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We were seated around a big oak table on chairs that had been crafted from bunches of hickory branches, finished with slabs of sealed maple wood for the backs and seats. It was just the four of us there: Carlton, Glad, Caledonia, and me.

“What’s he worried about?” Gladstone wondered. “All he needs is the right monitoring devices to figure out if they’re being spied on.”

Glad had what he called a “pet debugger” that he brought with him to any public meeting in New York, and just about anywhere else. He was probably armed with his pet right there in our woodland meeting.

“I asked him that,” Caledonia replied. “He said that the modern detecting tools wouldn’t work on an old-fashioned tape recorder.”

I could tell that Glad was impressed.

“He uses the more sophisticated stuff when they get to the second stop,” the club manager added.

“He told you all this?” Detective Van Arc asked.

“Yeah. Why?”

“Makes it sound like you were pretty deep into whatever shit he was doing.”

“When he was younger he’d been to prison. After he got out he went straight, that’s what he said. I thought he was just paranoid from the past.”

Carlton harrumphed. I liked the guy. He was a cop the way I had been, doing what he had to do to stay on top of the shit going down in his domain. When Glad called him, claiming to have information on a murder suspect who might also be a serial rapist, Van Arc checked out Sergeant Palmer’s bona fides, made the necessary calls to his superiors, then took a few days off to meet with us.

“Anyway,” Caledonia said, “one of Malto’s favorite places for the initial meeting is Calista’s Revenge, a negligée store just off Vine on Hollywood Boulevard.”

“And how do you know that?” Carlton probed.

After sighing demonstrably, she said, “Because whenever he is set to meet someone first at the Oyster, he has one of his people drive him somewhere; that where is usually the Hollywood bungalow. I know most of the drivers… and they like to talk.”

The cop’s stare was equivalent to a pair of six-hundred-watt bulbs glaring down on a suspect in an interrogation room of old. He was looking for any chink in the young woman’s story.

“Let me ask you somethin’, Miss Reese,” I said.

“What’s that, Joe?”

“How come you’re callin’ your uncle by his nickname?”

This question seemed to get to her more than did the cop’s other insinuations.

“Because,” she said, “my mother—his sister—had warned me about him. When I told her I was going to work for him, she told me that he was an awful man. And—and then I remembered how when I was a kid she’d never let me spend the night at their country house.”

“He’s married?”

“Was. They broke up when I was maybe sixteen. Anyway… my mom died but now, after what happened with Greta, when I think back on it, I wonder if Malto did something to his sister when he was supposed to be a babysitter.”

“This Greta,” Carlton said instead of expressing any feeling for the young woman’s mother, “do you think she’d be willing to talk to us?”

I liked Van Arc’s commitment to duty, but he had no sense of the humanity that lay under any law connected to justice. That was a limitation that many good cops had. They believed so strongly in their unassailable duty that they sometimes felt separate from—even contemptuous of—everyday human beings.

“No,” she replied to his boorish question.

I liked Caledonia too.

“That’s too bad,” Carlton said. “The LAPD has been granted extraordinary powers when it comes to predators like this. We could use her statement to set him up.”

“What could you do?” Glad asked. Unlike me, the dispatch sergeant was worried about the efficacy of the greater bureaucracy of the police. He was a company man.

“Get a warrant and a listening dispensation—”

“Dispensation based on what?” Glad asked.