“Hi, Izzy,” he answered in a flat tone. “What’s up?”

He watched Lucy get in the front seat and start the car. She was about to drive off. And again he had no leads on this case.

“Mayburn, you’re going to help me.”

“Excuse me?”

“I know you turned me down yesterday, but I need some serious assistance here. The cops aren’t looking into Forester’s death. The feds are investigating Sam, but they’ve pretty much told me to move on with my life. The thing is, I think Sam must be gone for a reason. I’ve got to figure out what that reason is. And I have to find out if someone hurt Forester-whether it was Sam or someone else-because I told him I would. This is the last thing I can do for him.”

“Look, take a breath. Can you log in to Sam’s e-mail?”

“I did that already. He hasn’t sent anything since he disappeared. Doesn’t seem to have received any e-mails that are suspicious.”

“Okay, try to find out if he took any flights.”

“He usually flies United. I got onto their site with his password, but there was nothing except the flight for our honeymoon.”

Mayburn grunted, impressed by Izzy’s tenacity. “Credit cards?”

“Checked ’em. Nothing. C’mon, help me. Give me a discounted rate or something.”

Mayburn watched Lucy’s glittery blue car pull out of the parking lot. He thought about how to package his rejection to Izzy. But then, the spark of an idea came to him.

“I might be able to pool together some money for you,” Izzy was saying. “It won’t be much, but-”

Lucy’s car disappeared into the two streams of traffic flowing down Clybourn. He smiled for the first time that day. “Izzy,” he said, interrupting her, “I think I know a different way you can pay me.”

An hour after I’d called him, I was sitting with John Mayburn at RL, the restaurant owned by Ralph Lauren, right around the corner from Ralph’s store on Michigan Avenue. It was apparently a favorite of Mayburn’s, which kind of surprised me. It was an elegant, refined place, and although Mayburn wasn’t exactly coarse or unrefined, I wouldn’t have expected him to suggest it. The place was cozy and cavelike, decorated in deep, rich mahogany. The walls were packed with oil paintings and photographs, to which there was little continuity of theme. A canvas showing a turn-of-the-century hunter hung next to a black and white of Mick Jagger.

Usually a table was hard to come by, but since it was between the lunch and dinner rush, we scored a banquette in the back. Still, the tucked-away positioning couldn’t stop the paranoid feeling I had that someone was watching me. Except it wasn’t paranoia. The feds probably were watching me.

I grabbed the chair with my back to the room, so that if someone was tailing me, they wouldn’t be able to see what I was saying. The thing was, although I didn’t have anything to hide, the thought of someone observing me, studying me, was unsettling. As Mayburn took a seat on the banquette, I couldn’t help but swivel my head around. Was the man by the door an agent, the one looking into the crowd as if searching for another diner? Could it be the guy in the blue business suit getting seated by himself?

“What’s wrong?” Mayburn asked.

I turned back to him. “Nothing.” I wasn’t sure if I was supposed to talk about the fact that I was probably being followed.

“I have a proposal for you. I’ll work your case if you work mine.”

“You need some legal work?”

“No, I need a female operative to assist on a few cases, one in particular.”

“A female operative?” The waiter came and took our drink orders-sparkling water for me, an iced tea for Mayburn.

“Here’s the deal.” Mayburn pushed aside his leather menu and leaned forward on his elbows. He was wearing a nice camel sport coat over black pants. “I’ll help you try and track down Sam, and we’ll look into what happened to Forester Pickett. If he was killed, we’ll try to find who did it. In return, I want you to work a case of mine.”

“I’m not even sure what that means.”

“Let me explain something. A lot of times I’ll conduct surveillance, and I’ll find myself in a place where it would be much, much easier to collect intel if I were a woman.”

“Like a women’s locker room?”

“Sure, or at a coffee shop during the day where there are a lot of young moms, or at a pilates class that’s taken mostly by women.”

“You take pilates?” I laughed.

“No, I don’t take pilates. That’s the point. There are a lot of activities or venues that are populated predominantly by women. The other point is that if anyone has even the slightest instinct they are being followed, they rarely look for a woman. Women slip by easier in this world.”

I looked around. How surreal that I was likely under surveillance by the feds, while Mayburn seemed to be asking me to conduct surveillance on someone else.

“So, I’ve been hiring freelance female operatives,” Mayburn continued. “Usually someone who’s got a P.I. license.”

“I don’t have that.”

“I know. But what you have is a look-a young, professional look. A look that says, ‘I live in Old Town or Lincoln Park or Gold Coast and you wouldn’t catch me dead on the South Side.’”

“Hey, that’s not true! I go to the South Side with my friend Maggie to visit her family.”

“Fine, but you’re not there a lot. You have a gentrified Northside look, and that’s what I need here. You’re not going to testify in this case. You’d just help lead me to evidence I might use in the future.”

“What about the freelancers you usually work with?”

“Those women aren’t a help to me with this situation. They’re a little tougher around the edges. They don’t always blend so well.”

“But they’ve got the training. I wouldn’t know what I was doing.”

“I’ll teach you.”

“I don’t have any background.” But it occurred to me that instruction from Mayburn might make it easier to tell when I was being watched.

“You actually have a lot of background,” Mayburn said. “One of the key skills an operative needs is how to listen. Most lawyers, although they never shut up, know how to do that. Of course, there’s a different kind of listening involved with this work, but I can teach you that.”

The waiter came to take our food order. I looked at my menu, but I couldn’t concentrate.

Mayburn ordered the lobster club. “I always get that,” he said.

I kept studying the menu, trying to let the last few minutes sink in. I was being asked to act as a private investigator. How had that happened? Mayburn said he’d teach me, but did I have the time to pick up the skills I’d need? I didn’t even know what those skills were.

But what other option did I have? Sam seemed to be slipping away from me fast. And I owed it to Forester to do anything I could to look into his death.

“Ma’am?” the waiter said.

I focused, ordered the first thing my eyes landed on, and then looked at Mayburn.

He stared back at me. “What do you think?”

“When would we start?”

He glanced around the restaurant and grinned. “Right now.”