I’d forgotten about it during our long ride and pulled it out of my shirt pocket for his inspection. He couldn’t place it any more than I could, but when we got home—in twenty minutes versus the eighty–seven we’d spent on the way out—I dug a copy of Mirabella out of the stack of papers in my recycling box. I went through it page by page studying the ads and on the inside of the back cover struck gold—or painted plastic. A pair of Ferragamo loafers were standing back to front against a rose silk scarf, and a pair of omegas like the one the girls had found were stitched into the strap across the instep.

“Va bene, Signor Ferragamo,” I said aloud. A horseshoe, not an omega. The Ferragamo logo. I’d recognized it because I tried on some Ferragamo pumps a few weeks ago: my beloved red Bruno Magli’s had finally become so worn that not even old Signor Delgado out on Harlem could patch the sides enough to attach new soles.

I’d decided I couldn’t afford shoes that cost almost three hundred dollars this summer—a wise decision, considering the expenses I was racking up right now. It was hard to imagine that the immigrants living along Balmoral and Glenwood could afford them either. I suppose someone might have gone into debt for an upscale logo, but I went to bed wondering where in the metropolitan area someone was looking in annoyance at a shoe or handbag with a damaged strap.

Chapter 7: Habeas Corpus?

7 Habeas Corpus?

Mary Louise called me early in the morning. “Vic, I’m running to get Nate to day camp, so this’ll be quick: there isn’t much, anyway. Aguinaldo was working as a mother’s helper for someone named Baladine out in Oak Brook. She’d been there two years when she stole a gold necklace worth forty or fifty thousand dollars—it had gems in it too, bitty diamonds or rubies. They pressed charges—”

“The Baladines?” I interrupted. “As in the Robert Baladines?”

“Robert, Eleanor, and their three children. Do you know them?”

“No, darlin’, he’s so big I don’t even think of him as competition. He runs Carnifice—you know, the billion–dollar PI firm, only when they get that big they’re called “Security Providers,’ or something.”