I went home to take the dogs for a swim and to let my neighbor know I’d be in Georgia for a few days. I also called my answering service, telling them to hand any problems over to Mary Louise until Monday.
I drove up to O’Hare with Mary Louise and the boys to help put Emily on the plane to France. She was scared and excited but trying to cover it with a veneer of teen cool. Her father had given her a camcorder, which she used with a studied offhandedness. At the last minute, when he saw she was really leaving, four–year–old Nate began to bawl. As we comforted him and his sniffling brother, I thought again of poor Robbie, unable to express his grief over his dead nanny without his father tormenting him.
We took the boys out for an evening show of Captain Doberman—another Global moneymaker. Over ice cream afterward, Mary Louise and I discussed odds and ends.
“Emily wanted me to promise I wouldn’t let you get Lacey in trouble while she was away.” Mary Louise grinned. “I think it was more like a subtle hint that she wanted every word of any conversation you and Lacey have.”
“I haven’t seen Lacey, only her old childhood friend Frenada. Over at his Special–T—” I broke off. “Mary Louise, you left me a note about the report from Cheviot on that shirtdress they found on Nicola’s body. You wrote down that the label said it was a specialty shirt. Could it have been Special–T?”
I spelled out the difference. Mary Louise looked chagrined and said she would check with the engineer at Cheviot Labs in the morning. She asked if I wanted her to go over to Frenada’s shop and talk to him while I was away, but we decided that could wait until I got back from Georgia.
It was past ten when I got home, but I wanted to pack my gun before going to bed. It’s a time–consuming business, and in the morning I’d be too rushed to get it done to FAA specs. I laid packing and cleaning materials on the dining room table and took the gun apart, placing two empty magazines in the carton—the cartridges have to be packed separately. I was cleaning the slide when the phone rang.
It was Rachel from my answering service. “I’m sorry to call so late, Vic, but a man named Lucian Frenada is trying to get in touch with you. He says it’s really urgent and he doesn’t care if it’s midnight, if you don’t call him he’s going to get the police to find you and bring you to him.”
I blinked—that was a curious coincidence. When the phone at the factory didn’t answer, I reached him at home.
He was so furious he could hardly get out a coherent sentence. “Did you plant this story? Are you behind this effort to defame me?”
“Do you know that I have no clue what you’re talking about? But I have a question for—”
“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?”