I was fairly sure I knew what this was about, but I didn’t make a move yet. I waited till she stopped for longer than just a moment and, finally, she did.

She paused beside a heavyset, well-dressed, patently prosperous farmer with a square, bare head and short-cropped white hair, standing with his thumbs in his suspenders, like Clarence Darrow at the monkey trial.

He was alone-his wife either home, or entering a bake-off or something, in a pavilion elsewhere on the fairgrounds.

As she pretended to watch Huey, the lipstick cutie was doing something else. Specifically, she was fanning her mark, checking for a fat wallet, and then she dropped her purse, and both her pretty head and the farmer’s square one disappeared under the sea of other heads. He was picking her purse up for her, no doubt, and she was flashing her smile and her baby blues.

A flirt is the best kind of stall there is, in a two-handed pickpocket mob.

Their heads appeared again, and he was smiling and blushing at her, handing her the purse-his hands kept busy, which is the way a stall frames her mark-and she was acting all coquettish, like. The blond pale boy of maybe twenty who could have been (and maybe even was) her brother moved through the crowd, behind them, brushing by just barely; he was wearing a white seersucker suit, not unlike mine.

By this time I had angled up to Joe Messina, who glared at me like a fifth-grade bully planning to get me after school.

“Want to do something useful, for a change?” I whispered.

“Huh?”

“See that dame? With the curls and the shape?”

“Yeah. So?”

“See that guy moving through the crowd, over there?”