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didn’t want to hang up a second time. He didn’t want to answer my question either. There was music playing in the background of whatever room he was in; thuggish hip-hop with an insistent beat.
    “How much they payin’ you, man?” a slightly different Roger Brown asked. This young man didn’t wear a suit and tie or collect a salary that had taxes taken out.
    “My regular fee.”
    “I’ll double it.”
    “You don’t know what it is.”
    “I’ll pay you a thousand to forget me.”
    “Are you in trouble, Roger?”
    “Naw, man. I ain’t in no kinda trouble.” His descent from Madison Avenue to the Lower East Side continued.
    “Because,” I said, “I only ever charge my standard fee. I never take more. That way I keep my nose clean.”
    “Why you up in my grill, man?”
    “All I need to know from you is if you are the Roger Brown known as B-Brain.”
    “Why?”
    “I’ll tell you what, Roger,” I offered. “I’ll come over right now and meet you at that little espresso place across the street from your office or anywhere else you say. We could talk.”
    “Uh-uh. No way, man. I ain’t meetin’ you nowhere, no kinda way.”
    I had already been to his office. He didn’t know what I looked like. Even if Juliet had described me, he didn’t have my picture in his head. But Roger wasn’t being rational. He was afraid of something, and I wanted to know what that something was.
    I made a few sounds that were meant to express hesitation.
    “I’m not used to giving out information on my clients,” I said. “That kind of breach in confidentiality is not looked upon kindly in my profession. But maybe if we got together you might convince me.”
    “I already told you, man. No.”
    Roger wasn’t going to trust me even though I was telling him the truth. I wanted to meet him face-to-face so that I could judge for myself if he was in some kind of fix that Ambrose had not informed me about.
    “Frankie Tork,” I said and the line went so silent that for a moment I thought the connection had gone dead.
    “S-say what?”
    “Frank Tork. He’s in the Tombs right now awaiting trial on B and E. They caught him trying to burglarize a pawnshop on Second Avenue.”
    “Frankie hired you?”
     
     
     
    “I AIN’T SEEN B-Brain in years, brother,” Frankie Tork had told me through a Plexiglas window in the visitor’s area of the New York City jail. “His moms and them moved somewhere out in Brooklyn right before his last year in high school. She said that we was a bad influence.”
    Jumper was small and wiry, brown like a walnut is brown, with tar-stained teeth and bloodshot eyes. He had the kind of smile that frightened children—and their mothers.
    “What was his mother’s name?” I asked, trying to corroborate the sketchy information I’d gotten from ex-officer Peel. Roger, aka B-Brain, and the others had been arrested for trespassing in 1991.
    “Mrs. Brown,” Frankie said.
    “You don’t know her first name?”
    “You still gonna gimme that twenty dollars, right?”
    There was an account I could credit. I would have given him the money even if he wasn’t any help.
    “What was B-Brain’s first name again?” I asked.
    “Roger.”
    “Yeah, I’ll give you twenty bucks.”
    “Maybe I could ask around, about his mom’s name, I mean.”
    “No thanks, Jumper.” I made to rise.
    “Hey, hey, man.”
    “What?”
    “They say around here that you the kinda dude get a brother out of a jam.”
    “I used to do that. Not anymore.”
    “How much?” Jumper asked, ignoring my claim of retirement.
    “Twenty thousand was my lowest fee.” That was a lie. No one had ever paid me that much. But I didn’t want to give Jumper false hope.
    “Damn, man. All I got is the twenty dollars you payin’ me.”
    “See you.”
     
     
     
    “... WHY JUMPER WANT you to find me?” Roger asked, admitting that he was the man I was looking for.
    “His lawyer, Matrice Johnson, is a friend of mine. Professional. She