“Oh.” There was a glum nod. Horns blew. Taking careful notice of Betty Kaminsky, Everett eased the taxi forward. Leland watched him until there was nothing to see but the marker on the taxi roof.

Betty Kaminsky moved across the seat. “Who is he?”

“My taxi driver.” Leland looked after him again. A trolley blocked the view.

“Do you think he saw anything on our faces?”

“No. It wouldn’t matter, anyway.”

“It’s a good thing he didn’t come along a minute earlier.”

Leland smiled. “Cured?”

“We’ll see.” She looked all right. She took the door from him and closed it. He put his hand on the windowsill and she put her hand over his. Her skin felt very soft and moist; he was used to Karen. “You have an interesting hand,” she said. “It doesn’t go with all the things you’ve done.” She patted it in an almost motherly way. She looked up at him. “You will call—if you can? About the case.”

“Of course I will.”

She nodded, thinking of something else, smiling a little, and moved across the seat again. She tugged at her skirt distractedly. If he tried to stop her now—he was not considering it—he would be wasting his time. The car lunged into the traffic flow. He had trapped himself with the remark about undoing her underwear. The fantasies had poured up vividly, her arms around him, the perfume in her hair. It had not been the flattery that had started him; he had been drawn to her when she had come into the lobby. He was still thinking of sleeping with her—the very craziness of it made him try to shake it out of his mind. Norma had put the money in his pocket to pay for this. He wanted to think that Everett really had seen him. Crazy, stupid thing: he felt as if someone had given him a kind of fantastic hotfoot. The fact that it had been nobody’s fault but his own made him that much more angry. There was no accounting for the things that could backfire and leave a man feeling like such a damned fool.

There was no one waiting upstairs. Florence picked up her memo pad and met him at the swinging gate. “Two calls from Port Smith.” She followed him into his office. “Mrs. MacIver called. She didn’t seem to be able to say what was on her mind. Then your father called. He said that it wasn’t important but that you wouldn’t be able to get him, so you shouldn’t try to call back.”

“Where’s Hugh?”

“Relieving Harry McLeod. It’s been quiet here. You seem upset. Didn’t it go well?”

“It went fine,” he said. “Did the file on MacIver’s father come through?”

“They called. Four-thirty.”

“What about Mrs. MacIver? What do you think was on her mind?”