centered only on the window. The men seated on the other side,
Cheyney smoking, relaxed, Paladin tense but trying to control it,
looked slightly lowish through the one-way glass. The sound of
their voices was clear and undistorted through the overhead
speakers - a top-of-the-line Bose in each corner.
Without taking his eyes off the men, McEachern said: 'You get his
lawyer?'
Jacoby said: 'The home number on the card belongs to a cleaning
woman named Howlanda Moore.'
McEachern flicked him another fast glance.
'Black, from the sound, delta Mississippi at a guess. Kids yelling
and fighting in the background. She didn't quite say I'se gwine
whup you if you don't quit!, but it was close. She's had the number
three years. I re-dialed twice.
'Jesus,' McEachern, said. 'Try the office number?'
'Yeah,' Jacoby replied. 'Got a recording. You think ConTel's a
good buy, Loot?'
McEachern flicked his gray eyes in Jacoby's direction again.
'The number on the front of the card is that of a fairly large stock
brokerage,' Jacoby said quietly. 'I looked under lawyers in the
Yellow Pages. Found no Albert K. Dellums. Closest is an Albert
Dillon, no middle initial. No law firm like the one on the card.'
'Jesus please us,' McEachern said, and then the door banged open
and a little man with the face of a monkey barged in. The mayor
had apparently won the race to Burbank.
'What's going on here?' he said to McEachern.
''I don't know,' McEachern said.
'All right,' Paladin said wearily. 'Let's talk about it. I feel,
Detective Cheyney, like a man who had just spent two hours or so
on some disorienting amusement park ride. Or like someone
slipped some LSD into my drink. Since we're not on the record,
what was your one interrogatory? Let's start with that.'
'All right,' Cheyney said. 'How did you get into the broadcast
complex, and how did you get into Studio C?'
'Those are two questions.'
'I apologize.'
Paladin smiled faintly.
'I got on the property and into the studio,' he said, 'the same way
I've been getting on the property and into the studio for over
twenty years. My pass. Plus the fact that I know every security
guard in the place. Shit, I've been there longer than most of them.'
'May I see that pass?' Cheyney asked. His voice was quiet, but a
large pulse beat in his throat.
Paladin looked at him warily for a moment, then pulled out the
lizard-skin wallet again. After a moment of rifling, he tossed a
perfectly correct NBC Performer's Pass onto the coffee table.
Correct, that was, in every way but one.
Cheyney crushed out his smoke, picked it up, and looked at it. The
pass was laminated. In the corner was the NBC peacock,
something only long-timers had on their cards. The face in the
