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“And he’s not our author. I wouldn’t touch him with a ten-foot-plague-pole.”
    “Well, whatever he is, the whole thing’s nothing but a tempest in a teapot,” he said, handing me what may have been the vilest cup of coffee I have ever drunk in my life.
    He took me into a vacant office, which was something of a mercy—that sense that the others in the squadroom were sneaking peeks at the prematurely balding editor in the drippy tweeds was probably paranoid, but it was pretty strong just the same.
    To make a long story even longer, about forty-five minutes after the wirephotos had arrived, and about fifteen minutes after Detweiller had arrived (not handcuffed, but flanked by two burly men in blue-suits), the plainclothesman who had been dispatched to the House of Flowers after my original call arrived. He had been on the other side of town all afternoon.
    They had left Detweiller alone in a small interrogation room, Tyndale told me, to soften him up—to get him thinking all sorts of nasty thoughts.
    The plainclothesman who had verified the fact that Detweiller was indeed still working at the House of Flowers was looking at the “Sacrifice Photos”
    when Chief Iverson came out of his office and headed for the interrogation room where Detweiller was being kept.
    “Jesus,” the plainclothesman said to Iverson, “these look almost real, don’t they?”
    Iverson stopped. “Do you have any reason to believe they aren’t?” he asked.
    “Well, when I went into that flower-shop this morning to check on that guy Detweiller, this dude getting the informal heart-surgery was sitting off to one side behind the counter, playing solitaire and watching Ryan’s Hope on TV.”
    “Are you sure of that?” Iverson demanded.
    The plainclothesman tapped the first of the “Sacrifice Photos,” where the face of the “victim” was clearly shown. “No mistake,” he said. “This guy.”
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    “Well why in God’s name didn’t you say he was there?” Iverson demanded, no doubt with visions of Detweiller bringing charges of false and malicious detainment beginning to dance dolefully in his head.
    “Because no one asked me about this guy,” the detective said, reasonably enough. “I was supposed to verify Detweiller, which I did. If somebody had asked me to verify this guy, I would have. No one did. See you.” And he walked away, leaving Iverson holding the bag.
    So that was that.
    I looked at Tyndale.
    Tyndale looked back at me.
    After a moment or two he softened. “For whatever it’s worth, Mr.
    Kenton, that particular photo did look real...real as hell. But so do the effects in some of these horror movies. There’s one guy—Tom Savini—and the effects he does—”
    “So they let him go.” A dread was surfacing inside my head like one of those little Russian submarines the Swedes are never quite able to trap.
    “For whatever else it’s worth, your ass is covered with three sets of skivvies and four sets of pants, the middle two sets iron-clad,” Tyndale said, and then added, with a sobriety that was positively Alexander Haigian: “I’m speaking legally-wise, you understand. You acted in good faith, as a citizen.
    If the guy could prove malice, that would be one thing...but hell, you didn’t even know him.”
    The submarine came up a little more. Because I felt right then like I was starting to know him, Ruth, and my feelings about Carlos Detweiller were not then and are not now anything I would describe as jolly or benign.
    “Besides, it’s never the informant they want to sue for false arrest anyway—it’s the cop who came and read them their rights and then took them downtown in a car with no doorhandles in the back doors.”
    Informant. That was the source of the dread. The submarine was all the way up, floating on the surface like a dead fish in the moonlight. Informant.
    I didn’t know Carlos Detweiller from a psychic begonia...but he knew something about me. Not that I was the head of the