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okay. I guess, somewhere in the back of my mind I
heard the bell on the door, but this cemetery thing . . . It's
really getting to me."
    "I'm sorry," I sympathized. I turned a ladies' chair-so called
because it was made without arms, to accommodate the huge skirts of
the previous century-to face him and sat down. As I carried on
undoing all those buttons on my gray coat, I asked, "Do you want to
tell me about it?"
    "You first," he said, brightening; he had a wonderful facility
for letting go of his own woes. "How did your surveillance go
today?"
    I smiled with genuine pride and pleasure. "I identified the
thief! As I had suspected, it was a woman." My smile faded.
"Unfortunately she was more of a girl, not long out of childhood.
I'm glad my part was only to identify her, not to place her under
arrest. I fear I would have been tempted to give her a good tongue
lashing and then let her go. I wouldn't make a very good police
officer, Wish. How did you bear it? Didn't you ever feel sorry for
the criminals?"
    "Um-hm, some of them," he nodded, his long face serious.
Everything about Wish is long, or big, or bony. But he had been
growing into himself, as it were, during the past couple of years,
so that he no longer looked like a gangly youth. Nor was he so
awkward physically as he once had been. Now he moved with the kind
of gentle gravity that many big men have, as if they must be
careful of all creatures smaller than themselves-in other words, of
most of the rest of us. With that same gravity he said: "But I
concentrate on the victims, and that gets me through. When laws are
broken, Fremont, somebody always gets hurt."
    "That's true," I agreed, chewing on my lower lip as I thought
about Mama and Papa Garofalo. They were honest and kind-hearted;
from the hours I had spent in their store I knew there were people
in the neighborhood for whom the Garofalos kept a tab. In some
cases, I suspected, a very long tab. If that girl had only asked
for their help instead of stealing from them, what might they have
been willing to do for her?
    "And what's more," Wish continued, "there's people who're always
wanting something for nothing, or wanting to get away with all
sorts of lawbreaking just to prove they can do it. They're your
run-of-the-mill sort of criminal. But the really big ones ..." He
shook his head from side to side, letting his words trail off. Then
suddenly he finished, in a voice so low I had to listen hard to
hear him: "The really big ones are pure evil."
    Pure evil! That gave me the chills, and I shivered in the
small silence that fell. Gathering myself together, I shrugged out
of the gray coat and let it drape over the back of the chair.
"Well," I said briskly, to break the pall, "at any rate, I told Mr.
and Mrs. Garofalo who their thief is, where she can be found, and
instructed them to call the police. Now all I have to do is send
them the bill: case successfully concluded. Your turn, Wish. What
was that you said, about the cemetery thing getting to you?"
    "Yeah, but I don't quite know what precisely is bothering me.
That's the hell of it. Probably best not to talk about it." He
turned away and began to fiddle with some papers on his desk.
    Ordinarily Wish would have said heck of it, so I knew
this was serious. I couldn't stand not knowing, so I somehow had to
persuade him to say more. I tentatively ventured: "I gather this is
something to do with Mr. Fennelly's daughter?"
    No response. I tried again: "Oh dear, I've forgotten her name.
Poor girl. And poor you, to have to go poking about in the cemetery
looking for her."
    "Cemeteries, plural." My young colleague turned back to me. He
was wavering, but he was also a little cross. "And her name is
Tara, but I've given up on her. I'm not going to find her. This
thing ... it's something else."
    I leaned forward. "Michael is out, isn't he?" He usually was at
this time of day.
    Wish nodded, frowning in most un-Wishlike manner. "So?"
    I urged, "So tell me. If it's tricky, I'll keep