“No.” I cut him off sharply. “He was not hanging around the hotel. He came there once, and Lacey met with him for an hour in her suite. Frank Siekevitz, the Trianon’s security chief, may be changing his tune now, but he told me that a week ago. I’ll be honest—Lacey has refused to talk to me—but I don’t believe that crock about Frenada harassing her. I think Global wanted me and Frenada both out of the picture. They’d give me so huge a fee for getting dirt on him that I couldn’t speak against them—and he’d be discredited. I know nothing that could interest, or harm, the studio, so why they’re riding me so hard I don’t understand. Whether Frenada did is another matter, but one we’re not too likely to find out at this juncture. But one thing I will stake my reputation on is that he was not in the drug trade.”

Murray’s full lips tightened in a thin line. I realized I wasn’t used to seeing his mouth—in all the years I’d known him he’d covered it with his beard. His face looked naked now, with a kind of bewildered petulance replacing his anger. It made me uncomfortable and I felt myself softening—into his ma or his scoutmaster. Mr. Contreras’s admonition came back to me and made me laugh.

“Yeah, it’s really funny. Maybe I’ll get the joke in a year or two,” Murray said resentfully.

“I was laughing at myself, not you. What are you going to do with this?”

He hunched a shoulder. “Cops found five kilos of coke in his office Saturday night.”

“Put there by the same hand that planted them on me. Unless you think I, too, am running drugs in from Mexico?”

“Nothing you do would surprise me, Warshawski. Although it wouldn’t be like you to do something that actually turned a profit. Where is the stuff you found?”

“St. Louis.”

“St. Louis? Oh. You flushed it.”

The Chicago sewers flow into the Chicago River. To keep the lake clean, we reversed the current of the river so that our sludge—properly treated, of course—flows backward, into the Mississippi. I suppose eventually it reaches New Orleans, but our rivalries are local—we prefer to think we’re dumping on St. Louis.

“In that case, you’ve got no proof. I don’t know what to make of this report. It’s the only thing that contradicts my story. It may be that new evidence came in between when you asked and when I did.”

“In forty–eight hours?” I lost my temper again. “If you go on the air tonight with this slander against Frenada I am going to persuade his sister to sue the studio and you for every dime you have.”