Lonnie Garvin

Lonnie Garvin is 41 and Raskin's foster sonfoster son A boy raised by a family that is not his birth family, without necessarily being legally adopted.. Born in a working-class Detroit neighborhood, he lost his father young and was taken in by the union at 9, when Raskin pulled him off the street, gave him a home, school and, later, a job. He grew up in the boss's shadow, learned from him to shake hands and lower his voice, and never could say whether it was affection or obligation. He is the handyman of union local 87, carries boxes, minds the front desk and handles what others forget.

He lives in a two-room apartment in Detroit, in a three-story building near the river, with a sagging sofa, a fridge with pizzeria magnets, a tube television and a window onto the building's parking lot. On the living room wall he hung a black-and-white photograph of the union, from when Raskin still laughed. He cooks little and eats a lot, usually alone, in front of basketball games.

He is burly, with a square face and stubble, wavy black hair and long sideburns. His eyes are swollen from lack of sleep. He wears a navy polo shirt tight in the arms and the union's nylon jacket, with a truck emblem on the chest. Emotional, he calls Raskin the boss, cries easily and scowls when the conversation gets too close.

About who he is to the boss, he answers that he's the foster sonfoster son A boy raised by a family that is not his birth family, without necessarily being legally adopted., and that anyone can say who cried more that day. About Wednesday morning, he says he carried boxes at the union, in Detroit, as every day. Nobody notices him, he claims, because he's just the boss's boy. When the detective asks whom he thinks made Raskin disappear, he points to the New York writer, who has hours of tape of the boss talking about the pension fund. People who sell secrets, he remarks, vanish like that.

It could be the genuine pain of a son who doesn't know how to live without the father who raised him. It could be the emotion of someone using tears to escape the next question. The detective will have to decide which.