Chapter 3. 7, maybe 8 times out of 10, after securing employment, our first stop would be lunch.

An expense account was a very fine thing and not to be trifled with.

There were not many problems in this veil of tears that could not be best divested, dispensed,

and otherwise detected with a belly full of spicy noodles from Jimmy Wong's chop suey house.

This particular day, however, was not one of those.

Grady Pittman had put on a stiff upper lip, but we both had the feeling that he would reach

the limit of his ability to find this little field trip to the big city in a surprising hurry, and we had a large, vague task ahead of us.

It's not that we were normally sympathetic to such matters, because we weren't, but Blackjack,

for all of his hard-boiled posturing, was a soft touch where families were concerned.

The wife and three kids back in Middletown were exactly his

brand of sucker bait, and we both knew it. On the surface, it was probably an empty gesture. This was

almost certainly a fool's errand, and it would most likely take at least three days for Grady Pittman

to accept that, and we were obviously going to eat during that time. The natural order would not have it otherwise.

But today, as we had both brown bagged our lunches, we elected to dine al fresco among the

working stiffs and deadbeat fathers in Potentia and set to work right away. People think that

there's some trick to detective work, and I guess that there is. the trick is to do as little of it as yourself as humanly possible.

This is not always easy, and sometimes it is more downright impossible.

If you know people who know things, you can get away with a certain amount of this.

If you have a particular brand of Grifter's Charm or a very fine looking pair of legs,

you can often prevail upon the same people

in the know on many and varied occasions without them telling you to take a long walk off a short

pier. This was the key to getting it done. But it wasn't always in the cards. See, there were no

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