Leland did not like that. The case was a lawyer’s referral and a man was trying to get his child away from his ex-wife because she had a boyfriend. The lawyer would not have a case to take to court, but that did not devalue this work. Being spotted would; it would devalue Leland. There was a very good chance that Hugh Thoms was wrong because he was an extremely cautious man, but they could not risk it. It was something to handle, as Florence had said “Did you tell Mike?”

“I haven’t been able to.”

“If he wants to get going on it, tell him that I said to see if he can’t pull someone out of Bonney’s who knows how to tail, and we’ll put Hugh in the store for the duration.”

“Hugh was very upset,” she said.

“He would be. When you’re sixty-eight we’ll let you get upset, too.”

“Yes, sir.” Her tone indicated that she was not bothering to listen, which was all right. Leland was still not awake. A directive on how to treat Hugh Thoms was something she did not have to hear. Leland knew that she liked Hugh in her own way, even if Hugh made it clear that he did not understand the faith Leland had in her, a girl who had just turned twenty.

“Was there anything else?” he asked.

“No, sir.”

“I’ll be down in ten minutes.”

It was enough of a goodbye, and they hung up.

His apartment was in a new building in the Clifford Heights section, looking down on the center of commercial Manitou. On a bluff over the river, to the right in his picture window, was a cluster of old mills and factories, some a hundred years old, and in their center, rising like the tomb of an Aztec king, was the square, buttressed, fourteen-story home office of the Manitou Life Insurance Company. In spite of a population nearing three hundred and fifty thousand, Manitou was still a company town, and that was the company. Twelve thousand people worked there, and many others depended wholly or in part on the business it made. When Leland had come here six years ago to take the job the company had offered, he had not known what to make of the location in the heart of the industrial district. But it had been no mistake; Manitou, the town, which had suffered terribly in the depression, was prospering in the postwar boom, and planned to rebuild from there, on the spot on which it had been founded. In six or seven years a score of apartments and commercial buildings, the home office among them, would rise from a grassy plain and command a view thirty miles down a river that surely was one of the most beautiful in the world.