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stations and newspapers if I didn’t give him the money. I told him he was insane. I told him I had friends in the police department. I told him never to call me again. When he started to laugh, I hung up. Then I talked to Marion.”
    Marion Senske shook her head and looked at C. C. with quiet disgust. C. C. pulled her butterscotch hair across her mouth like my daughter used to do when she was caught misbehaving.
    “He called back an hour later,” Marion added. “He asked if we had come to our senses yet.”
    “Did you speak to him?” I asked the older woman.
    She shook her head and gestured at C. C.
    “Should we pay him?” C. C. asked hopefully.
    “It’s always easier to pay,” I told her. “Until the price becomes too high.”
    “Your job is to make sure the price doesn’t become too high,” Marion told me.
    “I get four hundred dollars a day plus expenses. I also like my clients to sign a standard contract stating that I am acting on their behalf and that…”
    “Nothing in writing,” Marion insisted. “I’ll pay you cash. Right now. But we’ve never met. You don’t know me and Carol Catherine is someone you’ve only seen on television.”
    “All right,” I agreed. It wasn’t the first time a client had made such a demand.
    Marion Senske fished a bulging number-ten envelope out of a drawer, a thick rubber band holding the contents inside, and slapped it down on the desktop with so much force it seemed like the entire room shook. “I want the videotape,” she said emphatically. “Don’t give him the money until you get the tape.”
    “Should I count it?”
    “Do what you think is best,” she told me and took her purse from the desk’s bottom drawer. In it was another envelope. From that one she withdrew four one-hundred-dollar bills and handed them to me. I put the bills and the envelope in the same inside jacket pocket, the one over my heart.
    I asked her about the money, whether it could be traced. She assured me that it could not.
    “Candidates are required by law to report the sources of their income, all of it, along with all expenditures of one hundred dollars or more if the money is spent directly on an election campaign. However, no law requires a candidate to disclose where the money goes if it is not spent on an election. We simply list the expenditures in the ‘noncampaign expense’ category. We could use it to pay our water bills if we wanted to. It’s all perfectly legal.”
    “I’m sure it is,” I told her. “Where can I find Mr. Thoreau?” Marion handed me a piece of paper with an address on it. I put it in my pocket and moved toward the door. C. C. took my hand as I started to pass. She held it lightly and then kissed it. “Thank you, Holland,” she said.
    I don’t like the name Holland; Holly is worse and I have often bad-mouthed my parents for giving it to me. Yet, the way she said it…

    I knew I was being used. That’s okay. All my clients use me. That’s why I get the big bucks. The question was: Was Anne Scalasi using me? I tried hard not to believe it. My Anne Scalasi would simply have called and said, “I know these guys who need a good PI.” She’s given me referrals before. Yet there was my guardian angel to consider. Only I couldn’t find him when I left C. C.’s campaign headquarters, which made me nervous. Maybe they replaced him with a tail who actually knew what he was doing. No way. I drove clear to my office, twice around the Hubert H. Humphrey Metrodome, over to Como Park and then along the Mississippi River, first the Minneapolis side, then the St. Paul side. I was clean. That should have told me something. But it didn’t.

SIX

    I KNEW DENNIS Thoreau’s neighborhood well. It wasn’t far from the College of St. Thomas, where I spent several years deciding what to do with my life. That was before it became the University of St. Thomas and turned the surrounding residential area into a parking lot. School was in session, and I was