from there. I want to know where they are now. I'll pay the investigative fees out of my own pocket.'
'Damned right you will,' Penschley said jovially. 'Well, if they went north into New England, we can probably track them down. But if they headed south into the city or over into Jersey, I dunno. Billy, are you worried about a civil suit?'
. 'No,' he said. 'But I have to talk to that woman's husband. If that's what he was.'
'Oh,' Penschley said, and once again Halleck could read the man's thoughts as clearly as if he'd spoken them aloud: Billy Halleck is neatening up his affairs, balancing the books. Maybe he wants to give the old Gyp a check, maybe he only wants to face him and apologize and give the man a chance to pop him one in the eye.
'Thank you, Kirk,' Halleck said.
'Don't mention it,' Penschley said. 'You just work on getting better.'
'Okay,' Billy said, and hung up. His coffee had gotten cold.
He was really not very surprised to find that Rand Foxworth, the assistant chief, was running things down at the Fairview police station. He greeted Halleck cordially enough, but he had a harried look, and to Halleck's practiced eye there seemed to be far too many papers in the In basket on Foxworth's desk and nowhere near enough in the Out basket. Foxworth's uniform was impeccable ... but his eyes were bloodshot.
'Dunc's had a touch of the flu,' he said in answer to Billy's question - the response had the canned feel of one that has been given many times. 'He hasn't been in for the last couple of days.'
'Oh,' Billy said. 'The flu.'
'That's right,' Foxworth said, and his eyes dared Billy to make something of it.
The receptionist told Billy that Dr Houston was with a patient.
'It's urgent. Please tell him I only need a word or two with him.'
It would have been easier in person, but Halleck hadn't wanted to drive all the way across town. As a result, he was sitting in a telephone booth (an act he wouldn't have been able to manage not long ago) across the street from the police station. At last Houston came on the line.
His voice was cool, distant, more than a bit irritated. Halleck, who was either getting very good at reading subtexts or becoming very paranoid indeed, heard a clear message in that cool tone: You're not my patient anymore, Billy. I smell some irreversible degeneration in you that makes me very, very nervous. Give me something I can diagnose and prescribe for, that's all I ask. If you can't give me that, there's really no basis for commerce between us. We played some pretty good golf together, but I don't think either of us would say we were ever friends. I've got a Sony beeper, $200,000 worth of diagnostic equipment, and a selection of drugs to call on so wide that ... well, if my computer printed them all out, the sheet would stretch from the front doors of the country club all the way down to the intersection of Park Lane and Lantern Drive. With all that going for me, I feel smart. I feel useful. Then you come along and make me look like a seventeenth-century doctor with a bottle of leeches for high blood pressure and a trepanning chisel for headaches. And I don't like to feel that way, big Bill. Not at all. Nothing toot-sweet about that. So get lost. I wash my hands of you. I'll come and see you in your coffin ... unless, of course, my beeper beeps and I have to leave.
'Modern medicine,' Billy muttered.
'What, Billy? You'll have to speak up. I don't want to give you short shrift, but my P.A. called in sick and I'm going out of my skull this morning.'
'Just a single question, Mike,' Billy said. 'What's wrong with Duncan Hopley?'
Utter silence from the other end for almost ten seconds. Then: 'What makes you think anything is?'
'He's not at the station. Rand Foxworth says he has the flu, but Rand Foxworth lies like old people fuck.'
There was another long pause. 'As a lawyer, Billy, I shouldn't have to tell you that you're asking for privileged information. I could get my ass in a sling.'
'If somebody tumbles to what's in that little bottle you keep in your desk, your ass could be in a sling, too. A sling so high it would give a trapeze artist acrophobia.'
More silence. When Houston spoke again, his voice was