Jose considered this, then shook his head. “Advantages… Pretty much come and go as he wanted. Besides, with Mama and Marcus there, he could tomcat around town all he wanted and come home to twenty-four/seven room service and security.”

“That, and a twenty-four/seven alibi,” Frank conceded.

“Sure was into high-tech.”

The flat-panel TVs, the circuit boards, the scanner, and the secure phone.

“Pac-Man generation,” Frank said, still putting a follow-on thought together. “You think about it, Hoser… how much Skeeter’s business depends on communication. He can get stuff at Radio Shack or off the Net… scanners, bugging equipment, scrambler phones… stuff that’s years ahead of anything we’ve got.”

“What’s more,” Jose said, “he doesn’t need a court order to use it. Something else…?”

“Yeah?”

“Notice how eager Mama Lipton was to get his car back? We oughta have R.C. take it apart.” Jose said, adding it to a mental checklist. “ ’Nother thing-Skeeter’s organization.”

“Who’s gonna inherit?”

“Yeah. Takeovers in that line of work get messy.”

“Might tell us who had the motive and the balls to go after him,” Frank said.

Jose scribbled a reminder in his notebook, then sat pensively as though something else was calling for his attention.

“Yeah,” he said finally. “The chair.”

“Chair?”

“Babba Lipton. The chair she was sitting in… with the big round back.”

“Yeah?”

“Remind you of something?”

It wasn’t until Jose asked that a memory flashed to Frank like a falling star. He struggled with it, trying to give it definition, time, place.

“Huey Newton,” Jose hinted.

Instant clarity: The Black Panther poster. Huey Newton. Black leather jacket. Black beret. Shotgun in one hand, spear in the other. Sitting in a thronelike wicker chair. Brooding hate and malevolence.

“When we came in,” Jose continued, “I knew she knew. The way she was waiting for us, sitting in that chair.”