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simple.
    I didn’t try to give them the slip. Hell, I don’t
drive well enough to lose anybody. But I did take the precaution of
pulling into the lot at the rear of the Delores when got back home at
twelve forty-five, and the extra precaution of parking between two
burly old Cadillacs. I took a good look around before walking to the
front of building, but O’Hara and the black kid had driven past me,
down Reading toward town. Which didn’t really make me feel any
better. Something was wrong or I wouldn’t have been followed in the
first place.
    Once inside the apartment, I phoned Daryl Lovingwell
at the University and got the Physics Department secretary on the
line.
    "He’s not here," she said nervously. "He
had to go home."
    I didn’t like the quaver in her voice. "What’s
wrong?"
    I asked her.
    "You’ll just have to talk to the Professor,"
she said and hung up.
    I dialed Lovingwell’s home, let the phone ring ten
times—just like they tell you to do in the phone book—and was
about to give up when someone picked up the receiver.
    "Lovingwell?" I said.
    "Who is this?" a man’s husky voice
replied.
    I had the terrible feeling that I knew that voice,
that I’d heard it before and not in any classroom.
    "I want to talk to Daryl Lovingwell," I
said.
    "He can’t come on the line," the man
said.
    "What’s going on here? Tell him it’s Stoner.
Harry Stoner. I’m sure he’ll want to talk to me."
    "Oh, hello, Stoner," the man said affably.
"This is Sid McMasters."
    I had a heart·sick moment. McMasters was a homicide
dick with the C.P.D. and I knew his voice because I’d worked with
him when I was on the D.A.’s staff better than a decade before. I
didn’t want to ask him, but I did—in a dull, weary voice that
made me sound like my own father. "What’s happened, Sid?"
    "There’s been an accident here," he said.
"Lovingwell’s been shot. At least, we think it’s
Lovingwell."
    "Oh, Christ/’ I said softly. "Is he badly
hurt?"
    "He’s dead, Harry.
We aren’t sure, yet, but it looks like he may have killed himself
with a handgun."
    ***
    It had happened to me before. Not often, but it had 
happened. I’d lost a client to suicide or to some stupid piece of
violence, because in my business a good half of  the people who
come to me should have gone to a psychiatrist instead. The paranoid
ones, tormented by creatures of conscience. And the bullies, looking
for someone to hurt or to do their hurting for them. It had happened.
But never so unexpectedly, so completely without warning. Lovingwell
just hadn’t seemed the type.
    And, of course, what are you supposed to do? Pack it
in and pretend that you don’t care why a gentle, rather eccentric
soul decided to kill himself? And even if you could do that, which I
couldn’t, what about the daughter and the untidy little secret the
dead man entrusted to you? What do you do with it—after what it had
cost him? Do you go to the cops or to the FBI, which is precisely
what he didn’t want to do himself? Do you turn it over to someone
else? Probate it like another piece of property—one leather couch,
one portrait of Madame Récamier, and, oh yes, one missing document
that the Professor didn’t want the world to know was missing? Or do
you get on with the business at hand? And add to it a bonus
item—free, gratis, compliments of Harry the Sentimentalist? One
dead man and the reasons why he died, to be produced along with a
missing document that he may have died for.
    It’s hard to explain. In a way you have to be a
bodyguard or a cop to understand the peculiar loyalties you feel to
your charge. And when that charge dies, even by his own hand, you
have to understand the mute, oddly professional grief a cop or a
bodyguard feels. As if life itself were part of the job and death an
outrageous violation of your contract. A personal failure. An insult
to the profession. And since it’s your job, what you do well, you
simply can’t leave it at that. At least, I