Liddy knew the silence was lasting too long, but he couldn't find the right words.

"I guess I just don't know what you mean."

"I think you boys know what I mean all right. You are, or were, good cops, both of you. That outfit you're with seems to want to go down its own road, wash its own underwear, sing its own songs. But there has to be a structure, a network of law and law enforcement. I'm not telling you anything you don't know. Taking in two or three hundred million a year doesn't make you people immune any more than it makes the telephone company immune. I'm not going to push on you, hear?

But I kind of like that Moses. I wouldn't want anything to happen to him that could have been prevented by you boys.

Okay?"

"Okay, Sheriff. Thanks for calling."

Liddy hung up, leaned back, knuckled his eyes, faked a

Z98.

yawn and ended it with an expiring sigh.

"How do you want to do it?"

"How do we want to do it?"

"You see him come out of the chapel yesterday? No, you weren't there. You heard about death warmed over. There it was with that little old wife of his sort of holding him up, and snarling at him every two steps."

"Rick, you're not going to get a confession."

"I know that! I'm not foolish. If we get one, it'll be in a note found near the body. And the odds are against it. We'll start nudging him. You're in the best position to give him the first little push. Let's figure out what you should say to him. What are you after? What do you want?"

"We'll have to write some kind of a script that will play."

When one of the new nurses leaned over his chair to adjust the volume on the television set, old Matthew Meadows reached up and squeezed her left breast like an old-time motorist honking the bulb of the horn on his vehicle.

She yanked herself away, glowered down at him and gave him a ringing slap across the face. His look of mischief faded slowly into hurt and shock, and he began to sob into his hands.

"Maamaa," he cried brokenly through his sobs.

"Maamaa, oh maamaaa."

Mickey Oshiro and Glinda Lopez were ordered to meet with Harold Sherman in the small lounge on the second floor of Communications at 5:00 PM on Thursday. Oshiro arrived five minutes early and found Harold Sherman already there, sitting on the big blue Naugahyde couch, leafing through the papers on a composition clipboard. They said hello and Oshiro went over to the coffee machine and got the steaming cup of black, too hot to drink, as usual.

"I never drink coffee," Sherman said.

"I beg your pardon?"

"I said I never drink coffee."

"Well... some do, some don't." He sat in a straight chair against the wall. It had one wide arm like a lecture-room desk in a school.

"Coffee has as yet unknown effects on body chemistry," Sherman said.

2-99 Oshiro frowned at him.

"Are you trying to make me give it up or something?"

Sherman looked mildly surprised.

"I was making conversation. I was making general comment. Would you prefer to talk about the weather? It is very hot here this time of year."

"Which also has an unknown effect on body chemistry."

"Is that a joke?"

"Take it any way you want, Mr. Sherman."

"I was curious. I hadn't heard that you people had much sense of humor."

"Computer consultants?"

"You're Japanese, aren't you?"

"Racially, yes. But I was born here. I am an American computer consultant of Japanese heritage, and I sometimes make jokes."

"Are you trying to get our little meeting off on the wrong foot, Mr. Oshiro?"

"Heaven forbid!"

"Miss Lopezislate."

"Mrs. Lopez. And my watch says two minutes past the hour."

' "Mrs"? Excuse me. Ah yes. Here it is. It is indeed Mrs. Lopez. And, of course, late is late. How much late is a secondary consideration."

"Here she is," Mickey said.

"Hi, Glinda."

"How you, Mick? Hello, Mr. Sherman."

"Please be seated, Mrs. Lopez. I have been reviewing your special project. I have listened to the tapes made at intervals over the period of this project, and I have noted the improvement as time passed. Mr. Efflander brought me up to date on the details of the inception of the plan, and so forth. And I have made my own study of the cost effectiveness of the experimental program as it is now constituted. I see no special reasons for any further tinkering with the program, which of course means that we can terminate Mr. Oshiro's consultant contract and save sixteen hundred dollars a week."

"Now wait just a minute!" Glinda said.

"Allow me to finish, Mrs. Lopez. From the telephone records I find that during this experimental phase you have been calling delinquents on a schedule of four hours each working day, and you have not been training more operators. You began and then stopped. Why?"

They couldn't do it."

"I don't understand. If you can do it, they can do it."

Oshiro answered the implied question.