“Don’t play the innocent with me. You come to my plant with insinuations, and twenty–four hours after I refuse to hire you, this—this slander appears.”

“Which slander? Innocent or not, I don’t know what it is.”

“In the paper, tomorrow’s paper, you thought I wouldn’t see it? Or not so early?”

“Okay, if we have to do it by twenty questions, let me guess. There’s a story about you in tomorrow morning’s paper, is that right? About you and Lacey? You and that Virgin T–shirt? Do you want to tell me, or do you want to hold while I go out and find a newsstand with the early edition in it? I can be back in half an hour, probably.”

I don’t know whether he believed me or not, but he didn’t want to wait for me to call him back. He read me from Regine Mauger’s column in the early edition of the Herald–Star: “A little bird at the State’s Attorney says Lucian Frenada, who’s been hanging around Lacey Dowell all week like a sick pit bull, may be using his T–shirt factory to smuggle cocaine into Chicago from Mexico.”

“Is that it?” I asked.

“Is that it?” he mimicked bitterly. “It is more than enough. She calls me a sick pit bull, which is a racist slur anyway, and then accuses me of being a drug dealer, and you think I shouldn’t be angry? My biggest order of my life, the New Jersey Suburban Soccer League, they can cancel if they think I’m a criminal.”

I tried to stay patient. “I mean, is that the only story on you in the paper? Regine Mauger can print anything as a rumor. A little bird told her. I don’t know if anyone at Global—I mean the Herald–Star—fact–checks her. But if they ran a news story, that means they have actual evidence.”

“No one could have evidence of this, because it isn’t true. Unless they made it up.” He was still angry, but calmer. “And I am thinking you could have been a little bird yourself, out of revenge.”

“Then you aren’t thinking at all,” I snapped. “If I want to stay in business the last thing I’ll do is run smear campaigns on people who spurn my services. That word gets around fast. The next thing I’d know, all my clients would have left me for Carnifice.”

“So if you didn’t plant that story, who did, and why?”

I let out a compressed breath. “You want to hire me to find out, Mr. Frenada, I’ll be glad to talk it over. Otherwise, since I’m leaving town in the morning, I need to get to bed.”