“That would be funny, wouldn’t it—I call to chew you out and end up hiring you. The trouble is, I am so vulnerable, I and my small company.” His voice trailed away.

I knew that feeling. “Do you feel like telling me the odd thing you mentioned last week, or why you had a Lacey Dowell shirt in your plant?”

“I—they came—I made a couple on spec.” He floundered for words. “It didn’t get me anywhere. Global uses offshore labor, it’s much cheaper than anything I can produce.”

“Why didn’t you want to tell me last night?”

He hesitated. “For personal reasons.”

“To do with Lacey?” When he didn’t say anything I added, “You didn’t make the shirtdress Nicola Aguinaldo was wearing when she died, by any chance?”

He became totally quiet, so much so I could hear the tree toads croaking from the back of the house. Frenada gave me a hurried good night and hung up.

So he did know something about Nicola Aguinaldo’s death. That was a sad and startling thought, but it wasn’t as urgent for me at the moment as my own fury with Murray. Was that what he told Alex Fisher–Fishbein I would do—plant evidence of a cocaine ring at Special–T Uniforms? And then, when I didn’t jump at their offer, he and Alex decided to move matters on by putting a rumor in the paper?

I called Murray. He wasn’t at home—or at least he wasn’t answering, and he wasn’t at the office. I tried his cell phone.

“Vic! How in hell did you get this number? I know damned well I never gave it to you.”

“I’m a detective, Ryerson. Getting a cell phone number is child’s play. It’s the grown–up stuff that has me baffled. What was the point of that charade you and Alex Fishbein acted out in my office last week?”

“It was not a charade. It was a serious offer to give you—”

“Some crumbs from Global’s richly spread table. But when I didn’t snatch the bait you took an easier tack and planted a story in that prize bitch Regine Mauger’s ear. The last time she checked a source was probably 1943, but it doesn’t matter if a column devoted to innuendo gets the facts wrong.”

“How do you know they’re wrong? How do you know he isn’t smuggling coke in through his shirt factory?”

“So you did plant the story with her!” I was so furious I was spitting into the receiver.