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“Not me—I swear, it’s the building, they keep logs, there’s video surveillance, well, maybe I did mention something about, you came by?”

“I’m sure he’s a wonderful person regardless,” replies Maxine. “While I’ve got you on the phone, can I pick your brain?”

“Sure?” Like, let’s see, where’d I put it…

“You were talking about infrastructure the other day. I’m working for a client over in New Jersey with a capitalizing issue, and they’re curious about a fiber broker in Manhattan called Darklinear Solutions. This is all out of my area—did you ever do business with them, or know anybody who has?”

“No.” But there it is again, some peculiar hiccup in continuity that Maxine has learned means Look Closer. “Sorry?”

“Just trying to get educated on the cheap, thanks, Tallis.”

• • •

DARKLINEAR SOLUTIONS IS a hip-looking chrome-and-neon establishment in the Flatiron District. In the E-rated video game of this, it sells echinacea smoothies and seaweed panini, instead of doped silica to feed depraved fatpipe fantasies that still may linger from the era recently ended.

Maxine is just about to alight from her cab when she sees a woman coming out the door in a tight leopard-print jumpsuit and Chanel Havana shades over her eyes instead of up on her head acting as a hairband, who, despite this effort, possibly conscious, at disguise, is obviously, well, well, Mrs. Tallis Kelleher Ice.

Maxine considers waving and hollering hi, but Tallis is acting too nervous here, she makes the average urban paranoid look like James Bond at the baccarat table. What’s this? Fiber is suddenly so hush-hush? No, actually it’s the getup, which screams accommodation to somebody else’s idea of provocative, and Maxine naturally finds herself wondering whose.

“You getting out, lady?”

“Maybe you should put the meter on again, while I just take a minute here.”

Tallis makes her way up the block, glancing around anxiously. At the corner she pretends to stand gazing in the window of a toilet showroom, her feet in third ballet position, some Barnard girl in an art gallery here. A minute later the door of Darklinear Solutions swings open once again and out comes this compact party in a sales-floor blazer and slacks, carrying a shoulder-strap attaché and casing the street apprehensively also. He turns the other direction from Tallis but only goes as far as a Lincoln Navigator parked a few spaces away, gets in, heads back toward Tallis at a slow cruise. When he reaches the corner, the passenger door swings open and Tallis slides in.

“Quick,” sez Maxine, “before the light changes.”

“Your husband?”

“Somebody’s, maybe. Let’s see where they go.”

“You a cop?”

“I’m Lennie on Law & Order, you didn’t recognize me?” They follow the ponderous gas gobbler all the way over to the FDR and proceed uptown, exiting at 96th, continuing north on First Avenue into a fringe neighborhood no longer Upper East Side and not quite East Harlem, where you might once have gone to visit your drug dealer or arrange a compensated evening rendezvous, but which is now showing symptoms of gentrification.

The reconfigured heavy pickup pauses near a building newly converted, according to a sign tastefully draped across its upper stories, to condos running a million or so per bedroom, and then takes about an hour to park.

“Time was,” mutters the cabbie, “leavin somethin like that on the street up here? You’d have to be insane, man, now everybody’s afraid to touch it ’cause it might belong to some badass who thinks with his Glock.”

“There they go. Could you wait here for me, I just want to try something.”

She gives Tallis and ’Gator Man a couple minutes to get in the elevator, then goes stomping up to the doorman. “Those people that just came in? those idiots with the big SUV they don’t know how to park? They just fucking knocked my bumper off.”

He’s a nice enough kid, doesn’t exactly cower but does sound apologetic. “I can’t really let you go up there.”

“It’s OK, you don’t have to let them come down here either, it’ll only mean a lot of screaming in your lobby, the mood I’m in possibly bloodshed also, who needs that, right? Here,” handing him the card of a tax lawyer and byword of nineties excess who far as she knows is still inside, up at Danbury, “this is my attorney, maybe you can pass this along next time you see Mr. and Ms. Road & Track, and oh better let me have their phone number too, e-mail, whatever, so the lawyers can get in touch.”

At which point some doormen will get all technical and pissy, but this one here, like the building, is new on the block and just as happy to be rid of some crazy bitch with a parking beef. Maxine manages a quick scan over the records at the front desk and returns to the cab with everything on the BF but his credit-card numbers.

“This is fun,” sez the cabbie. “Where next?”

She glances at her watch. Back to the shop, it looks like. “Upper Broadway, anyplace around Zabar’s’d be good?”

“Zabar’s, huh?” Some junior-sidekick note seems to have crept into his voice.

“Yeah, had some strange information about a lox, need to check that out.” She pretends to examine the safety on her Beretta.

“Maybe I should give you the special rate for PIs.”

“But I’m only a… never mind, I’ll take it.”

• • •

“MAXI. WHATCHYIZ DOIN TONIGHT.”

Masturbating to a movie on the Lifetime channel, Her Psychopathic Fiancé, I believe, why, what’s it to you? Actually what she sez is, “You’re asking me out, Rocky?”

“Hey. She called me Rocky. Listen, it’s all respectable, Cornelia’s gonna be there, my partner Spud Loiterman, maybe a couple other people.”

“You’re kidding. A soiree. Where are we going?”

“Korean karaoke, there’s a… they call it a noraebang, up in K-Town, the Lucky 18.”

“Streetlight People, Don’t Stop Believing, karaoke boilerplate, I should’ve figured.”

“We all used to be regulars over at Iggy’s on 2nd Avenue, but last year we got—not me so much—but—Spud got us…”

“Eighty-sixed.”

“Spud, he…” Rocky a little embarrassed, “he’s a genius, my partner, you ever have a problem with like Regulation D… but he gets near a mike and… well, Spud will change key a lot. Even with pitch compensation, the technology can’t keep up with him.”

“I should bring earplugs?”

“Nah, just brush up on those eighties power ballads and be there around nine.” Hearing her hesitation and being an intuitive sort, he adds, “Oh and wear somethin schlumpy, don’t want you upstaging Cornelia.”

Which heads her straight for the closet and an understated yet tabloidworthy Dolce & Gabbana number she found at Filene’s Basement for 70% off, being obliged in fact to separate it from the grasp of a Collegiate mother, East Side hairband and all, slumming her morning away after dropping the kids off, who was two sizes too big for it anyway, and which Maxine has since been waiting for an excuse to wear. Lincoln Center gala? Political fund-raiser? Forget it, a karaoke joint full of vulture capitalists, just the occasion.

Gathered that evening at the Lucky 18, in one of the larger rooms, Maxine finds Rocky’s tone-deaf associate Spud Loiterman, Spud’s girlfriend Letitia, assorted out-of-town clients in for the weekend, as well as a small party of actual Koreans wearing, possibly as ironic fashion statements, shiny yellowish outfits from the North made of Vinalon, a fiber derived, unless Maxine is hearing this wrong, from coal, who have wandered off a tour bus and are growing increasingly uneasy about finding their way back to it. And Cornelia, who shows up tonight comfortably bridge-attired and sporting pearls also. Taller than Rocky even without the heels she has on tonight, she radiates an unforced amiability you don’t see in that many WASPs, though they claim they invented it.