“Ballem’s got to be here for the bond hearing,” I said. “Hill, we can’t be sure.”

“I thought he came to all these things.”

“That’s what Marvel said.”

“I’d hate for her to be wrong this early,” LuEllen said. We’d continued down the block past the City Hall. “Let’s go around

Wait a minute. There he is. There. Ballem.”

A man in a seersucker suit and a white straw hat was walking down the street toward us. He turned to look at our car as we rolled past. “Are you sure?” I asked.

“Ninety-nine percent. I saw him last week, on the street. His office is down this way.”

We found the Continental outside Ballem’s office, three blocks from the City Hall.

“If we could find Hill

“

“If we don’t, we’ll call it off,” she said. “But we’ve got the other two.”

“We go?” I asked.

“Yes.”

The phone company was a little redbrick cubicle on a side street, with a lighted blue and white phone booth hung on the side wall. We knew Chenille Dessusdelit, the mayor, was at the meeting. And we knew she was a widow and lived alone. But there might be a guest

We called her home, but there was no answer. With the twentieth ring LuEllen nipped the receiver off the phone with a pair of compact bolt cutters. The phone would still be ringing at Dessusdelit’s, and with the receiver gone, it was unlikely that anyone would come along and hang up our public phone.

“Get the portable,” LuEllen said. I knelt on the passenger seat, leaned into the back, unzipped her suitcase, took out the cellular phone, sat down again, and plugged it into the cigarette lighter. Dessusdelit’s line was still busy.

“Maybe we could get Bobby to kill the call records, so we could just use the cellular and not have to mess with public phones,” I suggested after I had hung up.

LuEllen shook her head. “Too complicated. Something could get fucked up and we’d be on paper.” She feared paper more than anything: tax records, agreements, leases, checks. Phone bills. Paper left a trail and couldn’t be denied.