Rick didn’t mention my troubles with the city manager. On this don’t-ask-don’t-tell basis we met at his office and got down to business. ‘There’s got to be some way we can at least get the names,’ I said as we sat on opposite sides of his busy-looking mahogany desk. ‘Files are out, names are out, billing records are out,’ he said, shaking his head tiredly. ‘You know this stuff as well as I do, Jim. It all comes under the statute.’ He tossed his pencil onto the yellow pad on his desk and blew out his breath. Touched by the afternoon sun angling through the window, his kinky red hair glowed like incandescent filaments around the edges. ‘I don’t like it any better than you do,’ he said, ‘but there it is. Inge’s gonna toss anything he thinks we developed from those records – it’s all fruit of the same fuckin’ poisoned tree.’ He took a clove from the small cut-glass candy dish beside his desk calendar, bit it in half with savage precision. I said, ‘What about the Cutchell list?’ Hart stood and walked to the window, staring abstractly into the pale sky, five and a half pudgy feet of disgust in pinstripe worsted.
