fast, before some¬body gets seriously hurt."
I gave a sardonic smile. "There's no need to go over the top, Dennis. We're talking a bit of illegal fly-posting here, not the ice-cream wars."
His genial mask slipped and he was staring straight into my eyes in full chill mode, reminding me why his enemies call him Dennis the Menace. "You're not understanding, Kate," he said softly. "We're talking heavy-duty damage here. The live music business in Manchester is worth a lot of cash. If you've got a proper flyposting business up and running with a finger in the ticket sales pie, then you're talking a couple of grand a week tax free for doing not a lot except keeping your foot soldiers in line. That kind of money makes for serious enforcement."
"And that's what my clients have been getting. Skin heads on super lager breaking up their gigs, their van set¬ting on fire," I reminded him. "I'm not taking this lightly."
"You've still not got it, Kate. You remember Terry Spotto?"
I frowned. The name rang vague bells, but I couldn't put a face to it.
"Little runty guy, lived in one of the Hulme crescents? Strawberry mark down his right cheek?"
I shook my head. "I don't know who you mean."
"Sure you do. They found him lying on the bridge over the Medlock, just down from your office. Somebody had removed his strawberry mark with a sawn-off shotgun."
I remembered now. It had happened about a year ago. I'd arrived at work one Tuesday morning to see yellow police tapes shutting off part of the street. Alexis had chased the story for a couple of days, but hadn't got any further than the official line that Terry Spotto had been a small-time drug dealer. "That was about fly-posting?" I asked.
"Terry was dealing crack but he decided he wanted a second profit center," Dennis said, reminding me how expertly today's intelligent villains have assimilated the language of business. "He started fly-posting, only he didn't have the sense to stay off other people's patches or the muscle to take territory off them. He got warned a couple of times, but he paid no never mind to it. Since he wouldn't take a telling, or a bit of a seeing to, somebody decided it was time to make an example. I don't think anybody's seriously tried to cut in since then. But it sounds like your lads have made the mistake of linking up with somebody who's too new on the block to remember Terry Spotto."
I took a deep breath. "Hell of a way of seeing off the com¬petition. Dennis, I need to talk to somebody about this. Get the boys off the hook before this gets silly. Gimme a name."
"Denzel Williams," Dennis said. "Garibaldi's. Mention my name."
"Thanks." I hadn't been to Garibaldi's, but I'd heard plenty about it. If I'd had to guess where to find someone I could talk to about so dodgy a game, that's probably the place I'd have gone for.
"Anything else?"
I shook my head. "Not in the way of business. Not unless you know somebody with a wad of cash to invest in a private eye business."
Dennis's eyebrows lowered. "What's Bill up to?"
I told him. Debbie tuned back in to the conversation and the subject kept us going for the remainder of the visit. By the time I'd dropped Debbie back at the house, I had a list of a dozen or so names that Dennis reckoned had the kind of money to hand that they could invest in the business. Somehow, I didn't think I'd be following any of them up. I'm unpopular enough with the police as it is without becoming a money laundry for the Manchester Mafia.
Come five o'clock, I was parked down the street from Sell Phones. All I needed was a name and address on this pair of con merchants and I could hand the case over to the police as I'd already agreed with my clients. We had the names and addresses of nearly a dozen complainants, some of whom would be bound to be capable of picking Will Alien or his female sidekick out of a lineup. I looked forward to handing the whole package over to Detective Chief Inspector Delia Prentice, head honcho of the Regional Crime Squad's Fraud Task Force. It wasn't exactly her bailiwick, but Delia's one of the tight-knit group of women I call friends, and I trusted her not to screw it up. There are coppers who hate private enter¬prise so much they'd