“He claimed Trant had stolen one, and Lacey laughed it off. I did, too—why would a Global boss steal a shirt when he could get a dozen of them free anytime he wanted? But the ones Trant could get all had a label reading Made with Pride in the USA, a kind of Arbeit macht frei label we had to sew into the necks of the T–shirts we made. Why they wanted a Mad Virgin T–shirt on Nicola I don’t know—maybe Trant had a crazy idea that they could finger Frenada for the murder if anyone was asking questions. Everything they did had a B–movie feel to it; it was just the thing that a studio executive would come up with. Or maybe it was Alex Fisher’s idea.

“When they thought I was dying they took my damaged shirt off in the cell and put on another one. They made some comment about it at the time. Even though I kept blanking in and out, I was aware of what was going on, although at the time, it didn’t make sense.”

Before my arrest, I had wondered if Frenada had something to do with Nicola Aguinaldo’s death, but during a wakeful night at Coolis I remembered the sequence of conversations we’d had. It was when I asked him how a shirt he made came to be on her body that Frenada suddenly became quiet, then hung up on me. The night that Robbie saw him in Oak Brook, Frenada had gone out to confront Trant and Baladine. The trouble was, I couldn’t prove that Baladine killed Frenada—I could only guess it. I asked Morrell if Vishnikov’s autopsy had turned up anything unusual.

“Oh, that’s right: we’ve had so much else to talk about I forgot about that,” Morrell said. “Frenada definitely died by drowning. Vishnikov says he had a blow on the side of the head that could have come from slipping on the rocks by the harbor—he got it before he died, and that might have been why he went into the water. Other contusions had appeared postmortem.”

I scowled. “He was out at the Baladine estate the night he died. Robbie saw him there and later overheard a most suggestive remark from Trant, something about that taking care of the problem. I think they drowned Frenada in the pool and carted him off to Lake Michigan, but I guess that didn’t show up on autopsy.”

Morrell shook his head. “After you asked me to go back to him, Vishnikov did a really thorough study of every organ in the body, but he says there’s no way to prove whether he drowned in fresh or chlorinated water.”