The Case of Murder in the Fiesta Lounge, Part 2. The name is Justice, Jack Justice.

It is a common observation that things often go from bad to worse, and this is true.

What it fails to allow for is the almost exponential nature of that

change, and the fact that it is seldom, if ever, a single transition from point A being bad,

to point B, being worse. Our afternoon in the Fiesta Lounge was certainly no exception,

as in the moments that immediately followed the plunge into darkness, we ran through

point C to Z in such rapid succession that a lesser man might be inclined to finish his cocktail,

call of the co-check for his hat, and take the rest of the day off with pay.

The first problem is that I was being paid to protect Michael Patrick Mulligan O'Day.

And so far that had gone pretty badly in that he had just been murdered.

There's really no way around that one.

There wasn't going to be a performance bonus on this job.

The only thing that was going to prevent every paper in town,

who were well represented within the assembled crowd,

from observing that at the time of

the aforementioned murder in the Fiesta Lounge, I was, in fact, seated comfortably a short

distance away enjoying a fresh cocktail, is if I immediately thrust myself into another, much more

competent role in this gory little pageant. A daily newspaper is a simplistic storytelling

venue, and two facts that appear

to contradict one another are almost never allowed in the same article. So if you don't want

the story to suggest that you are a boob, it had better be much more important to the rest of the

story that you are nothing of the kind. Which is why, when the lights to the entire building

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