I listened to her, nodding all the while, not believing a word of it. If Jimmy was stiffed he’d threaten, sure, who wouldn’t, and maybe break a leg or two, which could be quite painful when done correctly, but that was as far as it would go. Unless, maybe, we were talking big big bucks, but it didn’t seem likely that Jim would let it get that high with someone like this girl’s brother.

“So what I want,” she said, “is for you to find out who killed her and get them to stay away from me. I thought with your connections to this Jimmy Vigs and the mob it would be easy for you.”

“I bet you did,” I said. “But what if it wasn’t Jimmy Vigs?”

“He did it.”

“Most victims are killed by someone they know. If she was murdered, maybe it was by a lover or a family member?”

“My family had nothing to do with it,” she said sharply.

“Jimmy Dubinsky is not a murderer. The mere fact that your brother owed him money is…”

“Then what about this?” she said while she reached into her handbag.

“You did it again, dammit. And I wish you wouldn’t keep putting your hand in there.”

“Frightened?” She smiled as she pulled out a plastic sandwich bag and dangled it before me.

I took the bag from her and examined it. Inside was a piece of cellophane, a candy wrapper, one end twisted, the other opened and the word “Tosca’s” printed on one side. When I saw the printing my throat closed on me.

“I found this lying on her bathroom floor, behind the toilet, when I was cleaning out her apartment,” she said.

“So she had been to Tosca’s. So what?”

“Jackie was an obsessive cleaner. She wouldn’t have just left this lying about. The cops missed it, I guess they don’t do toilets, but Jackie surely wouldn’t have left it there. And tomato sauce was too acidic for her stomach. She never ate Italian food.”

“Then someone else, maybe.”

“Exactly. I asked around and Tosca’s seems to be some sort of mob hangout.”

“So they say.”

“I think she was murdered, Mr. Carl, and that the murderer had been to Tosca’s and left this and I think you’re the one who can find out for me.”

I looked at the wrapper and then at Caroline and then back at the wrapper. Maybe I had underestimated the viciousness of Jimmy Vigs Dubinsky, and maybe one of my clients, in collecting for my other client, had left this little calling card from Tosca’s at the murder scene.

“And if I find out who did it,” I said, “then what?”

“I just want them to leave me alone. If you find out who did it, could you get them to leave me alone?”

“Maybe,” I said. “What about the cops?”

“That will be up to you,” she said.

I didn’t like the idea of this waif rummaging through Tosca’s looking for trouble and I figured Enrico Raffaello wouldn’t like it much either. If I took the retainer and proved to her, somehow, that her sister actually killed herself, I could save everyone, especially Caroline, a lot of trouble. I took another look at the wrapper in that plastic bag, wondered whose fingerprints might still be found there, and then stuffed it into my jacket pocket where it could do no harm.

“I’ll need a retainer of ten thousand dollars,” I said.

She smiled, not with gratitude but with victory, as if she knew all along I’d take the case. “I thought it was five thousand.”

“I charge one eighty-five an hour plus expenses.”

“That seems very high.”

“That’s my price. And you have to promise to throw that gun away.”

She pressed her lips together and thought about it for a moment. “But I want to keep the gun,” she said, with a slight pout in her voice. “It keeps me warm.”

“Buy a dog.”

She thought some more and then reached into her handbag once again and this time what she pulled out was a checkbook, opening it with the practiced air you see in well-dressed women at grocery stores. “Who should I make it out to?”

“Derringer and Carl,” I said. “Ten thousand dollars.”

“I remember the amount,” she said with a laugh as she wrote.

“Is this going to clear?”

She ripped the check from her book and handed it to me. “I hope so.”

“Hopes have never paid my rent. When it clears I’ll start to work.” I looked the check over. It was drawn on the First Mercantile Bank of the Main Line. “Nice bank,” I said.

“They gave me a toaster.”

“And you’ll get rid of the gun?”

“I’ll get rid of the gun.”

So that was that. I took her number and stuffed the check into my pocket and left her there with a cigarette smoldering between her fingers. I had been retained, sort of, assuming the check cleared, to investigate the mysterious death of Jacqueline Shaw. I had expected it would be a simple case of checking the files and finding a suicide. I didn’t know then, couldn’t possibly have known, all the crimes and all the hells through which that investigation would lead. But just then, with that check in my hand, I wasn’t thinking so much about poor Jacqueline Shaw hanging by her neck from a rope, but instead about Caroline, her sister, and the slyness of her smile.

I took the subway back to Sixteenth Street and walked the rest of the way to my office on Twenty-first. Up the stairs, past the lists of names, through the hallway with all the other offices with which we shared our space, to the three doorways in the rear.

“Any messages, Ellie?” I asked my secretary. She was a young blonde woman with freckles, our most loyal employee as she was our only employee.

She handed me a pile of slips. “Nothing exciting.”

“Is there ever?” I said as I nodded sadly and went into my scuff of an office. Marked white walls, files piled in lilting towers, dead flowers drooping like desiccated corpses from a glass vase atop my big brown filing cabinet. Through the single window was a sad view of the decrepit alleyway below. I unlocked the file cabinet and dropped the plastic bag with the Tosca’s candy wrapper inside into a file marked “Recent Court Decisions.” I closed the drawer and pushed in the cabinet lock and sat at my desk, staring at all the work I needed to do, transcripts to review, briefs to write, discovery to discover. Instead of getting down to work I took the check out of my pocket. Ten thousand dollars. Caroline Shaw. First Mercantile Bank of the Main Line. That was a pretty fancy banking address for a punkette with a post in her nose. I stood and strolled into my partner’s office.

She was at her desk, chewing, a pen in one hand and a carrot in the other. Gray-and-white-streaked copies of case opinions, paragraphs highlighted in fluorescent pink, were scattered across her desktop and she stared up at me as if I were a rude interruption.

“What’s up, doc?” Beth Derringer said.

“Want to go for a ride?”

“Sure,” she said as she snapped a chunk of carrot with her teeth. “What for?”

“Credit check.”

“WHERE ARE WE OFF TO?” asked Beth, sitting in the passenger seat of my little Mazda as I negotiated the wilds of the Schuylkill Expressway.

Short and sharp-faced, with glossy black hair ct even and fierce, Elizabeth Derringer had been my partner since we both fell out of law school, all except for one short period a few years back when I lost my way in a case, choosing money over honor, and she felt compelled to resign. That was very much like Beth, to pretend that integrity counted for more than cash, and of all the people I ever met in my life who pretended just that same thing, and there have been far too many, she was the best at pulling it off. Beth was smarter than me, wiser than me, a better lawyer all around, but she had an annoying tendency to pursue causes rather then currency, representing cripples thrown off SSI disability rolls, secretaries whose nipples had been tweaked by Neanderthal superiors, deadbeats looking to stave off foreclosure of the family homestead. It was my criminal work that kept us solvent, but I liked to think that Beth’s unprofitable good deeds justified my profitable descent into the mire with my bad boy clients. In today’s predatory legal world I would have been well advised to jettison her income drag, except I never would. I knew I could trust Beth more deeply than I could trust anyone else in this world, which was not a bad recipe, actually, for a partner and which explained why I hitched my shingle to hers but not why she hitched hers to mine. That I still hadn’t figured out.