Chapter 25. The door to the back room opened and Mickey Fetz walked in. At least, I assumed it was Fetz. He was just as I had pictured him when we spoke on the phone. He was thin to the point of being wiry and he fidgeted constantly, as if he didn't sit right in his own skin.

The skin itself had that gray pallor that it often took on after a long stretch inside,

but Freddy hadn't mentioned anything about Fetz being a jailbird, and Freddie usually would.

To most of the criminal underclass, an occasional stretch of hospitality of the state was

just an occupational hazard.

My old pal Freddy the

finger, on the other hand, regarded such a thing as pure voodoo. Bad luck, which tended to be

contagious when you had an ex-con around. He worked with them, of course. Swimmers in the shallow end of

the talent pool didn't always get to pick and choose their playmates, but he would always know

which ones they were and made sure

not to get too close to them. If a man got caught once, Freddy reasoned, he's a bad risk to repeat.

But Freddy hadn't pegged Mickey Fetz as a con, which meant either Freddy didn't know or Fetz picked

up his clammy corpse-like appearance by other means. I watched him fidget as he made his way over to

Trixie and I. Maybe a hophead. I trust those even less than cons. Freddy had got the word out for us

that we were looking for whoever might have taken over Jimmy Lish's casebook. He had done it fast on the sly

and taken a certain amount of risk doing so. All the same, after setting up the meeting with Fetz,

Freddy advised me that he'd be out of town for a couple of weeks, just in case words should get to

Mr. Rosetti, who in some way might misinterpret the request. Freddy was not particularly

valiant, and with guys like Al Rosetti, that was a pretty healthy approach.

The back room at the green stripe had been Fetz's call. It was surprisingly large for the

management to allow it to be used for a small private party like this, but it was still early

in the day, and my guess was they knew Fetz here. About 10 feet away from the table where the

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