“Maxi, hi?” Vyrva McElmo, gliding across the porch through the crowd, taking much longer than she has to, a West Coast thing, it seems to Maxine. Vyrva is a sweetheart but not nearly time-obsessed enough. People been known to get their Upper West Side Mom cards pulled for far less than she gets away with.

“I’m like in another scheduling nightmare this afternoon?” she calls from a few strollers away, “nothing too major, well not yet anyway, but at the same time . . .”

“No prob,” just to speed things up a little, “I’ll bring Fiona back to our place, you can come get her whenever.”

“Thanks, really. I’ll try not to be too late.”

“She can always sleep over.”

Before they got to know each other, Maxine would bring out herbal tea, after putting on a pot of coffee for herself, till Vyrva inquired, pleasantly enough, “Like I’m wearing California plates on my butt, or what?” This morning Maxine notes a change from the normal weekday throwtogether, what Barbie used to call an Executive Lunch Suit instead of denim overalls, for one thing, hair up instead of in the usual blond braids, and the plastic monarch butterfly earrings replaced by what, diamond studs, zircons? Some appointment later in the day, business matters no doubt, job hunting, maybe another financing expedition?

Vyrva has a degree from Pomona but no day job. She and Justin are transplants, Silicon Valley to Silicon Alley. Justin and a friend from Stanford have a little start-up that somehow managed to glide through the dotcom disaster last year, though not with what you’d call irrational exuberance. So far they’ve been coming up OK with the tuition at Kugelblitz, not to mention rent for the basement and parlor floors of a brownstone off Riverside, which the first time Maxine saw she had a real-estate envy attack. “Magnificent residence,” she pretended to kvell, “maybe I’m in the wrong business?”

“Talk to Bill Gates here,” Vyrva nonchalant, “I’m just hangin out, waitin for my stock options to vest? Right, honey?”

California sunshine, snorkel-deep waters, most of the time anyway. Once in a while, though . . . Maxine hasn’t been in the business she’s in for this long without growing antennas for the unspoken. “Good luck with it, Vyrva,” thinking, Whatever it is, and noting a slow California double take as she exits the stoop, kissing her kids on top of their heads on the way past, and resumes the morning commute.

Maxine runs a small fraud-investigating agency down the street, called Tail ’Em and Nail ’Em—she once briefly considered adding “and Jail ’Em,” but grasped soon enough how wishful, if not delusional, this would be—in an old bank building, entered by way of a lobby whose ceiling is so high that back before smoking was outlawed sometimes you couldn’t even see it. Opened as a temple of finance shortly before the Crash of 1929, in a blind delirium not unlike the recent dotcom bubble, it’s been configured and reconfigured over the years since into a drywall palimpsest accommodating wayward schoolkids, hash-pipe dreamers, talent agents, chiropractors, illegal piecework mills, mini-warehouses for who knows what varieties of contraband, and these days, on Maxine’s floor, a dating service called Yenta Expresso, the In ’n’ Out Travel Agency, the fragrant suite of acupuncturist and herb specialist Dr. Ying, and down the hall at the very end the Vacancy, formerly Packages Unlimited, seldom visited even when it was occupied. Current tenants remember the days when those now chained and padlocked doors were flanked by Uzi-packing gorillas in uniform, who signed for mysterious shipments and deliveries. The chance that automatic-weapons fire might break out at any minute put a sort of motivational edge on the day, but now the Vacancy just sits there, waiting.

The minute she steps out of the elevator, Maxine can hear Daytona Lorrain down the hall and through the door, set to high-dramatic option, abusing the office phone again. She tiptoes in about the time Daytona screams, “I’ll sign them muthafuckin papers then I’m outta here, you wanna be a dad, you take care of that whole shit,” and slams the phone down.

“Morning,” Maxine chirps in a descending third, sharping the second note maybe a little.

“Last call for his ass.”

Some days it seems like every lowlife in town has Tail ’Em and Nail ’Em on their grease-stained Rolodex. A number of phone messages have piled up on the answering machine, breathers, telemarketers, even a few calls to do with tickets currently active. After some triage on the playback, Maxine returns an anxious call from a whistle-blower at a snack-food company over in Jersey which has been secretly negotiating with ex-employees of Krispy Kreme for the illegal purchase of top-secret temperature and humidity settings on the donut purveyor’s “proof box,” along with equally classified photos of the donut extruder, which however now seem to be Polaroids of auto parts taken years ago in Queens, Photoshopped and whimsically at that. “I’m beginning to think something’s funny about this deal,” her contact’s voice trembling a little, “maybe not even legit.”

“Maybe, Trevor, because it’s a criminal act under Title 18?”

“It’s an FBI sting operation!” Trevor screams.

“Why would the FBI—”

“Duh-uh? Krispy Kreme? On behalf of their brothers in law enforcement at all levels?”

“All right. I’ll talk to them at the Bergen County DA, maybe they’ve heard something—”

“Wait, wait, somebody’s coming, now they saw me, oh! maybe I better—” The line goes dead. Always happens.

She now finds herself reluctantly staring at the latest of she’s lost count how many episodes of inventory fraud involving gizmo retailer Dwayne Z. (“Dizzy”) Cubitts, known throughout the Tri-State Area for his “Uncle Dizzy” TV commercials, delivered as he is spun around at high speed on some kind of a turntable, like a little kid trying to get high (“Uncle Dizzy! Turns prices around!”) schlepping closet organizers, kiwi peelers, laser-assisted wine-bottle openers, pocket rangefinders that scan the lines at the checkout and calculate which is likely to be shortest, audible alarms that attach to your TV remote so you’ll never lose it, unless you lose the remote for the alarm also. None of them for sale in stores yet, but they can be seen in action any late night on TV.

Though he has approached the gates of Danbury more than once, Dizzy remains gripped in a fatality for sublegal choices, putting Maxine herself on moral pathways that would make a Grand Canyon burro think twice. The problem being Dizzy’s charm, at least a just-off-the-turntable naivete that Maxine can’t quite believe is fake. For the ordinary fraudster, family disruption, public shame, some time in the joint are enough to get them to seek legal if not honest employment. But even among the low-stakes hustlers she is doomed to deal with, Dizzy’s learning curve is permanently flatlined.

Since yesterday an Uncle Dizzy’s branch manager out on Long Island, some stop on the Ronkonkoma line, has been leaving increasingly disoriented messages. A warehouse situation, inventory irregularities, something a little different, fucking Dizzy, please. When will Maxine be allowed to kick back, become Angela Lansbury, dealing only with class tickets, instead of exiled out here among the dim and overextended?

On her last Uncle Dizzy field visit out there, Maxine came around the corner of a towering stack of cartons and actually collided with whom but Dizzy himself, wearing a Crazy Eddie T-shirt in eye-catching yellow, creeping around behind some auditing team, average age of twelve, their firm being notorious for hiring solvent abusers, videogame addicts, diagnosed cases of impaired critical thinking, and assigning them immediately to asset inventory.

“Dizzy, what.”

“Oops, I did it again, as Britney always sez.”

“Look at this,” stomping up and down the aisles taking and lifting sealed cartons at random. A number of these, to somebody’s surprise maybe, not Maxine’s, seemed, though sealed, to have nothing inside. Gee. “Either I’m Wonder Woman here, or we’re experiencing a little inventory inflation? . . . You don’t want to stack these dummy cartons up too high, Dizzy, one look at the bottom layer and how it isn’t buckling under all the weight on top? usually a pretty good tipoff, and, and this kid auditing team, you should really at least let them clear the building before you bring the truck up to the loading dock to shift the same set of cartons over to the next fucking branch store, see what I’m saying . . .”