With a couple of scotches lying warmly in her stomach, she soon felt better and asked why he had called her. "And if it's anything about Gypsy, I don't want to hear it. I've had enough of her for one evening!"

He looked at her solemnly and said, "No, it's about Harris."

"Conrad?" She looked at him completely surprised. "What about him?"

"Nothing much, really. Just a rumor I've heard. I still see a lot of my old newspaper pals and they told me about it."

"What, for heaven's sake?" she inquired anxiously.

"Well, it's really more than a rumor. To be exact, Bob knows the guy and says he's already started on it."

"Al," she said impatiently, "Will you please stop mumbling and tell me what's going on?"

"There's this guy named Joe Flanagan on the 'Evening Star'. According to Bob, he's a young squirt of a cub reporter who doesn't know his ass from his ear, however, but he got the bright idea if he did a big expose on his own and presented it to his editor, all written and nicely tied up with a red ribbon, he'd be the fair-haired boy."

"Expose?" she said.

"Yeah. Expose of Harris. And you know as well as I do that there's enough dirt to be dredged up about Harris and his crooked deals, in and out of politics, to raise one hell of a stink."

"But would they publish it? After all, Conrad's a big guy in town."

"Yeah, they might. Stan Morgan, the editor, would never dare order an investigation himself or it'd be his neck, but the trouble is their circulation has fallen lower than a stripper's morals and if he were presented with the stuff all wrapped up, he might just print it. After all, once the stuff was out, the public would probably get so aroused they'd demand a full investigation, and if Harris was convicted, Morgan would be riding high and so would his circulation."