'No. N-o,' Vail said, entering his office. He stopped short inside the door. Hanging on the coat tree behind the door were his dark blue suit and his tuxedo.
'What's this?'
'I had your stuff picked up for you. Didn't think you'd have time to get home and change.'
'Change for what?' he growled.
'You have to accompany Yancey to the opening luncheon of the State Lawyers Convention. He's the keynote speaker. High noon -'
'Oh, for Christ sake!'
'And the opening-night cocktail party is at the Marina Convention Center at six.'
'
'I may as well give you all the bad news. Yancey wants to see you in his office. He wanted me to go down and get you.'
'Out of interrogation?'
'I explained that to him - again.'
'Tell him I'm tied up until lunchtime.'
'I don't think he'll buy it. Raymond Firestone's in there with him. Came in unannounced.'
Vail looked at her with a sickened expression. 'Saved the worst until last, huh? Just stood there and sandbagged me.'
'No, no, I'm not taking the rap for this one. You agreed to both the lunch and the cocktail party last summer.'
'And you're just reminding me now?'
'What did you want me to do, Marty, give you daily time ticks? Three days to go until the lawyers convention, two days, eighteen hours. Call you at home and wake you up. Nine hours to go!'
'Wake me up? I haven't been to
'I did not drag you out to the city dump. Parver set up the interrogation with Darby, not me. And I had nothing to do with Councilman Firestone's visit.'
Vail stared angrily across the broad expanse of the office at DA Jack Yancey's door. He knew what to expect before he walked into Yancey's office. Raymond Firestone had arrived in the city twenty years earlier with a battered suitcase, eighty dollars in his pocket, and a slick tongue. Walking door to door selling funeral insurance to the poor, he had parlayed the nickel-dime policy game into the beginnings of an insurance empire that now had offices all over the state. A bellicose and unsophisticated bully, he had, during seven years as a city councilman, perfected perfidity and patronage to a dubious art. As Abel Stenner had once observed, 'Firestone's unscrupulous enough to be twins.'
Firestone, who was supported openly by Eckling and the police union, had let it be known soon after his first election that he was going to 'put Vail in his place'. It was a shallow threat but a constant annoyance.
Firestone was seated opposite Yancey with his back to the office door and he looked back over his shoulder as Vail entered, staring at him through narrowed dubious eyes that seemed frozen in a perpetual squint. Firestone was a man of average stature with lacklustre brown hair, which he combed forward to hide a receding hairline, a small, thin-lipped mouth that was slow to smile, and the ruby, mottled complexion of a heavy drinker.
'Hello, Raymond,' Vail said, and, ignoring the chair beside Firestone, sat down in an easy chair against the wall several feet from the desk.
Firestone merely nodded.
Yancey sat behind his desk. He was a chubby, unctuous, smooth-talking con man with wavy white hair and a perpetual smile. A dark-horse candidate for DA years before, Yancey had turned out to be the ultimate bureaucrat, capitalizing on his oily charm and a natural talent for mediation and compromise, surrounding himself with bright young lawyers to do the dirty work since he had no stomach for the vigour of courtroom battles.
'We seem to have a little problem here,' Yancey started off. 'But I see no reason why we can't work it out amicably.'
Vail didn't say a word.
Like Jane Venable before him, Vail had little respect for Yancey as a litigator but liked him personally. Abandoned ten years earlier by Venable, Yancey had eagerly accepted Vail - his deadliest opponent in court - as his chief prosecutor. Their deal was simple. Yancey handled politics. Vail handled business.
'It's about this thing between you and Chief Eckling,' Yancey continued.
Vail stared at him pleasantly. The 'thing' between Vail and Eckling had been going on since long before Vail had become a prosecutor.
