“Terrific, Joe,” Roberts said. “You were the same as you are now. Perfectly natural.”

Norma slapped at his arm. “You even wanted to turn it off. I won’t talk to you.”

Now Roberts stretched, his long arms shotting the cuffs of his shirt out of his jacket. “Your wife keeps a scrapbook, doesn’t she, Joe?”

“Yes. There’s not much she can do about this, is there?” A little reminder of his marital status. He had not missed it. Neither had Phyllis Reynolds. “During the war Karen used to complain about the radio broadcasts. I don’t know if I even want to tell her about this.”

“Why not?” Phyllis Reynolds asked.

“Well, she’s missed it, hasn’t she?”

“Maybe she did see it,” she said.

“Not in Manitou. This was a local broadcast.”

“Oh. Why isn’t she with you?”

“She’s working,” he said pleasantly. “I make her work.”

“Apparently your private detective agency isn’t as successful as the man said.”

He shrugged. He took a swallow of his drink.

“I don’t care to be lied to, Mr. Leland,” Phyllis Reynolds said.

“It wasn’t your business, Miss Reynolds.”

“What was the point to it? These people weren’t surprised by what they heard, so they must have known. It strikes me that you were trying to have a joke at my expense.”

“I assure you that I was not,” he said.

“I’m certain that he had his reasons, Phyllis,” Roberts said. “Let’s talk about something else.”

“I would like to say that I wasn’t as impressed as you two with his appearance,” she said. “Under the circumstance, with a man’s life in the balance, I thought it was in loathsome taste. I don’t know what right he had there, even if his father is the captain of that precinct—”

“Call headquarters and find out,” Leland said.

“All right, maybe you could be there, but first you use the circumstance to project yourself into the limelight, and second, you come out with all that gobbledygook about the glorious police. Where d-did you get that? People aren’t so naïve as to believe that the police have never raised a hand to a prisoner. Or taken graft. If it weren’t for the attention this case has gotten, no one would know that this man was in custody until a confession had been beaten out of him. Correct procedure. When the police finally begin to observe correct procedure, that’s when I’ll stop laughing at statements like the one you just made—and I’m not alone. There are a lot of people who are thinking right now that that’s the silliest thing they’ve heard in years.”

“I don’t think that he was speaking to the public,” Roberts said.

“I don’t understand that,” Phyllis Reynolds said.

“The police do feel pressure from above,” he said. “There’s nothing they can do about it, either—except occasionally.”

“No one asked me to say what I did,” Leland said. “Don’t assume anything like that.”

“The picture you painted of the police is still ridiculous,” Phyllis Reynolds said.