“I came up with the money.” Isaiah Sommers looked reflexively toward the hall: his wife, who had let me in, had made clear her disapproval of his exerting himself for his uncle’s widow. “And believe me, it wasn’t so easy. If you’re worried about your fee, don’t be: I can take care of that. And if you can find out who took the money, maybe we can get it back. We’d even give you a finder’s fee. The policy was worth ten thousand dollars.”

“I don’t need a finder’s fee, but I will need to see the policy.”

He lifted a presentation copy of Roots from the coffee table. The policy was folded carefully underneath.

“Do you have a photocopy of it?” I asked. “No? I’ll mail you one tomorrow. You know that my fee is a hundred dollars an hour, with a minimum of five hours’ work, right? I charge for all non-overhead expenses, as well.”

When he nodded that he understood, I pulled two copies of my standard contract from my case. His wife, who had obviously been lurking outside the door, came in to read it with him. While they slowly went through each clause, I looked at the life-insurance policy. It had been sold to Aaron Sommers by the Midway Agency, and it dated back, as Isaiah said, some thirty years. It was drawn on the Ajax Life Insurance company. That was a help: I had once dated the guy who now headed claims operations at Ajax. I hadn’t seen him for a number of years, but I thought he would probably talk to me.

“This clause here,” Margaret Sommers said, “it says you don’t refund money if we don’t get the results we’re looking for. Is that right?”

“Yes. But you can halt the investigation at any point. Also, I will report to you after my initial inquiries, and if it doesn’t seem as though they’re going anywhere, I’ll tell you that frankly. But that’s why I ask for a five-hundred-dollar earnest payment up front: if I start to look and don’t find anything, people are tempted not to pay.”

“Hmmph,” she said. “It doesn’t seem right to me, you taking money and not delivering.”

“I’m successful most of the time.” I tried not to let fatigue make me cranky-she wasn’t the first person to raise this point. “But it wouldn’t be fair to say I always am able to find out what someone wants to know. After my first inquiry, I can estimate the amount of time it will take to complete the investigation: sometimes people see that as more than they’re willing to invest. You may decide that, too.”

“And you’d still keep Isaiah’s five hundred dollars.”

“Yes. He’s hiring my professional expertise. I get paid for providing that. Just as a doctor does, even when she can’t cure you.” It’s taken years in the business to become hard-hearted-or maybe headed-about asking for money without embarrassment.

I told them if they wanted to talk it over some more they could call me when they’d made a decision, but that I wouldn’t take the uncle’s policy or make any phone calls until they’d signed a contract. Isaiah Sommers said he didn’t need more time, that his cousin’s neighbor Camilla Rawlings had vouched for me and that was good enough for him.

Margaret Sommers folded her arms across her chest and announced that as long as Isaiah understood he was paying for it, he was free to do as he pleased; she wasn’t keeping books for that mean old Jew Rubloff to throw her money away on Isaiah’s useless family.

Isaiah gave her a hard look, but he signed both contracts and pulled a roll from his trousers. He counted out five hundred dollars in twenties, watching me closely while I wrote out a receipt. I signed the contracts in turn, giving one back to Isaiah, putting the other with the policy in my case. I jotted down his aunt’s address and phone number, took the details for the funeral parlor, and got up to leave.

Isaiah Sommers escorted me to the door, but before he could close it I heard Margaret Sommers say, “I just hope you don’t come to me when you’ve found yourself throwing good money after bad.”

I turned down the walk on his angry response. I’d had my fill of bitterness lately, what with Lotty’s arguing with Max, and now the Sommerses taking each other on. Their snarling seemed endemic to the relationship; it would be difficult to be around them often. I wondered if they had friends and what the friends did when faced with this sniping. If Max and Lotty’s quarrel hardened into the same kind of misery I would find it intolerable.

Ms. Sommers’s gratuitous remark about the mean old Jew she worked for also hit me hard. I don’t like mean-spirited remarks of any kind, but this one jarred me, especially after listening to Max and Lotty go ten rounds on whether he should speak at today’s conference. What would Margaret Sommers say if she heard Max detail his life when the Nazis came to power-forced to leave school, seeing his father compelled to kneel naked in the street? Was Lotty right, was his speaking a demeaning exposure that would do no good? Would it teach the Margaret Sommerses of the world to curb their careless prejudices?

I’d grown up a few blocks south of here, among people who would have used worse epithets than Margaret Sommers’s if she’d moved next door. If she sat on a stage rehearsing the racial slurs that she probably grew up hearing, I doubted that my old neighbors would change their thinking much.

I stood on the curb, trying to stretch out the knife points in my trapezius before starting the long drive north. The curtains in the Sommerses’ front window twitched. I got into my car. The September nights were drawing in; only the faintest wisp of light still stained the horizon as I turned north onto Route 41.

Why did people stay together to be unhappy? My own parents hadn’t shown me a Harlequin picture of true love, but at least my mother struggled to create domestic harmony. She had married my father out of gratitude, and out of fear, an immigrant alone on the streets of the city, not knowing English. He’d been a beat cop when he rescued her in a Milwaukee Avenue bar where she’d thought she could use her grand opera training to get a job as a singer. He’d fallen in love and never, to the best of my knowledge, fallen out of it. She was affectionate toward him, but it seemed to me her true passion was reserved for me. Of course, I wasn’t quite sixteen when she died: what does one know of one’s parents at that age?

And what about my client’s uncle? Isaiah Sommers was certain that if his uncle had cashed in his life-insurance policy, he would have told his aunt. But people have many needs for money, some of them so embarrassing that they can’t bring themselves to tell their families.

My melancholy reflections had carried me unnoticing past the landmarks of my childhood, to where Route 41 became the gleaming eight-lane drive skirting the lake shore. The last color had faded from the sky, turning the lake to a spill of black ink.

At least I had a lover to turn to, even if only for a few more days: Morrell, whom I’ve been seeing for the past year, was leaving on Tuesday for Afghanistan. A journalist who often covers human-rights issues, he’s been longing to see the Taliban up close and personal since they consolidated their power several years back.

The thought of unwinding in the comfort of his arms made me accelerate through the long dark stretch of South Lake Shore Drive, up past the bright lights of the Loop to Evanston.