“Do you see it, a van?”

“Yes.” It was battered and white, with a raw brown streak of rust on its side. “I see it.”

“FBI.”

“It looks empty to me, Mrs. Kalakos.”

“FBI, Victor. They are still hunting for my son.”

“After all these years?”

“They know I am sick, they are expecting him to come. My phone, it is tapped. My mail, it is read. And the van, it is there every day.”

“Let me check it out,” I said.

Still standing by the window, I reached for my phone and dialed 911. Without giving my name, I reported a suspicious van parked on Mrs. Kalakos’s street. I mentioned that there had been reports of a child molester using the same type of van and I asked if the police could investigate because I was afraid to let my children go outside to play. When Mrs. Kalakos tried to say something, I just stopped her and waited by the window. I expected the van to be empty, parked there by some neighbor, nothing more than an innocent vehicle left to inspire the wild paranoia of an old, ill woman.

We waited in quiet, the two of us, accompanied by the rasp of her breath. A few minutes later, one police car pulled up behind the van and then another arrived to block the van’s escape. As the uniforms approached the car, a large man in horn-rimmed glasses, a flat-top chop, and a boxy suit came around from the other side. He showed a credential. While one cop examined it and another cop engaged him in a conversation, the man looked up at the window where I stood.

I watched all this as it played out, watched as the man in the boxy suit retreated back into his van and the two police cars pulled away. I closed the curtains and turned to the old woman, still propped up by the pillows, whose eyes, glistening with the light of the candle, were staring straight at me.

“What did your son do, Mrs. Kalakos?” I said.

“Only what I said.”

“You haven’t told me everything.”

“They are hounding him for spite.”

“Spite?”

“He was a thief, that is all.”

“The FBI doesn’t spend fifteen years searching for a common thief out of spite.”

“Will you help me, Victor? Will you help my Charlie?”

“Mrs. Kalakos, I don’t think I should get anywhere near this case. You’re not telling me everything.”

“You don’t trust me?”

“Not after seeing that van.”

“You sure you not Greek?”

“Pretty sure, ma’am.”

“Okay, there may be something else. Charlie had four close friends from childhood. And maybe, long time ago, these friends, they pulled a little prank.”

“What kind of prank?”

“Just meet him, meet my Charlie. He can’t come into city no more, but he can be nearby. We set up meeting point for you already.”

“A bit presumptuous, don’t you think?”

“New Jersey. Ocean City boardwalk, Seventh Street. He be there tonight at nine.”

“I don’t know.”

“At nine. Do for me, Victor. As favor.”

“As favor, huh?”

“You do for me, Victor. Work it out, make deal, do something so my boy, he come home and say good-bye. To say good-bye, yes. And to fix his life, yes. You can work that?”

“I think that’s beyond a lawyer’s brief, Mrs. Kalakos.”

“Bring him home, and you tell your father after this we’re even.”

I thought about why the FBI might be so interested still in Charlie Kalakos fifteen years after he fled his trial. Charlie was a thief, had said his mother. And long ago Charlie and his friends had pulled a little prank. That van outside told me it must have been a hell of a little prank. Maybe there was an angle in Charlie’s long-ago prank and the FBI’s strangely keen interest in it for me to find a profit.

“You know, Mrs. Kalakos,” I said after I did all that thinking, “in cases like this, even when I take it on as a favor, I still require a retainer.”

“What is this retainer?”

“Money up front.”

“I see. It is like that, is it?”

“Yes, ma’am, it is.”

“Not only a Greek face but a Greek heart.”

“Thank you, I think.”

“I have no money, Victor, none at all.”

“I’m sorry to hear that.”

“But I might have something to interest you.”

Slowly, she rose from the bed, as if a corpse rising from her grave, and made her way creakily, painfully, to a bureau at the edge of the room. With all her strength, she opened a drawer. She tossed out a few oversized unmentionables and slid open what appeared to be a false bottom. She reached both hands in and pulled out two fistfuls of golden chains glinting in the candlelight, silver pendants, broaches filled with rubies, strings of pearls, two fistfuls of pirate’s treasure.

“Where did you get that?” I said.

“It is from Charles,” she said as she stumbled toward me with the jewelry dripping from her hands, falling from her hands. “What he gave me long ago. He said he found in street.”

“I can’t take that, Mrs. Kalakos.”

“Here,” she said, thrusting it at me. “You take. I have saved for years for Charlie, never touched. But now he needs me. So you take. Don’t spend until he is back, that is all I ask, but take.”

I let her drop it all into my hands. The jewelry was heavy and cold. It felt as if it held the weight of the past, yet I could feel its opulence. Like foie gras on thin pieces of buttered toast, like champagne sipped from black high heels, like tawdry nights and sunsets over the Pacific.

“Bring my son home to me,” she said, grabbing hold of my lapels with her hands and pulling me close so her foul, pestilential breath washed over me. “Bring my son home so he can kiss my old parched face and tell his mother good-bye.”

I walked to my office that afternoon with a light step, despite the pockets of my suit jacket being weighed down with plunder.

The offices of Derringer and Carl were on Twenty-first Street, just south of Chestnut, above the great shoe sign that hung over a first-floor repair shop. We were in a nondescript suite in a nondescript building with no décor to speak of and a support staff of one, our secretary, Ellie, who answered our phones and typed our briefs and kept our books. I trusted Ellie with our financials because she was a trustworthy woman with an honest face, the fine product of a strict Catholic upbringing, and because embezzling from our firm would sort of be like trying to cadge drinks at a Mormon meeting.

“Oh, Mr. Carl, you have a message,” Ellie said as I passed by her desk. “Mr. Slocum called.”

I stopped quickly, put a hand on one of my bulging jacket pockets, turned my head, and searched behind me as if I had been caught at something. “Did he say what he wanted?”

“Only that he needed to talk to you right away.”

I thought about the FBI in the van outside the old woman’s house and the inevitable phone call once they found out who I was. “That didn’t take long,” I said.

“He emphasized the right away part, Mr. Carl.”

“Oh, I bet he did.”

When I reached my own office, I closed the door behind me, sat at my desk, and carefully pulled out the chains and the broaches, the heavy mass of jewelry, letting it all slip deliciously through my fingers into a small, rich pile upon my desk. In the bright light of the fluorescents, it all seemed a little less brilliant, tarnished, even. I supposed the old lady wasn’t into polishing her son’s ill-gotten gains. Just then I had no idea how much it all was worth, and I wasn’t intending to swiftly find out either. The last thing I needed to do was draw attention to the jewelry, being that my legal title to what was undoubtedly stolen property could only be considered dubious. No, I wasn’t going to let anyone, not anyone, know about what the old lady had given me.

There was a light tap on my door. I quickly shoveled the swag into a desk drawer, closed the drawer with a thwack.

“Come in,” I said.

It was my partner, Beth Derringer.