“I’d like to talk to your crew, to see if anyone seems to be hiding something. Or maybe they have an idea about the guy who broke into the plant this morning.”

“No way do you talk to any of my workers! Who told you to mind my business, anyway? You think I’m going to pay you for lurking around my factory?”

He was muttering his complaints, not shouting, which seemed ominous to me: a man afraid of what I would learn. I nodded, though, at his words: no one was going to pay me for spending my time at Fly the Flag.

As I stood to leave, I said casually, “You wouldn’t be doing this yourself, would you?”

“Doing what—you mean, putting dead rats in my own heating system? You are crazy, you, you—nosy bitch! Why would I do such an insane thing?”

“You laid off eleven people this fall. Your business is in trouble. You wouldn’t be the first person to try to sell your plant to the insurance company—solve a lot of problems, wouldn’t it, if sabotage forced you out of business.”

“I laid people off because of the economy. As soon as the economy improves, I’ll hire them back. Now get out of here.”

I took a card out of my bag and laid it on his desk. “Call me when you decide you can tell me who has you so scared you won’t even protect your own business.”

I left the office and walked across the floor to where Rose was stitching an intricate gold logo onto an outsize navy banner. She looked up at me but didn’t stop moving the heavy fabric through the machine. The racket on the floor was intense, what with the sewing machines, the giant electric shears, and the industrial steam pressers; I squatted so I could yell directly into her ear.

“He claims nothing’s going on, despite the evidence. He’s scared of someone or something, too scared to talk about it, in my opinion. Do you have any idea what that could be?”

She shook her head, her eyes on the work in front of her.

“He says it’s not gang protection. Do you believe that?”

She hunched a shoulder, not breaking the quick movement of her hands as they guided the needle through the appliqué. “You know this neighborhood. You know there are a lot of street gangs down here. The Pentas, the Latin Kings, the Lions, any of them could do anything bad. But usually they’re more—more violent than this—they would break the windows, something like that, not put glue in the locks.”

“And how did the guy get in this morning?” Maybe I’d left the back door open when I undid the lock this morning: I didn’t think so, but I couldn’t swear to it a hundred percent, either. “Who has keys besides Zamar?”