Fire Sale by Sara Paretsky

anyway? You think I’m going to pay you for lurking around my factory?”
    He was muttering his complaints, not shouting, which seemed ominous to me: a man afraid of what I would learn. I nodded, though, at his words: no one was going to pay me for spending my time at Fly the Flag.
    As I stood to leave, I said casually, “You wouldn’t be doing this yourself, would you?”
    “Doing what—you mean, putting dead rats in my own heating system? You are crazy, you, you—nosy bitch! Why would I do such an insane thing?”
    “You laid off eleven people this fall. Your business is in trouble. You wouldn’t be the first person to try to sell your plant to the insurance company—solve a lot of problems, wouldn’t it, if sabotage forced you out of business.”
    “I laid people off because of the economy. As soon as the economy improves, I’ll hire them back. Now get out of here.”
    I took a card out of my bag and laid it on his desk. “Call me when you decide you can tell me who has you so scared you won’t even protect your own business.”
    I left the office and walked across the floor to where Rose was stitching an intricate gold logo onto an outsize navy banner. She looked up at me but didn’t stop moving the heavy fabric through the machine. The racket on the floor was intense, what with the sewing machines, the giant electric shears, and the industrial steam pressers; I squatted so I could yell directly into her ear.
    “He claims nothing’s going on, despite the evidence. He’s scared of someone or something, too scared to talk about it, in my opinion. Do you have any idea what that could be?”
    She shook her head, her eyes on the work in front of her.
    “He says it’s not gang protection. Do you believe that?”
    She hunched a shoulder, not breaking the quick movement of her hands as they guided the needle through the appliqué. “You know this neighborhood. You know there are a lot of street gangs down here. The Pentas, the Latin Kings, the Lions, any of them could do anything bad. But usually they’re more—more violent than this—they would break the windows, something like that, not put glue in the locks.”
    “And how did the guy get in this morning?” Maybe I’d left the back door open when I undid the lock this morning: I didn’t think so, but I couldn’t swear to it a hundred percent, either. “Who has keys besides Zamar?”
    “The foremen—Larry Ballatra, he’s the day man, and Joey Husack, he’s the second shift.”
    “And you, right, since you often come in early?”
    Her lips moved in a nervous smile. “Yes, but me, I’m not trying to hurt the plant, I’m trying to keep it open.”
    “Or trying to get Zamar to think you’re indispensable, so he doesn’t let you go in the next round of job cuts.”
    For the first time her hands slowed and she didn’t feed the fabric through fast enough. She hissed a curse at me as it bunched up under the needle. “Now look what you’ve made me do. And how can you say such things? You’re Josie’s coach! She trusts you. I trusted you.”
    A hand suddenly gripped my shoulder and yanked me to my feet. The noise from the machines had been so loud I hadn’t heard the foreman come up behind me.
    Although he was holding me, he spoke to Rose Dorrado. “Rose, since when do you have the right to have guests at your workstation? You better not be short when the day ends.”
    “I won’t be,” Rose said, her face still red with anger. “And she’s not a guest, she’s a detective.”
    “Who you invited into the plant! She doesn’t belong in here. The boss told her to get out, so what business you got talking to her?” He shook my shoulder. “The boss told you to leave, now you’re going to leave.”
    He frog-marched me to the door and pushed me outside so hard that I stumbled against a man who was crossing the apron to the front door.
    “Steady there, steady there.” He caught me and held me upright. “You’re not drinking on the job,