I turned back to Mary Louise’s notes. At two o’clock Alex Fisher phoned. She wanted to know if you had thought over her offer any more. I said you were out of town for the day and would get back to her in the morning; she urged me to push you to take the job, it would mean a lot for your agency one way or another however you decided. Vic, what does this woman want?

She’d underscored the question several times. I was with her there: what did Alex want? What was Teddy Trant going to do to me if I didn’t dig around in Frenada’s affairs? Put a V chip in my TV so I was forced to watch nothing but Global programs? If Abigail Trant had persuaded her husband to give me some work, was that enough reason for him to be surly at my refusal to accept it?

Of course the other connection to Global was Lacey Dowell. She, or at least her face, kept cropping up. Now she was on the shirt Nicola Aguinaldo had on when she died. Was Global’s big star involved in something so ugly the studio wanted to pin it on Frenada? But there was nothing to link Lacey with Nicola Aguinaldo, at least as far as I could tell.

Maybe I should try to see Lucian Frenada. I had entered the phone numbers Alex Fisher gave me into my Palm Pilot. When I called his home, a machine told me, in Spanish and English, that Frenada regretted not answering my call in person, but that he was perhaps at his factory and would get back to me if I left a message.

I thought it over, then got up abruptly and went downstairs. If Frenada was perhaps at his factory I could see him in person. My back was stiff. A nagging sensible voice—Mary Louise’s or Lotty’s—told me if I had to poke at this wasp’s nest at all to do it in the morning. Or at least to take my gun, but what was I going to do with it—pistol–whip him into telling me what secret Trant wanted me to find?

There is no direct route from my place to Frenada’s factory. I snaked south and west, through streets filled with small frame houses and four–plus–one’s, past boys skateboarding or in small gangs on their bikes, now and then crossing pockets of lights around bars and pool halls. As I passed the fringes of Humboldt Park, the streets revved up with boom boxes and low–riders but died away again at the seedy industrial corridor along Grand Avenue.