Detective 1st Grade Richard Cheyney looked at him calmly for a
moment. When he spoke, it was in the soft and polite voice that
had earned him the only halfkidding nickname 'Detective to the
Stars.' Part of the reason he spoke this way was because he
genuinely liked and respected show people. Part of the reason was
because he didn't trust them. Half the time they were lying they
didn't know it.
'Could you tell us, please, Mr Paladin, how you got on the set of
The Tonight Show, and where Johnny Carson is?'
'Who's Johnny Carson?'
Pete Jacoby - who wanted to be Henny Youngman when he grew
up, Cheyney often thought - gave Cheyney a momentary dry look
every bit as good as a Jack Benny deadpan. Then he looked back at
Edward Paladin and said, 'Johnny Carson's the guy who used to be
Mr Ed. You know, the talking horse? I mean, a lot of people know
about Mr Ed, the famous talking horse, but an awful lot of people
don't know that he went to Geneva to have a species-change
operation and when he came back he was-'
Cheyney often allowed Jacoby his routines (there was really no
other word for them, and Cheyney remembered one occasion when
Jacoby had gotten a man charged with beating his wife and infant
son to death laughing so hard that tears of mirth rather than
remorse were rolling down his cheeks as he signed the confession
that was going to put the bastard in jail for the rest of his life), but
he wasn't going to tonight. He didn't have to see the flame under
his ass; he could feel it, and it was being turned up. Pete was
maybe a little slow on the uptake about some things, and maybe
that was why he wasn't going to make Detective 1st for another
two or three years ... if he ever did.
Some ten years ago a really awful thing had happened in a little
nothing town called Chowchilla. Two people (they had walked on
two legs, anyway, if you could believe the newsfilm) had hijacked
a busload of kids, buried them alive, and then had demanded a
huge sum of money. Otherwise, they said, those kiddies could just
stay where they were and swap baseball trading cards until their air
ran out. That one had ended happily, but it could have been a
nightmare. And God knew Johnny Carson was no busload of
schoolkids, but the case had the same kind of fruitcake appeal: here
was that rare event about which both the Los Angeles Times-
Mirror and The National Enquirer would hobnob on their front
pages. What Pete didn't understand was that something extremely
rare had happened to them: in the world of day-to-day police work,
a world where almost everything came in shades of gray, they had
suddenly been placed in a situation of stark and simple contrasts:
produce within twenty-four hours, thirty-six at the outside, or
watch the Feds come in ... and kiss your ass goodbye.
Things happened so rapidly that even later he wasn't completely
sure, but he believed both of them had been going on the unspoken
presumption, even then, that Carson had been kidnapped and this
