She smiled in embarrassment. “I didn’t come on his account, I’m afraid. But he told me you’re a detective, and you seem like the kind of person I need.”

Oh, boy. I do a good deed and I get a client. Who says we have to wait for our reward in heaven? When I ushered her into my office, she stood hesitantly in the doorway, looking around, the way people do whose ideas of private eyes are taken from Humphrey Bogart and James Ellroy movies.

“What is it you need detecting, Ms.-?”

“Lennon. Karen Lennon. It isn’t for me but one of my old ladies.” She sat on the couch and clasped her hands together on one plump knee. “I’m a chaplain. I work in the Beth Israel system and am assigned to Lionsgate Manor-it’s an assisted-living facility that Beth Israel runs-and my clients are mostly old and mostly women. One of my ladies, her son is missing. She and her sister, they’re the ones who raised him, they need to find him, it’s the only way they can be at peace before they die. I’ve been trying to figure out what I could do to help them. When I saw how compassionate you were with that homeless man and found out you were a detective, I thought I could probably trust you to treat my ladies right.”

“You know, not to turn down work, but the police have a whole department devoted to missing persons.”

“My ladies are African-American and very old,” Karen said. “They have bad memories of the police. A private detective wouldn’t carry all that baggage, in their eyes.”

“I don’t work for free, the way the cops would,” I said. “Or the Salvation Army-they have a service.”

“The Army says Miss Ella’s son’s been missing too long for them to do much for her, although they did file a report.” She hesitated. “She’s living on her small Social Security check, didn’t get a pension after all her years screwing gizmos together for the phone company. I looked you up online and saw the voluntary organizations you serve-women’s shelters, rape crisis, reproductive rights-I thought you probably would do pro bono work if the people were in dire need.”

My lips tightened. “I sometimes do pro bono work but not on missing persons, especially not a person who’s been missing for a long time. How long has it been, anyway, that the Salvation Army balked at searching?”

“I don’t know the details.” Karen Lennon looked at her hands. She wasn’t a skilled liar. She knew, and she thought I wouldn’t take the case if she told me. “Anyway, Miss Ella can explain it to you better than me. Her life’s been so hard, and it would ease the last stage of her journey if she saw someone was willing to help her out.”

“Someone will have to come up with money for my fee,” I said firmly. “Even if I don’t charge my full rate, which is a hundred fifty an hour, I cannot afford to pour time and money down a sinkhole in this economy. Does Lionsgate Manor have any kind of discretionary funds you can draw on?”

My old friend Lotty Herschel is the leading perinatologist at Beth Israel. We were having dinner later this evening. I could ask her, both about Karen Lennon and this Lionsgate Manor and whether Beth Israel might cough up money for a good cause. If it was, in fact, a good cause.

“Maybe if you have a conversation with Miss Ella, you can steer her toward a place she could afford.” Karen sidestepped my suggestion. “What harm can one meeting do you?”

OVER DINNER WITH LOTTY, I TOLD HER ABOUT MY RESCUE of Elton and Karen Lennon’s appearance in my life.

“Max knows more about the hospital’s subsidiaries and their staffs than I do,” she said when I asked what she knew about Karen Lennon and Lionsgate.

Max Loewenthal, Lotty’s longtime friend and lover, was executive director of Beth Israel Hospital and on the board of their holding company. Lotty called me the next day with his response. “Lennon sits on Beth Israel’s ethics committee. Max says she’s very young, but he thinks she has good judgment. As for your other question, do we have a discretionary fund, we have all kinds of odd funds for odd purposes but none to pay for private detectives to find the missing children of residents in our facilities. You’ll have to decide on your own what to do about that, my dear.”

I could have-should have-let Karen Lennon and her old ladies lie, but, after all, Lennon had stepped in to help with Elton. Three days later, when I found a free hole in my schedule, I drove out Roosevelt Road, past the gargantuan buildings the South Side hospital behe moths were erecting, to Lionsgate’s tired manor. It was a fifteen-story building, with a locked ward on the top two floors for Alzheimer’s and dementia patients, and a variety of apartments and nursing wards underneath. What a grim way to live, knowing the elevator might one day loft you skyward and only bring you down again in a box.

The security guard at the entrance directed me to Karen Lennon’s office. The place was so labyrinthine that I got lost a couple of times and had to stop for directions. At least everyone I asked seemed to know who the chaplain was, which meant she was doing a good job of covering her parish.

Lionsgate Manor was clean, but its last overhaul lay a long way in the past. The paint on the walls was chipped, and you could see where walkers and canes had pounded dents in the cracked linoleum flooring. Only a few hall lights were burned out or missing, but management used the lowest wattage possible, so even on a bright summer day the air was a dingy green, making me feel as though I were at the bottom of a dirty ocean.

When I finally reached Lennon’s office, she was talking to an older woman, a staff member, but she finished the conversation quickly and got up to escort me to Ella Gadsden’s apartment.

I mentioned Max Loewenthal’s name to the chaplain as we rode the elevator, and her face brightened. “So many executive directors are too focused on profit. Max remembers that the hospital only exists because it has a mission to care for human suffering.”

We got off on the ninth floor. Lennon led me briskly down the hall. As we went, the pastor warned me that Miss Ella’s manner could seem brusque. “Don’t let that put you off. She’s been through a lot, as I said at your office, and she puts on a tough veneer for protection.”

Karen Lennon knocked on the apartment door. After several minutes, after we heard the heavy thumping of someone who walked with a cane and the scrape of locks being undone, the door opened.

Miss Ella was a tall woman, and, despite the cane, she held herself ramrod straight. Home alone in the middle of the afternoon, she still wore stockings and a severely cut navy dress.

“This is Ms. Warshawski, Miss Ella. She’s here to talk with you about your son.”

Miss Ella inclined her head a fraction of an inch but ignored my outstretched hand.

“Call and let me know how you get on.” Karen Lennon let the comment float between Miss Ella and me. After a few questions about “Miss Claudia’s” condition, the chaplain trotted back down the hall.

I got off to a rocky start as soon as I walked in. The room was tiny and crammed with the mementos of Miss Ella’s life-tables and shelves stuffed with Hummel figurines, china vases, glass animals, a large bronze head of Martin Luther King, Jr… I knocked against a teetery table and rattled a tableau of china gazelles and zebras. Nothing fell, but Miss Ella muttered “Hmmpf,” adding, “Bull in a china shop,” in a loud undervoice. Only a small round table near the kitchenette was free of breakables, but it held Miss Ella’s workbasket, an enormous wicker affair that sprouted knitting needles like porcupine quills.

Martin Luther King, Jr.’s and Barack Obama’s portraits hung on either side of the wall-mounted television, framed religious texts stood among the figurines. “During your times of suffering and trial, when you see only one set of footprints, it was then I carried you,” I read, and “Try to live each day He sends / To serve my gracious Master’s ends.”