“We didn’t have any evidence.… Is there more coffee? I’m afraid I was a little short earlier.”

I grinned at him. “I can make some fresh, but it’ll keep you waiting, unless you don’t mind coming out to the kitchen.”

He followed me to the back of the apartment. I moved the plate of cold tofu to the sink and put water on to boil again. Loring took the papers from a chair and put them on the floor so he could sit down.

“When you showed up on Friday and started flaunting tales of knowing we were bankrolling Felitti, I thought you were working for him, that you might be trying to muscle something extra out of us. But when you called Monday with the tale of the copper spools—then I knew what they were doing.”

I poured boiling water into the coffee cone. “You could have hired a detective and had that information a year ago. Why didn’t you?”

He shook his head in frustration. “We always had complete audit reports from them. And they had a very reputable law firm behind them. I didn’t like it, but I didn’t think—”

“A detective would quickly have told you that the senior partner handling the buyout was the son-in-law of Jason Felitti’s brother. Then you could have started worrying about conflict of interest.”

“Okay. I’ll get a detective on the case. What do you charge?”

“Fifty dollars an hour and any expenses that aren’t part of my normal overhead.”

“You’re too cheap, Warshawski. But maybe I’ll hire you.”

I showed my teeth at him. “And maybe I’ll be available.”

“Sorry, sorry. I said it wrong. Seriously, I’ll talk to the board tomorrow. It’s your turn now. What was it you were mostly interested in—this dead man you mentioned the other day?”

“Right.” I gave him a thumbnail sketch of Mitch Kruger and Eddie Mohr and what I’d learned last night from my time in Dick’s files.

“Jason Felitti was just scrambling,” Loring said when I finished. “He was too ignorant to come up with a plan. He got goods from me and stole them, cheated the union out of their pension plan, parked bonds with a charity—all that’s just flailing around.”

“Yes. Not a criminal mastermind. Not even a bust-out artist, as I originally suspected. Just an incompetent schlep who wanted to prove he was as big as his brother. The problem is, I don’t see how I can tag them for murder. And I care more about that than I do about your theft problem. I’m worried about the pension fund too. I don’t want innocent bystanders screwed out of their rights.”