“After the Trade Center went down, there was a very big demand for them, you understand, everyone wanted a flag for their business, even some rich apartment buildings wanted to hang them from the roofs, and suddenly we had a lot of orders, almost too much, we couldn’t even keep up with it. Everything we do is by hand, you know, for this kind of banner, but for the flags we use machines, and so we even had to buy a second machine.”

“Sounds great,” I said. “ South Chicago needs more business success stories.”

“We do need these businesses. I need this job: I got four children to feed, plus now Julia’s baby. If this business don’t stay in business, I don’t know what I can do.”

And now she came to the crux of the matter. Since the summer, work had fallen off. Fly the Flag was still running two shifts, but Mr. Zamar had laid off eleven people. Josie’s mom had a lot of seniority but she was afraid for the future.

“It sounds very worrying,” I agreed, “but I’m not sure what you want me to do about it.”

She laughed nervously. “Probably it’s all my imagination. I worry too much because of having so many children to feed. I make good money at the plant, thirteen dollars an hour. If they close, if they go to Nicaragua or China, like some people think, or if Mr. Zamar-if some accident happens to the building-where else can I work? Only at By-Smart, and there you start at seven dollars. Who can feed six people on seven dollars an hour? And the rent. And we’re still paying for María Inés, for her birth, I mean. The hospital, they charge so much interest, and then she needs her shots, all the children, they all need shoes…” Her voice trailed off into a sigh.

All during Rose Dorrado’s rambling remarks, Julia continued to watch the television as if her whole life depended on it, but the tension in her thin shoulders showed she was acutely aware of her mother’s words. I drank my coffee down to the last undissolved crystal: I couldn’t waste anything here.

“So what’s happening at the plant?” I tried to bring her back to her problem.

“Probably it’s nothing,” she said. “Maybe it’s nothing; Josie kept saying not to bother you with it.”

When I pressed her harder, though, she finally blurted out that last month, when she arrived at work-and she always got there early, always anxious that she be thought a good employee-if there were going to be more layoffs she couldn’t let anyone say she had a bad attitude-anyway, she arrived to find she couldn’t get her key in the lock. Someone had filled the keyholes with Krazy Glue, and they lost a whole day’s work while they waited for a locksmith to come and drill them out. Then another time she opened the factory and found it full of a really bad smell, which turned out to be dead rats in the heating ducts.

“Because I’m there early I got all the windows open, and we could still do some work, it wasn’t too bad, but you can imagine! We were lucky the weather was not so bad-in November, you know, it could be a blizzard, or rain or something.”

“What does Mr. Zamar say?”

She bent over the baby. “Nothing. He tells me accidents happen at plants all the time.”

“Where was he when the locks were glued shut?”

“What do you mean?” Rose asked.

“I mean, wasn’t it surprising that you discovered they were glued shut? Why wasn’t he there?”

“He don’t come in early because he stays late, until seven or eight at night, so he don’t come in usually till eight-thirty in the morning, sometimes even nine.”

“So he could have glued the doors shut himself when he left the night before,” I said bluntly.

She looked up startled. “Why would he do that?”

“To force the plant out of business in a way that let him collect the insurance.”

“He wouldn’t do that,” she cried, too quickly. “That would be wicked, and, really, he is a good man, he tries hard…”

“You think maybe one of the people he laid off could be doing it for revenge?”

“Anything is possible,” she said. “That’s why-I’m wondering-when Josie told me a lady cop is coaching now instead of Mrs. McFarlane-can’t you go in there and find out?”

“It would be much better if you’d call the police, the real police. They can ask-”

“No!” the word came out so loudly that the baby hic-cupped and began to cry.

“No,” she said more quietly, rocking the infant against her shoulder. “Mr. Zamar, he told me no police, he won’t let me call. But you, you grew up here, you could ask some questions, no one would mind questions from the lady who helps the girls play basketball.”

I shook my head. “I’m just one person working alone, and an investigation like this, it’s time-consuming, it’s expensive.”

“How much money?” she asked. “I can pay you something, maybe when I finish paying the hospital for Julia.”

I couldn’t bring myself to tell her my usual fee was $125 an hour, not to someone who thought she was lucky to feed five children on thirteen dollars an hour. Even though I often do pro bono work-too often, my accountant keeps telling me-I didn’t see how I could conduct an investigation at a shop where the owner didn’t want me.

“But don’t you see, if you don’t find out, if we don’t stop this, the plant will close, and what will happen to me, to my children?” she cried out, tears in her eyes.

Julia hunched deeper inside her T-shirt at her outburst and the baby squalled more loudly. I rubbed my head. The idea of one more obligation, one more rope tying me to my old neighborhood, made me want to join Julia on the couch with my head buried in an imaginary world.

With a leaden hand, I pulled my pocket diary out of my bag and looked at my commitments. “I can come down early tomorrow, I guess, but you know I’m going to have to talk to Mr. Zamar, and if he orders me off the premises I won’t be able to do anything else but leave.”

Rose Dorrado beamed at me in relief. She probably figured once I took the first step, I’d be committed to the whole journey. I hoped very much she was wrong.

I hugged my windbreaker close to my chest and slipped through a loose piece of the chain-link fence. The pale steel of a late-fall dawn was just beginning to lighten the sky, and the air was cold.

When I told Rose Dorrado I’d come by Fly the Flag this morning, I’d originally planned to arrive around eight-thirty to question the crew. Last night, though, when I was talking to Morrell about the situation, I realized I should come early: if someone was sabotaging the plant before the morning shift arrived, I might catch them in the act.

I’d had another late night last night, between staying at the school with my warring players, calling on Rose, and then, finally, stopping to check on Mary Ann McFarlane on my way north. Although a home care provider came in four times a week and did laundry and other difficult jobs, I’d gotten in the habit of bringing her food, sometimes dinner, sometimes just extra treats she enjoyed that no one else thought worth shopping for.

Mary Ann lived just north of my old neighborhood in an apartment like my own, four rooms built railway style in an old brick eight-flat. She had been in bed when I reached her last night, but she called out to me in a voice still strong enough to reach the hall. I shouted back a greeting as I bent to pet Scurry, her dachshund, who was turning inside out in his eagerness at seeing me.

What I would do with the dog when-if-he needed a new home was one of my ongoing concerns. I already had a golden retriever and her gigantic half-Lab son. A third dog would bring the health department down on me-not on account of the dogs, but to put me into a locked ward.

By the time I got to the bedroom, my old coach had hoisted herself out of bed and made it to the doorway. She was clutching the edge of the dresser, but she waved off my offered arm and stood panting until she got her breath back. In the bedroom’s dim light she looked ghastly, her cheeks sunken, the skin around her neck hanging in folds. She used to be a stocky woman; now cancer and chemicals had sucked the life out from under her flesh. The chemo had also turned her bald. The hair was growing back, covering her head with a coarse, gray-streaked red stubble, but even when she was as bald as Michael Jordan she had refused to wear a wig.