So he asked Harry Lee to cover for him again during the dinner break and he went to the address given in the telephone book, which proved to be a creaky old Washington Street building that contained a lot of wholesale jewelry firms. The offices were very ordinary-looking business quarters that might have belonged to an insurance agency. Mr. Kittredge was about forty, conservatively dressed. He wore a Masonic ring and looked as though he never put his shoes on his desk.

“A domestic problem?” he asked.

“My wife.”

“You have a photograph?”

He dug one out of his wallet: taken shortly after Miguel had been born, a picture he had been proud of, Liz laughing, her head tilted, good use of sunlight and shadow.

Mr. Kittredge glanced at it. “Do you want to divorce her, Doctor?”

“No. That is, I suppose it depends on what you find out,” he said tiredly, the first concession to defeat.

“The reason I ask,” Mr. Kittredge said. “I want to know whether written reports will be necessary.”

“Oh.”

“You understand that you no longer need bedroom pictures and all that nonsense?”

“I really know very little about it,” Meomartino said stiffly.

“All the law requires now is evidence of the time, the place and the opportunity for adultery to have been committed. That’s where my written reports would come in.”

“I see,” Rafe said.

“There’s no extra charge for written reports.”

“Just oral reports, I think,” he said. “At least for the time being.”

“Do you know the names of any of her friends?”

“Is that necessary?”

“No, but it might help me,” Kittredge said patiently.

He was nauseated, the walls closed in slightly. “I think Adam Silverstone. He’s a doctor at the hospital.”

Kittredge made a note.

“My fee is ten dollars an hour, ten dollars a day for car rental and ten cents a mile. Two hundred dollars minimum, in advance.”

That was why he took no clients over the telephone, Meomartino thought. “Is a check all right?” he asked.

“A check is fine, sir,” Mr. Kittredge said politely.

When he got back to the hospital Helen Fultz was waiting for him. Without the benefit of alcohol, he thought, she was once again a careworn, aging woman.

A tired woman, he realized, looking beyond the uniform and seeing the person.

“I’d like very much to hand this back to you, Dr. Meomartino,” she said.

He took the paper and saw that it was the service complaint he had filed against the unidentified nurse who had served Mr. Roche two meals on the day before surgery, against written orders.

“What do you expect me to do with it?”

“I hope you will tear it up.”

“Why should I?”

“I know the girl who served those meals,” she said. “I can take care of the matter in my own way.”