address book followed the keys. He opened the after-shave, sniffed it, and handed it back to me. 'A bit heavy for my taste,' he said. 'I prefer real lime.'
'So do I,' I said, 'but who can afford it?'
'Now, Simeon,' Merryman said as though I hadn't spoken. 'I need to know absolutely everything you've found out, figured out, intuited, guessed, whatever. The complete dossier, anything that might help us to evaluate how much your silence is worth to us. You can think of it as a Listening session if you like, except that we haven't got the time to do it absolutely properly, so we're going to have to accelerate the process. Sit down again.'
I sat. Barry passed a belt around my lap, threaded it through the rungs of the chair, and pulled it tight. Then he took my left hand, pulled one of the handkerchiefs from my pocket, and twisted it around my wrist. He knotted the handkerchief through the belt.
'Didn't bring your tools?' I asked. My voice wasn't very steady.
'He doesn't need tools,' Merryman said comfortably. 'He's very ingenious.'
Barry took hold of my right hand and turned it palm down. He held it in a surprisingly strong grasp while he reached over to the nearer of the two breakfast plates and picked up a fork. Then he slipped one of the tines of the fork under the nail on my index finger and shoved it in.
I screamed for what seemed like a very long time. I kicked the chair backward and scuttled like a crab until I cracked its back against the wall. Then I kept scuttling, going nowhere but away from Barry, screaming until my throat felt like rags. Barry leaned against Merryman's desk and watched me with total absorption, turning the fork over and over in his hand. His mouth was open.
When I'd finished screaming and was leaning forward in the chair, fighting down an urge to retch, Merryman held up both of his beautifully shaped hands, fingers spread wide. 'Ten,' he said. He curled his right index finger. 'You've got nine to go. Then, if you want to experience really exquisite pain, Barry can go back to the one he just did. You have absolutely no idea what it feels like a second time.' He turned to Barry with an indulgent expression.
' Would you like to do another one?' he asked.
Barry nodded and got up. I was screaming before he took a step, twisting against the bonds of the chair. Merryman leaned forward and placed a restraining hand on Barry's arm.
'Later,' he said. 'I think Simeon's ready to talk to me now. Is that right, Simeon?'
I managed a nod.
'Nothing to be ashamed of,' he said. 'All those stories about people resisting torture are nonsense. No one can stand up to the prospect of real pain once they've felt it. That's why we started the conversation with a little attention-getter. So I wouldn't have to waste time asking you the same question twice.
'Wait outside,' he said to Barry. 'I'll call you if I need you.' He turned to Brooks, who was looking ashen. 'I think I'd like you outside too, Meredith. Just to create an atmosphere of perfect candor. Do you mind?' He might have been offering him a ride home. Brooks waved off the question with one heavy hand and stood up, with some difficulty, to follow Barry out of the room.
'I should be afraid of him?' Merryman said to me as the door closed. It had been loud enough for Brooks to hear. 'Hardly. He has the narrowest comfort zone of any human being I've ever met, including other lawyers. The slightest change in the status quo turns him to milk. That's one reason he's good in business. Very conservative, very steady. With all the cash we have to deal with, an impulsive man would be disaster. Still, I'll have to look into those books.' He crossed his arms across his chest and regarded me in a friendly fashion from across the room. 'All right, Simeon, tell me. If anything strikes me as false or incomplete, or if you fail to answer any of my questions in a forthright manner, I'll call Barry back in. Once he's in the room, I won't stop him no matter what you say, so don't make me call him. Have I made myself clear?'
'Yes.'
He reached up and smoothed his hair. 'Start at the beginning, if you don't mind.'
I did. I told him about Harker, about the assignment to tail Sally, about Sally's murder and the fact that I'd seen Barry on the scene. I explained about the real Ambrose Harker and about Skippy Miller being my only link to the man who'd hired me.
'Why didn't you just wash your hands of it and go to the police?' he asked. He hadn't taken his eyes off me since I'd started talking. 'A girl is murdered virtually under your nose and you don't go to the police?'
'What for? What were the cops going to give me? I didn't even have a client. All I wanted at first was to get a little money out of it. Then, as I learned more and more, I realized that there was more than a little money floating around and that I could probably catch as much of it as I could hold in two hands.'
He gave me a long, absolutely level gaze. Most people look you first in one eye and then in the other. Merryman had the knack of looking directly into both eyes at once. After perhaps a full minute he said, 'So you went to Big Sur to see Mr. Miller. Driven by the profit motive.'
I ran through all of it. I told him about my first interviews with Brooks and Wilburforce, explaining that I'd used Eleanor only for her connection with the Times and emphasizing that she knew only what had been said on those occasions. I didn't mention Hammond or the Red Dog.
'We know what Eleanor knows,' he said. 'She was very cooperative last night. She was more cooperative, in fact, than you're being. She told us, for example, that you asked her to look into the death of poor little Anna, which she didn't, and to locate Caleb Ellspeth, which she did. I'd say Eleanor knows quite a bit more than you're telling me. I wonder whether we shouldn't call Barry in here?'
'No,' I said, very quickly.
'You've just gotten your only break,' he said. 'If Barry comes back in, I'm going to let him do a double. He'll enjoy that much more than you will. Was your talk with Mr. Ellspeth productive?'
'He told me more about Meredith than he did about you.'
'Of course. He barely knows me. The man was away from home practically all the time. Do you think he's a danger to me?'
'No. He's frightened. I had the impression that you had something on him.'
Merryman was watching me very intently. 'He didn't tell you what it was?'
Praying that Eleanor hadn't told them, I said, 'No.' If I didn't get out of there, I didn't want them going after Ellspeth and Ansel.
After a moment, he dropped his eyes and studied the nails of his left hand. 'Good,' he said. 'Then that's under control, isn't it? Still, I think we'll have Barry drop by and remind him that we'd really rather he didn't talk to strangers.'
'Why tell me?' The confidence didn't make me feel comfortable.
'Why not? I feel as though you know everything already. I have to congratulate you, Simeon, you've done very thorough work. There are a few details wrong here and there in the account you gave Meredith, a few wild guesses, but by and large it's been very instructive. There are any number of loose cannon rattling about, it would seem. You've done us a service, actually. You've been profoundly irritating, but you've identified quite a few points of entry that should be shored up immediately.'
'Glad I could help,' I said.
'The first ten or fifteen years, before you get to be institutional, are always the most vulnerable in a business like this,' he said. He sounded like he was talking to a trainee. 'Everybody, when faced with something new, wants to take a crack at it. Politicians, the media, the competition. We know that. We've invited it by making the Church as vivid as possible. Beautiful little girls, a billion-year-old spirit, rather nice sermons, if I do say so myself.' He waited for a compliment.
'The one I heard was very impressive.'
'Thank you. I had no idea I could write until I actually had to sit down and do it. And even then, it wasn't until we printed little Jessica's first twelve Revealings and I saw them on the page that I knew how good they really were.'
'You can't delegate that?' I said, just to make conversation and to keep Barry out of the room.
'Oh, no.' He gave a manicured little laugh. 'Very few people know how the Revealings work. Not even Mary Claire. Just you and I. And Brooks, of course. And Miss Chan.'
'She doesn't know,' I said.
'She certainly didn't seem to,' he said absently. 'She would have told us if she did. She would have told us anything. Barry rarely gets a chance to work on a woman. There was Miss Oldfield, of course, but that was over
