I followed him out of the building the back way. We were almost to his unmarked Ford sedan when Cherry stopped abruptly and said he had to go back inside and tend to one thing he’d forgotten. I waited in the car and he reappeared about ten minutes later. We drove across town to a run-down-looking building that could have been a small motor repair shop, but was actually a restaurant. The clue was the Good Eats neon sign hanging over the doorway. Cherry led me inside, and a cloud of cigarette smoke billowed out as he opened the door. A waitress with big hair, lots of lipstick, and, I had to admit, a rather spectacularly engineered figure smiled at Cherry like he was a regular and showed us to a table.

I waved my hand in the air as Cherry got out some cigarettes.

“This town doesn’t have antismoking bylaws?” I asked.

Cherry nodded. “Sure. We just choose not to enforce them. And Rose, who runs this joint, she pretends not to notice.” He tipped his cigarette pack toward me. “Smoke?”

“No thanks,” I said, “I’ll just breathe the air. How’s the food here?”

“Basic. But good.” The big-haired waitress came over and got close enough to the booth so Cherry could give her a friendly squeeze around the middle. He pushed his head into her breasts. “How’s my honey?” he said.

She smiled. “They ain’t a pillow, Mikey,” she said. “What’ll you have?”

Cherry ordered a cheeseburger with onion rings and I said I’d have the same. When the waitress walked away, Cherry lit up, leaned across the table almost conspiratorially, and said, “So, you’re suspended.”

For a second I thought maybe I’d pretend not to be shocked that he knew this, but I didn’t have the stuff to pull that off.

“That’s right,” I said.

“I made a call when I went back inside. To your paper, to check you out. And they know you there, no question about it. But evidently you were put on a bit of a leave recently. I don’t like it, people don’t play straight with me.”

I swallowed, took a sip from my glass of water. “I haven’t told you anything that wasn’t the truth.”

Cherry put his index finger in the air. “Ahh, but, you haven’t told me everything. That’s a little bit like lying.”

“I’m still on the Metropolitan payroll. And with any luck, if I can figure out what happened up here, and find out what happened to Trixie Snelling, I think I might be able to end this suspension.”