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syndicate. Willard Kelly had been with the firm less than a year. This was the first time he’d handled a case in court for them. The profile writer was sad that Kelly was selling his brilliance to the underworld.
    Your father. You think you know him. You forget he lived a lot of years before he started you. All of a sudden you find out you never knew who the hell he was.
    I wrote down all the names. Morris Silber, the landlord. Andrew McArdle and Philip Lamarck and Samuel Krishman, partners in the law firm. George Ellinbridge, the prosecuting attorney. Andrew Shuffleman, the judge.
    Willard Kelly didn’t show up again. I went back through the Index, twenties and thirties, checking the other names. Morris Silber got a year in jail in 1937 for housing violations in his tenements, mainly rats. His lawyer wasn’t named. Philip Lamarck died in bed in 1935, at the age of sixty-seven. Andrew Shuffleman died just as peaceably the same year, at the age of seventy-one. George Ellinbridge was elected State Assemblyman in 1938, but wasn’t re-elected.
    Andrew McArdle personally defended crime kingpin Anthony Edward “Eddie” Kapp in his income-tax evasion trial in 1940. The crime kingpin went to jail, with two sentences of ten years and one of five years, to run consecutively and not concurrently. Twenty-five years. It wasn’t up yet, but there were such things as paroles.
    Eddie Kapp. I didn’t find any references to him later than 1940. I found a lot of them in the early thirties and late twenties. A friend of Dutch Schultz and Bill Bailey. An important man around that crazy time when Schultz was killed over in Jersey and Bailey became top man for two weeks. Then Bailey walked into a New York City hospital one afternoon and said he didn’t feel well. They put him to bed, and two o’clock the following morning he was dead. The death certificate said pneumonia.
    Eddie Kapp. Willard Kelly. Connected by a man named Andrew McArdle.
    I wasted some time, then, looking in the current year’s Index. They had monthly indices in a filler book, and July was the most recent. My name was there, for July 14th. I filled out a slip, got the microfilm, and put it in the viewer. I read about the shooting. The Times called it “bizarre.” It only rated a small paragraph on page eight. DRIVER SHOT AT WHEEL .
    The woman came over and told me it was five o’clock, closing time. I put the microfilm back in the box, put my pencil and pad in my pocket, and left.

Six
    Back at the room, there was a guy with Bill. He had on a brown suit with the coat open. His white shirt was bunched at the waist. He was thin and his tie was brown and orange and green and he wore a brown hat back on his head indoors.
    Bill said, “This is Ed Johnson. He’s a private detective.”
    Johnson grinned at me. “That’s right,” he said.
    I frowned at Bill. “What the hell for?”
    “We’re not going to get anywhere on our own. You got some jerky idea about Dad mixed up with the underworld. We need somebody who knows the ropes.”
    I looked at Johnson. “Get out,” I said.
    His grin faded. “Well, I don’t know,” he said. He looked from me to Bill to me. “I’ve been given a retainer, to check out a license plate.”
    “We want to do that,” Bill told me.
    I sat down and lit a cigarette. “We don’t want to spread our business around,” I told the match. “We don’t want to finger ourselves.”
    “I’m trustworthy,” Johnson told me. “One hundred per cent.”
    “Just the license, Ray,” said Bill. He sounded embarrassed.
    Johnson said, “You couldn’t do it, I can.”
    I shrugged. “The hell with it,” I said. “Go play with the license plate. It was on a Plymouth.”
    He looked from face to face again, and then he said he’d be seeing us, and left.
    Bill said, “That was a hell of a way to talk. He’s a nice guy.”
    I said, “He’s a stranger.”
    “We need somebody dispassionate. You’ve got this nutty idea—”
    I took out the