The Frumious Bandersnatch

7

THERE WERE MARCHERSoutside the Rio Building when Carella got there on Monday morning at eight o’clock. The marchers were carrying hand-lettered signs on wooden sticks.

Some of the signs read:ROCK RACIAL PROFILING!

Others read:TAMAR IS A RACIST!

Yet others read:WHY A BLACK RAPIST?

The marchers were chanting, “Ban Bandersnatch! Ban Bandersnatch! Ban Bandersnatch!”

Television cameras were rolling.

Carella was not surprised to see the Reverend Gabriel Foster at the head of the procession.

Six-feet-two-inches tall, with the wide shoulders and broad chest of the heavyweight fighter he once had been, his eyebrows still ridged with scar tissue, Foster at the age of forty-nine still looked as if he could knock your average contender on his ass in thirty seconds flat. According to police records, the reverend’s birth name was Gabriel Foster Jones. He’d changed it to Rhino Jones when he’d enjoyed his brief career as a boxer, and then settled on Gabriel Foster when he began preaching. Foster considered himself a civil rights activist. The police considered him a rabble rouser, an opportunistic self-promoter, and a race racketeer. His church, in fact, was listed in the files as a “sensitive location,” departmental code for anyplace where the uninvited presence of the police might cause a race riot.

Foster looked as if he might be promoting just such a commotion on this bright May morning.

“Good morning, Gabe,” Carella said.

“Ban Bander…” Foster said, and then cut himself off mid-sentence and opened his eyes wide when he saw Carella. He thrust out his hand, stepped away from the line of protestors, and grinned broadly. Carella actually believed the reverend was glad to see him. Shaking hands, Foster said, “Don’t tell me you’re on this kidnapping?”

“More or less,” Carella said, which was the truth.

“Did you see the video?” Foster asked him.

“I saw the taping they did last night,” Carella said. “Not the video itself, no.”

“It depicts the girl’s rapist as a black man.”

“Well, it depicts a black dancer portraying some kind of mythical beast…”

“Some kind of mythicalblack beast,” Foster said.

“The beast in the original poem isn’t black,” Carella said.

“That’s exactly my…”

“And the poem was written in England, back in the 1800’s.”

“So why…?”

“There isn’t even arapist in the poem. That’s what’s so fresh about the song. This girl takes a…”

“That’s exactly my point, Steve! Thereis a rapist now. And the rapist is black.”

“Come on, Gabe. The song takes a powerful standagainst rape! You can’t object to that.”

“I can most certainly object to the rapist being black.”

“It’s thedancer who’s black. Tamar Valparaiso hired a black dancer. Equal opportunity. Do you object…?”

“To portray a black rapist.”

“Gabe, I think you’re barking up the wrong tree. I don’t know the girl, but I’m willing to bet my last dollar she isn’t a racist.”

“I can smell one a hundred yards away,” Foster said.

“Maybe your nose is too sensitive,” Carella said. “I have to go upstairs, Gabe. You want my advice?”

“No.”

“Okay, see you later then.”

“Let me hear it.”

“Pack up and go home. You don’t want to be on the wrong side of this one. It’ll come back to haunt you.”

“Ah, but I’m on the right side of it, Steve. The rapist on that video is vicious and monstrous and black. That’s racist. And that’s good enough for me.”

“I have to go,” Carella said.

“Good seeing you again,” Foster said, and nodded briefly, and stepped back into the line of marchers. “Ban Bandersnatch!” he shouted. “Ban Bandersnatch! Ban Bandersnatch! Ban Bandersnatch!”

The black security guard who took Carella’s name and phoned it upstairs glanced through the tall glass windows fronting the street, and asked, “What’sthat all about?”

“Beats me,” Carella said, and signed his name, and waited for clearance. When it came, he took the elevator up to the twenty-third floor, and went through the still-empty reception area directly to Barney Loomis’ office at the end of the hall. The Squad was already there. Loomis was not.

“Steve, ah,” Corcoran said, and immediately looked at his watch as if to imply that Carella was late, which he wasn’t. “Few people you should meet who weren’t here yesterday,” he said, and introduced a handful of FBI agents and detectives whose names Carella forgot the moment he shook hands with them.

The office itself had undergone something of a transformation since late last night. There was now new equipment everywhere Carella looked. In fact, someone he guessed was an FBI technician was busily testing an electronic device set up on a long folding table across the room.

“Let me tell you what we’ve done here,” Endicott said.

He looked wide awake and alert, wearing this morning a dark gray suit that seemed better tailored than the blue one he’d worn yesterday. Corcoran, in contrast, was wearing brown slacks and a brown V-necked sweater over a plaid sports shirt. Carella himself had worn a suit today. He suddenly felt overdressed for a city detective.

“First off, we’ve installed a direct line to your office. You pick up that green phone there,” Endicott said, pointing, “and you’ve got the squadroom at the Eight-Seven. How’s that for service?”

Carella was wondering How come?

“We figured we’d let you guys do what you do best, am I right, Charles?” Endicott said. “The legwork, the nuts and bolts, the nitty gritty. We get anything to chase, you pick up that green phone, your boys are on it in a minute. Will that work for you?”

“Sure,” Carella said. “Thanks.”

“Regarding all this other stuff,” he said, “we noticed that your telephone guy set up a simple Tap and Tape, with a jack for a single listener, but we’ll be more people working on this, so we’ve installed equipment that’ll accommodate three more sets of ear phones, you can understand why that would be necessary,” Endicott said, and smiled hopefully, as if seeking Carella’s approval.

“More the merrier,” Carella said.

“The other thing…the court orders you got yesterday were for the primary landline carriers…AT&T, Verizon, Sprint, MCI…but there are at least half a dozen other service providers so we’ve taken the liberty of obtaining court orders for those as well, assuming our boy will be calling from landline equipment—which may not be the case.”

“This is all so much easier since 9/11,” Corcoran said.

“Ohso much,” Endicott agreed. “Though I have to tell you the truth, I’ve never known a judge to turn down a federal request for a wiretap.”

“Used to be probable cause, probable cause,” Corcoran said, and rolled his eyes.

He was referring to the way it customarily worked. Before a judge could approve an application for electronic surveillance and issue a court order, he had to determine that:

a) there was probable cause for belief that an individual was committing, had committed, or was about to commit an offense covered by law…

b) there was probable cause for belief that particular communications concerning that offense would be obtained through such interception…

c) normal investigative procedures had been tried and had failed or reasonably appeared unlikely to succeed or to be too dangerous…

d) there was probable cause for belief that the facilities from which, or the place where the communications were to be intercepted were being used, or were about to be used, in connection with the commission of such offense.

In each of Carella’s applications yesterday, he had cited probable cause. His petitions had been granted in every instance. But Corcoran was saying…

“Judges are a lot more malleable since 9/11. Before then, to get a court order for a pen register…”

“That’s a sort of reverse caller-ID,” Endicott explained.

“Yes, I know,” Carella said.

“We record the numbers dialedout. ”

“Yes, I…”

“…you had to show probable cause. Now, you just go in and say the information will be relevant to an ongoing investigation, and by federal law, a judge is required to approve the order. Relevant, can you believe it?”

“Makes it nice,” Endicott said.

“Makes it simple.”

“Anyway,” Endicott said, “since you’d covered only the landline carriers, we went ahead and obtained additional court orders for the wireless companies, too. These computers you see around the room…”

Carella counted four of them.

“…tap into our central computers down at Number One Fed. If our boy uses any of the seven mobile-phone providers servicing this city, we’ve got sophisticated links to all of them, and we’ll triangulate in a second.”

Carella nodded.

He didn’t know what “triangulate” meant. He said nothing.

“Want to try your new toy?” Corcoran said, and handed him the receiver on the green phone.

Carella put it to his ear.

He heard the phone ringing on the other end.

“Eighty-seventh Squad, Detective Hawes.”

“Cotton, it’s me. Just testing.”

“Testing what?” Hawes asked.

ON ONE WALLof Bison’s conference room down the hall, the company had set out a generous buffet consisting of orange juice (or grapefruit juice), croissants (plain or chocolate), Danish pastries (cheese or jelly), bagels (plain, onion, or poppy seed), smoked Norwegian salmon, cream cheese, butter, jellies and jams in a wide variety of flavors, and coffee (either full-strength or de-caf).

The four men seated around the huge rosewood conference table had helped themselves to the sideboard goodies and were now leisurely enjoying their morning repast before getting down to business. They were in a jocular mood. They had a lot to be happy about.

Barney Loomis’ plate was brimming, as usual. He demolished his breakfast with obvious gusto now, listening to the chatter all around him, but not distracted by it in the slightest. Gulping down the last of his onion bagel heaped with salmon and cream cheese, he washed it down with the last of his “hi-test coffee,” as he called it, and began the meeting abruptly by asking, “Did you see those marchers outside? They’re labeling Tamar a racist! What’s wrong with these people, anyway?,” never once realizing that referring to the black protestors as “these people” might in itself be considered a trifle racist.

“Controversy never hurt anybody,” Binkie Horowitz said.

As Bison’s Vice President in charge of Promotion, he had checked all his people before this morning’s meeting, and was confident that the only thing that could possibly hurt them now was if the kidnappers actually killed Tamar Valparaiso, bite your tongue.

“I’m not so sure,” Loomis said. “We lose the black market because of those jackasses marching out there…”

“We won’t lose the black market,” Binkie said, “don’t worry.”

Short and slight, narrow-waisted and narrow-shouldered as well, he resembled a harried jockey whipping a tired nag across the finish line. Leaning over the table, his brown eyes intense, he said, “We are not at this verymoment, in fact, losing the black market. Weare, in fact, averagingmore spins per hour on all-black radio than we are on the white stations. Take WJAX, for example—which by the way played Alicia Keys’ ‘Fallin’ ’ a hundred and seven times in its first week of release—I checked with our man in Florida first thing this morning, and since news of the kidnapping broke, and especially since the kidnap tape ran last night on network news, they’ve been playing ‘Bandersnatch’ every hour and a half, with requests for it pouring in all the time. If the momentum holds at that rate, we’re looking at sixteen spins a day, times seven days a week, will come to a hundred and twelve spins in the next week alone, which will top Alicia’s hundred and seven for a week on that same station. And I don’t have to tell you ‘Fallin’ ’ was number one all over the country. And JAX is atop black station, this isn’t some thirty-kilowatt shack in rural Mississippi. We don’t have to worry about losing the black market, Barney, I can assure you of that.”

“Tell that to the good Reverend Foster,” Loomis said, going to the sideboard and pouring himself another cup of coffee. “He’s a national player, he’ll be all over cable television in a minute and a half.”

J. P. Higgins, Bison’s VP in charge of Video Production, had been silent until now. Truth of the matter was that he was nursing a hangover this morning, having partied too strenuously aboard theRiver Princess on Saturday night, and having partied privately with the black reporter fromRolling Stone last night, celebrating what he considered the fortuitous circumstance of a kidnapping that had thrust Tamar’s video into national prominence.

Dressed this morning in sweater and slacks and wearing a blue beret he thought made him look debonair if only he had a mustache, he turned to Binkie Horowitz and, seemingly suddenly inspired, asked, “Any chance we can get more cable stations to show our video?”

“Why not?” Loomis said from the sideboard, and while he was just standing there, fixed himself another bagel with salmon and cream cheese. “If Foster’s going to join the talking heads, then maybe they’d like to lead in with our actual goddamn video! Let it speak for itself. Hell, that video isn’t aboutrace, it’s aboutrape! ”

“That’s a good point to make to the radio stations, too,” Harry Di Fidelio said. “A good talking point. ‘Bandersnatch’ isn’t about race, it’s about rape. Race, rape, they almost rhyme, in fact. What they call a slant rhyme.”

Dressed this morning in a dark blue suit with a white shirt and a blue tie, Di Fidelio lacked only laced black shoes to blend right in with most of the FBI agents down the hall in Loomis’ office. Instead, unaware that he might be emulating the fashion preferences of a former U.S. President, he was wearing brown loafers with the blue suit. His socks were brown, too, but that’s because he was color blind.

As Bison’s VP in charge of Radio Marketing, Di Fidelio was constantly on the lookout for ways to convince the deejays that they actually had something totalk about. It was one thing to Pay-for-Play a radio station, and another to sic the indie promoters on them, but if you could give a deejay a trulypersonal reason to plug a record, you were home free. So far, the single had been played on more than 115 Top 40 stations including Z100, WKTU, KIIS, WHYI, KZQZ, WNCI, KDWB, KSLZ, WEZB, and enough damn alphabet soup to feed an army of fans. But if this thing becamereally controversial…

“Rape or Race, we could say,” he suggested, and spread his hands on the air to spell out the words. “Rape or Race.You decide.”

“That’s not bad,” Binkie said. “Rape or Race. We fight fire with fire. Go head to toe with Foster or anyone else who wants to bring up the race issue. Hell, our hands are clean, our credentials are spotless,” he said, seemingly unaware of the fact that no one around that table was black.

“Let’s shotgun the video all over the place,” Loomis said. “Use the ‘Rape or Race’ pitch, I like it, spell it all out for them. Maybe get viewers to call in or e-mail, get a poll going, is it rape or race?You decide.”

“Rape or Race,” Di Fidelio repeated, spreading his hands on the air again, reminding everyone that this washis idea, after all. “Youdecide.”

“Be great if we could get some women’s rights groups to champion the video,” Higgins said. “Get them to say what a brave stand Tamar took, get them to suggest sheherself may be out there getting raped this very…”

“I wouldn’t go there,” Loomis said at once.

“Well, we don’t reallyknow what’s happening to her, do we?” Higgins said. His head was pounding. He didn’t feel like arguing.

“When they call today,” Loomis said, and looked at his watch, “I’ll ask to speak to her. Before we turn over any money, I want some assurance that…”

“Incidentally…”

They all turned toward the far end of the table.

A short, slender man wearing a blue blazer, gray flannel slacks, a paler blue shirt, and a gold-and-blue silk-rep tie, sat there with only a cup of coffee in front of him. Jedediah Bailey, the firm’s accountant.

“Do you have any idea how much they’ll be asking for?”

“Of course not,” Loomis said. “How would I know how much…?”

“Just asking,” Jedediah said, and spread his hands defensively, palms outward. He’d merely wanted to ascertain that Loomis could get hold of what would most certainly be a sizable amount of cash in a short period of time. Loomis was the company’s sole shareholder and CEO. Were his personal assets liquid enough? That’s all Jedediah wished to determine, so sue him.

“I’m hoping we’ll have her back by tonight sometime,” Loomis said.

The room went silent.

“You know…” Higgins ventured, and then shook his head.

“What?” Loomis asked.

“It wouldn’t hurt if this thing dragged on even longer. Few days longer,” Higgins said, and shrugged. “It wouldn’t hurt, really.”

He was the only one in the room who’d dared say it.

THE ENTIRE SQUADwas in the office when Endicott gave Loomis’ private secretary her marching orders.

Gloria Klein was in her early thirties, a somewhat plain-looking woman, even in the mini and tight sweater she felt appropriate to her job at a record company. She kept shifting her attention and her pale blue eyes from Endicott to Loomis, as if checking to see that her boss agreed with all this.

“Mr. Loomis won’t be taking any calls from people you can identify. If you recognize a name, you tell the caller Mr. Loomis will get back to him or her. Have you got that?”

“Yes, sir,” she said.

“Now, Gloria,” Endicott said, “if a caller refuses to give his name, or if he says something like ‘This is personal,’ you ask him to hold, please, and then check with Mr. Loomis before putting him through. Have you got that?”

“Yes, sir. Does this have to do with Tamar, sir?”

No, it has to do with the price of fish in Norway, Endicott thought, but did not say.

“Yes, it has to do with Tamar,” he said.

“Are we expecting a call from her kidnappers, is that it?”

“You don’t need to know that.”

“Yes, sir.”

“Anyone whose name you recognize…”

“Mr. Loomis will call back.”

“Any strange name, or anyone who won’t give a name…”

“I buzz Mr. Loomis, check if it’s okay to put the call through.”

“Very good, Gloria. And if anyone should ask, there’s no one here with Mr. Loomis.”

“Yes, sir.”

“He’s alone.”

“Yes, sir.”

“That’s it.”

“Thank you, sir,” Gloria said, and made eye contact with her boss again, checking.

Loomis gave a slight nod.

THE PHONEon his desk rang at twelve o’clock sharp.

He picked up.

“Yes?” he said.

“Mr. Loomis, there’s someone who says you’re expecting his call. He wouldn’t give a name.”

“Give me three minutes, and then put him through.”

He replaced the receiver on its cradle, and turned to the others. “Won’t give a name, says I’m expecting his call.”

“Bingo,” Corcoran said, and nodded toward a makeshift structure not unlike a phone booth, its walls baffled to deaden any sound in the office around him. Loomis entered the booth at once, sat in a chair set up in front of an extension phone. Endicott, Corcoran, and two of his detectives put on ear phones at the monitoring equipment. Carella stood by the green phone that would connect him directly to the Eight-Seven. The three other detectives and the remaining agent were already sitting at phones that linked them to One Fed Square.

The room was utterly silent.

When the phone rang again, its sound burst on the air like a hand grenade.

“Here he is,” Endicott said. “Just sound natural, hear what he has to say. We’ll be on him, believe me.”

The phone kept ringing.

“That’s three, four…”

“Pick up,” Endicott said.

In the booth, Loomis picked up the receiver.

“Barney Loomis,” he said.

“We have the girl,” the voice on the phone said. “We want $250,000 in unmarked, hundred-dollar bills. We’ll call at threeP.M. sharp to tell you where to deliver it. Do anything foolish and she dies.”

“How do I know she’s still alive?” Loomis asked at once.

“Would you like to talk to her?”

“Yes. Yes, please. Let me talk to her.”

There was a silence.

“Verizon landline is tracking,” one of the agents said.

“Sweetheart, come here a minute.”

This on Loomis’ phone. Somewhat apart, as if the caller were holding the receiver out to someone.

“Verizon says it’s a cell phone,” one of the detectives said.

There was another silence, longer this time.

“Tell Mr. Loomis you’re okay,” the voice on the phone said. “No, don’t touch the phone!” Sharply. “Just tell him you’re fine.”

“It’s AT&T wireless,” the same detective said.

“Get on it,” Endicott said.

A shorter silence.

“Hello?”

“Tamar?”

“Yes, Barney.”

Across the room, an agent was asking an AT&T operator to determine the number of the cell phone and track its location.

“Are you all right?”

“I’m fine, Barney.”

“Nobody’s hurt you, have they?”

“No, I’m fine.”

“I’ll get the money they want, Tamar. You’ll be home soon.”

“Thank you, Barney.”

“How’s the CD doing?” Tamar asked.

“Very well, actually.”

“First tower’s tracking,” one of the agents reported.

“Am I gonna be a star?”

“Oh, you betcha, kid. A real diva.”

“Good. I have to go now, Barney. He wants me to get off the phone.”

“I’ll see you soon,” Loomis said.

The man’s voice came on again.

“Okay?” he asked. “Satisfied, Mr. Loomis?”

“Second tower’s got it.”

“Yes. Thank you,” Loomis said.

“Get the money by threeP.M. ”

“Keep him on,” Endicott said.

There was a click on the line.

“Shit!”

“The way this works,” Corcoran said, yanking off his ear phones, “is the landline company hands us off to the wireless provider, who tracks the call through the base station towers handling it. It’s called triangulation. These are threeradio towers, you understand, a cell phone is aradio phone. The first tower judges a rough distance to the caller. Second tower narrows the choice to two points. Third tower pinpoints the location. Unfortunately, our guy got off before the third tower could zero in.”

“He’s out on the Island someplace, that’s for sure,” one of the agents said.

“Here comes the info now,” a second agent said, and joined him at the computer. They both turned to look at the printer as it began spewing paper. Two detectives rose from their phones and immediately put on their jackets.

“How does it jibe with Sands Spit?” Endicott asked.

“Rosalita Guadajillo,” the first agent said, yanking the printout free. “3215 Noble. Nowhere near. She’s right here in the city.”

“Maybe an accomplice,” Corcoran said.

“Move on her,” Endicott ordered, and the two agents went out the door, followed immediately by the two detectives. Carella, sitting by his new green toy with his thumb up his ass, looked at Special Agent in Charge Stanley M. Endicott.

“We have experience in such matters,” Endicott explained, and shrugged.

“What’s happening?” Loomis asked, coming out of the booth.

“We lost him,” Endicott said.

“This is going to be elaborate,” Corcoran said.

“How do you know?”

“We’ve had experience with these things.”

“She’s alive,” Barney said. “Thank God for that.”

“Everything’ll be fine,” Endicott told him. “You’ll see.”

Carella said nothing.

“You pissed off about something?” Endicott asked.

SPECIAL AGENT HARVEY JONESdefinitely thought he saw cockroaches in the hallway. Which was better than rats, he supposed. His cousin was an agent in Los Angeles, and she told him there were rats in Beverly Hills. Driven down into populated areas because of the drought. Drinking from rich people’s swimming pools. Imagine you’re a movie star and you go out for your early morning swim in your big private walled pool and a hundred rats are in the water with you! In this part of the city you expected rats—although all Jones had seen so far were cockroaches. In Beverly Hills, you didn’t expect rats. Jones had grown up with both cockroaches and rats; he was sensitive to both.

This part of the city was familiarly calledLa Perlita, after an erst-while notorious slum in San Juan cynically namedLa Perla, which was Spanish for “The Pearl,” and some pearl it had been, honey. The reincarnation here wasn’t much better. Nicknamed by the so-called Marine Tigers who’d first migrated from the island in the early forties (aboard a vessel called theMarine Tiger, hence the derogatory appellation),La Perlita was still predominantly Puerto Rican and somewhat dangerous, even for four men carrying guns and badges.

A lot in this city had changed since the forties but notLa Perlita. Maybe nowadays, third-and fourth-generation Puerto Ricans no longer sounded likebanditos. Maybe nowadays, men going to work in business suits weren’t necessarily hit men for drug posses. And maybe nowadays teenage girls wearing short tight satin skirts and stiletto-heeled sandals were only heading to the prom and not the nearest street corner to peddle their wares. But however you looked at it,La Perlita was still a sprawling slum rife with drugs, prostitution, and…yes, rats. Come to think of it, it was a lot like Beverly Hills, don’t write me letters, Jones thought.

As they climbed to the fourth floor of the tenement at 3215 Noble Street, the four men were discussing a TV show Special Agent Forbes had seen on television. Special Agent Forbes was saying he’d been watching this writer on C-Span the other night, giving a book talk in a book store in Seattle someplace, and the writer was telling the audience that he once got a letter from some lady who said she wasn’t going to read his books anymore because there were too manypeople in them.

“Can you imagine that?” Forbes asked. “Too manypeople in them?”

“No, I can’t,” Jones said, shaking his head in agreement and amazement. “In fact, one of the things I like most about this job ismeeting different people. So how can there be too many people in abook? ”

“Besides, they aren’tpeople, ” Detective/First Grade Lonigan said, “they’recharacters. ”

“Who was this writer, anyway?” Detective/Second Grade Feingold asked.

“Some mystery writer,” Forbes said.

“Well, that’s different,” Lonigan said, changing his mind. “In a mystery, you can’t have too many people, that’s right. That’s because all the people are suspects…”

“The characters, you mean.”

“Are suspects, correct. So if you can’t keep track of them, then you can’t possibly figure out who committed the murder, which is the whole point of a mystery, anyway, isn’t it?”

Listening, Jones wondered if that was the whole point of a mystery, anyway.

“I still think he was right,” Forbes said. “A woman telling him there’s too manypeople in his book. If she wants fewer people, she should go read ‘Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs.’ ”

Or “The Three Little Pigs,” Jones thought, and all four men stopped outside the door to apartment 4C. Because they’d had experience in such matters, they listened at the wood before they knocked. Because they’d had experience in such matters, they also drew their weapons. This was maybe an accomplice to a kidnapping behind this door here.

“Yes?”

A woman’s voice. Sounded young. No Spanish accent despite the Spanish handle. Forbes looked at the computer printout again. Rosalita Guadajillo.

“Miss Goo-ah-duh-Jello?” he asked.

“Gwa-da-hee-yo, sí,”she said, correcting his pronunciation. “Who is it?”

“FBI,” Forbes said. “Want to open the door, please?”

There was a moment’s hesitation. FBI?What! The reaction was always the same. You could almost visualize the silence behind the closed wooden door, as if the words were popping up in a comic strip balloon. What the…! ! ! !

The door opened just a crack, held by a night chain. In the wedge, they could see part of a narrow foxlike face.

“Let me see some ID,” the woman said. Perfect English. Not a trace of an accent.

Jones held up his badge. So did Forbes. Gold, with a spread-winged eagle crowning what looked like a true warrior’s shield, dominated by the large lettersU.S. engraved midway between the smaller wordsFederal Bureau of Investigation above andDepartment of Justice below. Not at all like the hanging plastic ID badges they carried on “X-Files,” those so-called Burbank Studio FBI Cards. Behind the two agents, the city dicks flashed their gold, blue-enameled shields.

The overwhelming ID had no effect.

The door remained fastened by the chain.

“What do you want here?” the woman asked.

“Are you Rosalita Guadajillo?” Jones asked, having no better luck with the name than Forbes had.

“Yes? What is it you want?”

“Few questions we need to ask you, Miss,” Forbes said. “Could you please open the door?”

There was another hesitation, and then a short sharp click as she closed the door. Forbes figured it wouldn’t open again. He was thinking they’d have to come back later, with a warrant, when all at once he heard the chain rattling loose, and the door opened wide, surprising him.

Rosalita Guadajillo was a slender woman in her early twenties, they guessed, some five-feet-six-inches tall, obviously dressed to go out on this Monday at almost twelve noon. Her hair was black, her eyes brown and lined with a greenish tint. She was wearing bright red lipstick and round plastic earrings of the same color, high-heeled strappy black sandals, a short, tight black skirt, and a crisp white blouse unbuttoned some three buttons down to reveal somewhat exuberant cleavage cushioning a red plastic necklace that matched the earrings. Both Jones and Forbes figured her for a hooker, so much for profiling.

“May we come in?” Forbes asked.

He wasn’t being polite. He was protecting their asses against future claims of forced entry, these days.

“What’s this about?” Rosalita asked, stepping aside to allow them entry. She was not unmindful of the display of big hardware, but this wasLa Perlita and guns were as common here ascuchi frito joints. They walked into a small kitchen still set with that morning’s breakfast dishes. Living room with a thrift-shop three-piece set of stuffed furniture. Doors opening on two small bedrooms. Closed door probably led to the bathroom. One of the detectives opened the door. Nobody in there, thank God.

“This your phone number, Miss Guadajillo?” Forbes asked. He was getting close to the correct pronunciation, but still no cigar.

She looked at the printout.

“Yes?” she said.

“You make a call from this phone at noon today?”

“No.”

“To a man named Barney Loomis…”

“No.”

“At Bison Records?”

“No. I haven’t even tried to use that phone since late last night.”

“You know exactly when you used it last, is that it?” Jones asked.

“Yes, it so happens I do,” she said, getting all huffy. “Because that was when I tried to call my sitter, and I discovered it was missing.”

“Missing, huh?”

“The phone, huh?”

“Your sitter, huh?”

“I have two kids,” Rosalita said. “A sitter was with them last night. When I tried to call her, my phone was gone.”

“You have two kids, huh?” Lonigan said.

“Eight and six. A boy and a girl.”

Meant she’d been knocked up the first time when she was sixteen or thereabouts, Lonigan figured.

“Where are these kids now?”

“My mother has them. She keeps them all day. While I work.”

“Doing what, Miss Guadajillo?”

Lonigan figured he already knew.

“I have a boutique on Mason and Sixth.”

“A boutique, huh?” Feingold said.

“Yes. I sell costume jewelry. These earrings are from my shop.”

“Is that a fact?” Forbes said skeptically.

“Yes, it’s a fact,” Rosalita said. “Why do you want to know about my phone?”

“Did you happen toreport it missing?”

“I just learned about it late last night.”

“What time last night?”

“Around ten-thirty. When we got out of the movies. That’s when I tried to call home to see how the kids were.”

“Who’s we?” Forbes asked.

“What movie?” Jones asked.

“My boyfriend,” Rosalita said. “The new Tom Cruise movie.”

“But your phone was missing, huh?”

“My phone was missing, yes. I think I may have left it at the shop. Or else somebody stole it from my bag.”

“You going to the shop now?”

“Yes.”

“Why don’t we just come with you?” Forbes suggested. “See if maybe you left the phone there.”

“Por que es ese putó selular tan importante después de todo?”Rosalita asked—which was incidentally Spanish, which neither the agents nor the detectives understood, incidentally.

Besides, it didn’t really matter, did it?

The fucking phone wasn’t in her shop, anyway.