The only good news was that Carl Brauner, Russ’s similarly hale-and-hearty pal, didn’t stop by as he’d promised with records for me to autograph on my break. Perhaps he’d been traumatized by the outcome of his Heritage Picnic, or the death of Russ Hewett.

It was easy to guess where the information had come from. Russ would have had all the details Gail was encoding. Because he’d helped oversee the building of the island when it was a civil and not a military project, he was that rare thing, a civilian privy to information that would otherwise have been known only to the navy. Just as he had enlisted the Army Corps of Engineers to help build a world’s fair, the government undoubtedly needed his help in transforming what had been intended to become a municipal airport into a U.S. naval base. Once again the go-between, Russ would have had access to facts and figures normally off-limits to a civilian.

The question was, Had Russ knowingly and willingly supplied the information?

Perhaps Gail’s letter to him had not been heartfelt at all. It could have been a case of Salome trying to get what she wanted from Herod by feigning an attraction to him. And was it not absolutely horrendous that I was eager to embrace this theory?

I didn’t have to decode any more to know that Gail was in a terrible situation, but not much worse than the one I was in. I should be calling the police, the FBI, or the navy at this very moment, but then Gail would be arrested. What was the punishment for revealing government secrets of this nature? I supposed it might even be death.

This was probably not the most propitious evening for Jack to introduce me to a new vocalist he had filling in for the absent Vera. He’d heard the young woman at different clubs along the west coast, had been wowed by (and keeping tabs on) her. Now Vera had given him the perfect excuse to see how she fit in with our sound. The call he’d placed last night had been to her, and she’d taken the train up from Los Angeles this morning. Norma Deloris Egstrom was her name, and yes, she knew it wasn’t a great name. She’d tried working under a different moniker in Hollywood, but nothing had panned out, so in the hopes of breaking two years of bad luck, she was giving Norma Deloris a try. She figured the initials N.D. were appropriate for a North Dakota girl.