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end tables, and a colorful rainbow painted across two walls, culminating on each end in framed displays of Carol’s photographs. Her record collection filled most of a six-foot-long shelf, bluegrass to the center with a few rock records tacking down either end.
    She told me to pour myself a drink while she finished processing some photos in a darkroom she had rigged up in her bedroom closet.
    I checked my watch. I never drink until after six. It was then four-fifteen. Close enough. I buried the bottom of a glass under three fingers of bourbon, walked into the bedroom after her, and sat down on her bed.
    There wasn’t much to be said for this room’s decor. Her clothes, mostly sweaters, shirts, and jeans hyphenated at irregular intervals by a few frilly party numbers, hung on a trapeze-style bar suspended from the ceiling. She had cameras, lenses, carrying cases, and other equipment I couldn’t identify scattered everywhere. I could smell her photographic chemicals even through the closed closet door.
    She came out after a few minutes carrying some wet prints. “Let me just put these in the dryer,” she said. She placed the prints into a small contraption set on top of her dresser.
    I came up behind her and looked over her shoulder at her prints, five copies of the same Baby Herman strip. “How come you don’t do this at your studio?”
    “I work when the mood strikes me,” she answered. “There’s no punching a time clock when it comes to creativity.”
    I didn’t quite see the creativity involved in smelling up a bedroom by running off five identical prints, but who was I to question art? “How did you get into this business?” I asked while she finished loading the dryer.
    “I started out processing film for a small comic book publisher. He gave me a chance to shoot some complete episodes, I liked it, was good at it, and so went upward from there.”
    We went back into the living room where Carol poured herself a duplicate of my drink and sank into an easy chair that was slipcovered in a pastel print. It nearly swallowed her small body whole. “Is this visit business or pleasure?”
    I passed up the other easy chair in favor of a wooden kitchen chair which, as usual, I straddled in reverse. “Let’s start with business. I’m just wrapping up Roger’s case. If you could clarify a few minor points, that should do it.”
    “However I can help.”
    “Give me some background on the syndicate. How long have you worked for the DeGreasys?”
    “About five years.”
    “You like it?”
    “So-so.” Carol kicked off her sneakers, put her feet on the front of her chair cushion, and wrapped her arms around her knees, compressing herself into a compact bundle of pretti-ness—pretty feet, pretty hands, pretty chin, pretty nose, pretty hair. Anyone seeing her like this, elfin and vulnerable, might be tempted to write her off as a harmless piece of fluff, a cream puff. Until you saw her eyes. The kind of cool, luminous eyes that peek out at you through jungle shrubbery and size you up for lunch. “I could do a lot better financially and have a lot more artistic satisfaction as a free lancer, but I still have five years to go on my contract. I’ve offered to buy myself out, but the DeGreasys won’t play. Or rather one of them won’t.”
    “Rocco?”
    “Right. He’s the corporate hard-nose. He personally negotiates every contract, and he ties down every loose end. Nobody gets out of a Rocco DeGreasy contract unless he lets them out.”
    “And if somebody tries?”
    “That’s where Dominick comes in. He’s the muscle man.”
    “Sounds like a very dynamic duo.”
    “They do tend to balance out each other’s weaknesses.”
    “You ever heard of Dominick DeGreasy attacking anyone with a pie?”
    She got a big yuck out of that. “A pie? Hardly. He’s more the brass knuckles type. Why do you ask?”
    I snickered once or twice as I described Roger’s run-in with the pie man. I told her it sounded like a