She repeated my words dubiously. When I nodded she said them again into the phone. This time she seemed to be on hold. She answered incoming calls and routed them through, checked back with her own blinking light and waited again. About five minutes later she told me I could have a seat: Sukey would be down for me.

The wait stretched to twenty minutes before Sukey showed up. She was a tall, thin woman whose skintight skirt emphasized the painful boniness of her pelvis and hips. Her pale face was pitted with acne scars, but her voice, when she asked me to follow her, was deep and sweet.

“What did you say your name was?” she asked as we got on the elevator. “Charlene wasn’t very clear over the phone.”

“Warshawski,” I repeated, handing her a card.

She studied the little rectangle gravely, until the doors opened for the eighth floor. As soon as we stepped off the elevators I realized I’d found the secret cache of Paragon employees. The place was a maze of cubicles, each holding two or three computer stations and the people to staff them. As we moved toward the end of the floor the cubes gave way to offices, still filled with computers and their minders.

We finally reached a small open area. Sukey’s desk stood outside an open corner office. It was labeled as Ben Loring’s lair, but he wasn’t home. Sukey directed me to one of the foam-core seats and knocked on a nearby door. I couldn’t hear what she said when she stuck her head around the jamb. She disappeared briefly, then came back to escort me in.

The conference room was filled with men, mostly in shirt-sleeves and all of them looking at me with a mix of suspicion and contempt. No one spoke, but two or three of them were darting glances at the second guy from my left, a burly fiftyish man with a thick bush of gray hair.

“Mr. Loring?” I held out a hand to him. “I’m V. I. Warshawski.”

He ignored my hand. “Who are you working for, Warshawski?”

I sat uninvited at my end of the oval table. “Salvatore Contreras.”

This time all seven of them exchanged glances. Normally, of course, I keep my clients’ identities secret, but I wanted to watch them all try to figure out what big financial interest Mr. Contreras represented. Maybe they’d even think he was with the Mob.

“And why does he care about Diamond Head?” Loring asked at last.

“How about this, Mr. Loring: you explain to me what Paragon’s connection to Diamond Head is and I’ll tell you what my client’s is.”

There was a little rumble through the room at that. I heard the man on Loring’s right mutter, “I told you this was a waste of time, Ben. She’s just going to dick us around.”