo and the baby, do you?”
    I smiled sardonically to myself: No one was going to let me stay away from the murder. “You know, Carol, I really don’t believe he would. How much did he care for Consuelo? And