David Weather stood behind the desk in his overheated office at the Criminal Courts Building, staring out the open window at the relentless rain that had been drowning Dallas for weeks, threading No. 2 pencils -- county property -- through his fingers and snapping them in half. He ought to be concentrating on the upcoming trial, but instead was imagining the pencils were a certain reporter’s neck. Two boxes had already given themselves for his frustration and today that new secretary had remarked casually that perhaps Ina Rae should put a lock on the supply closet, because pencils had been disappearing. Probably the cleaning people, she’d nodded knowingly.

He snorted and wrenched the secretary’s neck in effigy. She should put as much mouth into getting county maintenance up here to fix this damn radiator as she did watching the janitors. Snap. He laid the splintered corpse alongside the others in the silver ridges of the offending contraption. Suspicious little Jean could sizzle her skinny fingers gathering up the evidence for Ina Rae.

He couldn’t come up with a good reason to refuse to talk to her, since his father, the district attorney prior to the present one, was a well-respected dead man. He could come up with several bad reasons, but of course those were the same ones Francy would be delighted to print in her newspaper. The woman fed on dirt, and must be famished about now because of the gag order Judge Skelton had imposed on the Broadman trial.

Broadman! Now that’s who he ought to be worrying about. Francy was a gnat compared to the slippery snake he was about to prosecute. That is, if the snake’s lawyer didn’t get another postponement.

Philip Bauman Broadman, of Houston, shipping line scion, socialite, dilettante, man-about-town, stood accused of a brutal slashing murder that took place in Dallas fourteen months ago. The killing was similar to several murders that started up in Houston during the war. The Houston killer, dubbed the "Maniac" in the hometown press, was credited with up to seventeen straight razor murders in and around that city. Most of the dead were prostitutes; a few were plain old dirt poor, ignorant girls, and one was an unfortunate young lady from the middle class and a member of Broadman’s personal circle. These were two-man crimes, with nothing pointing to Broadman except his association with Racine Steinholz. In fact, after Racine was killed, Broadman offered a reward for the arrest and conviction of the Maniac. His do-gooderism and concern for the citizens of Houston attracted almost as much attention as the next decomposing body part to float up from one of Houston’s bayous.

Why the Maniac chose Dallas as his next venue was anyone’s guess. Maybe he was too publicly linked with the investigation at home to secure any more victims so he took his show on the road, where he encountered a couple of New Orleans prostitutes taking a busman’s holiday through Texas. When he picked up the blonde and the brunette in a West Dallas honky-tonk, he made a phone call to a "friend" from a pay phone. After he returned to the car, he boasted that he and the unnamed friend were the two most wanted men in Houston. The girls, who claimed to be"dancers," unfamiliar with Houston’s crime wave and being from the City of Sin itself, were unimpressed with his braggadocio. They simply assumed he was creating a little titillation for himself through intimidation. Some men needed that, the survivor said in her statement.

The friend never arrived. In the back room of an empty apartment building in one of West Dallas’ tiredest streets, Broadman began to act peculiar, pacing and railing about the other man’s "betrayal." When he pulled out the razor, the girls rushed for the open door, but he intercepted them both and slammed the bigger girl’s head into a wall. When she came around, she found herself and her companion gagged and tied to wooden chairs. Broadman nicked and slashed at the hapless Valeria Hix, while the blonde, Honeydew Thibodeaux -- proudly pronounced "Tippytoe" by the robust Miss T. -- watched in terror. As the killer became mesmerized by his immediate task, Honeydew used the strength and agility of her dancer’s body to bounce her chair to pieces and dive through a closed window into the night. Valeria, smaller and less powerful, or perhaps merely the unlucky first chosen, died of blood loss from the multiple slash wounds.

David Weather had gone to the crime scene, unusual for a prosecutor, but the chief investigator happened to be drinking in the area, overheard the call on his car radio and called Weather to the scene.

The white of her skin was unlike any paleness he’d ever seen. In life, no matter how wan, frail or sickly a woman might be, she still had those blue veins bulging on transparent hands, throbbing at the temple like subcutaneous worms. But this woman’s blood had surged out of its natural channels, spraying the bed and walls behind her. After the blood tide subsided, the remaining trickle settled into a black lake at her bound feet. Skid marks cut through this puddle after it had begun to congeal, leaving choppy, coagulated ruts in the smooth lake surface. At the other end of the body, the woman’s slit throat yawned wide. Her head, with its long dark hair, dangled off the back of the chair like some filthy matted animal drowned in a storm sewer.

In life, Miss Hix had had ambitions. She’d worked her way, if not up, at least vertically, by switching careers to exotic dancing. This lapse back into the oldest profession had cost her her life.

Broadman’s arrest, along with Honeydew’s insistence that Broadman had confessed to the Houston killings, immediately drew the Houston press to town and sent Francy Cotton into a foaming-at-the-mouth frenzy that Weather had hoped would choke her. The accused himself brought in a public relations man to put the word out about his many philanthropies, his War Bond drives, his home front efforts. The ink from Dallas papers dripped with Broadman’s wholesome citizenship.

That was before Judge Skelton shut the circus down.

"The press is not going to impede jury selection by informing the public about the character of the accused, or his alleged crimes in another city," the judge had declared. "He’s not being tried for those. I want to make sure he gets a fair trial for the Dallas crime he’s accused of." For days after his announcement, Skelton trotted heavy-footed around the Criminal Courts Building, radiating self-satisfied beneficence.

The victim moldered in her unmarked county grave for over a year while all of this brouhaha was going on. On the legal side, her advocates wrestled first to keep the defendant in jail, then to bring him to trial.

As the lead prosecutor, Weather had argued hard that Broadman had no ties to Dallas and so many to South America through his shipping company, that he was a serious flight risk. The argument held for six months before the hottest defense attorney in the state of Texas finally got his client sprung.

Weather kept having to redefine victory; okay, Broadman was free, but it had taken the Alan Caldecott six months to get him out. But he was hard-pressed to find anything to smile about when Broadman simply took a suite at the Adolphus a few of blocks away from the jail and began directing his business long distance. He ought to be happy that jury selection was scheduled for Monday, but he would wait ’til Monday for that.

"Yoo, hoo." Francy Cotton appeared in Weather’s open door. "Got a sec?" she queried, grinning her round face at him.

"For you, Francy? Not a chance," Weather grinned back.

She came in and took a seat opposite him anyway. "It’s hot in here. You haven’t got that radiator fixed yet?" She lifted a page of notes from his open briefcase and fanned herself. He reached over the desk and unceremoniously retrieved the paper. She shrugged.

"Francy, I was just getting ready to go to lunch. Now what part of my family history can I decline to discuss with you today? Or is it the Broadman case you’re interested in getting nothing out of me about?"

"I’ve got two or three things I want to go over with you about your daddy."

"No, you don’t." Behind the desk, Weather gripped his hands together in imaginary strangulation. It was a paltry satisfaction. Damn, he needed a punching bag.

"I’m just real curious why it is that you don’t want me to do the story. What is it about him you don’t want me to dig up?"

"There’s nothing to dig up," Weather lied into those little eyes of hers, eyes that missed nothing. Ugly woman, flyaway white hair, round face, tiny black eyes like raisins in a pancake. Or flies. She’d look all right if he didn’t dislike her so much, he acknowledged privately, but he remained steadfast in his assessment of her. The thought comforted him. "It’s really very simple, France. My mother’s been remarried almost five years. She’s got a new life. My littlest sister, Resa, is about to marry into the Highland Park Porters, and she’s got her hands full with the society wedding of 1947. They’re all doing that wedding, in fact. As for myself, I’ve been interviewed by somebody about something every two or three months ever since I got back from the war. I’ve talked to you people about being a pilot, about adjusting to peacetime, about being a prosecutor. I’ve talked about how the city has changed. I’ve talked to so many reporters I think I must be running for office. I’m talked out for now, and I’m very, very busy with the Broadman case. And don’t you dare print anything I said." He thrust some papers into his open briefcase, just so he could slam it loudly shut.

Don’t go introducing my mother or my sisters to any of Tom Weather’s bastards they might not know about, he wanted to say, but didn’t. Stay away from why he might have been better off dead. He kept his face frozen into a tell-nothing cocky smile and made an extra effort to relax his teeth. Francy could read facts in a facial tic; if she could verify them independently, she would print them. As a boy, Weather had been delighted to be in on his father’s secrets. But the same secrets one finds so intriguing at eleven or fourteen or seventeen could be damned embarrassing to an adult.

Francy abandoned her Highland Park politesse for heavy mock-Texan, a special language reserved for occasions when unwelcome messages could be blunted when delivered by a clown. He himself had "aw-shucksed" himself out of more than one tight spot in his life.

"Afraid ah’ll turn up some ol’ floozy or find some half (she said hafe) brother or sister you haven’t (yew habn’t) met? Hell (Hay-ull), I know all about them, prob’ly more’n yew know." Don’t be offended, the voice mocked. But I have you pinned against the wall, and I’m not letting you down ’til you give me what I want.

"I could help you find someone if you wanted me to," she continued. "Mrs. Harris had a daughter, Betty Anne, Becky Jean? Your Colorado half-sister. And of course there’s that one here in Dallas."

"I don’t know any Mrs. Harris, and there’s nobody here in Dallas either. Everybody knows my father had women. Some of them didn’t even count as mistresses. Besides, I thought even the Beacon had some standards. Like no smear campaigns except in an election year, which this isn’t. Besides, Tom Weather can’t run for anything. You print up names of mistresses and you’ll just look like a jealous woman."

"I wasn’t going to actually put them in the paper," Francy said. "I just thought you might want to find out where they went after your daddy and Red Holcomb got killed. After all, your own flesh and blood . . ."

"I know as many of my flesh and blood as I need to, France. Besides, I never heard of a Mrs. Harris and I wouldn’t discuss her with you if I had." He sat grinning daggers at her.

"All, right. Truth to tell, Tom Weather’s extracurriculars aren’t my main interest, anyway. What I’m really here about is, I still believe that your daddy’s accident wasn’t any accident, and I wish you would talk to me about it. Who would want your daddy dead, David?"

My mother, he didn’t say, and shut out any other possibilities.

"I found out some things in Colorado that . . ."

Weather rose and made a show of opening the already open door a little wider. He heard, then saw, Larney passing by in the hall. "Why looky here, here comes Larney. You remember ol’ Larney, Francy. Ol’ Larney and I were just about to head out to lunch, weren’t we, Larney?"

Larney stuck his head in, raised blond eyebrows over pale brown eyes and said, "Yeah, and I need to talk to you in my office before we go." Good ol’ Larney, who wasn’t really old at all. His and Larney’s antennas stayed tuned to the same frequency most of the time. They didn’t need to speak to communicate. Discharged from the army early because of a combat injury that left him with an artificial leg, Larney was one of the few veterans in Dallas with a legitimate child born in 1943. He was the closest thing to a best friend Weather had.

"He’s busy with me," Francy retorted to Larney, who gave a silent salute and went on his way. To Weather, "You ought to want to hear me out, David. When I get this story together, you’ll wish you knew about it in advance."

He stood unspeaking in the doorway, pointing outward. Francy stayed in her seat for a longish moment, then left, tossing her head like a dismissive queen. He watched her sally down the skinny hall that opened out into the elevator area, then got his coat and hat, locked up his office and went down the hall to Larney’s.