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was sitting in a chair drinking a ginger ale.
    “Keep trying to tell this sumbitch he needs a goddamn drink,” Collins said when I walked in.
    “I’m driving you around, Mr. Collins, I like to be alert,” Park said.
    “I’ll have a bourbon, neat,” I said to my old pal Norman. He grinned, the gin blossoms on his nose and cheeks a deeper red than usual.
    Collins was in one of his professorial moods, and I had apparently interrupted a long discourse on the comparative sexual needs of men and women, which he now resumed.
    “On the other hand, though,” Collins said, “we have the women who can’t settle for one man. These are a rare breed. Most become prostitutes. Others bring shame upon good families by making spectacles of themselves. When I was coming up in Michigan there was a woman in our town, the wife of a judge, no less, who was discovered to have taken on no fewer than five lovers over a period of fifteen years. Now she was a handsome woman, but what sort of wife isn’t satisfied with a judge? And we knew, we men of the town, that the judge was perfectly capable in bed because he himself was known to keep mistresses. Now not everyone admired him for it, but it was proof that he could satisfy a woman, and by extension proof that his wife was insane. The scientific term is nymphomaniac.”
     
    NORMAN SHOOK HIS head and looked at the floor. Park sat back in his chair and drank his ginger ale while Collins went on for a while in this vein: the horrors of menstruation, women’s hormones leading eventually, inevitably, to insanity of one kind or another.
    As always Norman’s face hair was unwashed and a little too long, his glasses badly smudged, and he looked like he’d rather not listen any more. “Let’s go meet some women,” I said.
    Park was already out of his chair. “I know a roadhouse way out on Tyler Road has some pretty wild ones,” he said.
    “Guess we might as well before I get much drunker,” the boss said. I paid our bill (I was reimbursed every two weeks for expenses, since Collins wasn’t to be trusted with great amounts of cash on these expeditions), and we took our leave. At the bottom of the rickety staircase that led downstairs the old man stumbled and fell forward, hitting the door. A stream of obscenities and animal howls erupted, and when Park tried to reach for him Collins swung a wild fist in his direction.
    “Goddamn broken ribs, Jesus Christ, I need back on the fucking morphine. Ogden, you get on that first thing in the goddamn morning.” His voice broke on that second “goddamn.”
     
    THE ROADHOUSE PARK took us to was indeed full of wild women, and the boss’s mood cleared right up on arrival. He was talking to a pretty brunette who was dressed for a much better class of place than this, and she was rubbing his sleeve and laughing with delight at whatever he was saying to her, probably an indecent proposition. Park and I had earned our keep for the night.
    Park stood in the doorway beckoning me. “There’s a dark Plymouth been following us since the blind pig; I don’t know if they were on our tail before or not, but that’s my guess. Parked in the back corner of the lot, guy’s sitting behind the wheel still.”
    I went through the back door and moved to the parking lot, lurking among the twenty or so cars until I spotted the Plymouth and its driver, watching the front door of the roadhouse with a camera perched on top of the dash, a new-looking Speed Graphic. It was Hiram Fish, whom Mrs. Collins occasionally entrusted with the job of following her husband around gathering evidence of his misdeeds. There wasn’t much point to it besides masochism that I could see; devout Catholic that she was, she wouldn’t be able to use the photos in a divorce case.
    On one occasion during the war, the old bitch had shown the old man a set of photos and demanded an explanation. They showed him at a party in the company of a homely and heavily made-up woman wearing only