"What we got you here for," Keys interrupted, "was to set you straight on something." I guess I looked as surprised as I felt. The impossibly blond girl giggled. "Over the phone, Maragon," Keys went on, sitting down on the bench beside the girl, "you said there was a Federal rap hanging over Mary's head on this 99th National Bank fracas."
I nodded.
"The theory being," he went on, "that the law doesn't let anybody with the Stigma get away with a thing, right?"
"Right."
"Then relax. Mary hasn't got the Stigma. Have you, Mary?"
"No," she said. I looked her over more carefully. She was closer to twenty than thirty, round-faced, with blue eyes that were about as impossibly bright as her hair was impossibly white. It could have been a corneal tattoo, but somehow I doubted it. Impossibly red lips made up the patriotic triad of colors—but that was lipstick, pure and simple.
"No Stigma?" I demanded. "I know Psixieland when I hear it, Miss Hall. Don't tell me that wasn't telepathic jazz."
She tossed her short hair-do around. "My side-men were TP's," she conceded. "Why do you think I was playing box chords? They knew what I was playing—I didn't know what they'd play."
Well, some of it was adding up. Still, I had to be sure. "I see. Tell me, Mary, where were your parents on the 19th of April in '75?"
She sat up straight beside Keys on the bench, and her fair face flushed pinkly. "Drop dead!" she told me.