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barely hear him. “You saw the charade at the city commission meeting. And that idiot Louis trying to choke me.” One hand fluttered to his neck. “Maybe half an hour after I got home, two cops knocked on my door. They had questions about my whereabouts for the past twenty-four hours and my relationship with the dead man.”
    The waitress returned with water for Lorenzo, coffee for Eric, and the appetizers I’d ordered for the table. I reeled off a list of dishes that we would also share. “Anything else you’re craving?” I asked them.
    “I don’t have much of an appetite,” Lorenzo admitted.
    “You’ve pretty much ordered everything on the menu already,” Eric added with a laugh.
    “One thing I have to ask,” I said to Lorenzo once the waitress had bustled off with our order. I tried to think about how to word the question so he wouldn’t take offense. “Did you have any kind of premonition that Louis attacking you last night was going to happen?”
    He looked so distressed that I wished I hadn’t said anything, hadn’t appeared to question his special vision. “I’m not trying to be fresh or rude,” I said. “I’m really serious. Did you have any sense something bad might happen with the Artistic Preservation group? Or Louis himself?”
    Lorenzo mopped his forehead with a limp white hankie. “Of course things have been terribly stressful at Mallory Square for the last—let’s say, even the past year or so. I felt every bit of that anxiety.” He patted his chest.
    Which didn’t really answer my question, but I hated to press him harder. Let him tell the story in his own time. I spread a spoonful of pimento cheese on a saltine cracker for each of us and waited. Eric and I began to eat. The cheese and pimentos were a lovely combination of creamy and tangy, and the crackers crispy and salty. I could eat an entire order of this and nothing else and feel perfectly happy. Lorenzo’s fingers trembled as he picked up his cracker. He set the treat back down on the small plate and peered over the railing to the street below.
    “How does the organization work down at Mallory Square?” Eric asked as he loaded a second cracker with cheese. “It always looks like barely controlled chaos.” He waved his cracker at me. “By the way, I never imagined I liked pimento cheese, but this is amazing.”
    “It’s too complicated and convoluted to tell you everything,” Lorenzo said. “Basically, we elect a board of directors to set up the performer guidelines and negotiate the contract with the city. The organization leases the space from the city,” he explained. “Across the years, the biggest conflict has been over seniority. If you’ve visited Mallory Square at Sunset you mighthave noticed that some of the positions are worth a lot more money than others.”
    “If you score a square of space near the water,” I suggested, “your traffic will tend to be better?”
    “Of course,” said Lorenzo. “When the sun actually dips into the water, tourists want to be right there on the edge, where they have the best view. Performers who’ve been around a long time don’t want the space to be portioned out according to who gets there early in the day to set up. They want a primo space reserved for them.” He sighed and crossed his hands neatly, reminding me of a big tuxedo housecat. “The newer people don’t like this.”
    “I see the potential problems snowballing,” Eric said. “I suspect that many of the performers are living on a shoestring, so tips matter a lot?”
    “You got it.” Lorenzo huffed. “There’s more. One of our other hot issues has to do with voting. When an important vote is about to be decided, some people have been salting the membership with new members who will vote the way they want them to. You can only imagine the ways the rules can be twisted.” He heaved another big sigh. “These people aren’t Harvard-educated, polite politicians. They’re street performers.