By one-thirty, I had driven the twelve miles to San Luis Obispo and I was circling through the downtown area, trying to orient myself and get a feel for the place. The commercial buildings are two to four stories high and immaculately maintained. This is clearly a museum town, with Spanish and Victorian structures restored and adapted to current use. The storefronts are painted in handsome dark shades, many with awnings arching over the windows. The establishments seem to be divided just about equally between trendy clothing stores and trendy restaurants. Carrotwood trees border most avenues, with strings of tiny Italian lights woven into branches bursting with green. Any businesses not catering directly to the tourists seem geared to the tastes of the Cal Poly students in evidence everywhere.

Bailey Fowler's new attorney was a man named Jack Clemson, with an address on Mill, a block from the courthouse. I pulled into a parking space and locked my car. The office was located in a small, brown frame cottage with a pointed gable in the roof and a narrow wooden porch enclosed by trellises. A white picket fence surrounded the property, with a tangle of geraniums crowding in among the pales. Judging from the lettered sign affixed to the gate, Jack Clemson was the sole tenant.

I climbed the wooden porch steps and moved into the entrance hall now furnished as a reception area. A grandfather clock on the wall to my left gave the only sense of life, the brass pendulum snick-snacking back and forth mechanically. The former parlor on the right was lined with old-fashioned, glass-fronted oak bookcases. There was an oak desk with a typing ell, a swivel chair, a Xerox machine, but no secretary in sight. The screen on the computer monitor was blank, the surface of the desk neatly stacked with legal briefs and brown accordion files tied with string. Across the hall, the door to the matching parlor was shut. One of the buttons on the telephone was lighted and I could smell fresh cigarette smoke drifting out from somewhere in the back. Otherwise, the office seemed deserted.