She waited patiently for him to say something. He sighed with disgust.

“Isn’t this more along your line?” he asked, patronizingly. “You could do most of this on the phone—”

“I could if I had the time, which I don’t,” she replied, imitating his tone perfectly. “If I could afford a secretary, it would be his job. Since there are things to do that only I can get way with, like trading information with the cops, you’re going to have to do the other stuff if you want to get anything accomplished. It’s a fair distribution of effort. I have other cases to work on, David—I have to make a living. No P.I. of my small-time stature works full-time on anything. You have the time I don’t to do this kind of thing.”

He came very close to wincing when she mentioned the cops, and he hoped she didn’t notice. Or had she somehow found out about that little run-in he’d had? Was she rubbing it in?

It would be just like her, he thought sourly. Every time he tried to get into the dominant position with her, she just put him right back down again—and he had no doubt that if she had learned about the humiliating episode, she was saving it for later use.

“One of the guys called me this morning,” he said, after a moment. “He got his buddy Paul Fry to keep him posted on what’s going down out at the site. Calligan is trying to replace all the guys calling in ‘sick,’ but it seems like everybody who shows up for an interview is either an alkie or a fake.”

“A fake?” Jennie looked up from frantically scribbling something on a pad by the phone. “What do you mean by ‘a fake’?”

He straightened a little, pleased to have some knowledge she didn’t have. “According to Fry, all the ones that have gotten callbacks turn out to have given bad phone numbers. Either the numbers have been disconnected, don’t exist, or no one on the other end ever heard of the guy who interviewed.”

Jennie tapped her eraser on the desktop in a curious and rhythmic pattern for a moment. “Doesn’t that strike you as odd?” she finally asked.

He made a noncommittal sound. “I don’t know. I know Billy said it was another sign of the curse on Calligan.”

Jennie tossed her head, so that her hair whipped over her shoulder, and snorted. “Right. I don’t think so. Not unless that particular lot of mi-ah-luschka has learned how to work the phone system. It takes a lot of power to fake out the phone lines, and a lot more knowledge that I don’t think they have.”