Strange bedfellows can be political poison, and the candidate had picked himself a dilly. She was ruthless and corrupt and had enough on him to smear his shining armor with front page mud. Donald Lam and Bertha Cool told him not to worry. Women were Donald's specialty, the more dangerous the better. But when the lovely lady turned up dead, the case took an ugly twist. Suddenly Lam and Cool were in the middle of a red-hot race where bullets, not ballots, counted. The lettering on the door says "Bertha Cool--Confidential Investigations. " Bertha's latest client, who insists on being called "Mr. Smith," is all about the confidentiality. No one, he stresses, is to know anything about case or client. He just wants the agency to quietly track down one Mrs. James C. Lintig, with nothing more to go on than a two-decades-old address and a whiff of unspecified scandal. Except, leg man Donald Lam soon learns that others have been blazing the trail before him. Confidentiality? Phooey.