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taffeta. The photo came straight out of a Town & Country Magazine back issue which, by all appearances, had published news of their marriage. While a smiling, wide-eyed Tina looked ravishing in the photo, Farrell looked proud and, dare I say it, smart.
    “Now what’s this all about?” Tina asked.
    “We’ve run into a problem with the asbestos removal down at PS 20,” I said. “It requires your husband’s personal attention.”
    Her eyes blinked rapidly, her sexy bottom lip assuming a pout position. The invisible cat had got her tongue.
    “So is your husband home?” I pressed.
    Blue eyes continued boring holes into me.
    “I remember you now,” she said. “From the country club when I was a child. You went to school with James. You’re a contractor like Daddy.”
    “Yes,” I said. “Like Daddy.” Then impatiently, “Tina, I really need to speak with Jimmy about the crisis situation at PS 20.”
    She crossed long, ripped arms over an ample chest, cleared her throat, peered down at the tops of her tennis shoes.
    “He’s gone,” she said.
    I wasn’t sure if I heard her right.
    “Excuse me?”
    “Ms. Harrison—”
    “Spike.”
    She seemed taken aback.
    “When I was kid,” I explained, “I stepped on a big nail the size of a spike . It impaled itself through my foot.” Raising up my hands like, Get it? What I didn’t tell her was that my grandfather’s long dead beagle had also been named Spike.
    “Spike,” she said, eyes filling, “my husband went fishing on Saturday morning and has not returned since.”
    The floor shifted under my boots.
    “He hasn’t called in?”
    She shook her head, wiped her eyes with backs of her hands. I couldn’t help but notice her manicure. I made loose fists with my hands, felt my jagged cuticles. Sometimes I felt like a man with boobs.
    “You tried calling him?”
    She sniffled, tried to compose herself.
    “All I get is the answering service.”
    “What about the police?”
    “Daddy,” she said, clearing a tell-tale frog from her throat. “Meaning, my father wanted to wait another day…to see if James would show up.”
    A million and one questions ran through my brain, the major one being: Did Farrell have a squeeze on the side? Is that what this is all about?
    “I imagine you must be quite upset,” I said. “But by the looks of things, your husband… James …has chinsed out on the asbestos removal phases of the PS 20 contract, placing a lot of people in considerable danger.”
    Her eyes were wide, unblinking. Big tears beginning to fall.
    “I just left his office and guess what, Tina? No more office. Meaning our James has chewed and screwed; flown the coop, bolted the scene.”
    Nothing but open, tear-filled eyes.
    I said, “And he did it with most of a two-hundred fifty-thousand dollar contract in his pocket, plus another ten that I personally advanced him.”
    More tears.
    “Now Tina, think hard. Do you know where he might have gone fishing on Saturday?”
    She stared at me through a haze of salt water. Her whole body was trembling.
    “You sure he went fishing at all?”
    “Fly…fishing,” she nodded. “That’s what he told me…And I…believed him.”
    “Did you see him leave the house with all his stuff—waders, fishing poles?”
    “He left at dawn,” she said. “He used to go with Daddy almost every weekend. Then they stopped for a while.” Taking on an ironic smile. “Lately, they’ve been going out again quite often.”
    “You’d still be sleeping at dawn,” I said.
    She pursed her lips, squinted her eyes.
    “I had doubles scheduled for ten A.M. at the club…Plus Pilates.”
    “Of course you did,” I said. “But if Jimmy did actually go fishing, do you at least know where he went fishing?”
    “He doesn’t tell me those things,” she said, wiping both sides of her face with the backs of her hands. “He doesn’t tell me where he goes, what he does when he goes there.”
    “I’m not surprised.”
    “Well that’s