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Kill Me Tomorrow

A Shell Scott Mystery

Richard S. Prather

FOR TINA

who helped more than she knows.

CHAPTER ONE

She was a full-lipped and -hipped Italian tomato with Rome burning in her eyes.

Tall, with long firm shapely legs, a waist hourglassed by a swinging Mother Nature, and an improbably extravagant bosom carried with the flirtatious yoo-hoo that glazes male eyeballs and ripens fruit in the trees, she had the look of Carnival in Rio, or Mardi Gras in New Orleans, or bullfights in Spain, or Saturday night in my apartment.

My apartment was a long way from here—here being the cool, quiet cocktail lounge of Del Webb’s luxurious Mountain Shadows resort hotel, nestled between Mummy and Camel-back Mountains in Paradise Valley, lush oasis on the edge of Scottsdale, Arizona, in the Valley of the Sun.

My apartment is a bachelor’s Hollywood pad in the Spartan Apartment Hotel—on North Rossmore, a couple of near-wrecks on the Freeway from my downtown L.A. office, Sheldon Scott, Investigations—but I was taking a week’s vacation from the Los Angeles smog and rumble and clatter, a hiatus from the hoods and heavies and grifters with whom I normally rub elbows or bump heads. I was here to soak in the pools and sweat in the heat, to laze and loll, to booze a little and unwind a lot. So, for the last hour, or since three P.M. of this steaming Friday in July, I had been sitting at the bar doing part of what I was here for.

I’d yacked with the two bartenders, peeked at a couple of Eddie’s enchanting pictures and informed him that he was under citizen’s arrest, and listened to several of Fernando’s unbelievably atrocious jokes at which he—he alone—laughed uproariously, and I had jollied the three bouncy and good-looking waitresses, Harriette and Vera and Lou.

But now I sat with my fingers touching the moist glass holding my half-finished bourbon-and-water and wondered what Lucrezia Brizante was doing in Scottsdale, Arizona.

That was her name: Lucrezia Brizante.

I didn’t hear her come in. Maybe I felt her. Or sensed the heat she seemed to bring in with her from the sun-burned desert outside. I wasn’t the only one.

It was suddenly quiet in the bar. There had been the murmur of conversation, clink of ice on chilled glass, ripples of soft laughter, and then suddenly it was still.

I knew who she was. Who didn’t?

Dressed entirely in white, from high-heeled pumps, to high-on-thigh minifrock with low-on-loveliness neckline, to ridiculous puff of feathery hat on her hell-black hair, she lit up the room. She lit more than that. Standing motionless inside the doorway gazing at the men and women seated at tables behind me, she was a white-sex explosion, a fragment of Neronian orgy or solo Saturnalia momentarily held still and hugged by time.

Then her glance fell on my face like the brush of a soft, warm wing. Her lips curved slightly, as if remembering a smile. And then she walked across the room toward me. Straight toward me.

Well, maybe not straight, exactly.

She moved in a direct line, true; but that movement in space was merely the invisible axis for a whole Ferris wheel of feminine goodies—Ferris wheel, hell, it was an entire circus of sensuous ripples and shimmers and tremblings—that notorious thrust of breast and swoop of waist and flare of hip so emphatic she appeared to be shaped in several more than three dimensions, obviously crammed with all the familiar female hormones plus aphrodisiac juices previously unknown.

This was the first time I’d seen her in person, rather than brightening a magazine cover or in photos or on film, and for a moment I thought that a woman who looked so unbelievably good must be half real and half mirage, like those heat-wave oases that shimmer in hot sands. But I thought that only for a moment; because by then Lucrezia Brizante was halfway across the room and still coming toward me.

Me? I thought. Why should the glory of the entire Italian peninsula want to see Shell Scott, private eye? Maybe it’s a horrible mistake; maybe she thinks I’m Grandpa Willie.

Don’t get me wrong. You will never see me on television, advertising toothpaste which—in ways mystifying to all mankind—smacks gooey kisses upon male chops; even so, I do not look at all like Grandpa. The thought had occurred to me simply because, on rare occasions, strangers glimpsing me from a distance have gotten the impression I might be an octogenarian, or at least more ancient than the lively lad of thirty years which I am, since my hair, which sticks straight up into the air for half an inch or as much as an inch when I let it grow to pot, is as white as bleached bone-slivers—this once leading an unbelievably dumb broad to comment that my skull appeared to be unraveling—as are the up-slanting and bent-down-at-the-ends brows over my gray eyes.

But it is my eyes, not my hairs, that are gray; and since I am a six-foot-two ex-Marine with a broken nose and other visible and invisible testimonies to public and private wars, and weigh two hundred and six solid pounds, and am tanned approximately the shade of a ripe banana, that impression had not yet persisted in a viewer’s mind when he, or she, lamped me from less than ten feet away.

And Lucrezia Brizante was now only a foot and a half from me. Then I was standing, looking down at her, and she was at least a foot closer. And you can bet she knew I wasn’t Grandpa Willie.

“Mr. Scott?” she said.

“Yes, ma’am. I’m Shell Scott.”

“How do you do?”

She extended her hand, and I shook it gingerly, and even with that very casual touch she turned my thumb and four fingers into five little erogenous zones. A mere half-dozen words she’d said to me, but in them were the Thousand Nights and a Night in the Garden of Kam—that perfumed garden of sensual delights where the flesh burns forever with shameless desire—because they were breathed in a voice a man hears in his inner ear, if he dreams of houris and wantons and bawds.

“I’m so glad I found you here, Mr. Scott”—sweet, scented breath warmed that inner ear, and before the inner eye nubile maidens undulated, busily flinging off diaphanous veils—“I need your help.”

“Lady,” I said, “you’ve got it.” And I meant it both ways.

She smiled like a woman getting chewed on the neck by Pan. It was a nice smile. I liked it. It went in my eyes and reamed out my arteries and steamed my blood and opened up half a dozen glands like cooked lotus blossoms.

“But you don’t even know what I want you to do, Mr. Scott. It might be dangerous—”

“Dangerous?” I laughed lightly. “Miss Brizante, you speak of danger—to me? Why, I am the man who parachuted alone into Red China armed only with poisoned chopsticks—which were made in Japan, at that. I am the man who fed peanuts to King Kong. Who twice addressed the Legion of Decency in his shorts—”

“Really?” Her lips curved slightly.

“Well, not really. I was just trying to impress you.”

She looked up at me. “You are rather impressive, in an … unusual way. The word Harry used was ‘batty.’”

“Harry? Batty?”

“Shall we find a booth where we can talk, Mr. Scott? I would like to tell you about it.” She was glancing around. “How about over there?” With a nod she indicated a booth near which no other customers sat, a spot where we’d be assured of some privacy. Not much. I said, “Splendid,” anyhow, and steered her past a couple of tables and into the booth. I’d brought my half-full bourbon-and-water from the bar, so I asked Lucrezia if she’d like a drink.

“Yes, I would, Mr. Scott.”

“Shell?”

She dropped her gaze to my mouth, then returned it like a gift to my eyes. “I’d like something cool and frosty.… Make it a Margarita, Shell.”

I caught Vera’s glance—stare, it was, really—and she took the order, looking long at Lucrezia, briefly at me, and then apparently at something invisible which gave her a stomach ache. While waiting for the drink I took a long look at Lucrezia myself. If she’d been heat in the doorway, she was fire and brimstone this close in the booth. Her skin looked softer than the fuzz on baby chicks, the lips were provocatively pouting and pagan, and those black-velvet eyes could have burned holes in wet blankets.

“Well,” I said, “here we are. I don’t know anything about the case yet, of course. But let’s be optimistic and suppose we get it all settled nicely in a day or two, or less. If so, how about dinner some night—soon—Miss Brizante? Lucrezia?”

The question caught her off guard. “No,” she said.

“No?”

“Harry said you’d be like this. I’ll have to insist that we remain … businesslike, Mr.—Shell. I really do need your help. I think.”

There was Harry again. “Harry who?”

“Feldspen.”

Ah, I thought. That Harry. Harry J. Feldspen was a longtime friend and sometime client, a man small in stature but very big, in Hollywood terms supercolossal, in moviebiz.

He was head of Magna Studios, producers in the last two years not only of Sins of Sheba—advertised almost entirely by life-sized photos of abundantly endowed Sarrah Starr wearing what appeared to be a fig leaf left behind by the locusts—which had grossed forty-seven million dollars worldwide, but also of the Oscar-winning Wagner, which despite the presence in it of the London Philharmonic Orchestra and the Boston Pops and three hundred flautists playing golden flauts grossed under six million.

Since Harry Feldspen, though himself a classical-music buff and enamored of critical acclaim, was also a man wise in the ways of the millions, and since he had lost five hundred thou on his earlier Beethoven, he did not now plan to produce Respighi, or even Mozart, not as long as he lived.

He was, instead, on the verge of filming his latest epic, which might possibly gross a million dollars merely in Yonkers.

“Ah,” I said aloud, when the salt-rimmed Margarita arrived, “Harry. Sure. You’re going to star in his Sins of Caesar’s Orgies. Right?”

“Yes, I am.”

“Not as Caesar, I’ll bet.”

“Of course not … will you quit it?”

“OK. What did Harry tell you about me?”

“Oh, he told me all about you.”

“That was foul of him.”

“I don’t think he was serious. I think he was just trying to frighten me.”

“Miss Brizante,” I said soberly. “Lucrezia? Well, no matter what little fibs Harry told you, I am now none of those things. I am alert, almost entirely sober, and prepared to be industrious. To prove I’ve been listening attentively, you said you need help—you think. Is there some doubt?”

“I’m not really sure.” She lifted her drink, let her lips sort of snuggle up to the salted rim of the glass. “It’s my father. He and my mother live at Sunrise Villas. You know where that is, don’t you?”

I nodded. It was one of those “retirement communities” for the fifty-and-over set, a regular little city with its own local government, fire department, hospitals and such, with a population of around twelve thousand citizens and more residents doddering in daily. It was out in the desert about twenty miles from Scottsdale.

I’d never been to the place, but similar “retirement cities” had mushroomed, almost exploded, throughout the land during the past three or four years, some of them thriving and some kind of doddering, so to speak; as a result the brains in Washington, D.C., had set up an agency which would make grants to those communities most in need of federal assistance. A Congressional delegation was at the moment studying the situation in Arizona. Consequently Sunrise Villas as well as the Del Webb—also builder of my Mountain Shadows vacation retreat—development, Sun City, a thriving community out in the Youngtown-Peoria area, and a couple of other similar developments near Tucson and Flagstaff in Arizona had been prominent in the local news of late.

“Haven’t been there, but I’ve been reading about it,” I said.

“Well, I’ve been staying with Dad and Mom for the last week, resting up and getting in shape …” Lucrezia hesitated—as well she might, I thought—smiled very slightly, then continued, “… getting rested before starting Caesar. And Dad just isn’t himself, he’s terribly worried about something. I’m sorry I can’t be more definite—he won’t tell me what’s wrong. But I know him, and I know he’s very worried. Or frightened.”

“You’ve no idea what’s bugging him?”

“Nothing specific. But night before last he got a phone call, and after Dad hung up he started swearing and growling about crooks and thieves and ruffians, things like that.”

“Crooks and thieves and ruffians, eh? I don’t suppose he mentioned any helpful names?”

“No. I was standing in the doorway, and Dad must not have realized I was there, because when he saw me he stopped talking to himself. Just suddenly got quiet. I asked him what had got him so excited—he’s quite volatile, anyway, easily excited, like many Italians.”

“Hmm.”

“But he wouldn’t tell me anything at all.”

So far, it didn’t sound dangerous to me. But, then, I had not at any time assumed Lucrezia Brizante was faced with a problem of very dangerous dimensions—except the one she always had. Even so, a mere bit of swearing and growling seemed hardly enough to send her looking for a private investigator.

“How did you happen to find me here?” I asked her.

“I saw a little piece in the Whatyoucallit? this morning, about your vacationing at Mountain Shadows.”

The Arizona Republic isn’t a whatyoucallit, it is one of the finest newspapers in the country; and it had been a big piece. In fact, it had been a whole “profile” of me by award-winning Maggie Wilson, gal columnist on the paper. Even including mention that I was in Arizona recuperating from a gunshot wound and several blows on and about the head which had resulted from my attacking several crooks and thieves in Los Angeles.

More accurately, they had attacked me, since I seldom assault bands of ruffians single-handed if I can help it. The Republic’s reporter had been kind enough to mention that, of the five dangerous thugs, only two got away from me. Unfortunately she’d included the fact that I hadn’t gotten away either, having come to in the Receiving Hospital. There was also one other passage which had not been wholly clear to me, concerning my committing mayhem upon the hoodlums, and “in typical Shell Scott fashion had everything well in hand, and was feigning unconsciousness very convincingly when two police cars arrived, barely in time to rescue the remaining criminals …”

Slightly miffed, I said, “Is that all? You want me to investigate your father’s conversation? With himself?”

“Dad wouldn’t tell me anything more. He refused even to discuss it with me. There is one other thing I should mention, though. A couple of nights ago, Dad called a friend of his—a Mr. Jenkins, Fred Jenkins—and he came right over. He and Dad spent hours talking together. Like … like some kind of conspirators.”

“Could you maybe make that a little clearer?”

“They were scowling and waving their hands in the air. You know?”

“Well, I … Go on.”

“They went into Dad’s den and drank wine and talked and talked and talked until way after midnight. But whenever Mom or I went in they’d stop talking. Then shoo us out. But we caught them whispering, and scowling, and mumbling.”

“Sounds serious, all right. Who’s this Jenkins?”

“I think he used to be an executive in a phone company, or an electronics company—some kind of engineer. Why?”

“Beats me. I’m probing—looking for clues.”

Actually, by listening attentively I had already come up with one. A very small clue, perhaps, but I decided to impress Lucrezia with my keenness, anyhow. I wanted her to be sure I was the right man for this job.

“Uh-huh,” I said. “Your father got a phone call Wednesday night. Shook him up. Crooks and thieves and ruffians! Then he phoned Jenkins after that—the same night! Significant, what? How about that?”

She blinked slowly, impossibly long lashes swooping down and up, down and up again. But she didn’t seem very excited. Seemed to be going to sleep. “Of course,” she said.

“Yes … of course.” I paused, wondering where I’d gone wrong, then proceeded briskly, “Well, we’re off to a fine start, what? Just in case I wrap this job up before, ah, eight P.M., how about dinner tonight, Miss Brizante? Lucrezia?”

“No.”

“Ah. Hum, well. Anything else you can tell me? Besides ‘No,’ I mean?”

“No.”

“That’s swell. Well, ah, do you want me to take the case? Whatever it is?”

“Of course I do. Why do you think I came here to see you?”

“Makes sense. OK. I’m on the job. Rarin’ to go.”

“Then, shall we go, Mr. Scott?”

“Shell?”

“I mean, Shell. I forgot.”

After a thick silence I said, “You—forgot.”

She leaned forward, smiling a wise smile, and dropped a cool, soft palm on the back of my hand, her body pressing against the table’s edge. More accurately, what it appeared she did was rest her sensational bosom upon the tabletop, whereupon as though impelled by reverse gravity it began preparing to sit on my lap.

Mollified, I said, “Well, I suppose we’d better get at it.”

“Yes, you should talk to Dad as soon as possible.”

“Dad?”

“If we hurry, we can get there during the council meeting.”

“Dad—council—ah. He’s in a council meeting? What council is this?”

“Dad is president this year of the Sunrise Villas Community Representation Council. They meet every Friday afternoon, and Kerwin Stephens will be there this time, so it’s a very important meeting not only for Dad but for all the residents.”

“Kerwin? Kerwin … I—”

“Congressman Stephens. His brother’s been at the Villas for the last week—he’s the Congressman’s representative, sort of advance man, you know—but the really important thing is to impress the Congressman himself, you understand.”

“Sure …”

“After all, what happens at the council meeting this afternoon may have a lot to do with whether Sunrise Villas gets an AGING grant or not. I’d like to be there myself, so we’d better hurry.”

“Congressman Stephens. That Kerwin. His brother has been … His brother—”

“David Stephens. Brother of Kerwin Stephens, head of the Committee on AGING.” She paused. “I thought you said you’d been reading about it.”

I nodded, gathering my thoughts. I nodded for a while.

I would like to put it on the record that I am not a dummy. Actually, my brain often hums along like a well-oiled machine. Obviously Lucrezia had assumed I knew what she was talking about. Her comment “reading about it” proved the key clue. Lucrezia was making it difficult for me to demonstrate my keenness—but she’d been throwing a lot of good stuff at me there. And she had lots of good stuff to throw.

Now, however, I had it straightened out. Kerwin. Congressman Stephens. David Stephens. Brother. AGING. Council. Friday afternoon. It was July, and I was at Mountain Shadows, and Mountain Shadows was in Arizona.

“Right,” I said decisively. “We sure better.”

“Better what?”

“Better hurry.”

Lucrezia waited in the lobby while I made a quick trip to my suite, strapped on my gun harness and shoved my Colt .38 Special into the clamshell holster. For a case which had begun in this happy fashion, and involved merely the kind of “crooks and thieves and ruffians” one might expect to find in a retirement community where people sort of dawdled about, I was ninety-nine-percent certain I wouldn’t need the revolver. Still …

With Miss Brizante at my side, peering past my shoulder, I left a note at the desk for Dr. Paul Anson. Paul, who lives a couple doors down the hall from me in the Spartan, is a movie-colony medicine man and sometime healer, a jolly, vital and vigorous cat who is my very good friend and stimulating companion. He was at the moment en route from L.A. to attend one of several conventions currently being held in the Phoenix-Scottsdale area, this one a gathering of electronic and other scientific experts, including several top-notch medical men, here at Mountain Shadows. I had been looking forward to spending a couple of days in Paul’s company, that being one of the reasons I had chosen this time and place for my own vacation.

Probably, I thought, as Lucrezia and I went out through the lobby’s swinging glass doors and headed for my Cadillac, I’d have time to wrap up this job and—unless Miss Brizante at least let me start calling her Lucrezia—still have plenty of time left over for Paul.

And so it happened that, with Lucrezia Brizante at my side, in Arizona, in July, I headed gaily for Sunrise Villas—and the sunset.

CHAPTER TWO

The drive to Sunrise Villas was quite pleasant—it could hardly have been otherwise with Lucrezia Brizante in the car. But she insisted upon wearing her seat belt. When she also insisted I put on my seat belt, I concluded Lucrezia’s mother had taught her that Yes was a No-No, and let my thoughts wander a bit.

At least it helped me unjumble what Lucrezia had been talking about back there in the bar. I had read a good deal about it, but concentration was easier with Lucrezia wearing a seat belt instead of leaning over a cocktail table. Probably she should wear a seat belt when leaning over cocktail tables.

AGING. It was an acronym, part of the alphabet sop so dear to the heads of legislators and bureaucrats in the Capitol. The Capitol letters stood for the “Agency for Gerontological Investigation and Need-Grants.” Congressman Kerwin Stephens was the chairman of the Commission on AGING. His brother David had for a week or so been surveying the situation at Sunrise Villas, but today Congressman Stephens, the boss-man himself, would be present in the flesh. And with her father president of the council of something-or-other, I could understand Lucrezia’s feeling that the upcoming meeting was very important.

I supposed it was pretty important, at that. I did think the growth of retirement communities was in many ways a splendid development—men and women from the young-middle-aged on up, often with kindred interests, able to afford living in an environment specially designed for them. That part was fine.

It was those giant brains in Washington, D.C., which bothered me, that and the giant AGING grants which might eventuate from government intervention, because when the federal government started out to improve a situation it almost invariably managed to screw it up beyond the power of mortal minds to comprehend. Besides, these vast spending programs always cost a lot of money. It is undeniable that spending costs money. But … maybe this time it would be different.

About halfway to Sunrise Villas Lucrezia said, “What happened to you in Los Angeles, Shell?”

“Nothing happened to me. I’m perfectly marvelous. Just a little quiet, that’s all—”

“I mean the trouble mentioned in the Republic article. The fight, and your getting shot.”

There wasn’t much to tell, but I hit the high spots for her. The head of a construction company had hired me to check into the background of some unsavory characters he suspected of muscling his employees and sabotaging expensive machines. Behind the violence was a union boss—with reputed but never formally proved Mafia ties—who had demanded that my client sign a closed-shop contract with his union, despite the fact that eighty percent of my client’s employees, by secret ballot, had turned thumbs down on the proposal.

During the investigation I arranged to meet a nervous informant who was to supply me with additional info on four lobs whom I already knew to be professional heavy men. It turned out that my presumed informant was buddy-buddy with the four hoods, who thus were awaiting me at the meeting place. Because that meeting place was on a dimly lighted stretch of lonely road and I am suspicious of nervous informants anyway, I had my gun in my hand before the first shot was fired at me. Because that was the way those lads said Hello.

The slug banged my side and bounced off a rib. It didn’t knock me down but I let myself go down, hoping whoever was after me would think he, or they, had got me. Presumably they did think I was, if not dead, unconscious; because all four of them trotted toward me and, from flat on my back, I shot and killed two of them while they were still trotting.

As for the rest of it, I got up and emptied my Colt Special, slugged one guy and knocked him pretty far into unconsciousness, took another slug in my leg and went down. The Arizona Republic’s Maggie Wilson had been right about the arrival of police cars barely in the proverbial “nick of time.” Because the only man on his feet when spots from two prowl cars hit his face was a short, burly hood named James Q. Ryan, called Jimmy Ryan or more often simply “Lucky,” and I was still conscious enough to see the heavy .45 in his hand pointed at my gut, and his square, milk-white face behind the gun.

Some years back, for reasons not now important, Ryan’s associates had decided it was necessary to get rid of him. Three times in two weeks they’d tried to kill him, and each time he almost miraculously escaped completely unharmed. From that time till now he’d been called “Lucky,” and since then Lucky Ryan had led a charmed—if not charming—life. Even in L.A. with me his luck had held, since I had pumped one squarely into his head—or, rather, it would have gone into his head if my gun had not by then been empty.

I finished it up for Lucrezia. “Anyhow, the cops scared Lucky Ryan off but caught him and my informant a couple of blocks away, took them and the guy I’d clobbered in to book them and hauled the other two downtown in the dead wagon. Me, I started taking a nap about that time, so the last part is hearsay.”

“You really got shot twice?”

“Yeah, but the one in my side was nothing, and I limped for a while from the pill in the leg, that’s all. I guess I’m just a lucky fellow. When it comes to getting shot.”

“Now, don’t start that again. Turn left up there, Shell—that’s Sunrise Villas, a mile down Saguaro Way.”

So I took a left, and there it was sprawled out in the desert ahead of us. We drove beneath a huge orange sign arched like the upper rim of the rising sun, on which was lettered SUNRISE VILLAS and beneath the name the slogan, “Where the Golden Days of the Golden Years Begin.” Here Saguaro was a two-lane street bisected by a four-foot-wide strip of grass enclosed between cement curbs, with palm trees planted in the grass every fifty feet or so. On left and right were clusters of adjacent apartments forming three sides of a square, the fourth side open next to the sidewalk and street, plus rows of small houses, most set back behind recently mowed lawns or individually planted cactus gardens, some with beds of green or dull-red crushed rock in place of lawns.

We passed two big shopping centers crowded with cars and people moving leisurely in and out of stores and through the black-topped parking lot, and a group of long, low wood-and-cement-block buildings which Lucrezia pointed out as the Community Recreation Center. As we passed it I got a glimpse of blue water in a curving swimming pool beyond one of the brown-and-white buildings. It all looked pleasant, and peaceful.

As I pulled up to a stop sign, preparing to turn on Palos Verde Drive following Lucrezia’s directions, I glanced out the Cad’s window at a large, velvety, lawn-bowling green across the street. Nearest me, in a group of four fairly ancient citizens, one man was preparing to bowl. He was tall, thin as a string, and about a hundred and fifty years old. I got the impression he’d been preparing to bowl for some time. The three men watching him seemed frozen, but he was bent over, head thrust forward on a long thin neck, rigid except for his right arm which swung forward, back, forward again, hand holding a grapefruit-size bowling ball. Back went the arm again, forward once more. Back, forward. Man, I thought, I might run out of gas before he gets that thing on its way. But finally he unleashed the wooden projectile and it began rolling, rolling, and he began straightening up, straightening.…

“I said, we turn left here, Shell.”

“Yeah. Just a minute. This is fascinating.”

The ball, moving a bit more rapidly than a three-legged turtle, was about midway to the stake, and the bowler was still straightening, straightening. He’d got his left hand on one side of his lower back, and was making a sort of cranking motion with his right hand.

The ball was barely moving as it approached the stake. It gently kissed one of the three balls already there, rolling it out of the way, nudged a second ball, came to rest against the stake. Two of the men near the bowler smacked fists into their hands as if disappointed, while the other whooped and waggled both arms in the air. The old boy was still trying to reach an approximately vertical position.

As I swung left around the corner into Palos Verde Drive, a sense of peace, of laziness almost, was stealing over me. This job was going to be a dandy. I could feel it in my bones.

A block ahead on our right were two more long, low buildings in the same wood and cement-block style of the Community Recreation Center we’d recently passed. I guessed, correctly, that they housed the Town Hall and various offices of the Sunrise Villas city government—and in one of them the meeting of the Sunrise Villas Community Representation Council was now under way.

As I found a spot at the curb and parked, I said, “Just what is this council, Lucrezia?”

“It’s a kind of semiofficial group, twelve men chosen by other homeowners to represent them, plan and discuss improvements, make recommendations for needed services, hear complaints. Once a month their reports go to the official governing body of the Villas. Mainly they’re a kind of buffer between all the homeowners and residents and the mayor and council and other elected city officials—Dad could tell you more about it.”

We proceeded up a wide cement walk lined with low green shrubs, several mimosas, and half a dozen thin-trunked palm trees, and turned between the two buildings to enter the one on our left. The air-conditioned interior was pleasantly cool after the hot-but-dry oven outside. Lucrezia rested one hand on my arm as we walked down a hallway to a pair of heavy double doors. From beyond them I could hear the muted sound of someone speaking. We went in.

Near us were about forty wooden folding chairs, only seven of them occupied by interested citizens. Beyond the chairs, around an elongated oval table, sat twelve men, one of them tapping the tabletop with the eraser end of a yellow pencil as he spoke.

“—in consequence,” he was saying as Lucrezia and I took seats in the front row, “I recommend that we submit a formal resolution to the mayor and City Council expressing our combined agreement on the urgent need for action on this matter. And that we make it unmistakably clear, if there is no improvement in trash and garbage collections, it is our unanimous opinion a lawsuit should be brought against Tri-City Sanitation Engineers. Preferably by the city of Sunrise Villas, but that if the city fails to act, this citizens’ group will itself initiate the legal action.”

A man at the end of the oval table on my right said in a strong, resonant voice, slightly accented, “We’ve discussed this at length, and it seems to me we’re in agreement. So I’ll just ask if there are any objections.”

Heads shook around the table. Nobody spoke.

Lucrezia whispered, “That was Dad, Shell.”

Brizante was an impressive-looking old gentleman. Not really so old—in his middle fifties, I guessed—and with the firm features and strong voice of a younger man, but the large moustache adorning and almost completely hiding his upper lip made him appear older than he’d have looked without the brush. It was a regular old-time handlebar job, curving out and up a good four or five inches on each side, thick and uniformly gray. Those whiskers looked wiry and strong enough to support a small boy without bending. His eyes were stern, hawklike under heavy brows.

“All right, then. We’ll let you draw up the proposal.” The man nodded, tapping away with his pencil. “You can bring it to our meeting next week,” Brizante finished.

The next fascinating discussion concerned potholes in a couple of streets paved by the Atlas Paving Company, unreasonable delay in the beginning of construction on the Sunrise Villas Doctors’ Hospital and such—all stressing the great need for money—so I looked over the men seated around the conference table. And almost immediately I got a queer feeling. Like that cool prickly sensation you get on your skin just before the goose-bumps pop out.

I was glancing from Brizante to my left, casually eyeing the men whose faces were visible to me, when I felt that prickly chill. I pulled my eyes back, let my gaze stop on the man seated next to Brizante. And it was as though ancient little bells rang, tolled in a slow and measured rhythm somewhere deep inside my brain. So I lit a cigarette and took a closer look at the guy on Brizante’s right.

Nothing. I didn’t recognize him. As far as I knew I’d never seen the creep before. And creep he was.

It was an old, lined face, very old, very lined. He had to be pushing—or, more likely, pulling—ninety, and he looked a little bit like one of Death’s pallbearers. The brows were thick, gray with a few streaks of black, over dark, sunken eyes. The nose was big, fleshy, and even from twenty feet away I could see that it appeared pitted, as if dotted with enormous open pores or strangely scarred. Under that big nose and the bushy brows his mouth appeared much too small for the wizened face, the too-thin lips puckered, contracted, grotesquely wrinkled, as if it were the mouth of a thousand-year-old boy. The skin of his face was almost gray but faintly marked with darker amoeba-like splotches, resembling the liver spots elderly men get on the backs of their shiny hands, and it sagged beneath his eyes, under his sharp cheekbones, at the corners of his mouth. Loose flesh hung in a long crepey wattle underneath his pointed chin.

“Who’s the dead guy on your father’s right?” I asked Lucrezia.

She winced slightly. “That’s Mr. DiGiorno. One of the oldest residents here.”

“I had a hunch he wasn’t one of the youngest.”

“I mean one of the first people to buy a home and settle here at the Villas, after it was opened to the public six years ago. He was one of the original organizers of the Community Council, served two years as president. He’s quite wealthy. I understand he owns a good deal of property here.”

“Like mortuaries, cemeteries? Funeral—OK. You don’t have to look at me like that.”

“Dad could tell you more than I can—he’s been on the council with Mr. DiGiorno for over three years now. I think he owns a hundred acres or so where they’re considering building the new golf course. And—” She stopped for a moment, brows elevated prettily. “I think he does own the cemetery. Or at least sold the city most of the land for it. How did you know that?”

“I didn’t. I just figured a guy with his looks had to live—skip it. Can’t I make a little joke once in a while?”

I was gazing at Lucrezia’s profile when another man began speaking. It was a voice I hadn’t yet heard this afternoon, but even without taking a look I figured it belonged to a preacher or reverend or pastor of some kind. The voice was one of those syrupy humbler-than-thou sounds which at the same time managed to be sonorous and oracular, its pitch and rhythm—even while the guy spoke to his fellow council members about the desirability of improving sewage systems so toilets wouldn’t back up—throbbing with that peculiarly oboe-like vibration and gently swinging Pavlovian meter which issues from many pulpits on Sunday mornings.

“I have personally been the recipient of more than twenty complaints, merely from among the members of my congregation,” he said solemnly. “This in the seven-day period since last Friday alone, since our previous meeting. Much linoleum has been soiled, and two living room carpets have been damaged beyond repair. One particularly distressing example, gentlemen. Mrs. Ginsburg and Mrs. Okiyame live in adjacent houses on Pomegranate Street. Whenever Mrs. Ginsburg flushes her toilet, Mrs. Okiyame’s overflows. Whenever Mrs. Okiyame lets the water out of her bath, it appears in Mrs. Ginsburg’s kitchen sink. They have very nearly come to blows. And can we blame them? Of course we cannot. I feel sure I need not cite other examples, gentlemen. But clearly, action must be taken. Something must be done!”

That’s what he said. And it sounded as if he were reciting a newly discovered poem, written in collaboration, by Matthew, Mark, Luke and John.

“Who’s he?” I asked Lucrezia.

“Reverend Archie.”

“Archie?”

“Well, it’s really the Reverend Stanley Archibald, but most people call him Reverend Archie.” She paused. “Are you going to say something funny about him?”

“Well … not now.”

Reverend Archie, unlike the three or four others who’d spoken before him, had risen to his feet to deliver his remarks and was just sitting down again. He was a tall man, heavy but not quite fleshy enough to be called fat, with a wide almost cherubic face and a pink scalp partially hidden by strands of light brown hair. I guessed his age at between fifty and sixty, probably nearer the latter figure. He was wearing a black suit, white shirt, black tie with a very small tight knot.

In less than five minutes a committee of three men had been selected to investigate the problem and report back next Friday, with special attention paid to those who’d complained to the Reverend, particularly to Mrs. Ginsburg and Mrs. Okiyame.

Then Mr. Brizante stood for the first time and began to speak of the Commission on AGING and that the council members were “honored and gratified” that so eminent an individual as its chairman, Congressman Kerwin Stephens, was present.

I’d forgotten all about the guy, despite Lucrezia’s remarks to me. But he was indeed present, for Brizante concluded his remarks by saying he hoped the afternoon’s meeting had indicated the need for federal assistance in combatting the many serious problems which had in the past two years begun to plague Sunrise Villas, and that Congressman Stephens had graciously consented to speak “a few words” to the assembled council members.

Brizante moved his chair aside, and from one of the seats behind me a man arose and walked to the end of the oval table. Standing there, between Brizante and creepy Mr. DiGiorno, he began to speak. And, grudgingly, I had to give him a silent hand. He actually did keep it down to a few words.

Congressman Kerwin Stephens was a rather odd-looking bird. I choose the noun with care. He looked like a bird. Not any particular kind of bird. Just a whole bunch of birds mashed together. He wasn’t a small, wispy man—I’d say he was five feet, ten or eleven inches tall and weighed about one-seventy—but his features, individually and collectively, were very, well, very birdy.

His hair was gray and smooth and full, and combed straight back from forehead to nape of neck; his eyes were small, almost beady, black as ripe little berries; and his nose was so thin and arched and hooked, and looked so much like a beak, I expected it to open and clack when he began to speak. He did have a fine, rich voice, vibrant and full yet soft, mellow but husky, like the cooing of a dozen doves with flu. But, after all, he was a Congressman, and men in politics rarely sound like chalk screeching on a blackboard.

Stephens came across quite well. After merely stating that he was not in Arizona seeking votes—he was from out of state—but that if his constituents ever failed to return him to “the Hill,” God forbid, he would himself like to live in a community such as Sunrise Villas. He even made a little joke to the effect that he meant a Sunrise Villas in which the plumbing worked without fail. He appreciated the problems, the great need, and concluded by saying, “And I am one of those who sincerely believe in the oft-quoted phrase, ‘Find a Hole … er, Find a Need—and Fill It.’ I have already visited similar communities in California and Oregon, gentlemen, and I can honestly say your need here is greater than anything I have previously encountered. Of course, I cannot promise that the entire Commission will share my views, but I can assure you that my personal recommendation will be that one of the first AGING grants be made to Sunrise Villas.”

Everybody applauded. Well, almost everybody. Then Stephens spoke briefly to Brizante, smiled, nodded, and left.

I discovered, almost to my dismay, that I had been quite impressed by the man. Brizante gaveled the meeting to an end, and Lucrezia and I stood up. Mr. Brizante nodded to his daughter and smiled, spoke for a moment longer to the Reverend Archie who was standing next to him, then both of them walked over to us.

Lucrezia performed the introductions and I shook hands, first with her father. His grip was strong, the skin of his hand not calloused but rough, and he smiled at me, showing strong, crooked, clean and very white teeth. The Reverend Archie’s skin was soft and smooth, and his palm felt almost squishy, like warm dry fat. Maybe part of it was that he merely extended his hand and let me pump it, his fingers returning no pressure, just sort of going along for the ride. And when he smiled he showed no teeth. His lips stretched out and curved up at the corners, almost sweetly; but no teeth peeked through.

We mumbled a few inanities, and I said this was the first council meeting I’d attended, but I’d found it a lot more interesting than having a tooth drilled.

The Reverend assumed what I took to be a grieved expression, but Brizante laughed and said, “We do our best to discourage sightseers, Mr. Scott. You got only yourself to blame. Or did Lu make you come here?”

I told him Miss Brizante had suggested it, but I’d come of my own free will. At that the Reverend managed another of those sweetish smiles and commented, “I daresay, to those not intimately involved with the issues under discussion, these meetings must often seem dry as—as sermons,” he finished, seeming pleased. “But the work is necessary.” His eyes—which I noted were light brown—took on a sort of glazed and distant look. “‘Man goeth forth unto his work and to his labour until the evening.’ Psalms: One-oh-four, Twenty-three. Indeed, the work must be done. ‘And thou shalt teach them ordinances and laws, and shalt shew them the way wherein they must walk, and the work that they must do.’ Exodus: Eighteen, Twenty.”

Keerist, I thought, this guy must think I’m his congregation.

“For,” the Reverend continued, all Revved up, “‘by works a man is justified’—James: Two, Twenty-four—and ‘Also unto thee, O Lord, belongeth mercy: for thou renderest to every man according to his work.’ Psalms: Sixty, Two-twelve.”

Pretty quick the Reverend would start trying to save me, I feared. And I didn’t want to be saved. At least, not this minute. So, as he launched into “‘Be ye strong therefore, and let not your hands be weak,’” I smiled and said, “‘What I must do is all that concerns me, no matter if the kitchen sinks.’ Emerson, Self-Reliance, slightly edited.”

Brizante laughed again. The Reverend didn’t. Brizante said, “You were lucky enough to hear about one of our most interesting problems here at Sunrise Villas, Mr. Scott. Maybe Reverend Archie should tell Mrs. Okiyame, ‘Let not thy left hand know what thy right hand is doing.’ Or doeth? Or is that in the Bible—”

“Matthew: Six, Four,” said the Reverend, without enthusiasm. Then he looked upon me. “It’s Mr. Sheldon Scott?” I nodded. “Well, I would guess you aren’t a resident of the Villas. Are you visiting here, Mr. Scott?”

“Just passing through,” I said. “Though I might stick around for a few days. Hard to say, Reverend.”

“I do hope you can remain over the weekend. Perhaps you could attend services at my church Sunday morning. It’s open to all, the Universalist Communion Church on—”

“I’m afraid not,” I said. “I usually sleep late on Sunday mornings.”

That didn’t go over real big with him. After a couple more bland comments he excused himself and walked out.

Lucrezia said, “You want to wait for us in the car, Shell?”

“Sure.” I figured she wanted to give Brizante a hint about what I was doing here. I noticed that ancient Mr. DiGiorno was leaving the table, so I waited till he went by us and out the door. As he passed I saw that the little finger on his left hand was missing, and there was a fine white scar on the right side of his wrinkled neck. All in all, not exactly a man to inspire confidence in the innocent and pure.

By the time I got outside, DiGiorno was standing on the sidewalk talking to a short, very wide man, wearing tan whipcord trousers and short-sleeved shirt. On his head was a white Stetson, and the hair visible below the hat was trimmed so short in back it almost looked shaved. As I walked toward them DiGiorno turned and moved along the sidewalk, reasonably agile for a guy with both feet in the grave, and the broad-shouldered man went across the street, with long strides and an exaggerated swinging of his shoulders, to a tan-colored car with an official-looking seal painted on the door. In a half-circle over the seal I could just make out the words, “Sunrise Villas Security Guards.”

The tan car pulled away as I got into my Cad and lit a cigarette, smoked half of it before Brizante and Lucrezia came out of the building and walked to the car. Following Lucrezia’s directions I drove down Palos Verde to a street called Willow Lane. Brizante, sitting in back, didn’t say anything until I turned left off Willow into Mimosa Lane, where he and his wife lived.

Then he said, “So. You’re a detective, Mr. Scott. And my crazy daughter thinks you can help me, that’s it?”

“I’m a detective, all right,” I said. “But I can’t help you if you don’t want help, Mr. Brizante. For all I know, maybe you don’t need any help.”

“Well …” he said. And that was all.

Mimosa Lane was appropriately named. All up and down the street feathery-leaved mimosa trees were planted, alive with delicate lavender-pink blooms. Three of them brightened the lawn before an attractive white house trimmed in green, where Lucrezia told me to park.

At the door we were met by a short, plump woman with a kindly face and bright brown eyes. Lucrezia introduced the lady as her mother, and Mrs. Brizante rubbed her hands vigorously on an apron around her waist before shaking hands with me.

“Excuse the flour, all over,” she said, smiling up at me. “I make ravioli. Come in, come in. Come in the kitchen while I finish.”

She kissed her husband on the cheek, bending his moustache, then bustled off. Lucrezia smiled at me, took my hand and led me into the house, through the living room cluttered with heavy, dark wooden furniture, a couple of cloth-covered hassocks, some kind of sewing or knitting basket. Three bright paintings and half a dozen framed photographs were on the walls and the mantel above a gas-log fireplace.

We went down a short hallway and into the bright, airy kitchen where Mrs. Brizante was pounding gobs of dough with great energy.

After a minute or two, Brizante appeared in the doorway and wiggled a finger at me. I walked over to him and he said, “I think Lu did right. I’ll tell you, anyway, see what you think. Come with me into the den, Mr. Scott?”

I nodded, followed him back down the hallway to a room at its end, and inside.

CHAPTER THREE

The den was clearly a man’s room, small, without frills. There was a green carpet, green couch on my left, a low rough-wood table before it. In one corner was a small bar and two stools, in the opposite corner a battered pine desk with a phone on it and a swivel chair behind it.

Soon after we entered the den it was “Tony”—from Antonio—and “Shell.” Tony struck me as a solid, down-to-earth type of man, strong and maybe more than a little stubborn, level-headed enough. Hardly the kind of “Papa Brizante” I’d been picturing when talking with Lucrezia.

So by the time he said, “OK, I’ll tell you what the trouble is, Shell,” I was paying attention. He went on, “A friend of mine, Gilberto Reyes, is missing. Been missing three days. I think Gil is dead. Maybe killed—murdered.” He stopped and stared at me from the stern eyes.

“Just because a man’s missing for a few days doesn’t mean he’s dead, Tony. Have you checked the hospitals, police—”

“Anna, that’s Gil’s wife, has. Checked all over, hospitals, morgue, police, even the amateur police we got here at the Villas—Security Guards they call themselves. And I’ve stayed in touch with Anna. Called her just a few minutes ago.”

“If you think this Gil Reyes is dead, maybe murdered, you must have a pretty good reason.”

“Well, seems to me I do. But … maybe it’ll look different to you. See, if anything has happened to Gil, I’d feel part responsible. Mama and I knew him when we lived in Tucson. I’m the one talked him into moving here to the Villas nine, ten months back.” He brought up his right hand and grabbed his moustache from behind, tugged on it gently a few times. His lip stretched out and back into place, out and in.

Then he dropped his hand and said, “I guess it starts last Sunday. Gil was down in Tucson on business over that weekend, and Sunday morning he was walking to church—he’s very religious, wouldn’t miss the services if he could help it. When he was three, four blocks from the church he saw a man killed. Murdered right there on the street. Gil and maybe a dozen other people saw it.”

My skin was feeling prickly again. Maybe there was something wrong with my glands today. More likely it was because I knew of a murder which had occurred in Tucson, Arizona, on the previous Sunday, and it had been the very violent murder of a very violent hoodlum called “Crazy Joe”—born Giuseppe—Civano. Joe Civano was known on the turf, or among his hoodlum associates, as a kind of wild man, unpredictable and dangerous, subject to violent rages—hence the monicker, or tag, “Crazy.” Crazy Joe had been an enforcer or hit-man, a soldier in the private army of one of the two dozen or more capos, or bosses of the Cosa Nostra, U.S.A. Commonly called the Mafia. Joe had been blown messily up—also down and sideways—when he’d switched on the ignition of his brand-new Lincoln Continental, thereby causing the explosion of what must have been an unnecessarily large number of sticks of dynamite.

“Something the matter?” Tony asked me.

“I hope not. But I was just wondering about the guy Reyes saw killed. Did he happen to mention the victim’s name?”

Brizante nodded. “He told me it was a man named Joe Civano.”

I sighed. “Dynamite job. Blew him to hell in his car.”

“You know about it, huh?”

“I read the newspaper stories. And I already knew a little about the guy who was killed.”

“Impression I got from Gil, he was some kind of crook.”

“You sure got the right impression. Go on.”

“Well, the police questioned Gil and some others, took his name and all, and let him go. Funny thing was, Gil told me he used to know this Civano real well, they lived for a while in the same block in a town called Gardena in California. Gil hadn’t seen him since he left there sixteen years ago—knew he was a crook even then—but I didn’t know about that till the crazy thing happened Tuesday morning.”

“Crazy?”

“Seemed crazy as hell to me. About sunup I was driving Gil to his shop—his car was in the garage for a couple days. He’s got a carpet store, all kinds of floor coverings, and had a lot of work to do before he opened up that morning. I was slowing down for the stop sign where Roadrunner Drive crosses Claridge Street when all of a sudden, Gil said, ‘Jesus Christ. Mary, Mother of God!—only all in Spanish, you know, ‘Madre de Dios!’ he said.”

Brizante smiled slightly. “He didn’t mean any disrespect, he only swore like that, in Spanish, when he was excited. Gil’s Mexican-American, not Catholic, but religious, very religious, didn’t mean anything the way he said that.”

“Suits me. What brought on the attack?”

“He was staring out the car window on his side. ‘Stop, stop the car,’ he said. I pulled over. Didn’t know what the hell had got into him, but it looked like he was staring at a guy, a big fellow, standing in front of a house. So I asked him what was the matter and he said, ‘That looks like Civano.’”

I blinked. “He say anything else?”

“No, that was all. But it didn’t make sense to me—he’d already told me about this Civano getting blown up in Tucson. Been talking quite a lot about it. Natural enough.”

“Uh-huh.”

“Anyhow, Gil just looked a little more, then got out of the car and walked over and spoke to them for a few minutes.”

“Them?”

“This big heavy fellow was talking to a woman in front of the house. Turns out it was her house, but I didn’t know that then. Well, Gil spoke to the two of them for a minute, then he and this big guy walked a few feet off and stood there talking for another couple minutes. When Gil came back to the car he looked funny—like he was puzzled—and he said something about he guessed maybe he’d made a mistake. It’d been sixteen years since he left Gardena, and people change, something like that.”

“Did he actually tell you he thought the guy was Joe Civano? The man he’d seen killed in Tucson?”

“He didn’t say any more to me about the killing in Tucson. But he’d already told me about that. And you’d think if he saw the man killed, he’d know he couldn’t be walking around here at Sunrise Villas, wouldn’t you?”

“Yeah. My understanding is the guy was turned into hamburger. Blast threw the engine nearly a block away, sent half the car’s hood up on the roof of the house across the street. And, of course, scattered bits of the other hood, Joe Civano, untidily all over.”

Brizante stroked his moustache. “Seems funny as hell to me, but I found out later Gil really did think the man was Joe Civano. He did, sure enough. Only thing that makes sense to me—because Gil was plenty smart, nothing wrong with his brain, or his eyes for that matter—is he must’ve figured it was somebody else got killed in Tucson.”

I shook my head. “No matter how badly the body was chewed up, I can’t see the Tucson police making a mistake in identification like that. Not with a known mafioso. If they say it was Joe Civano, a hundred to one that’s who it was.”

“Sure. I’m just saying what I figure Gil must have thought. Hell of it is, I know Gil would have talked more to me about it, but it was only a minute or so later I dropped him off at his store—and that was the last time I saw him.”

Tony was silent, frowning, for a few seconds. “Well, let me give you the rest of it. When I was driving back up Claridge on my way home, I saw this big guy again. He was just leaving the house there where Gil had been talking to him, getting into his car, so when he drove off I followed him. He turned on Palma Drive and I saw him pull into a drive-way about half a block down the street, so I turned on Palma myself—”

“Tony, you mean you tailed this guy?” I knew the man couldn’t really have been Joe Civano—at least, there was only about one chance in a thousand that it could have been—but even the fleeting thought of Brizante tailing that kind of murderous hood gave me shivers.

“Tailed him, followed, call it anything you want to,” Tony said with apparent unconcern. “Anyhow, I saw him take out a key and open the front door of his house and go in. I was going pretty slow. Way Gil acted, I wanted to know more about the guy, where he lived, and all that.”

“Uh-huh. Did this chap maybe sort of eyeball you curiously as you crept by?”

“He didn’t even look around, don’t think he noticed me.”

“Back up a little. You said you found out, later, Gil did think the man was Joe Civano. Found out how?”

“Well, Gil was supposed to come over here Tuesday night at eight o’clock—after supper—for some cribbage. We’d play cribbage two, three nights a week. He didn’t show up. So I phoned and talked to his wife. She said all he’d told her was about seeing somebody he thought he recognized from Gardena, and Anna said he seemed upset, like he was puzzling over it. Finally he told her he had to get it settled in his mind, and was going to go talk to the Reverend about it. Only he’d been gone two hours already and she was wondering what was keeping him. Especially since he left before supper.”

“Reverend?”

“Yeah, Gil and Anna belong to the Universalist Communion Church. It opened up just a couple months before they moved to the Villas, and when they got here they joined up. That’s Reverend Archie’s church.”

“The guy I met at the council meeting, huh?”

Tony nodded. “I went right over to the church and talked to him. Gil had been there, all right, and told Reverend Archie flat out he’d seen Joe Civano here at the Villas. At least he thought he’d seen him. Well, the Reverend got what information he could from Gil, then phoned and asked both the man Gil had talked to and the woman the man had been with to come over to the church. Reverend Archie told me when Gil left he was convinced he’d made a mistake, even apologized for the trouble.”

“Archibald had these two come to the church, huh? Who were they?”

“Man’s name was Yarrow. Henry Yarrow. Turns out he’s head of a real estate agency here at Sunrise Villas, been in business here more than three years. Woman’s name is Blessing, she’s a widow. Yarrow was a salesman for her husband’s agency till Mr. Blessing died a year or so back—Mr. Yarrow told me about that himself.”

“Wait a minute. This guy you saw Gil talking to, then tailed, peeked at when he went into his house—while, I presume, your car was practically parked in the middle of the street—you met him? Talked to him?”

“Yes, while I was at the church that night.”

“This was the same guy?”

“Sure it was the same guy. Hell, I saw him three times.”

“OK. What’s this about talking to him at the church?”

“Well, I was pretty much—disturbed, you know. So the Reverend had the man come on over again and I talked to him ten, fifteen minutes. This was just a little while after Gil had talked with him there at the church. Yarrow claimed he didn’t know what in the hell was going on.” Tony shrugged. “Appears Gil just made a plain ordinary mistake, probably this Yarrow looks something like the way Gil remembered Civano. It’d been sixteen years or so since he’d seen Civano, remember. Except—except Gil never came home that night. Hasn’t come home yet.”

When we’d first come into the den Tony had told me I was hired, he wanted me to take over the job he’d been “working on” himself. I was a bit concerned about the way he’d been “working on” it, so I said, “All right, Tony, there are several things I want to do right away. Tonight. But first I’ve got a couple of questions.”

“Sure, sure. But …” Tony looked across the room, for the first time appearing ill at ease. “One more thing I’ve got to tell you about,” he said. “All this was Tuesday. But Wednesday night Anna phoned me here and said Gil still hadn’t come home, no word from him, nothing. So I knew something must’ve happened to him.”

He paused, then went on rapidly, “A little while after talking to Anna, I phoned a friend of mine and he came over. I told him about Gil, and this fellow he’d seen, and the rest of it, Gil just—disappearing. We both figured the only thing made sense was this fellow Yarrow must’ve had something to do with it. My friend worked twenty years in the phone company, knows about telephone equipment and how to listen in on lines, even everything that’s said in a room or a whole house.”

I was getting an uneasy feeling. It was a feeling that I knew what Brizante was leading up to.

“We talked a while,” he said. “Drank a little wine, talked, had a little more wine. The way it wound up, Fred—my friend, Fred Jenkins—said it’d be easy to fix it so we’d know anything Yarrow said, who he might talk to. I don’t know much about that sort of thing myself, but Fred—”

“Are you trying to tell me your friend bugged Yarrow’s home?”

Brizante seemed relieved. “That’s what he did. Seemed like a good enough idea at the time.”

“He put a bug in the house? What’d he use, a transmitter? Are you talking about bugging or just wiretapping—”

“Wait a second. I don’t know for sure. I told him I figured we ought to know about it if this Yarrow did happen to say anything about Gil. But Fred just told me he’d take care of it. So he did. In fact, he’s still got it set up—whatever he’s doing—and getting everything that goes on in Yarrow’s house recorded on tape. But I don’t know how he set it up. All I know is he’ll phone me here if anything important happens.”

I shook my head. “This Jenkins actually bugged Yarrow’s place Wednesday night? That is, before sunup Thursday morning?”

“I don’t know exactly when he did it, either. He was here with me till maybe three, four o’clock. Then when Fred and I started figuring we’d listen in on what he said there, I just drove Fred by and showed him the house. He told me he’d watch it till Yarrow left, then do whatever he was planning on. Fred came by early today to tell me everything got set up OK Thursday morning.” Brizante paused. “Struck me he was maybe a little bored with the whole idea.”

I almost felt like smiling. There are few things in life more unbelievably dull than a stakeout, even an electronic stakeout allowing the eavesdropper to sit around in relative comfort, when nothing’s happening. And if, as I suspected, Henry Yarrow was a decent run-of-the-mill citizen whose idea of excitement was watching old movies on television, I gave Fred Jenkins a maximum of twenty-four more hours at his post before he became totally rigid and had to be carried away.

“All right, Tony,” I said. “Do you have any more intriguing revelations for me? I mean, while you and Fred were guzzling all this wine, you didn’t decide to investigate organized crime in the entire United States, did you?”

“Now, goddammit, I told you it struck us as a good idea at the time. Maybe there was some better way to go at it—why in hell you think I want you to take over from here?”

“Relax, Tony. Now, I know what Joe Civano looks like—I saw him up close three years ago when he was being booked on an ADW rap—which he beat, by the way—at the L.A. Police Building. Let’s start with the sensible assumption that Joe Civano is dead, therefore Gil did not see Civano Tuesday morning, but instead saw some harmless old duck named Henry Yarrow. OK?”

“OK. So what?”

“You’ve talked to the guy. Describe him for me.”

“Well, like I said when I told you about first seeing him with Gil that morning, he’s pretty big, six feet anyway I’d guess, and a good two hundred pounds, maybe more, a lot of stomach on him. Not like a potbelly, just a big chest and stomach kind of running into each other. Brown-haired, little gray, plenty gray at the temples. Fifty years old or so.”

“Did he have a moustache?”

“No. Clean-shaven.”

“You notice any scars or marks? Anything unusual about his face, way he was dressed, the way he moved?”

Brizante shook his head. “He had on a gray suit, all three times I saw him. Nothing unusual, business suit. And he looked fit, tanned. Real deep tan. I can’t think of anything else.”

Among other things I knew that Joe Civano had been six feet, two inches tall, weighed between two-ten and two-twenty pounds, and had been a few months shy of his forty-seventh birthday when blown into oblivion Sunday A.M. There’d been a couple of noticeable scars on his face, he’d worn a heavy moustache and let his sideburns grow long, and was very dark-skinned.

“OK,” I said. “Now, about Jenkins. I take it you don’t know how he’s set up, but unless he’s a pro or had easy access to some pretty good equipment, I’d guess he’s using a little mike, or maybe a short-range radio transmitter. In which case he’s very likely staked out quite near Yarrow’s house. Do you know where Fred’s—listening post is?” Brizante shook his head, looking a bit fierce, and I asked him, “Jenkins married?”

“Was. Divorced. Lives alone now.”

I asked Tony if I could use his phone, and called Jenkins’ home, but there wasn’t any answer. So I then phoned the Universalist Communion Church on Palos Verde Drive, caught the Reverend Stanley Archibald there in what he referred to as his “sanctum,” and arranged to visit him in fifteen minutes.

When I sat down near Brizante again I said, “It looks like we’ll have to wait till you hear from Jenkins to find out where he’s sitting, getting more and more bored. In the meantime I’m going to call on the Reverend, then talk to Yarrow and this widow—what did you say her name was?”

“Blessing. Mrs. Blessing.”

The Widow Blessing. It conjured up a picture of a kindly old lady in a faded old gray dress wearing black shoes and stockings, and with knitting needles in her old gray head. Probably she wasn’t like that at all. Names can fool you.

So I asked Brizante, “What does she look like?”

“Tell you the truth, I didn’t pay much attention to her. I was thinking about Civano then, you know. What Gil had just said. And after the first minute or so Gil walked out on the lawn with Yarrow, and I was looking at them instead of the woman. She was still standing in front of the door.” He squinted, thinking. “All I remember is she was wearing shorts. And something white on top. Blouse or shirt, maybe, but it was white.”

“Shorts?”

He nodded.

“Like—Bermudas? Or the things gals play tennis in? Those little … short things?”

“Yeah. Shorts.” He paused. “And she was barefoot.”

“That’s … interesting.” I got to my feet. “Well, I’ll let you know the results of my careful, scientific investigation.”

“Goddammit,” he said, “I never claimed to be a goddamn scientific—”

“Whoa, Tony. I was merely—jesting. Truth is, you’ve done as well as could be expected so far, considering the peculiar circumstances. Hell, I’ll probably do much worse.”

For a moment I stood there wishing I hadn’t said that. Idle words loosed into the ether sometimes spring back upon you. But then I put such negative ideas out of my head, as Tony and I walked into the front room.

Tony went into the kitchen, from which were wafted to my nostrils the scents of cheeses, garlic and other spices and seasonings—and, of course, wine—and as I moved toward the door Lucrezia entered the softly lighted living room, rubbing her hands on a pink apron tied around her waist. When she walked up to me I noticed one white smudge of flour on her cheek, another on the back of her right hand.

“I came out to thank you, Shell,” she said sweetly.

“I haven’t done anything yet. Ah, don’t flip—all I meant was, the case has only begun—”

“I know what you meant. I think. But I was talking to Mom while you were in the den. Dad’s a lot more worried than he lets on. He’s been acting … strange. I do hope you can help him, Shell.”

“I’ll give it my best shot, Lu—Miss Brizante. But I’ve a hunch there’s no real reason for your dad to be so wound up.”

“I hope you’re right. Where are you going now?”

“Believe it or not, I’m on my way to see a Reverend.”

She shook her head. “Well, phone me if you learn anything important, Shell.”

“Sure. I may phone you even if I don’t.”

She held out her hand—for a friendly shake, of course—but as I bent forward, and lightly kissed the back of her hand, I got a little flour on my mouth. I got more than that. As my lips brushed her skin, Lucrezia squeezed my fingers gently twice; and that pulsing tightening and relaxation of her fingers against mine, which with most women might have been interesting or even stimulating, was, with Lucrezia, a hell of a thing to happen to me on my way to church.

CHAPTER FOUR

The Universalist Communion Church, plus its large parking lot at the left of the building, occupied half of an attractively landscaped city block on Palos Verde Drive. The sun was setting when I parked the Cad, walked from the lot back a hundred feet to the strip of pebbled cement leading to the massive double doors of the entrance. They were closed against the heat, but unlocked, and I walked on into the cool dim interior of the church, then down a slanting and thickly carpeted aisle between rows of polished benches on my left and right.

A door in the wall ahead of me and on my left opened, and Reverend Stanley Archibald appeared in it, light behind him spilling out onto the carpeted floor. “Mr. Scott?” he called.

“Yeah, just got here, Reverend.”

“Come in, please.”

He moved back as I walked past him, closed the door, stepped across the small room to a black curving desk and sat behind it, indicating a black leather chair nearby. “How may I help you, Mr. Scott?”

I told him I was a licensed private investigator—licensed in California—acting as a friend of the Brizantes, and hoping to trace Gil Reyes’ movements. “Mr. Brizante has already told me about his conversation with you Tuesday night, Reverend, but I’d appreciate it if you’d give me your version. Could be you’ll remember something he forgot or left out.”

He nodded, elbows on the desk before him, fingers pressed together and forming a steeple. “Do you mean Mr. Reyes hasn’t returned home yet?”

“That’s right. The last place Mr. Brizante and I have been able to place him is at this church, Tuesday night. Which is why I’m starting here.”

“My word,” he said. “I had no idea. I assumed Mr. Reyes had surely returned home by this time. I was expecting to see Gil and Anna on Sunday.…”

He let it trail off, clasped his hands and lowered them to the desk’s top. “This is extremely disturbing to me, Mr. Scott. I have come to know Mr. and Mrs. Reyes well in the months they have been attending services here, and this is unquestionably a grave matter if Anna has not seen him since Tuesday evening. Gil is not the kind of man—well, someone else might have become enmeshed in the snares of the flesh, or succumbed to the poison of alcohol, but not Gil, sir.”

“Maybe he succumbed to something else.”

The Reverend nodded, then his eyes came to rest on a single rose in a narrow vase on the corner of his desk. He pursed his lips, as if gathering his thoughts. Then he started talking, and I was rather impressed with the way he lined up the facts and delivered them. Maybe he gave a pretty good sermon at that.

“Mr. Reyes came to the church and spoke to me at about this hour last Tuesday evening. I’m not certain of the time—I wasn’t expecting him, he hadn’t phoned, but it was near sundown. He didn’t appear inordinately upset, but he was definitely troubled by a belief that he had seen a man whom he thought dead. Whom, in fact, he believed to have been killed in his presence.”

I nodded. “In Tucson last Sunday.”

“Yes. He spoke of a Joe Civano. The name meant nothing to me then. I elicited all the details I could, learned that Gil had not seen the man under discussion for something like sixteen years—in the city where both then lived—and that for two days prior to his apparent recognition of this person here he had been thinking much of Mr. Civano.”

Reverend Archie pulled his eyes from the rose and looked at me. “Though at that moment I could only guess, it seemed quite clear to me that Gil’s continued thinking of Mr. Civano’s shocking death in Tucson, and therefore of Mr. Civano, was the immediate cause of his error in mistaking a man who only slightly resembled him as Joe Civano. Unaccountably alive—and at Sunrise Villas.”

“Makes sense,” I said. “When you put it like that.”

“Mr. Reyes told me the man to whom he referred claimed to be Mr. Henry Yarrow.”

“Did you know who he meant? I mean, did you know Yarrow?”

“The name was familiar to me, but I had not met the man. I therefore hesitated to phone him. However, Mr. Reyes had also informed me of the location on Claridge Street where the confrontation occurred, thus I knew the house of which he spoke must be one of at most two or three near the corner at Roadrunner Drive. I know many people on that block, and from Gil’s description of the lady I felt reasonably sure she was Mrs. Blessing, a charming widow who has long been a member of this church. I phoned her, explained the situation, and her comments—somewhat to my surprise, Mr. Scott—corroborated what Gil had told me in every detail.”

“Why to your surprise?”

“Simply because Mr. Reyes’ story seemed quite incredible. A dead man, a gangster, this unusual confrontation at dawn, Gil’s manner and concern—surely you understand, Mr. Scott. Quite simply, I found it all very difficult to believe.”

“Yeah. It is a bit queer, isn’t it?”

He sighed. “At any rate, I asked Mrs. Blessing if she would communicate with Mr. Yarrow, and if possible come to the church in his company. She agreed, and they both arrived within ten or fifteen minutes.”

The Reverend appeared to hesitate in his recital for the first time. After a few moments he went on, “It is true, as I have already said, Mr. Reyes did not seem to me excessively upset, but he was without question extremely tense and nervous. Especially during the time when we were awaiting the arrival of Mr. Yarrow and Mrs. Blessing.”

“That’s understandable enough if he really thought the guy about to drop in for a visit might be Joe Civano. I’d have been nervous myself.”

“That is the salient point, Mr. Scott. It was almost as though Gil was in the grip of delusion, had become possessed by a completely irrational thought, an idée fixe.”

“Are you saying he acted like a guy cracking up?”

“Oh, no, no. Of course not. I’m merely thinking back—it was a rather incredible situation, really. That Gil should mistake a resident of Sunrise Villas for a totally corrupt gangster. I believe he said Civano was a member of what is called the Mafia.”

“Gil was right as rain about that. OK, Yarrow and Mrs. Blessing came to the church, talked to Gil, and Gil left—left, convinced of his error.”

“That is correct.”

“How come? In the morning Gil thought this guy was—maybe—Civano. What big deal happened to change his mind?”

The Reverend frowned slightly. I don’t think he was crazy about my manner. Or maybe I hadn’t made a grand impression on him when we’d met. As his face smoothed he said, “Mr. Yarrow has been a rather prominent businessman here for several years. In addition he produced abundant evidence of his identity. Gil seemed quite convinced of his error after the four of us had engaged in several minutes of discussion. But, further, to be certain Gil was completely convinced that this Joe Civano was indeed deceased, I phoned the police in Tucson and investigated the remote possibility that the victim, because of the nature of the crime, might have beeen someone other than Mr. Civano.” The Reverend shook his head vigorously. “There was, and is, no such possibility.”

I nodded. “I’ll buy that. Did Gil say anything about where he was going after leaving the church?”

“No. I naturally assumed he intended to return home.”

I asked the Reverend to cover his meeting a little later that evening with Tony Brizante, Yarrow’s coming to the church again; but there was nothing new for me there. While speaking, the Reverend made a few notes on a pad before him.

I stood up. “Well, I guess that’s it. Thanks for your help, Reverend. By the way, could you give me the addresses of Mrs. Blessing and Mr. Yarrow?”

He let his lips smile sweetly, ripped the top sheet from the pad on his desk and handed it to me. “I assumed you would wish those addresses, Mr. Scott.”

He had a neat mind, this guy. “Ask and ye shall receive,” I said. “New Testament. How about that? It really works.”

“Indeed it does, indeed it does.”

I had almost begun to like old Archie. But then he had to spoil it. Just as I was going out the door, he said from behind me: “John: Sixteen, Twenty-six.”

The church was dark now, except for softly glowing lights near and around the altar and two similar small lights halfway up each of the outer aisles. I walked up the aisle on my right, and in the glow from the small lamp checked those addresses the Reverend had given me. Mrs. Blessing lived at 2430 East Claridge Street. Mr. Henry Yarrow’s address was 1694 North Palma Drive. I decided I would call first on Mrs. Blessing. The lamp was above an exit door, so rather than go out the main entrance I opened the little door and went through it instead.

From the side exit a path led between masses of green bushes to the darkened parking lot. A hedge of oleander paralleled the near edge of the lot, a six-foot-wide space cut into it. When I stepped through the opening I turned left, started to step toward my car which was parked ten yards away, near the street.

The man’s back was to me.

He stood close to a eucalyptus tree, his body in the faint light appearing to merge with its trunk, the lowest branches spreading out seven or eight feet above the ground forming a cover above him and dropping more shadow on and around him.

He could have been merely a guy overly fond of eucalyptus, but in my business a man standing in shadow, silently, is Trouble. Or even patient death. I reached under my coat, eased the .38 from its holster and moved, very slowly, toward him.

The man was midway between me and my Cadillac, but he wasn’t looking at the car. His gaze was fixed on the street, or on the strip of sidewalk beyond the oleander hedge where anybody walking from the church entrance to the parking lot would appear. I took four slow, careful steps and was no more than a couple of yards from him when he heard me.

It was a stone or pebble that grated beneath the sole of my shoe. The sound wasn’t loud. But he heard it.

He didn’t swing suddenly around. I could see his whole body jerk slightly, though. And with a quick but almost instantly checked movement he started to turn his head. Maybe part of the reason he stopped was because a fraction of a second after the stone grated beneath my shoe I thumbed back the hammer of my revolver. If he was the kind of night cat I assumed him to be, he knew what that sound was, and what it meant.

His head was angled to his right and I could see part of his face in profile. I took one more step toward him.

I made him then, and a cool breeze brushed over my skin. At least that’s what it felt like. It was still hot, though; it wasn’t a real breeze.

“Hello, Lucky,” I said. “Where do you want it, pal?”

CHAPTER FIVE

His reaction surprised me.

In a gruff and almost jolly voice he said, “Shell? Am I right? That you, Shell Scott, you old bastard?”

“Turn around, Lucky. Slow or fast, it’s your hide.”

He moved with hardly any speed at all, and even as he started turning, his arms were rising to point over his head. But when he’d swung around enough so I could see, again, that square milk-white face I’d last seen behind a cocked .45 automatic aimed at my gut, his right hand and much of his arm were still hidden by the tree.

So I kept the Colt centered high on his breastbone and said, “One step left, out in the open. And do me a favor, Lucky. Just wiggle a little the wrong way. I don’t need much of an excuse, but I need a small one.”

He stepped sideways, slowly, moving almost gracefully for such a chunky man. He was grinning, or trying to. At least his lips were pulled apart and the faint light gleamed on his teeth. There was enough light so I could see now that both his hands were empty, fingers splayed.

“Man, don’t go ape on me,” he said. “You act like you want to plug me.”

“You guessed it.”

“What in hell’s the matter with you, Scott? I ain’t done nothin’. I guessed maybe it was you—”

“You weren’t doing anything in L.A. a few weeks ago, either. Except starting to squeeze off about five into me.”

“Oh, for chrissake, Scott. That was then. Shee-it, it’s all in the business, ain’t it? Man, you pooped two of my friends, didn’t you? It was a job, that was then. All I—”

“What are you doing in Arizona, Lucky? We’ll get to this particular part of Arizona in a minute.”

“It ain’t too healthy for me in Southern Cal, old buddy. It’d be different if I’d had time to cut you all the way down and lam before them fuzz like to poked my eyes out with the goddamn arc lights or whatever they hit me with. Another second and I’d of got you for sure and been on my way, right? Man, you know it. Way it is, there’s some jokers what feel resentful to me for lettin’ you get away.”

He sounded sincere, almost bubbling with good humor. He seemed to enjoy talking about how close he’d come to killing me. I didn’t. “Lean over against the tree trunk. Feet way back, spread ’em. You know how.”

“Yeah. I done it enough.”

He did it again. I went over him for heat. Nothing.

“I don’t get it,” I said. “Jimmy Ryan without the tools of his trade? Where’s the rod?”

“I ain’t got a Arizona license—”

“You want me to clip you?”

“Man, you’re touchy as a bus driver with grapes, ain’t you? OK, OK. I’m sprung from that rap what hit me account of you, Scott. Out on bail. I get picked up with a banger on me and I’m up for big numbers. Way it is, I got a chance of beating this rap.”

“Yeah, if you knock me down. I was more than merely a disinterested witness. I assume you remember?”

“There’s something to that effect in my memory banks,” he said. “Fact is, that’s why I come over here. Seen your car parked there where it’s at and I’d read a newspaper story telling you was in Arizona, and I says, that looks exactly like Scott’s car, what do you bet it is his? So I hung around so if it was you we could strike up old acquaintances and maybe you’d be feelin’ good or drunk or something and say let’s let bygones be bygones, and I wind up beatin’ that goddamn L.A. rap.”

“You’ve reformed, huh? You were listening for my dainty footsteps, so you could spring out and kiss me.”

“Shee-it, you are the damn suspicious most dumb flatheel in the en-tire world, Scott.”

“You are going to get knocked on your can, Lucky—”

“Will you listen? Look”—he pointed toward a green year-old Thunderbird parked fifty feet from my Cad—“there’s my heap. I told you, I seen your car and swung in. Checked the registration like a burglar and it was you, all right. All I wanted was to chop it up a minute, tell you there ain’t no hard feelings on my side.” He paused. “Don’t need none. You got enough for both of us.”

“At least.”

“And a couple gorillas left over. Now what good’s it going to do if you puke on me when I come up to trial, Scott? I know you can use a friend or two on the turf, right? Well, I got friends like you wouldn’t believe. Do you lots of good.”

“Shove it, Lucky.”

“OK. What you gonna do with me then? Turn me in for bein’ outside California? Tie me up and hang me on your car like they do with deers? Or do we just stand here and jaw at ourselves all night? Use your conk, Scott. If I was on the arm, wouldn’t I be rodded up for you?”

He had a point. “So why were you doing a crouch over there in the shrubbery?”

“Man, you don’t think I wanted you to see me first, do you? Sometimes you ain’t the easiest guy to get along with.”

He had a couple of points. While I was wondering what, if anything, I should do with jolly Jimmy Ryan, my newfound pal, he said, “C’mere with me, Scott,” and took a step toward the lot.

I guess the gun in my hand jerked a little. I know my finger moved on the trigger, and on that trigger it doesn’t have to move much. Lucky held himself motionless, licked his lips, but he didn’t come apart at the seams.

“Easy, tiger,” he said softly. “You need a rest, that’s what. Now come on and look at what I want to show you.” He moved, slowly as a cat at first, then more rapidly, walking toward that green T-bird. I followed half a dozen feet behind him. If he wanted to try something dumb, then he could die trying something dumb.

But all he did was walk to the Thunderbird, slowly open the door, and reach inside. When the door opened, light flooded the car’s interior and there was no problem about keeping in sight the one hand with which he reached past the steering wheel. He fumbled with the holder of the registration slip, unfastened it from the steering post, and held it up where I could see it.

“The idea come to me maybe you thought I was lyin’ about this being my heap,” he said. “This convince you any?”

The registration was in the name of James Q. Ryan, address in Los Angeles, California.

He tossed the holder back inside, reached into his pants pocket, saying, “You went over me, Scott, so you know I got nothing on me. Just gettin’ the keys.”

He pulled a key ring out, leaned over and stuck one key into the ignition, slid very gently onto the seat but didn’t close the door. “Just open your chops and say you can use a friend who knows where there’s bodies buried, and a lot of who does what, and your friend is on his way.”

I was about half ready to let him be on his way, at that—only not until we’d talked a little longer and I’d learned a few more things, such as where he was staying, why he was not merely in Arizona but specifically at Sunrise Villas, and a few other odds and ends.

But he slid a little farther into the car and pressed the key over in the ignition, and as the engine caught he turned his head toward me and lifted it in such a way that the dash light slanted up over his face and for a moment he not only looked different—and older, much older—but the trick of light and shadow made his face resemble a skull, just a little.

And that faint resemblance to a skull plus memory of Jimmy Ryan standing over me with a gun, and memory of another almost skull-like face and of much that had occurred since I’d met Lucrezia Brizante this afternoon, combined with the faint, faint sound of ancient bells to race along my nerves and into my brain with a shock that was like reaching in the dark for that extra step at the top of the stairs, the one that isn’t there.

I felt the pull of muscles in my back and shoulders, a sensation like a tiny fist clenching in my solar plexus, but it was the mental shock that kept me from telling Lucky to get totally paralyzed and maybe eased the pressure of my finger on the Colt’s trigger enough to let him slip the car into gear, kick the accelerator, and burn rubber out of the lot and into the street.

In a few more seconds he was out of sight and I could hear the car’s engine whining up the scale. But I wasn’t overly concerned about that. There was something more important than Lucky Ryan on my mind. Besides, other things were moving in my brain. It was as if that mental shock had opened a few extra circuits, let a little more juice flow into my noodle.

I walked back to the spot where I’d first seen Lucky, glanced up into the tree, along the trunk, to the first of those spreading branches. There, precariously balanced at junction of trunk and branch—where jolly Jimmy Ryan, my newfound pal, while his raised right arm and hand had been out of my sight, had planted it—was the heat.

I reached up, grabbed it, pulled it down. The cliché gun, an Army Colt .45 automatic pistol. Common, both among amateurs and pros, partly because it’s available, but primarily because it kills so well. The gun was cocked, safety on. All Lucky had to do was thumb off the safety and pull the trigger gently, a bang or two and there you are.

I had to say this for him. He was not only hardboiled as a two-hour egg but he had what the kids call “cool.”

Well, if I saw Lucky Ryan again, he was going to get a lot cooler.

It was a forty-mile round trip from the Villas to Del Webb’s Sun City, but I made it there and back in just over an hour. I went there to see Walter Maypole, which is a funny name for a cop. I hadn’t seen him for three years, but he’d been in police work for three decades in Southern California.

For nearly half of those thirty years Walt Maypole worked out of Intelligence, and he had gathered together, organized, and indexed a private file on thugs, thieves, ex-cons, felons, hit-men, you name it, known to and often referred to by nearly every law-enforcement agency in the Golden State. And, more than once, by me. When Walt moved from L.A. to Sun City he brought all those filing cases and records, mug shots and rap sheets, copies of ID reports and the other criminous miscellany that was his private property, with him. He was retired now, true; but crooks and crime were still his hobby. His special area of interest: the shadowy, secret organization of hoods known as the Mafia.

I’d phoned him on my way and he was expecting me. When I parked in front of his house on Peoria Avenue, the door opened and he walked out to meet me.

“Shell, good to see you,” he said smiling. “What the hell you doing in my country?”

I grinned and shook his hand. He’d put on some pounds, looked tanned—and rested. Otherwise he was the same small, intense, hyperthyroid guy I’d last seen in Los Angeles.

“Wish this were just a social call, Walt. But I’ve got a problem.”

“Hell, that’s social enough. Come on in.”

He led me into the house—and through it. Walt hadn’t lost his passion for getting straight to the point. We went out in back to a separate one-room building, his “workshop,” in which three walls were lined with gray metal filing cabinets and against the fourth was a long table piled with papers, folders, stacks of letters.

I sat down in a sagging overstuffed chair while Walt got two cans of beer from a small refrigerator, opened them and gave one to me, then perched on the edge of a narrow cot.

“What’s the problem?” he asked me.

“A guy. I’ve seen him, or his picture, somewhere, but not for a long time. I saw this boy today at Sunrise Villas and it stretched a few nerves in me, but I can’t put a name with the face.” I swallowed some of my cold beer and lit a cigarette. “Don’t think I’ve ever seen him in person. And he’d have been before my time, anyway. Right now he must be half as old as the redwoods.”

“Describe him, give me what you can.”

I hit all I could remember about DiGiorno, the man who’d been sitting on Brizante’s right at the council meeting this afternoon. Walt sat quietly for a full minute, swallowing beer. Then he shook his head. “Beats the hell out of me.”

“Remember, I’m telling you what he looks like today. Right now he looks like Father Time after a long illness. I’ve got a hunch, if he ever was any kind of hood, he’d have been active a long time back. Think of him as at least twenty years younger. Or forty. Say a guy in the rackets, maybe already pooping out, during your first ten years as a cop.”

“Six-one?” Walt asked.

“About that now. They say guys shrink as they get older. If so, he might have been seven feet tall when in the bloom of youth.”

Walt grinned, but kept shaking his head.

“That’s it,” I told him. “Except, well, he made me feel—creepy. Like he had a kind of B.O. reserved for hoods or psychos, or for evil. Evil’s the word, the insides of Dorian Gray, corrupt, conscienceless, lecherous, murderous. He looked like something like that might crawl up out of a swamp and puke moss and little bugs. If I ever saw—”

Walt jerked his head up and suddenly snapped his fingers. “Got him. I think.” He moved to a filing cabinet, yanked open a drawer, ran his thumb over the top of a row of manila folders, selected one and pulled it out. He studied its contents, then tossed the folder on my lap and handed some photographs to me. “Four mugs of him,” he said. “A nice kid, growing up. First one, he’s nineteen years old. Then thirty-six, fifty, and sixty-eight. The last one was taken twenty-two years ago.”

The first shot was of a tall, skinny, good-looking kid. Really good-looking, almost handsome. At thirty-six, heavy-jowled, harder, a chill in the eyes. Then with the nose bulbous, eyelids drooping, mouth bent down at the corners. Maybe in each of the first three pictures there were traces of the man I’d seen today, but I would have missed them if it hadn’t been for the last shot.

That one was my man.

A hell of a lot younger, but even so there was the ancient look I’d noted, the appearance of rottenness or decay, the bulbous nose pitted and flesh of cheeks and jowls sagging, even the start of that crepey wattle under the neck.

“It’s him,” I said.

“Pete Lecci. Sonofabitch. I thought the old monster was dead.”

“Pete …” Yeah, no wonder those ancient bells had rung.

“Funny,” Walt continued. “That little finger, the scar and all helped. But when you said ‘lecherous,’ it was like you’d stuck his picture in front of me. Lecci—they called him ‘The Letch.’ But he goes way back. Maybe you don’t remember. He dropped—or was pushed—out of circulation about the time you were born, maybe a few years later.”

“I remember. I mean I remember reading and hearing about him. Never actually had the pleasure of his company.”

“A lot of suddenly dead guys did. Shell, you sure stir up the memories—I spent most of a year on Letch right after I made detective, but I couldn’t pin anything on him. Nobody could. That first picture of him was taken a few months before he did his first—and only—bit. Reformatory bit at that. Arrested maybe twenty times in the next forty years but never spent another day in the slammer. But if ever anybody should have been put away for good it was Pete Lecci. In thirty years there were three, four men who stand out for me. Guys so miserable, so sly and rotten and—inhuman maybe, you almost got to admire them for being such complete sonsofbitches. Lecci was one of them. Yeah, Lecci. You better believe it.”

Walt guzzled some beer and went on, his voice soft, as if he were talking more to himself than to me, roaming among those thirty years of memories.

“Pete Lecci was a Cosa Nostra Don, sure. Big one, right at the top, member of the Commissione. But more than that. He was as close as anyone, even Maranzano and Luciano and Genovese, ever got to being the real number one, the Capo di tutti Capi—Don of Dons, boss of all bosses. Couldn’t prove it, but they say in his best years he owned, and I mean owned right down to their shorts, two Cabinet members, half a dozen federal judges, Congressmen and Christ knows how many cops. Heroin, prostitution, labor unions, loan-sharking, gambling—racetracks, dog tracks, numbers, slots, stock market—if there was a buck in it he was in it. And murder, naturally. Can’t play all those games if you’re sensitive.”

Walt stopped talking, seemed to come back from somewhere else. Then he looked at me alertly and said, “What in hell is Pete Lecci doing at Sunrise Villas?”

“Maybe you’ve guessed. That’s what I’ve been wondering.”

While Walt finished his beer in silence I went through the papers in the folder. I remembered that Lecci had dropped out of sight more than twenty years ago, retired either voluntarily or involuntarily. More often than not, a Mafia bigshot is “retired” after being treated to a sumptuous dinner complete with booze and friendly talk by his dearest pals, who then shoot him several times in the head. But that hadn’t happened to Lecci. He’d been seen around or there’d been word about him for a few years after he’d come down off the mountain. Then there were rumors: he was sick; he’d died; he’d moved to Italy or Brazil or Sardinia; his ex-buddies, fearing he was getting soft in the head but still knew too much and thus could spill too much, had gagged him with cement; lots of rumors. Never, however, one that said Pete Lecci had moved to Arizona.

I read with care one of the typed sheets of bond paper, on which was detailed Lecci’s family history. Not the Cosa Nostra “Family,” but his own blood relations.

Mother and father, uncles and aunts—mafiosi families are uniquely loyal, close-knit; they stick together, present a united front against all that is not Mafia or non-mafiosi. There’s a lot of intermarriage among members of the various Mafia groups or Families as well, binding the Brotherhood together, appropriately, with ties of blood.

It was difficult to picture that wrinkled and wasted old man I’d seen today as young and vigorous, his flesh pressed against the flesh of a woman, his lips on her lips, their limbs entwined. Yet Pietro “The Letch” Lecci had not only married but had fathered two children, a son, Antonio, and a daughter, Angelica.

The son had been killed in an alley one week after his twenty-fifth birthday, shot by a rookie patrolman who emptied his service revolver into young Lecci after taking two slugs from the hood’s gun in his own chest. The patrolman died in that alley. But so did Antonio Lecci.

Angelica married, and soon gladdened Dad’s heart by giving birth to his grandson, Giuseppe, and two years later to the first of his three granddaughters, Andrea; three years and a bit later, Felicca came along; and then Maria, two years after Felicca. The man whom Angelica Lecci married was a minor hoodlum named Massero Civano, little more—at the time of the nuptials—than an errand boy in one of the minor Cosa Nostra Families, but within ten years a man to be reckoned with, as “underboss” or subcapo, second-in-command to a capo, a man with the power of life and death—or, more accurately, the power of death.

I dropped the papers into my lap.

I leaned back, relaxed. There it was. I checked the dates again. Giuseppe, now, would be forty-six years old. Giuseppe—Joe. Joe Civano.

So the guy blown all over the landscape last Sunday morning in Tucson, Crazy Joe Civano, was—had been—Pete “The Letch” Lecci’s grandson.

CHAPTER SIX

I rolled to a stop near 2430 East Claridge Street at nine P.M. Lights were on inside the house. I’d made good time—but I had nonetheless reentered the city with as much care as if I’d been a Greek clambering from the Trojan Horse into Troy.

Peaceful Sunrise Villas, huh? Where the Golden Days of the Golden Years Begin? Lucky Ryan alone would have been enough. But add Pete Lecci and his so-recently-dead grandson … Well, I wasn’t even going to call on old gray-headed Widow Blessing without my Colt .38 fully loaded and inches from my hand, and every sense on the alert, and a mind steeled against slyness, chicanery, double-talk and deception.

Charged up with those thoughts I climbed out of the car and, after looking all around, strode to the front door and rang the widow’s bell. A gal—obviously not the Widow Blessing—opened the door. Whoever she was, it looked as if her bell was still ringing.

She stood in the doorway, leaning against the jamb, but she wasn’t just standing there, she was moving. It would be even more pointedly descriptive to say she was moving. I hadn’t seen anything quite like it before. And I’ve seen lots of things.

She gazed at me with a small smile on her face, and her right shoulder resting against the door jamb, and her bare arms folded beneath astonishingly protuberant jugs, and all of that was quiescent; but her hips and even in small measure her thighs and knees were engaged in tracing strange and wonderful patterns in the air—and if I hadn’t known this sort of thing didn’t happen, even to me, at least not on such short acquaintance, I would have presumed she was doing provocative grinds, and friendly little bumps, and assorted ingenious combinations of the two.

“How do you do?” I said finally. “I’m looking for the Widow Blessing.”

“I’m Mrs. Blessing,” she said.

“No, I mean the old gray-haired babe … You’re Mrs. Blessing? Mrs.—”

“Mrs. Mary Blessing. Who are you?”

“I’m Shell Scott. But let that go for a minute. You’re—”

“I don’t think I know you, do I?”

“No … The reason I’m here, I’d like to talk to you about Mr. Gilberto Reyes.”

“Oh. That Reyes thing.” She paused. She paused all over. I hadn’t realized it would disappoint me. “Would you like to come inside, Mr.—was it Scott?”

“Yes, it was. Sure, I would.”

She stepped back from the door, and with more light falling on her face and form I could get an even better look at her. The Widow—no, that was no good any more; Mrs. Blessing, or Mary Blessing, or Mary—did not fall into the normal fifty-or-over category of most Sunrise Villas residents. On the other hand, it was highly unlikely that Mary would ever see thirty again. She might even have to look way behind her even to get a peek at it. But it is not true that all good-looking tomatoes are ineligible to vote. This one wasn’t exactly a spring chicken, but more of a summer hen. For whom the roosters would battle, with beak and claw, all over the barnyard.

As I walked into the room I heard the throb of soft music. Wild music. Strange music. I wasn’t even sure it was music. As a guess, it was a combination of pounded drums, strummed strings, plucked chickens, and clacked clackers, as the rather disturbing background to the voices of Haitian voodooists calling on Agwé, Sogbo, and Badé simultaneously. Finally I realized that Mrs. Blessing had not been laying an egg in the doorway, but merely keeping time to the music. At the moment she was snapping her fingers in a sort of absentminded way. She had lots of rhythm.

Lots of other things as well.

So this was the woman Tony Brizante had barely noticed when Gil Reyes was talking to Henry Yarrow. Tony’s eyesight, and perhaps more than his eyesight, was failing if all he’d been able to recall was that she’d been wearing shorts and a white blouse and was barefoot.

She was tall, a gal formed for negligees and peignoirs, for showers and baths and nudist camps, a lovely climbing—but not over—the hill; in a word, she was built. The face, especially the dark eyes and wide red lips, was sensual, with thick black brows over and long lashes curling from the huge eyes. A mass of waving black was her hair, her skin was dark, and she looked as if she might be Italian—or Mexican, Spanish, Portuguese. If Italian, it was a different Italy from Lucrezia’s, maybe the Rome of Gypsies or the Naples of new Borgias. Or wherever modern temples to bawdy Venuses were built.

Mrs. Blessing was wearing a gray dress of some thin smooth shimmering fabric, plus nylons and high-heeled gray shoes, and very little else. The cloth slid against her skin as she walked across the room to a wide, soft, upholstered chair and indicated a similar chair for me, directly opposite and about four feet from hers. As I seated myself in it, she sort of slunk downward into hers and crossed her long legs in such a way that the gray cloth fell away from her thigh.

It fell way away, revealing a vast and hypnotic expanse of smooth curving flesh indented by the black strap of what might have been a garter belt. What must have been a garter belt. What, at least, was not a chastity belt. Sure, there was a little doohickey clutching the top of her nylons—

“Mr. Reyes?” she said pleasantly.

“Yes, ma’am, Mr. Reyes. I wanted to talk to you about that—him. I … Mind if I smoke?”

She shook her head.

I got the smoke lit, took a puff. “I’m trying to find Mr. Reyes. He—”

“Have you phoned his home?”

“Not lately. He—”

“Why not?”

“Well, he—he may be someplace where they don’t have any phones. For all I know. He—”

“Surely he has a phone in his home.”

“Who says he’s home? He—”

“Do you know he’s not home?”

“Well, not positively. Not absolutely. But—”

“Would you like to use mine?”

“Your what?”

“Would you like to use my phone?”

“Your phone? What would I do with it?”

“Call Mr. Reyes.”

“I don’t want to call Mr. Reyes. Look, lady, I think he’s dead. Killed, deceased, a corpse. He—”

“You’re pulling my leg.”

“I wish you wouldn’t say … May I use your phone, Mrs. Blessing?”

“Of course.”

I used her phone. I looked up Reyes’ number, dialed, listened to a ring, hung up, and went back to my chair.

“He’s not home,” I said.

“Why did you want to see him?”

“It’s not so much that I want to see him. I want to find him. He’s probably loaded with lupara anyhow—”

“Lu—what?”

“Never mind. Make it bullets. Shotgun pellets. Anything. Look, I have reason to believe, at least seriously to suspect, that Mr. Reyes has been killed, that he is dead, d-e-a-d, dead.” I paused. “Probably I should have got around to telling you this before now. I’m an investigator, a private detective.”

“How fascinating.”

“I’ve never understood why people say that.”

I’d have bet a dollar to a nickel that when I’d come back to my seat after making the phone call there was at least two more inches of thigh showing than there’d been before.

Two, maybe even three, inches.

A good two and a half, anyhow.

Well, that was all very well, but I—even though I have a natural, healthy interest in such things—was not going to let it distract me from my duty. No matter what they say about me, when there is a job to be done, I am not a man who lets business … How did it go?

I concentrated. I gathered my mental forces together, knitted my brows together, jammed my teeth together, and said, “Mrs. Blessing, I merely want you to tell me about your brief conversation with Mr. Reyes Tuesday morning.”

“What? I can’t understand you when your teeth are pushed together like that.”

I opened my mouth and wiggled my jaw.

“It just sounded like a buzz,” she said.

I felt like telling her to shut up. “Mrs. Blessing,” I said slowly and distinctly, “I merely want you to tell me about your brief conversation with Mr. Reyes Tuesday morning.”

“Oh, is that all? Why didn’t you say so?”

“Ma’am, I have already said it twice—”

“You mean when I was with Mr. Yarrow, and Mr. Reyes thought Mr. Yarrow was somebody named Civano? Joe Civano?”

“That’s it. Let’s keep it going, now we’ve got it.”

“There isn’t much I can tell you. I was talking to Mr. Yarrow in front of my house when this car parked, and Mr. Reyes—I didn’t know who he was then, neither of us did—walked up and asked Mr. Yarrow if he was from Gardena, in California. Mr. Yarrow said no, he wasn’t, he’d never lived in California. But Mr. Reyes didn’t seem to believe him. Said something about he’d lived in Gardena, and hadn’t Mr. Yarrow lived there too? Several years ago? Wasn’t he Joe Civano? It was funny. I mean, odd.”

“That’s all?”

“Just about. Henry talked to him a little longer—told him what his name was, and his business and all, then the man went to the car he’d been in, and they drove away. Somebody else was driving.”

“Yeah, I know. You saw Mr. Reyes again Tuesday night, didn’t you?”

“Yes. That was the really odd thing. That’s when we found out who this Mr. Civano was, that he was a criminal—and he was dead, he’d just been killed.” She shook her head. “How could Mr. Reyes think Henry was a dead man?”

“That, to put it mildly, is one of the peculiar things about this case. Did Mr. Reyes mention—or have you ever heard of—a Pete Lecci? Or The Letch?”

She looked at me blankly. “Who are they?”

“He—they—isn’t they. I mean, it’s one guy. The names don’t mean anything to you?”

“No. The only funny name was Civano.”

Yeah, funny name, I thought. Funny man. “Can you tell me a little more about Mr. Yarrow?” I asked her.

“When George—my husband for twelve wonderful years, rest his soul—was alive he owned a real estate agency, and Henry worked for him as a salesman. George liked him very much, was even thinking of taking him in as a partner when … well, George passed away. Henry knew all about the business—I don’t understand any of it myself—so I asked him if he’d run it for me.”

I didn’t say anything.

She broke the silence by volunteering, “It was just a coincidence that Henry was here so, ah, early in the morning. He dropped by to … have me sign some papers. Real estate things—it’s all a mystery to me, I just sign the papers and somehow everything works out all right.”

And that was about it. I thanked her, and she showed me to the door. The door closed, shutting off the soft sound of that crazy music, and I walked to my Cad thinking about Henry Yarrow. It puzzled me even more than it did Mrs. Blessing that Gil Reyes could have mistaken a local businessman for a Tucson mafioso he must have been pretty certain was dead.

Besides, I’d have given a dollar to a nickel that Henry hadn’t dropped by Mrs. Blessing’s home so, ah, early in the morning to … have her sign some papers.

I found North Palma Drive about a mile down Claridge, followed it a couple of blocks till I hit the sixteen hundreds, parked near the next-to-last house, number 1694, at the far end of the block, and approached Yarrow’s home with at least as much care as I’d used on my previous stop. And when I rang the bell my right hand was beneath my coat. Just in case.

Even though I was virtually certain Civano had been dead more than five days, it was a bit of a relief when the door opened and a tall, heavily built man looked out at me. Because he was certainly not Joe Civano.

He was a couple of inches shorter than my six-two, but the thick chest and stomach—the stomach not unusually protuberant, however—accounted for maybe an additional ten pounds more than my two hundred and six. His hair was brown, thick, slightly waving, flecked with strands of gray and definitely gray at the temples. He was deeply tanned, and his eyes were a startlingly light blue.

Except for the fact that he was roughly the same height and weight as Civano, and that there was a very slight facial resemblance—sharp nose, wide chin, full lips—I wouldn’t have mistaken him for Crazy Joe at a distance of fifty feet, much less when he was standing only a yard from me as he was now. Civano’s eyes had been brown, there’d been a fine scar on his upper lip and a wide and deeply indented scar—the result of getting clobbered by a well-aimed crowbar—high on his forehead near the hairline.

“Mr. Henry Yarrow?” I asked. He nodded and I said, “My name’s Shell Scott. I’d appreciate it if you could give me a few minutes of your time.”

“Sure,” he said. “I was expecting you. Recognized you from Mary’s description.” He smiled. “You’re not difficult to recognize, are you?”

I shook my head as he continued, “She told me—Mrs. Blessing told me, that is—you’re a private detective, and had just called on her. I understand it’s about Mr. Reyes.”

“Right on all counts.”

“Come in, Mr. Scott.”

I stepped into a very attractive living room done in blues and soft grays, the basic coolness of the room warmed by splashes of orange from scattered pillows and two abstract oil paintings, and the red-orange shade of a six-foot-high floor lamp.

We both sat on a thickly cushioned blue couch and I said bluntly, “Didn’t take Mrs. Blessing long to let you know I might be dropping in, did it?”

He raised a neat eyebrow but said levelly, “No. Indeed, after this conversation, Mr. Scott, I shall phone Mary and tell her anything of importance which we may discuss.” He lit a cigarette. “Perhaps our interest and”—he smiled again—“reciprocal communication seem excessive to you. I doubt that it would if you were in my position. I have been in business here for several years, and now—in part due to the confidence placed in me by Mrs. Blessing and her late husband—am president of the Blessing Real Estate Agency. Should rumors begin, linking my name no matter in what way or how innocently with a known criminal and murderer … well, would you want to purchase land or a home from the alleged associate or intimate of a hoodlum? A member of the Cosa Nostra?”

“I see what you mean, Mr. Yarrow. Apparently you know quite a bit about the late Joe Civano.”

He nodded. “I do now. I’d never heard the man’s name until Tuesday, but I’ve made it my business to find out what I could about him since then.” He puffed on his cigarette and blew smoke out in a thin blue-gray stream. “You see, at first it was more of a joke than anything else. Then when Mary and I talked to Mr. Reyes for the second time—and realized he really had mistaken me for a hoodlum—it wasn’t so funny.”

“Yeah. OK, I’ll buy that.”

He looked straight at me, his gaze level and direct, not entirely friendly. “It is of very little importance to me whether you ‘buy it’ or not, Mr. Scott.”

“Sorry, I’m sometimes more abrasive than I should be. Especially when investigating a murder.” I meant to go on, but Mr. Yarrow’s expression deteriorated.

“Murder? Oh … I suppose you mean the killing of this Civano?”

“No. I was speaking of Mr. Reyes.”

“Reyes? He’s been killed?” He shook his head rapidly.

“Maybe I’d better back up a little. I haven’t any evidence he’s dead—none except the fact that he hasn’t returned to his home since Tuesday night.”

“My word,” he said blinking. “Didn’t he go home after we talked to him at the church?”

“Maybe he started to. He didn’t get there. Did Mr. Reyes say anything to you indicating he might have been going someplace else from the church?”

Mr. Yarrow shook his head rapidly again. “He didn’t say anything. Just thanked Mrs. Blessing and me—indeed, he apologized for the trouble he felt he’d put us to. That was all. Then he left, and Mary and I left a few minutes later.”

He put out his cigarette, saying in a somewhat puzzled tone, “I’m surprised Mary didn’t mention that.”

“I got the impression it didn’t strike her as very important.”

“It strikes me as important. Suppose he is dead? I don’t like being one of the last people to have seen a man who …”

“Look, I don’t want to take too much of your time, Mr. Yarrow. If you don’t mind, I’d appreciate your telling me just what did happen when Reyes talked to you Tuesday morning, and again that night.”

He nodded, and described the A.M. and P.M. meetings with Gil Reyes. Except for minor and unimportant variations it agreed with what I’d already been told. I said, “When you heard the name Joe Civano it didn’t mean anything to you?”

“That’s correct.”

“How about the name Lecci? Pete Lecci?”

He looked at me blankly, and shook his head.

“At one time he was called ‘The Letch.’”

“That’s an odd name. Very odd—is he a criminal, too?”

Instead of answering, I said, “I guess that’s about it. Thanks for putting up with my questions, Mr. Yarrow.”

“It’s quite all right, Mr. Scott.”

I got to my feet. “By the way, I was a little curious to know how it happened you were talking to Mrs. Blessing at such an early hour of the morning. She explained you’d brought some papers by for her signature.”

“Yes. I … often do that. Thank God I’m running the agency for her—she signs anything I put in front of her.” I thought he was going to let the implied question pass. I wouldn’t have blamed him. But he didn’t. After a short pause he said, “I rather doubt that Mrs. Blessing mentioned this, Mr. Scott. But I have—twice—asked her to marry me.”

“I see,” I said.

After another brief pause he added, “It was a rather early hour. I presume you are possessed of discretion—”

“I am the very soul of it, Mr. Yarrow.”

He smiled, seeming relieved. So I added, “The only thing I’m interested in is what’s happened to Reyes. And maybe a couple other things going on here at the Villas—but that’s for sure not one of them.”

Thus we prepared to part almost friends, or at least with the tie that binds those who share a guilty secret. Of course, he knew a hell of a lot more about the secret than I did. But I knew a little of it. And for a guy with an imagination like mine, even a little is a lot. At the door, however, I resolutely blotted out such thoughts, and turned off the wild music in my ears, and put my hand on the doorknob.

Mr. Yarrow was standing right beside me, so I said, “I know this will sound silly to you. But would you move back a few feet? Over there?” I pointed.

He looked quite puzzled, but did as I’d asked. “And pay no attention to anything I do which may strike you as a bit peculiar.”

Then I pulled the door open, stood in it framed by the reddish-orange glow from the living room lamp, and stepped speedily aside.

I said, “It’s merely—”

I was about to tell him that it is my habit, under certain circumstances, to take more-than-usual precautions. But I didn’t tell him. I didn’t have time.

Right after “merely,” or perhaps even in the middle of the word, the blast tore open the night’s stillness. It wasn’t from a handgun or rifle; that boom was from a heavy-gauge shotgun. The shot snapped through the open doorway and drilled holes into the far wall. It didn’t hit anything on the way, there was no sound of smashing glass or shattering crockery. But it was quite dramatic enough for me. For me—and apparently for Henry Yarrow.

Half a second after the blast I was on my way to the floor. I kicked the door shut on my way down, hit the carpet with my rear end and rolled, slapping my right hand to the Colt’s butt and yanking it out as I stretched my head around to get my eyes on Yarrow. But he wasn’t behind me holding a gun, or a club. He wasn’t doing anything. He stood precisely where he’d been moments before, and the expression on his face was one of almost total astonishment and bewilderment.

When he saw the gun in my hand—pointed at his gut—I got the impression he was preparing to pass out.

So I quit worrying about Yarrow.

“Douse that light!” I yelled, pointing past him.

For a moment he was frozen, then he whirled and leaped halfway to the tall lamp in one enormous bound, jumped forward and switched it off. It had been the only illumination, and when he turned it off the entire house was suddenly in darkness. By then I was squatted on my haunches next to the door, hand on the knob—but even before the light went out I heard the sudden roar of a car’s engine, followed immediately by the high-pitched shriek of tires spinning on asphalt.

I yanked the door open and went through it low, bent over and running, gun raised in my right hand. I couldn’t see the car at first. But I could hear it. The driver was roaring up Palma Drive, headlights off, already twenty yards or more to my left. My feet hit the lawn and I slid to a stop, shoes skidding on the grass. My eyes hadn’t completely adjusted from the relative brightness inside the house, but as I aimed toward the sound of the speeding car I could dimly see the blur of its bulk racing up the street—too dimly. I held my fire.

Close on my left a bright amber light flared. It was the outside light above the front door of the house next to Yarrow’s. It couldn’t have been more than five seconds since I’d lunged through the door behind me—a few seconds more since that sharp crack in the night—but already startled citizens were moving, reacting. There’s something about a gunshot. Especially when it’s close.

As the reddish-yellow glow blossomed on my left and reached for the street, fell upon the grass beneath my feet—and upon me—it brushed something on my right, gave half-solid form to what a fraction of a second before had been only darkness. I turned toward it, and I turned fast, without thinking about what I was doing, not yet fully aware of why I was moving, bending my knees, dropping into a squat, straining my eyes toward whatever it was that moved on my right.

Because it was moving now. Moving suddenly, almost with a jerk, as if that movement were somehow allied to—or maybe caused by—my own. It moved, and stopped, and I caught the red-yellow ripple of light on metal, and I threw my hand and the gun in it toward that form, knowing it was a human form, and tightened my finger on the Colt’s trigger as a gun cracked and red-yellow flame almost like a ten-times-brighter version of that amber light behind me lanced toward me from the man’s fist.

Barely after his gun blasted, my .38 cracked and bucked easily in my hand. In the same moment I felt something flick at my coat, a pressure gentle as a girl flicking at a speck of lint and a tiny pain as if I’d been pinched, and heard the sound of my slug hitting the man.

It must have gone in and smacked bone. It rocked him, turned him. Turned him far enough so he took the next three slugs in the side of his chest and stomach. At least one of them hit his heart. The other three were in him.

By the time I reached him, he was dead. There was no breathing, no froth of bubbly blood at his lips, none of the ugly twitching which sometimes convulses a man as he dies.

He was just dead, that’s all.

It was enough.

CHAPTER SEVEN

I grabbed the man’s chin and pulled his head, loose as liver on his neck, around so I could get a good look at his face.

I’d expected it to be Lucky Ryan. But it wasn’t. This was a man about five and a half feet tall, thin, with a pale thin face and big ears. Nobody I’d ever seen. Not while he was alive—except as a shadow that moved, and tried to kill me.

One man—or more—in a car across the street, ready to get me when I came out the door. That should have been enough. But just in case the first guy missed me, a second wiper, also ready and waiting, near the house. Easy: if that miserable flatheel, Scott, charges out and stands there gawking after the heap, mow him down, pally. Piece of cake.

It could have been a piece of cake; it should have been.

It bothered me a little. To tell the truth, it bothered me one hell of a lot.

I told my tale to the Sunrise Villas “Security Guards,” two men who arrived in a tan-colored “official” car. The dead man was found to have no identification whatsoever upon him—not to mention the presence of a heavy .357 Magnum revolver on the grass next to his body—and with Henry Yarrow’s corroboration of my statement that should have been enough. Because Yarrow, still nervous and pale, backed up everything I said.

It would have been enough except for a guy named Weeton. In the hierarchy of what passed for law in Sunrise Villas, he was a lieutenant. After I’d made my statement to a Sergeant Striker and the patrolman with him, and they’d talked to Yarrow then joined me again out in front of the house, Lieutenant Dan Weeton drove up in another of the tan cars. I could hear the two-way radio as he stepped out, leaving the car door open. He was efficiently briefed by Sergeant Striker, whereupon Lieutenant Weeton, as though not a word had been said, took me through it all again twice, from the beginning.

Then he started over.

More, he had a peculiarly whining voice, which was marvelously irritating, but less so than his manner. His attitude, his entire bearing, told me clearly that he was lord of the land here, and I’d bloody well better hang my head and kick my toe in the dirt. Which I would do, of course, in a pig’s eye.

But when I’d finished my third complete and careful recital for him, I’ll be damned if he didn’t say to me, “Well, that’s not too bad. Only veered off in a couple spots, Scott. Now, you give it to me once more.”

I just looked at him.

He wasn’t a tall man, maybe five feet, nine inches, but he was about as wide as a warehouse door. I tagged him at two-hundred-plus pounds, and solid. His shoulders were thick, sloping, and his arms and fists were so meaty and heavy they appeared misshapen, freakish.

Finally I said, “One more time, huh?”

“One more time.”

“I am not singing songs at the Safari Piano Bar, Lieutenant. I’ve done enough encores.”

“One more time.”

His voice was softer, still whiny, but more like a nasal whisper. The lids drooped slightly over his pale eyes, and he shifted his feet just a little.

Well, that was OK with me. Even under the most felicitous circumstances I am not noted for my jollity when getting goosed, so I said, “Lieutenant, I’ve told the goddamned story four times, three times to you. I’ve told it exactly the way it happened. I’m not going to tell it all again—not until you compare my statement with Mr. Yarrow’s and check some of the neighbors around here. You’ll get the same thing from them. There was one pop—if you want my guess, from a twelve-gauge smokepole—probably from directly across the street. The slugs are in Yarrow’s living room wall, thus there is the possibility that you might care to dig them out and check them. You might personally desire to compare them with artillery shells, or dust them for fingerprints. A few seconds later there was one shot from a Magnum aimed at me—by that very dead sonofabitch over there. The Magnum, obviously, is a pro’s gun. Finally, there were four shots from my revolver at said very dead sonofabitch.” I paused, smiling slightly, and added, out of sheer meanness, I suppose, “You’ll find all four of the slugs in him, by the way.”

Weeton folded those ham-hock arms across his chest and looked me in the eye and said in the soft whine, “I’ll check Yarrow and the rest of it. I’ll check it good. You better keep in mind, Scott, you’re maybe a hotshot private dick in L.A., but there’s no such thing as a license to work in Arizona.”

“There’s no such thing as a citizen’s license, either, Lieutenant. And a citizen has the right—nay, the duty, as I see it—to defend himself against felonious attack.” I paused. “So I merely did my duty.”

Weeton turned and walked toward Yarrow’s front door. He walked with an odd sway, shoulders swinging exaggeratedly. The hair on the back of his head was close-trimmed, a mere stubble. It was odd, but when he’d been facing me there was nothing familiar about the man. It was only when he walked away from me that I recognized him as the guy I’d seen talking to that creep on the council.

That creep, which is to say, DiGiorno, or Pete Lecci.

When I could find a nice quiet spot, without the kind of distractions which had lately been plaguing me and interfering with calm concentration, I was going to have to just sit a spell. And do a lot of thinking.

The patrolman had followed Weeton into the house, but Sergeant Striker was still standing on the lawn. He walked over to me.

Striker was about fifty-five years old, I guessed. Maybe older, but he looked as if he could still run up a pretty good score in the decathlon. He was five-ten or -eleven, not heavy but wiry. His hair was gray and thinning, and his eyes were soft gray under heavy drooping lids. Those eyes looked sleepy, but I had a hunch they didn’t miss much.

“Don’t let Weeton get under your skin, Scott,” he said.

“That’s like asking the wind not to blow, Sergeant. Is he always like that?”

“Most of the time. But—well, this is a kind of Keystone Kops setup we got here at the Villas. You know, the private patrols go around in most of the cities, flash their spots, check doors and all?” I nodded, and he went on, “Same thing, only it’s fancied up here. If the city incorporates, like the council’s been talking about but some people don’t seem to want, we’ll have a chief marshal, and deputy marshals under him. But right now there’s just a dozen patrolmen and a communications officer, three sergeants, one lieutenant—that’s Weeton—and the captain. What I’m getting at, the captain’s a good joe, but there’s just him and Weeton at the top, and right now the captain’s asleep. The two of them kind of run the show.”

“The sheriff still has jurisdiction, doesn’t he?”

“Sure. Sheriff’s the chief law-enforcement officer in the county. You know that. But unless something unusual happens—like this—you don’t often see any deputies here at the Villas. I mean, if you’re planning on staying around, a man like Weeton can make it kind of hairy. Which I got a feeling you won’t mention to him I said.”

I grinned. “Thanks, Sergeant. But I can take care of myself—I hope.”

He smiled easily, glanced at the body still prone on the lawn, then let the sleepy-looking eyes rest on my face. “So far,” he said, “I got to believe you. Well, you want to talk about anything, let me know.”

Then it was just standing around until the sheriff’s men came, a uniformed deputy followed by a team of detectives, then a sergeant from the sheriff’s ID Bureau. And finally the coroner, who said he thought the homicide was justifiable and that the coroner’s inquest would be held next Friday. I didn’t have nearly the trouble with all five of them that I’d had with Weeton.

From whom I received a few final words of wisdom when I was allowed to leave. “You’re free as air, Scott,” he said. “Unless—” He stopped, gave me the kind of smile occasionally seen on corpses with rigor mortis. “Unless you get a little bit out of line. Probably it’d be better if you stayed away from Sunrise Villas for a while. Quite a while.”

I smiled. “I figured I was free to leave as soon as the coroner and sheriff’s men told me so. But thanks for making it official.”

He turned abruptly and walked off, and I climbed into my Cad—wondering if Lucky or somebody else had spotted it parked at the curb, or if my unofficial greeters had found me some other way—and got out of there.

In my rooms at Mountain Shadows I showered and put on a fresh shirt and jacket. The ones I’d been wearing had holes in them. There was also a small burn on my left side where the slug had “pinched” me.

I phoned the Tucson Police Department, identified myself to the desk sergeant and mentioned the Sunday morning murder of Joe Civano, then said, “I understand the victim was blown to hell—any chance it wasn’t Civano?”

“It was Joe Civano, period. He was torn up, sure, but his face was still recognizable. We checked his prints anyhow, routine. It was him. Why all the static? You’re the second guy to ask me if Civano was still roaming around.”

“The first guy, was that last night from Sunrise Villas?”

“Yeah, call from a preacher or something. Just a minute … Reverend Archibald.”

“No other calls about Civano? I mean last night or any other time.”

“Hell, no. Two’s not enough?”

“Any leads to whoever did the job?”

“Nothing important yet. Probably some of his friends got tired of his company.”

“That’s about the way I figured it. Thanks, Sergeant.”

We hung up, and I made another call, this one to Dr. Paul Anson’s room in the hotel. But there wasn’t any answer, so I slid the reloaded Colt into its holster, ran both hands over my hair, which is just as effective as combing it, and went out. It was a few minutes after midnight, and as I walked past the huge swimming pool, admiring it and the tall thin palm trees bathed in colored lights, the jets of water arching through the now-cooler air at one end of the pool, I could hear music from the five-piece group in the main dining room.

Still playing—but not for long. In Arizona the bars—and practically everything else—close up at one A.M. But there remained forty minutes before the cocktail lounge shut its doors, and that’s where I was headed. I was looking forward to a cool bourbon-and-water, but even more to seeing Paul Anson. If I knew Paul—and I did know Paul—he would be either in or at the bar, very likely with some young, fascinated, unsuspecting, or possibly even happily suspecting, lovely.

Paul was a little older than I, like me a bachelor. He was a damned fine doctor, one of the best in his business but forever studying, trying to add to his already encyclopedic knowledge of medicine and psychology. But that was his profession; life was his hobby.

There were times when I felt he confused “life” with “girls,” for he seemed to spend almost as much time operating on tomatoes as prescribing variously tinted and shaped pills for variously tinted and shaped patients. When I walked into the bar he was—I said I knew him—thus engaged. He was standing near the bar, looking down at a girl seated on one of the stools.

She was sitting with her back to the bar and her front to Paul—and it was a front to conjure with—gazing at Dr. Anson with what appeared to be hypnotic rapture.

I walked up next to them. She was a doll, a gorgeous blond creature—which failed to surprise me—about twenty-five years young, blue miniskirt hiked more than halfway up peachy creamy thighs, swooping rounded blue neckline low enough to reveal much of a bosom as maxi as her skirt was mini.

Neither of them noticed me.

Paul, at six-three, was an inch taller than I am, and he bore a faint but noticeable resemblance to a younger and leaner John Wayne, a resemblance which he did all in his power to emphasize. He was bent slightly forward, eyes on the lovely’s moist, parted lips, murmuring, “… you’ll love Los Angeles, my dear. And of course Hollywood—I can’t believe you’ve never been to Hollywood. Why—”

I leaned closer and said, “Miss, he’s not John Wayne. Not his brother, either. He isn’t even a cousin.”

She got a sort of blank look on her lovely face, then swept her eyes and long-long lashes toward me.

“His real name’s Homer,” I said. “Homer Kludd.”

She looked up at Paul again. “What’s with him?”

“I don’t know. Never saw him before, my dear.”

“Of course he hasn’t seen me,” I said quickly. “I’m with the Watchdog Society. And we’ve had our eye on this bird for a long time. A long time—”

She looked at me suspiciously. “You don’t … look like a—what? A Bird Dog?”

“Watchbird. And we’ve had our eyes on this dog for twenty, maybe thirty years. This man Kludd is a notorious lecher with more than a hundred citations in our files, which are incomplete. I felt it my duty to warn you—”

“Please mind—your own—business!” she said.

“Well, can I leave you one of our tracts?”

Paul laughed and socked me on the shoulder. “Damn, it’s good to see you again, Vivian. I already heard a few things about you and a very female movie star. None of which I believe, needless to say.” He glanced, grinning, at the girl and said, “Janelle, it’s OK. He’s a friend of mine.”

It was disgusting what those few words—from him—did to her.

“Oh!” she cried cutely. Then she grabbed my hand in both of hers and kind of kneaded it and hugged it and squeezed it, and cried “Oh!” again and then “I’m sorry, Mr.—what’s your name? Vivian? I’ll call you Viv—”

“The hell you will. It’s Shell. Shell Scott.”

“Mr.—Shell. I didn’t know you were a friend of his.”

“What’s so great about him?”

She was still kneading and doodling with my hand, and then she pulled it toward her and pressed it artlessly against the front of her dress, which of course was also the front of her, and said, “I’d never have talked like that to you if I’d known you were a friend of Paul’s. Can you ever forgive me?”

“I probably could. Yeah, I think I could.”

Paul glanced around, poked the air with a long index finger. “Couple leaving that table, Shell. Grab it and I’ll join you in a trice. Which is approximately four and a half hours.”

I probably wouldn’t have left in time, except that Janelle let go of my hand. She even gave it a little push. I suppose by then she figured she’d have to push it a little if she wanted it to go away.

I got to the table just as it was vacated by a very happy—very drunk—young couple. Harriette tripped over and, while smilingly evading her questions about Lucrezia Brizante, I ordered two bourbon-and-waters. If Paul didn’t get here I could always force myself to drink both of them.

He joined me in less than three minutes, however. I actually saw him whisper in Janelle’s delicate ear, then take a key from his pocket and slip it to her. She slid off the stool and bounced smiling out of the bar.

Paul sat down, swallowed a third of his highball, and said, “Tell me everything. Was it Lucrezia Brizante?”

I told him as little as possible about Lucrezia. But over our drinks I did tell him the rest of it—Lecci, Jimmy Ryan, coming within a hair of getting killed.

“You mean you haven’t even kissed her yet?” he asked when I’d finished.

“Paul, can’t you think of the finer things in life? Cleanliness, goodness, exercise, like that? This girl is a shining star, a girl who honors her father and mother and … well, honors a little too much, maybe.” I paused. “I shook hands with her.”

“That’s the stuff,” he said, as Vera walked by. He caught her eye, and when he said, “Couple more bourbon highs, dear?” with his face lit up like a lighthouse lamp, she smiled and buzzed off and zipped back with two more highballs.

By the time we finished them Paul had told me about his last few days in L.A., and much of his day here, including the first lectures of the convention. He’d been in the convention hall from eight P.M. till ten—but hadn’t wasted a lot of time after that, apparently.

“Damndest thing,” he said. “The first medical papers and demonstrations won’t be presented till tomorrow, and that’s mainly what I came up here for. But I’m glad I didn’t miss the show tonight. Nearly the entire program was on applications of the laser.” He paused, swallowed some of his drink, and eyed me. “You know what lasers are?”

“No,” I said stuffily. “Not lasers, or masers, or atoms, or molecules, or flashlights—”

He raised an eyebrow, then the other one. “You may think you know what a laser is, but you do not, you simply do not, my ignorant friend. You may know that laser is an acronym for light amplification by stimulated emission of radiation, which describes a concentrated source of coherent light all of the same wavelength, and you may realize that with lasers men can drill holes through little jewels and also bounce signals off the moon and make holograms, and you may be vaguely aware that men even now perform delicate retinoneural surgery—weld eyeballs, to you—and even more delicate microsurgery on single cells, and do other exciting things such as etching halftone plates and fixing decayed teeth. But you do not know what a laser is.”

“I’ll bet I’m going to find out.”

“It is your great good fortune. Soon lasers will be all over the place, coming out of your ears. They’ll be used for swift bloodless surgery, for invisible death rays that slice open the enemy, knock down satellites, carve legs of lamb. They’ll carry thousands of phone calls on one beam of light, zillions of television sets on one laser beam—”

“Sets?”

“—stations. Channels, signals. What do you care?”

“I don’t.”

“But I haven’t told you the greatest thing,” he said.

“Can I stop you?”

“During the demonstration earlier tonight, Dr. Fretsindler—that’s Fretsindler of M.I.T.—had a big hunk of granite on the stage. He banged it with a hammer, smacked it with a chisel, and naturally nothing happened.”

“Then why are you telling me all this?”

“Nothing was supposed to happen, Sheldon,” he said cheerfully. “That was the point. But then Fretsindler aimed some new kind of infrared laser—already had it on stage—at the damned boulder. Just aimed it and turned it on. Couldn’t see the light, of course, but it was on, the beam hitting that old rock.”

Paul raised his glass. “Cheers.”

“Yeah, cheers.”

“Well,” he went on, “the doctor told us lasers would soon be used for drilling tunnels, slicing off parts of mountains, leveling rough terrain, because even now they can make solid granite rocks as weak and porous and crumbly as glued-together sand. Only talked a minute or so. Then he turned off the laser and walked over to that old rock and gave it a kick, and a big hunk of it simply flew off and hit the stage and crumbled into little pieces, would you believe it?”

“No.”

“Shell, the damn rock just crumbled apart, I saw it with my own eyes. Would I lie to you?”

“Sure.”

“It happened, all right,” Paul said. “Damndest thing I ever saw. There was old Dr. Fretsindler chopping away at what was left of that solid-granite boulder with a screwdriver, and giving it another kick, and in a minute the thing was all over the stage in a billion pieces.”

“I don’t believe that, either. Not that many.”

Paul looked quite sober. And I figured he was sober, as long as he was able to pronounce Fretsindler. But he stole a surreptitious peek at his watch. Then he commenced yawning. He yawned prodigiously. He put on a splendid act, even made real water come out of his eyes.

“Been a long day.” He stifled another yawn. “Driving all the way here from L.A., and then—”

“You fool me not.”

“What? Shell, old friend—”

“Don’t old friend me, old friend. You’re wide awake.”

“Shell, I really do have to say good night. Up at the crack of dawn, you know. More lectures tomorrow, big day, got to hit that old sack, pound the old pillow—”

“Hit the sack—hah. Pound the pillow—hah. Old—hah.” I leaned over the table toward him and pinned him with a glance. “Don’t try to key me, I saw you slip the kid to her.”

He started to laugh.

“Missed it that time, didn’t I?”

I shook my head. I’d only had two or three drinks, but my glands had been given quite a workout today and I was pretty well pooped. About time to hit the sack myself. It was just as well, because Paul, still chuckling, got up and—without even saying good-bye—left the bar.

At which point, Vera stopped by the table and handed me the check. I looked at it. “What’s this?” I said.

“That’s the check,” Vera said.

“Oh, for—I know what it is. But … thirty-eight dollars and forty cents?”

“Dr. Anson said you wanted to pay for all the drinks he ordered. He told me you said—”

“Uh-huh. All the drinks, huh?”

“He bought drinks for quite a lot of people.”

“I can see that. Vera,” I said, “you know Dr. Anson is a doctor, don’t you?”

“What kind of question is that?”

“Well … he usually drinks bourbon-and-water, but that’s not what he really likes. If you’ll let me whisper in your ear, I’ll tell you what he really likes. And you’ll make sure he gets it next time he comes in, won’t you?”

She leaned over. She straightened up quite suddenly. “Well,” she said, “I guess … there’s no accounting for tastes.”

I put my wallet into my jacket again, and watched Vera as she walked away with my money. The thing that hurt most was I’d just paid for Janelle’s drinks. And Paul, wide awake—

But then I smiled. There was one thing I had done that Paul had not done. And, by God, if I had anything to do with it, he never would: I had shaken Lucrezia Brizante’s hand.

Ten minutes later, that was the thought in my mind as I fell asleep.

And two hours after that, it was Lucrezia’s voice—her frightened voice—that woke me up.

CHAPTER EIGHT

I fumbled for the phone, got it near my head.

“Mbwaa,” I mumbled. “Waitaminute. Hello, just a minute.”

“Shell? Shell, is that you?”

“Yeah, what—”

“Shell, this is Lucrezia. It’s Dad—he’s hurt. Can you come out here?”

That jarred me awake. Her voice was tight, frightened, the words tumbling over each other.

“Slow down,” I said. “He’s hurt? What happened?”

“He’s in the hospital—he was beaten, somebody beat him up! But I guess he’s … all right, the hospital’s releasing him. Please, Shell, will you come?”

“I’m on my way. Who beat him up? When did it happen?”

“I don’t know. Shell, I have to go to him.”

“Hold it. There are strange things going on at the Villas. Wait till I—”

She’d hung up.

I skidded to a stop in front of the Brizantes’ home on Mimosa Lane. The door opened just before I reached it, and I simply ran inside, past Lucrezia, who had heard—and seen—me arrive.

In the first few seconds of babble I figured out she’d picked up her father at the hospital and got back to the house less than a minute before. She seemed bewildered I’d been able to get here so fast. Which didn’t surprise me in the least.

“How’s Tony?” I asked her.

“I’m all right.”

The voice came from the couch on my left. Brizante was sitting there, bent forward with his elbows on his knees, and he—even his handlebar moustache, for that matter—looked alert enough, but not exactly all right. A white patch was on the side of his head, there was a ruddy abrasion on his left cheek and the eye above it was puffed, discolored. That eye was going to be completely shut in a few more minutes if I was any judge. And I am practically the Supreme Court when it comes to that particular kind of judgment.

I looked at him for a second or two and said, “Excuse the expression, but you should really excuse your expression. You sure don’t look like the winner. How’s he?”

“I got two of them pretty damn good, busted out a tooth for somebody. But the other—”

“Dad! How many were there? You’ve got to tell me what—”

“Lucrezia!”

Man, the word cracked in the room like a bundle of dry sticks breaking. Lucrezia stopped speaking in mid-sentence. She didn’t start again, either. Tony continued, “This I will not discuss. We will not even discuss … discussing it. This is not for women. Go to your room.”

She turned and started to leave. Her lovely face was a picture of concern and frustration, but there wasn’t a peep out of her. The man had spoken. The man of the house. The guy who wore the pants. And she—the obedient woman—obeyed instantly. That was a bit of all right, I thought; wonder how he does it? Be worth learning, that was for sure.

Tony spoke again, his voice more gentle. “No, it’s all right to stay, Lu. Shell and I, we will go.”

He got to his feet, features twisting slightly as pain hit him somewhere. He motioned to me, and I followed him into the den. We sat where we’d been on the previous afternoon, and he started right in talking a blue streak.

“Glad Lu called you, Shell. If she hadn’t, I would have. Gil’s dead. Don’t have to guess any more. Fred phoned me”—he pulled out an old round pocket watch and looked at it—“only an hour and a quarter ago. At two-fifteen. Hard to believe it could all happen so quick. Fred was excited, sounded scared, said he’d got it on one of his tapes—talk about them killing Gil. Fred said they’d found out what he was doing, but he had what we were after and wanted me to meet him. I ran down, three blocks away got there on the corner of Mimosa and Yucca Drive—didn’t want to meet him too near the house here—right after Fred did. I saw him pull over and park. He jumped out holding the reel of tape and had time to tell me maybe three, four sentences, and then those ruffians come at us—”

“Tony, let me catch up, OK?”

He stopped, sighed. “Little excited myself,” he said.

“Fred—that’s Fred Jenkins? The guy you told me was going to try bugging Henry Yarrow’s place?” He nodded. “You mean … Are you trying to tell me he actually did it? He taped some talk about Gil Reyes’ death? His murder?”

“That’s what Fred told me. On the phone, it was. Didn’t have time after I met him. Only a few seconds—fifteen, twenty. I don’t know, I got the hell beat out of me. Those—” He started ripping off a bunch of impassioned Italian.

“Wait a minute. You say some men jumped you. How many?”

“Three.”

“How’d they know where you were? How come they showed up just as Jenkins was meeting you?”

“Damned if I know how. They just did. We were there on the corner and they come up in two cars, jumped out and ran at us. Knocked me cold for maybe ten minutes. When I come to, I waved at a car and a lady in it took me to the hospital.”

“I’m trying to figure how they knew where you and Fred were. Think your phone could be tapped?”

He opened his eyes wider—his right eye, at least. The left one hardly moved. “Hadn’t even thought of it.”

“Well, just in case, don’t use it for any important calls from now on. Where did Jenkins phone from?”

He shook his head.

“These three guys, did you recognize any of them?”

“No, it was too dark. But one guy, I know I busted a tooth for him.” He fingered a cut knuckle on his right hand. “But I wouldn’t recognize any of the three if I saw them again.”

“Tony, you said Fred had a reel of tape. What happened to it?”

“It was gone when I come to. So was Fred.” Tony looked at me solemnly for a while. “I don’t know what happened to him. Probably dead. Like Gil.” He muttered in Italian. “Just before those guys jumped us, Fred said there was another tape. He had two, but got rid of one.”

I’d lit a cigarette, and stopped moving with it halfway to my mouth. “Another?”

Tony nodded. “I’m giving this to you a little scrambled, everything happened so fast, then I was out cold for a while.” He stopped, scowled, reached up and pulled on one handle of his moustache. “Fred only had a few seconds to tell me about it. But he thought somebody was chasing him in a car. He had two reels of tape with him. One he’d recorded over the last couple days, and the one he took off the machine just before he phoned and came to meet me. Well, he was damned scared, but if anybody caught up with him, he didn’t want them to find that last reel, especially not on him … Must have been the one Fred was taping when he heard the talk about Gil’s being killed.”

My arm was still motionless in the air. I dragged on my cigarette, then said, “Tony, what the hell happened to that tape?”

“Fred threw it away.”

“He … threw it … away.”

Brizante yanked on his moustache again, as if trying to pull it clear off. I was beginning to realize he did that when concentrating. I hoped it helped.

“Yeah,” he said. “Maybe he had an idea he could go back and get it if he was wrong about those guys.”

“Then why didn’t he toss both of them away?”

“Don’t ask me what I don’t know. Like I said, he was scared, damned scared. But I’d guess Fred figured if he wasn’t wrong about those guys and they caught up with him, if he didn’t have any tapes at all on him they’d know he got rid of it—or them. But if he had one and they took it, maybe they’d think they had what they were after and leave him alone. Looks like he was wrong about that part.”

I nodded. “Where did he throw that other tape, Tony?”

“Yeah … that’s goddamned important, isn’t it? Where he threw it. And Fred didn’t have time to tell me that part.”

“Try to remember exactly what he did say.”

“He said … he was on his way to meet me. And this car was after him—at least he was pretty sure it was. He stopped, was going to hide the reel, realized there wouldn’t be time—maybe got scared. So he just threw it out the window and got the hell away from there. Driving crazy, I’d guess. I heard his tires screeching before I even saw him pull up there at Yucca.”

Something flickered in my mind then, but I wasn’t able to hold it.

Tony continued, “I know he wanted to tell me more, only there wasn’t time. Those lousy—”

The rest of it was in rippety-pop Italian. I wasn’t listening anyway. I was in a very peculiar state, almost of shock. I was still trying to accept the fact that Brizante and Fred Jenkins, futzing around like a couple of paranoid grandpas equipped with Junior Secret Agent kits, had apparently done precisely what they had—filled to the gills with wine—set out to do.

But another thing was bothering me. Tony had told me Jenkins was bugging Henry Yarrow’s home. I had spent enough time with Yarrow in his home last night, however, to make me pretty sure he was not a hood, or even nonhood, knowingly involved in murder.

Of course, I’ve been wrong before.…

“Tony,” I said, “Fred was bugging Henry Yarrow, the man you talked to at the church Tuesday night. The guy who lives on Palma Drive?”

“That’s right.”

“Describe him again for me, will you?”

Brizante gave his moustache three or four good yanks scowling, then described Henry Yarrow as succinctly and accurately as I could have myself. For a moment I’d let myself wonder if we were talking about the same guy, but obviously we were. Brizante had missed, or skipped, one thing, though.

“What about the color of his eyes?” I asked.

“Oh, sure. Blue. Should have mentioned it—very distinctive. Real bright blue. Almost pretty eyes.”

“Well, that settles that. Here’s what I’m getting at, Tony. Unless Jenkins managed to sneak in and hide a damned fine wireless transmitter, say, in Yarrow’s house, he’d have been set up nearby. He never told you where he was staked out?”

“No. Ah, something else you made me remember. When we met, and he was so excited, Fred said to me he was afraid they were after him, they’d seen the thing—he called it a transmitter. Little FM transmitter. Is that some help?”

“Quite a lot. We’ve an idea of what he was using, and if Fred was right we know how they got onto him. Probably how they managed to show up right behind him at Yucca, too. They must have chased him from … Tony, do you have a map of the Villas?”

He had one in the den, got it and gave it to me. Looking at the map I said, “Tony, I’d say if Jenkins was coming from anyplace close to Yarrow’s home and heading for the corner of Mimosa and Yucca, he’d probably have gone down Palma Drive to Claridge, right on Claridge to Palos Verde, then left to Willow—a straight half-mile or so there. Then another right on Willow for three or four blocks to Mimosa.”

“Five blocks.”

“OK, then left on Mimosa, heading for Yucca, where you met him. How many blocks to there? It’s about ten from here to Willow Lane?”

“Twelve. But Yucca’s three blocks from here, so it would be nine blocks from Yucca on up to Willow.” He looked at me curiously. “What’s all this, these blocks, about?”

“We’ve got to find that tape, Tony. If Jenkins drove all over the damned country, we’re dead. But if he took the most direct route, which seems likely, he ditched it somewhere along the streets I’m talking about. Skip the little chunk of Palma between Yarrow’s house and Claridge. Too short a stretch, and the way you tell it I get the impression Fred ditched the tape after he’d been on his way for a while. Forget Claridge for now. Most of it’s pretty well lighted, isn’t it?”

“One of the few streets besides Palos Verde that is.”

“OK. And skip that dead straight half-mile on Palos Verde Drive, too. So a good wild guess leaves us with the five blocks of Willow Lane between Palos Verde and Mimosa, plus those nine blocks of Mimosa between Willow and Yucca. In other words, the last fourteen blocks he traveled.”

Brizante didn’t appear to be listening very closely.

“What’s the matter?” I asked him.

“Fred. I keep thinking about Fred. Especially now I know Gil …” He let it hang there.

“Yeah. Well, Tony, that may be merely one of your new worries. Listen close.” I gave it to him: Pete Lecci, who he was and what he was, Giuseppe “Crazy Joe” Civano, Jimmy Ryan, the attempt on my life outside Henry Yarrow’s home, even what I thought of Lieutenant Dan Weeton.

When I finished he stared at me silently for five or ten seconds, his mouth partly open. “The Black Hand,” he said.

“One of the real old names, yeah. Cosa Nostra, Our Thing, Mafia, murderers, extortionists, muscle artists, sonsofbitches. Usually I just call them Mafia, or hoods, or sonsofbitches.”

“But Mr. DiGiorno, he can’t be—”

“He is. Get it through your head, dammit. You won’t find a more miserable or bloodthirsty monster in this hemisphere, much less in little Sunrise Villas.”

“But I’ve known him three years, worked with him, talked—he’s so polite, very nice.”

“Sure he’s polite, very nice. You don’t think he’s going to strangle newborn babes in broad daylight at the Town Hall, do you? They all give to the church, contribute to charities, smile and say ho-ho, jolly good fellow. So what? Maybe Bluebeard liked dogs—and fed them little pieces of people.” So dog lovers say, ‘Isn’t he a nice man, he likes dogs.’”

Tony remained silent. I sat quietly, thinking.

Accept it as fact that Jenkins using an FM transmitter had been bugging certain unknown men, at least three of whom after tumbling to what he was doing had chased him, caught him, and grabbed a tape from him. For a while they might think they were in the clear, but—if they were the kind of jolly good fellows I assumed them to be—they had also grabbed Jenkins, who soon would be telling them everything he knew and maybe several things he didn’t know. If he hadn’t already done it. Ignoring that, those men knew what they’d been discussing, just before Jenkins took off. They had one tape now, and would unquestionably play it without delay. When they did, it would become unmistakably clear that their most recent discussion was not on it. It would, therefore, inevitably dawn upon them, even if all three together possessed the total intelligence of one imbecile, that a second tape must exist. The important tape, the one upon which they could be heard discussing, among other things, the murder of Gilberto Reyes.

Very damned soon then, if they were not already thus occupied, they—and possibly some of their friends—would be looking very busily for Tape Number Two.

I, of course, would also be looking very busily for Tape Number Two.

Which presented me with a problem: those hoods would soon either find that tape, or—if I didn’t get a wiggle on—find me looking for that tape.

So I got a wiggle on.

CHAPTER NINE

I got to my feet and headed for the door, saying to Tony, “You’ll have to phone the local law—and the sheriff’s department, fill them in yourself. I haven’t time.”

“Wait a minute. I’m not going to get them guys asking what Fred and me were doing, or about the tapes. They’d probably put me in jail.”

“You are so right.” I stopped. “All you have to tell them is that you and Jenkins got in a fight with three guys and they knocked you cold. You want to know what happened to them, and Jenkins. You don’t have to mention the bugging—those hoods won’t.” I opened the door and went out.

He caught up with me in the living room. “Where are you going? Why such a hurry?”

I groaned. “Listen close, because I’m going to talk fast. It’s damned important for us to get that tape if possible, and I’ve got an idea that may help me find it—”

“You’re going out now to look for it? When that fellow was waiting at the church to shoot you? When two other times already you’ve been shot at? Are you crazy?”

“There’s a chance I’ll have a few minutes jump on those guys, and it might be all I need.”

“They see you, Shell, they’ll kill you. Gil is dead. Fred, he is dead, too, I feel it. Now you will be dead, they will kill you—”

“Will you quit saying that?” I don’t like people talking about death and dying—mine, that is. It has something to do with flinging words into the ether, and thoughts are things, and all that. “Man, haven’t you ever read Norman Vincent Peale? Or Rebecca of Sunnybrook Farm? Or—”

“Then I’ll go with you.”

“Dammit, get on the phone and make those calls. Besides, doesn’t it make more sense for you to stay here and take care of yourself and Mrs. Brizante?” I paused. “And Lucrezia.”

He was silent for a while. Then he gave his moustache a terrible yank, using both hands and consequently flapping his lip out on both sides at once. It was a remarkable sight.

“I will do it,” he said. “Shell … take much care.”

“Yeah, sure. But, man, right now I’ve got to get going.”

I could imagine slope-headed hoods roaming around out there in the darkness, peeking into mailboxes, trees, into bushes, shooting at every moving thing, even little birds.…

Tony turned and walked toward the den. I hustled to the front door and was reaching for its knob when I heard the word, “Shell,” from behind me. It was so soft I almost missed it, hardly more than a whisper. Even so, I knew it was Lucrezia.

I turned around.

She stood just inside the room. After a few silent seconds she walked toward me, and that walk had everything in it I’d first seen in the Mountain Shadows Lounge, and maybe a little bit more. She stopped very close to me, head tilted back as she looked up at my face. Her expression was sober, and those burning-black-velvet eyes were wide.

“I heard it all,” she said. “Everything, while you and Dad were talking here. I heard him say there are men who would kill you.”

“Well, I’ll tell you all about it, Lu—Miss Brizante, when I get back. Right now, they’re shooting little birds out there—no, that’s just a joke. Don’t know why I keep thinking about birds, birds.… Actually, those bums may really be doing it. I wouldn’t put it past them. They’d blast the little things right in their nests—”

“Please, Shell, be serious—”

“You think I’m not? Why, these guys would pull the wing off a fly. Just one wing. That’s their way, so the fly would go crazy—”

“Be serious with me! It is true? Someone has already tried to kill you? Shot with guns at you?”

“Well, yes, I suppose so. In fact, I know so. But there wasn’t any real damage done. Not to me, anyhow.”

“But—shot at you? Why?”

“Wanted to hit me, the way I figure it—”

“Damn you, Shell Scott! You listen to me! Is it true you might get hurt when you leave here? Get … killed?”

I sighed. “If I stand around here yakking much longer they may have time to come in here and poison me. Put it this way. There are certain low and uncouth individuals who seem consumed by the desire to do me bodily harm. And—especially if I don’t get the hell out of here—they may discover ways of doing it. However, I can almost promise that it won’t happen, because only the good die young, so I’m practically guaranteed a couple hundred years—”

“Dead …” she said softly. “I can’t imagine you dead … Dead!”

“Will you quit—dead she says, kill he says, dead, die, kill, dead—you’re worse than your dad. Make that father, dad sounds too much like … dammit, now you’ve got me doing it.”

“You idiot! You imbecile!”

“Ah, you do care—”

“Shell, you might walk out that door and get killed, but, you fool, you joke about it—”

I reached up and put my hands on her shoulders. “Lucrezia, I insist that we be scrupulously logical about this. What do we have? Life—and death. Right? That’s all there is, right? Yes. Incontrovertible. And life is serious enough. That’s half of all there is. So if we get serious about the other half, too, then we’re in terrible trouble—”

“All right. Fine,” she said with some heat. “Go ahead. Go get killed. I’ll laugh.”

“See how much fun it is? Now, pay attention.”

She nodded.

“In one minute, less than a minute, I go to meet my fate. Shouldn’t I take some little, oh, little memory with me?”

One corner of her mouth moved, very slightly. But she didn’t say anything.

“Like in the days of King Arthur,” I went on. “When a knight went out to joust, his lady gave him her colors, a big handkerchief or something. So if he got a lance, or pike, or one of those joust things stuck through him he’d have something to cram in the hole, I suppose.” I paused. “Do you know what I’m talking about?”

“I—think I do,” she said.

“And—well, like in movies. When the doomed man goes off laughing and scratching, he, ah, gets a little something from his lady, doesn’t he?”

“Noxzema?”

“Listen, this is serious stuff. It’s nothing to joke about. What I mean, well, before I go, I’d like to—to shake your hand once again, Miss Brizante.”

“You—you imbecile fettucini-spumoni-spaghetti-ravioli—” Those weren’t her exact words, of course. It was all in Italian, and I translated it as something generally unflattering.

But then she stopped, suddenly. She composed her face, that lovely, sensual face, let the smooth lids half conceal those black-magic eyes. She reached up and grasped my wrists, pulled my hands down and placed them on her waist just above the swelling softness of her hips. She wound her arms around my neck, pressed her body against me, lifted her face.

Very softly and sweetly she said, “I could kill you myself, you stupid,” and then pressed her soft warm mouth against mine.

Well—how can one say what can’t be said?

It was a kiss which only started upon the lips, and spread from there throughout anatomy I had not previously suspected I owned. And then it spread on into what I can only describe as indescribable dimensions. It would require a three-dimensional language to describe merely the pucker—and for the rest, well, it is simply not true that there’s no rest for the wicked.

If it was true that Rome burned in Lucrezia’s eyes, then not only all Italy but the rest of Europe and half of Brazil flamed in her mouth and tongue and lips. The rest of Lucrezia was not exactly petrified, either. Her body moved against me, the soft masses of her breasts molding against my chest, her thighs and hips moving slightly, only slightly, but it was the kind of slightly that makes centimeters seem like meters and inches feel like yards. What I mean, I had never been kissed by a hundred and twenty-five pounds of lips before.

Just when I’d decided Lucrezia had not merely pressed her mouth to mine but had annealed, cauterized, fused and vulcanized it there, and from now on she and I would go through life with Siamese lips, stuck together in eternal osculation, suddenly her lips were gone. It took me a while to figure it out, but as soon as I did I opened my eyes. Four or five inches away I could see—Lucrezia’s eyes.

Slowly she unwound her arms, stepped back from me.

“All right, Shell,” she said, her voice humming like hot winds in a beehive. “Now—you can go.”

“Go?”

“Now you can go.” She flung out an arm dramatically—just like an actress. “And do what you have to do!”

“But … if I go, I can’t do what I have to do.”

“Shell, you said—”

“Never mind what I said. You think I want to go out there and get killed? You think I’m some kind of nut? I want to live—”

Just then Tony Brizante, perhaps attracted by the noise I was making, came in. “You still here?” he said.

I glanced at my watch: three-fifty A.M. Wow, I thought, where does the time go? Memory came back: murder, hoods, tape—it all seemed pretty dull stuff now. But man is a creature of habit. So I checked to make sure my gun was still in place, and had not been fired, then walked to the door.

Behind me that soft sweet-hot voice said, “Be careful, Shell. And come back. Please come back.”

“And how,” I said. “By the way, I presume you won’t mind—now—if I call you Lucrezia?”

There she went again. I walked out into the dark night, with a whole Italian banquet in my ears.

When Tony was telling me about running down Mimosa to meet Jenkins, he’d said he could hear Fred’s tires screeching even before he saw him pull up and park at the intersection. Now I knew what had flickered in my mind then. When tires skid on asphalt they leave streaks—visible streaks of burned rubber. If Jenkins had stopped to get rid of the tape he wouldn’t have slowed leisurely. He’d have hit the brakes hard.

Two blocks from Mimosa on Willow Lane my headlights picked out fresh black lines stretching for at least twenty or twenty-five yards over the asphalt. Except for the beam of my headlights and light in one house a block away, the street was dark; more important, no other headlights were brightening the darkness. On my left was a row of houses, all with neatly mowed lawns before them, not much there in the way of cover. But on my right, set back a yard or so from the sidewalk, was a thick six-foot-high mass of oleander, which is so often used in Arizona both for decoration and as a screen for privacy.

I swung sharply right and stopped with my front tires against the low curb, the Cad angled in so its headlights were pointed at the base of the oleander hedge opposite the spot where those skid marks ended. Then I grabbed a flashlight from the glove compartment and climbed out of the car.

In my mind was the thought that the added illumination from my headlights would help me spot the tape if it were here, lessen the time required to find it and get the hell away. Obviously, the more time I spent here the more chance there was that one of those low uncouth characters I’d spoken of to Lucrezia would happen along and spot me.

For some reason, with that thought so prominent in my mind, it didn’t occur to me that the beam of those headlights—slanting away from the street toward an oleander bush, and of course toward me poking about in an oleander bush—would be a circumstance of remarkable interest to any low types who might note it. So who’s perfect? So who thinks of everything? Especially within minutes after being stupendously kissed by Lucrezia Brizante?

The search for the tape was anticlimactic. There wasn’t anything unusual in sight at the base of the hedge, and I saw nothing in the massed oleander leaves and branches. So I bent over, forced my way with some difficulty through the stiffly resisting hedge, and even before getting all the way through saw the reel, with a snakelike length of tape trailing from it, on the ground another dozen feet ahead of me.

As I stepped toward it I saw something else that brought me to a stop for a moment. I had become so used to seeing rows of small, compact homes or the three-sided squares which comprised the usual apartment complexes here at the Villas, that to see a two-story building almost the size of a hotel startled me.

I couldn’t see the base of the building, and knew it was two stories only because its upper half and the irregular roofline and a couple of old-fashioned rounded towers at its corners, reminiscent of some nineteenth-century mansions I’d seen, loomed above me against the sky and were given a kind of nebulous solidity by the faint light of the moon.

The base of the building was hidden by a solid-looking stone wall, about twenty feet from me and visible in the glow from my Cad’s headlights filtering through the hedge. The wall was ten or twelve feet high, and extended to my left and right until it faded into the darkness.

I didn’t waste time admiring the quaintness—or spookiness—of the scene. I jumped forward, grabbed the reel and rewound the few loose feet of tape upon it, then crammed it into my coat pocket as I walked to the hedge and began forcing my body back through it the same way I’d come.

I stuck my head out on the other side, realizing the beam of my Cad’s headlights was half blinding me.

Realizing, in truth—as I poked my head through the oleander hedge, like a fat bird peeking from its nest—a great deal more than that.…

CHAPTER TEN

It was a single second that included a minute of visual acuity, mental shock, emotional shambles, intestinal paralysis, and intellectual rigor mortis, all wrapped up in a general all-over sick feeling.

On my left were two men, moving toward me, looking very alert and intent on what they were doing. Or, rather, about to do. Also looking very unnerving, partly because of the guns in their hands, partly because of their physiques and features. One was an enormous creature, not unusually tall, but so wide of shoulders and chest and middle and hips that he closely resembled one of those statues on Easter Island.

The other was a mere wisp, a frail reed in comparison to the creature. A few inches shorter and maybe a yard thinner, he had a face actually lopsided, nose bent to the left, left corner of his mouth turned up, left ear “cauliflowered” and jutting out farther than the other.

The enormous guy had a totally hairless head and a face about the size of a square basketball, its features in reasonably harmonious relationship except for a nose so ridiculously small it appeared to have room for only one nostril.

I could see both men quite clearly, in spite of the fact that my Cad’s headlights were striking me smack in the eyes, because they were close enough—five or six yards away—that the headlights’ glow also made them stand out from the darkness behind them. There was another factor, too—some other source of light, wavering and apparently becoming brighter, which fell on them and made it more easy for me to clearly note their features.

The source of that light might have puzzled me if I’d had time to think about it. But I was not at that moment concentrating on anything except those two guys with guns in their hands, and the fact that—for the first time in my life, come to think of it—I had gotten myself entangled, apparently permanently, in an oleander hedge.

The thin guy moved more quickly than his buddy. He spotted me, and his eyes seemed to pop forward in his tilted face, and he flipped his gun up and let go a shot at me. He moved a bit too quickly, though, and the pill tore through leaves and branches a yard or more to my right.

His next shot would have hit me—and by the time he got it off, his large pal was pumping a slug out of his gun as well—except that when both pills tore through the space where I’d been I was no longer there, having discovered that a bullet flying even a yard away from a man tangled in a hedge is enough to prove he is not inextricably tangled.

I simply lunged backward, jerking and wriggling at the same time, feeling the grab of bending limbs and hearing cloth tear, but I flew out of the hedge so fast I went down flat on my back, down hard enough that it banged half the wind out of me. I sucked in air as I got to my feet and yanked the Colt from its holster, then sprinted parallel to the hedge for ten yards, stopped, looked back toward my Cad.

It was perfect.

That was a thick hedge, true; but light did filter through it, enough light did; and between it and me, like cracked and fragmented figures in a surreal painting, I could see the blurred outlines of the two men.

They were so dimly visible I couldn’t tell which of the moving figures was the big man and which the thin one. It didn’t make much difference to me, because since those first two shots there’d been two more fired toward where I’d been and a third this way, apparently at random but too close for comfort. So I aimed at movement, squeezed off one shot with a second right behind it and heard a short sharp yell, almost a bark, that was not merely a cry of surprise or fright. I’d hit one of them.

When I’d leveled the Colt and squeezed its trigger I had heard the sound of tires sliding as a car came to a sudden stop, and noted that light coming through the hedge was moving, dancing. Finally, then, I realized what that wavering glow was which only seconds ago had made it easier for me to see the two men.

I heard a car door slam, voices, a yell. A rumbling, stentorian shout, “Yeah, the sonofabitch is in there somewhere.” I couldn’t see him, but I could imagine the shouter pointing. “Behind them bushes there.” A second later, “Wait a minute—watch out. He just drilled Frankie square in the biscuit.”

“The hell with Frankenstein. Bludgett, get your ass outa the light, you goddamn freak!” That was another voice, high and flat and hard, a voice I’d never heard before.

I was not simply standing there listening to the noises in the night air. Even before I’d heard that car door slam I had jerked my head around and seen, rising above the hedge and darker than the sky beyond it, the silhouette of a telephone pole. On both of its sides the hedge had been trimmed. Thin leafy branches of the oleander were growing toward the wood, touching it in a few places. But at either side of the pole was a foot or so of comparatively open space.

I was at the pole and easing my body carefully past it while the man with that flat hard voice was speaking. I pushed my head forward slowly, wishing at least for the moment that the hair on my head wasn’t so white. But then I was looking to my right, field of vision almost unobstructed, and no shots rang out.

So little time had passed that the enormously wide egg was still standing—no more than twenty feet from me—right in front of my Cad’s headlights. He had to be Bludgett. So Frankenstein was the boy I’d hit. Hit hard. He was flat on the parking strip in front of my car, sprawled on his face. Maybe that was why Bludgett was still there, standing over him. The guy on the ground didn’t move. He probably wasn’t going to. The “biscuit” is the head.

It had been five seconds, maybe a couple more, since the man had yelled at Bludgett to get out of the light. I guess he got impatient, because he yelled at him again and jumped forward, jerked at the big man’s arm. Then he looked around, stepped to the side of my Cad and reached in through the open window, hit the switch and doused the lights. But before complete darkness fell—the lights of the other car were already off—I had time to see two things of interest.

One was the man himself. He was of medium height, dressed in pale gray slacks and a blue T-shirt, built like a weight-lifter—good shoulders, well-defined pectorals bulging on his chest, flat stomach and almost too-narrow waist and hips. He was a blond, hair more a light coppery-gold than straw-colored, and there was a lot of it, bushy atop his head and lancing down into a sharply defined widow’s peak on his forehead. Big chin, a strong face. I’d remember him.

The second thing of interest was Bludgett’s finally moving. When he stepped forward just before the lights were doused, he took Frankenstein with him. He simply bent over and bunched some cloth in his hand, or grabbed the guy’s belt, picked him up—I mean, with one hand picked him up—and walked off with him.

It’s one thing to be strong. But this guy had to be seen to be believed. When he picked Frankenstein up, the man was absolutely limp, so naturally he bent in the middle, head and arms dangling loosely on one side and legs flopping on the other. Which meant, in order not to scrape him along the ground, Bludgett had to lift him into the air a ways. So he did. Just cranked up his arm and bent his elbow and walked off as if he were carrying a suitcase.

It was, perhaps, unlikely I would live long enough for it to happen, but as I watched that scene with something approaching awe I couldn’t help thinking: Man, I hope I never get clobbered by Bludgett.

There was conversation over there in the darkness, but I wasn’t able to make out any of the words. I heard the slap of shoe leather on pavement; somebody was running—but away from me, the sound getting a little fainter.

I still had the flashlight in my left hand, gun in the right, but neither of them gave me a real sense of security. It was clear I couldn’t make it back to my Cad. And I wasn’t about to get into a gunfight, any kind of fight, with three men—at least three—if I could help it.

So I eased back, brushing against the telephone pole, and moved slowly a couple of feet from the hedge. I turned and started to walk away from the activity behind me, and thought I heard the faint cry of a siren. I stopped, listened. The sound became clearer, and in a few seconds I could distinguish two sirens, wailing almost in unison at first and then falling into their separate rhythms, even in the warm night their thin and whining dissonances strangely chilling.

Two of them, getting louder. On their way here, undoubtedly. That didn’t surprise me. But what happened next did.

There was a shout—the same hard, flat voice: “Fleepo! Get back here. Crank it up!”

I wasn’t sure of that first word. A man’s name, undoubtedly. Fleepo, or Flippo, or maybe even Cleepo. But shortly after the slim-hipped muscle-boy yelled, there was, again, the soft slap of shoes on the ground, then the sharper splat of them on pavement. A car engine turned over, caught.

I moved back to the telephone pole. Just beyond my Cadillac headlights flicked on, the car door opened, somebody jumped in, the door slammed. I could hear the thud of another pair of feet well to my left. The car backed up, jumped forward, swerved around my Cad and headed down Willow Lane. The sound of thudding feet stopped. Then the same thing was repeated. Door opening, slamming, engine catching. Headlights lit up the darkness half a block to my left on this side of the street. The car came toward me, gaining speed rapidly, raced past me and skidded around the corner.

I stood there, wondering.

Obviously, those lads did not like the law. Almost certainly, they had good reason for not hanging around to jaw, as they might put it, with the fuzz. Particularly if there was a body hereabouts, with a hole in its head. Even if they hadn’t put the hole there.

My natural impulse was to sprint to the Cad and get the hell out of here myself. But also fresh in my mind was what had happened when, thinking all the would-be killers had flown, I’d run out through the front door of Henry Yarrow’s home.

I pressed my left hand against the pocket of my coat, felt the round reel of tape there. And made up my mind. The Cad it would be. But I wasn’t about to walk over to it, whistling, and I didn’t. None of my sly stratagems made any difference. Nothing happened.

So I climbed into the Cad and left that scene like a bomb, maybe fifteen seconds before the first police car arrived.

I should have felt very good about it. I did feel good. Still, there was one small kernel of discontent.…

It had been too easy.

CHAPTER ELEVEN

It was the right tape, the second “Jenkins tape.” No question about that.

I punched the rewind button, stopped the machine, started playing the tape for the second time. Not from the beginning. The end of the plastic tape was stretched and torn—undoubtedly by Jenkins in his haste to get away from wherever he’d been—and the whole thing played for just over fifty minutes. But it was only the last six minutes which would be of real interest to others—and were fascinating to me.

After reaching my rooms at Mountain Shadows I’d taken time to shower and change clothes again, then arranged with the desk for the use of two tape recorders. I’d used one to play the Jenkins tape, while making a duplicate of it with the other. The first three-quarters of an hour consisted merely of conversation and a few phone calls of no apparent importance, and there were never more than two or at most three people conversing. But in those last six minutes seven men spoke, and it sounded as if a planned meeting was in progress.

Unfortunately the sound reproduction was of very poor quality, probably in part because of the equipment Jenkins had used but also because of a humming noise, perhaps due to air-conditioning equipment in operation nearby. I had to admit that Jenkins had done an admirable job in getting anything recorded at all, but while I was able to distinguish a difference in tone and phrasing when each man spoke, I was unable to identify any of them from the sound. Except, possibly, for one man.

I knew Henry Yarrow’s voice almost had to be one of the seven, since the transmitter had been placed in his home, but the only voice I was able to pick out was quite distinctive, and I’d heard it very recently. It was a voice with muscles in it, flat and hard, a little louder on the tape than others. Maybe it wasn’t a hundred to one, but I called it eight to five that the guy was the slim-hipped and well-muscled cat I’d seen so recently on Willow Lane.

Not knowing who the men were, though a few names—including mine—were mentioned, I mentally identified each new voice with a letter, from A through G in the order of their vocal appearance. I made a few more notes as the tape rolled through the machine for the second time, and the dialogue in those last six minutes went like this:

A: OK, that’s enough of that. Let’s get a few things settled. First goddamn thing, what the hell are we going to do about Scott? Ace, you miss him. Fleepo’s at the wheel so you don’t even have to worry about drivin’, you’re in the back seat like it’s shootin’ ducks. You got him cold, so you miss him—

B: I already told you. He was there, then goddamn he ain’t there. The sonofabitch ain’t human—

A: Shut up. You miss him, then even The Nailer misses him. And what happens? He kills The Nailer.

C: If I—if I could ask a question here … I can understand about Scott. And I certainly realize Reyes could have caused a great deal of trouble. But was it necessary to kill him? Scott wouldn’t be in this at all if—

B: Christ, am I gonna get bugged by you, too? You mean we shouldn’t of hit him? When he’s blabbing all over about Civano?

A: You know what that could of screwed up. First you, then me, then the whole goddamn works. If anything screws the setup now, when we’re so close—

C: That won’t happen. Nothing is going to … screw the setup. I’ve guaranteed that—

A: You goddamn well better keep it guaranteed—

D: Gentlemen, that’s enough! It is true that Scott wouldn’t be involved if Reyes had not been hit. But Reyes had to be hit. He was not greatly exercised, but I feel certain he would have persisted and caused us serious difficulties eventually. Under the circumstances, I saw no reasonable alternative.

A: You’re goddamn right, there wasn’t none. Next thing, that Mex bastard might have been kicking the Attorney General in the pants—and we got no line up that high in Justice.

D: There has been enough argument, enough digression. The problem is serious, but not critical—and it will not become critical once Scott is eliminated. Therefore, the first question is how do we eliminate him? There is one way which keeps us out of it, and almost assures us that we can keep it in the family, so to speak—that the sheriff’s department will not conduct an intensive investigation, which is especially important after what has already happened tonight. That way is to give the contract to Jimmy Ryan.

E: Lucky? Maybe nobody told you yet. He already gave it a shot and crapped it up. He’s just lucky Scott didn’t hit him in the head.

D: I know about that. You overlook an important factor. We brought Ryan up here, but that was because of the trouble in Tucson—

A: Yeah, I still want to know who the hell we look for in that mess. That’s just as important—

D: One thing at a time, all right? All right?

A: Yeah … sure. It’s just it’s natural … OK, OK, go ahead.

D: We brought Ryan here, but not to kill Scott. Nobody knew that white-haired sonofabitch was going to show up at the Villas, he was supposed to be on a vacation. The important factor is that the fool play Ryan pulled was his own idea, it was not authorized. And because he is both stupid and impulsive, he made a mess of it. But, with proper planning, Jimmy Ryan is the perfect man for the contract.

E: You mean on account of the beef in L.A.?

D: Exactly. He tried to kill Scott in Los Angeles. That is well known. It would surprise no one if he did kill Scott. When Jimmy Ryan was brought here none of us could have anticipated the present situation. But he is here. He is available. We should make use of the opportunities presented to us.

A: What difference does it make who kills him? Or how? Just so the sonofabitch gets off our backs—and goddamn quick. Especially now, with what we know he’s come up with somehow. Scott’s not the same thing as a Brizante—or even that Mex bastard. He already knows enough to screw us up plenty, maybe even all the way. Jesus, when I think of how close it was to blowin’ up if Henry hadn’t handled himself right, when Scott was asking him—

D: If you will allow … allow me to complete the presentation, I will explain why it makes a difference. Of course we hit Scott as soon as possible. But we can’t just leave him on the street like a pile of garbage—not here at the Villas. Maybe it will come to that, maybe we’ll have to take that chance, the extra risk, but not yet. And if it can be worked with Jimmy Ryan as the hit-man there won’t be any loose ends.

E: I don’t get it, either. If it’s smooth, nobody’s going to know who done it anyway—

D: On the contrary, they will know. We plan it that way. There’s no advantage to having Ryan kill Scott unless it becomes known that it was Jimmy Ryan—right now awaiting trial on that ADW rap. And who is the chief witness? The man who will testify against Ryan? The man Ryan has the best possible reason to hit? Scott.

A: Sure … yeah. Perfect. I’ll vote for it.

E: Am I stupid or something? How’s anybody going to know who the crap kills Scott? What do you mean they’ll know it was Lucky? He’s just going to stand there and say I done it?

D: It should be obvious. Ryan hits Scott. We kill Ryan.

E: Well, crap. I guess I just hadn’t thought it far enough ahead. Who hits Lucky?

D: Ace and Fleepo. They handled Reyes without any trouble, they work well together. And Ryan trusts them. It’s perfect all the way around. Are we in agreement?

A: I already said it. I like it.

E: Yeah, swell, now I understand how you meant it.

D: Ace?

B: Sure, why not? Only … Well, the bum owes me a couple hundred fish. If I kill him, there goes my two hundred.

D: We can do without the jokes, Ace. Fleepo?

F: Sure. You say so, OK for me.

D: All right, Ryan gets the contract. Ace, it’s got to be arranged so you and Fleepo have enough time to get Scott’s gun and use it on Ryan. I don’t want any loose ends. Of course, this is predicated on the assumption the present situation does not deteriorate. It may develop that we’ll have to get rid of Scott any way we can, but if it’s at all possible we’ll do it this way.

E: Just in case it doesn’t come off—like, look what happened with Ace and The Nailer both spraying lead at him, who’d have figured it?—maybe I could handle it my way, like I already mentioned.

D: That remains a possibility, but right now there is too much risk involved.

E: Yeah, OK. It’s just, if it comes to it, I wouldn’t mind handling it. I wouldn’t mind a goddamn bit.

D: There is another thing you—all of us—should keep in mind. Scott has a great many friends in Los Angeles, especially Uncle Angelo. Including that goddamned Samson. Imagine what would happen if Scott was killed in an accident, say in a cell, on his way to the can, almost any kind of accident with even a little smell to it. There’d be enough heat in Los Angeles to reach here and halfway to Chicago.

A: What’s worse? A little heat, or the big heat? It don’t matter if L.A. gets steamed up so long as they can’t prove Scott was hit. He’s dead, he can’t cause trouble, that’s the main thing. I mean … just in case something gets screwed up, we got to hit that sonofabitch in the head any way gets the job done. But your way’s the best … I agree, like I said. Very definite, best way to keep trouble down.

D: That’s why I was sent out here.

C: If I could ask another question. Will it be necessary to do anything about this man Brizante? I mean, you know who his daughter is. If he was hurt, or killed …

D: I think we could both drink a gallon of wine with him right now and he wouldn’t do anything except open another gallon. He is an old fool, and very lucky to be alive, but he is no threat to us at the moment—thanks, in large measure, to your very clever and intelligent suggestion.

C: Well, I must say … I appreciate …

D: Consequently it is unlikely that we will need to consider any pressures against Brizante. And killing him, unless the situation changes very drastically, is out of the question. There has already been enough killing. Too much, under the circumstances. We must hit Scott, but if it is at all possible that’s got to be the end of it. You can kill a man like Scott and get away with it. But if you kill a movie star—or the father of a movie star—or a politician, you might as well kill a Fed. We all know you can hit a competitor, a businessman, even a—

G: Hey, what the crud. Hey—lookit. Jesus Christ, lookit, it’s a bug, who’d of—it’s a bug—

D: What the hell is the matter with you—

G: It’s a bug! I dropped my smokes and just happened to look under the—oh, godalmighty, some bastard is on the earie while we’re talkin’—

E: Shut up! Jesus, it is. Little bit of a short-range—can’t carry more than a block or … The bastard can’t be far from here right now—

A: Sonofabitch—

B: Fleepo, get the heap—

And right there the voices, the sounds, everything suddenly ended.

The last inch of tape, stretched and raggedly torn, passed between the record’s playback heads and the machine stopped automatically. For a moment I imagined Jenkins listening to those final shouted words. But then I put that chilling thought out of my mind and studied the notes I’d made on a sheet of Mountain Shadows stationery.

Some of the names mentioned weren’t important. “Uncle Angelo” is merely a Mafia term for the law, law-enforcement officers, cops. And the Samson spoken of as a friend of mine is indeed a very good friend, the captain of Central Homicide of the L.A.P.D. I had to assume, however, that the “Henry” mentioned was Henry Yarrow. Also from the dialogue it was apparent that the second man to speak—the guy with the hard, flat, loud voice—was Ace, and the man I’d listed as F was Fleepo. Identification of the other five men would have to wait a while longer.

There were, of course, several other obvious conclusions to be drawn from the conversation, and some guesses that could be made with reasonable hope of accuracy. But of special fascination to me, naturally, were the plans discussed for my as-soon-as-possible demise. Including the fact that it would help a lot—help them a lot—if it was unnecessary to leave me on the street “like a pile of garbage.” Further, that all which had been under discussion was “predicated on the assumption the present situation does not deteriorate.”

Well, the situation—even before the boys completed formulating their plans for me—had sure as hell deteriorated. Not only had the bug been spotted, but subsequent to that there’d been the action on Willow Lane when Bludgett and Frankenstein spotted me and—it could be deduced with reasonable certainty—recognized me. Either that, or they’d felt like shooting the head off a stranger. Whether Bludgett and Frankenstein had been present at the meeting or not, they were tied to it by the arrival on Willow of Ace and Fleepo who had been present.

I wound up dwelling on the words of the guy I’d listed as “A.” He was the one who’d seemed most bloodthirsty—most thirsty for my blood, at least—the guy who’d claimed there’d be only a little heat from L.A. if I was killed, but should I unfortunately fail to be hit suddenly in the head there might be “the big heat.”

Well, that’s what I was going to see that he—and all the rest of those bastards—got, if I could manage it: the big heat. And I didn’t much care how I managed it, either. They’d all sat there in Henry Yarrow’s house and with the casual air of businessmen discussing whether or not to buy extra shares of Standard Oil agreed it was a splendid idea to murder Shell Scott. Neatly and cleanly if possible, but if the situation “deteriorated,” then what the hell, kill the sonofabitch untidily.

OK, they’d asked for it. Call me pal, pal I’ll be. Call me jolly, I’ll be jolly. But most of those seven cats had called me “sonofabitch.” So they’d named it.

I am not a lad who believes in turning the other cheek.

The sun had been up for an hour, but it was not one of Arizona’s most bright and beautiful mornings. The sky was overcast, dull, and it looked as if it might rain. The brooding dawn had not, however, depressed me. I’d been busy.

The cassette on which I’d duplicated the “Jenkins tape” was in place in the small battery-operated AIWA machine I’d used for recording it, ready to be played. In my coat pocket was the original tape and a typed transcript of its last six minutes, made for me by a male stenographer to whom I explained the risk he was taking in even listening to the recording, but who felt the bundle I paid him not only justified the risk but compensated him for being awakened at the crack of dawn. On the transcript itself I had identified the speakers with my letters from A to G. And I had used the stenographer’s typewriter to peck out a note—not on Mountain Shadows stationery—to Tony Brizante.

I didn’t put Tony’s name on it, nor did I sign it. But at the end I typed a P.S.: “Lucrezia, don’t shake hands with any strangers.” She would know who’d sent the note. I hoped.

I had phoned Walt Maypole, got what info he could give me about the Sunrise Villas Security Guards, especially Sergeant Striker, of whom he spoke highly. Walt also was able to give me the name of a professor—Elliott Irwin—retired after fourteen years at the California Institute of Technology, who might help me with some ideas I’d had about the Jenkins tape. I had talked for ten minutes on the phone with Sergeant Striker, learning several items of interest and also being assured of his cooperation later in the day, when events surely would begin to quicken. And, finally, I had phoned Professor Elliott Irwin—whom, like everybody else except Walt Maypole, I woke up—and explained my problem. He said he could probably help me; he didn’t say he would; he said I had phoned him at a ridiculous hour. I agreed. And he agreed to see me at eight A.M.

With that accomplished, I made my last call. A young, brash, seventeen-year-old kid named Artie Katz had parked my car a few times and we’d chewed the fat a little. He lived near the hotel. He was a hustler. If I’d let him, he would have parked the Cad, washed it, changed the oil, and painted my initials on it—for a price. Four minutes after I hung up my phone I heard the slap-slap of somebody running fast and opened the door in time to save Artie the trouble of knocking. The bill I handed him made everything I said from then on OK with Artie Katz.

“Go to Seidner’s Posie Post,” I told him, “florist on East Main in Scottsdale—”

“I know where it is. They’re not open yet, Mr. Scott.”

“Get them to open up early for you if they will; if not, you be the first customer when they do open. Buy two dozen long-stemmed roses and deliver them to this address.”

I’d typed “Lucrezia Brizante” and the Mimosa Lane address on a plain envelope. “There’s a note inside here,” I said. “When you get the flowers, take the note out and put it in one of those little envelopes they keep handy in flower shops. Write the same name and address on the envelope and slip it inside the box with the roses. Deliver the box personally.”

“Gotcha. Nothing to—Lucrezia Brizante? Her? Will I get to see her?”

“Maybe, if you’re lucky. I want—”

“Lucrezia Brizante—hey! This early maybe she’ll be wearing one of them negligeese.”

He couldn’t even pronounce it yet, but he was sure anxious to see it. Well, that was normal; he was a growing lad. I hoped if Lucrezia was indeed wearing a negligoose, the sight didn’t arrest his growth.

“Listen,” I said. “No foul-ups, Artie. Use your own heap to make delivery. If I recall, it is a heap.”

“What do you mean? It’s a stripped-down fifty-nine Chewy coupe with a Merc V-8—”

“Never mind, Artie. I don’t think you’ll have any trouble, but just in case, you know from nothing. A short bald-headed guy asked you to deliver the flowers.”

“Gotcha.”

“Final thing. If possible, I’d like the flowers delivered by eight A.M., even eight-thirty. But no later than nine A.M.”

“I wish I was deliverin’ them right now,” he said, and in his eyes I could see the geese flying north. I knew I could trust Artie not to dawdle along the way.

“OK,” I said, “on your horse, pal.”

He gave me a toothy grin, whirled and went off running. About ten years from now, I thought, that kid was going to be way ahead of a lot of guys who walked.

The hell of it was, they’d hate him for it.

At the tick of eight A.M. I rang the bell at Professor Elliott Irwin’s home. He opened the door immediately.

“Mr. Scott?”

“Yes, sir.”

“Come in.”

He was about sixty, small, lean, sharp-eyed. His hair was thinning, and gray, and he had a little pointed gray goatee. He looked—the word seems absurd for a grown man, but it fit—cute.

“Come along, come along,” he said, leading me through the front room and into a hallway. I half expected him to hop like an elf or leprechaun. We wound up in a spacious, bright kitchen, square table with checkered yellow-and-white cloth on it, yellow curtains draped at the window.

A plate of ham and eggs and a cup of steaming coffee were on the table. “Ridiculous hour for a man to phone,” he said cheerfully. “Ridiculous. Have you eaten breakfast?”

“No—but I’m not hungry.” As soon as I said it I knew it was a lie. It didn’t matter; I’d grab some chow later.

“I shall eat,” he said, as if announcing he was going to build the Sphinx. “Coffee?”

“Yes, thanks.”

He poured a cup for me, sat down, attacked ham and eggs with relish, almost with ferocity. Chewing, he said, “Now, what’s this about spectrograms, Mr. Scott? How did you know I am an expert? What is your purpose in desiring the prints? Are you also a scientist? No, you do not sound like a scientist—you do not look like a scientist, either. Say something. You see, in conjunction with my work on spectrograms, I am endeavoring to determine the physical, mental, moral, and spiritual qualities of an individual from the language, tone, rhythm, inflection, timbre—”

“Professor—”

“—strength, emphasis, accent, and idiosyncracies of his voice alone. So far, it’s merely a hobby, but … who knows?”

“Professor Irwin, this is all very—”

“That’s enough. I would say … hmm. You are—or were—a military man. Army.”

“Marines.”

“Not Army?”

“No.”

“Navy?”

“Please skip the submarine service, and National Guard. I was one of the best goddamn fighting men in the world, Professor, a United States Marine—”

“Goodness, don’t get angry.”

“A Marine.”

“Of course.”

He ate eggs, and thought. “Hmm. At the present time, however, you are—a pugilist?”

“No. Oh, I’ve hit a few guys, but—”

“I have it. You put out fires in oil wells.”

“I’m losing my confidence in you, Professor—”

“A policeman, then.”

“Hey, pretty close! I’m a private investigator.”

“I was going to say that next.” He thrust a huge hunk of ham into his mouth.

“Professor, do you mind if I ask you a couple of questions?”

“I’d be delighted. I may not answer them, but I would be delighted—”

“I know, essentially, what a Voiceprint—or spectrogram—is. But can you, personally, from a tape recording, make Voice-prints of each person who speaks on that recording and be assured each separate Voiceprint reflects one individual’s voice pattern and only his?”

“Of course. Why, except for Lawrence G. Kersta himself, I undoubtedly know more about voice spectrography than any other man alive.”

“Who’s Lawrence G. Kersta?”

“Who’s Lawrence G. Kersta? You don’t know?”

“I’m sorry, but I haven’t the faintest—”

“He is the originator, the developer, the innovator of the Voiceprint Identification System. He is president of Voiceprint Laboratories in Somerville, New Jersey—why, it was from him I got my own Sound Spectrograph. You ask me about Voice-prints, but you don’t know who’s Lawrence G. Kersta?”

“I said I was sorry, Professor. Look, all I want to know is if you—personally—can make identification of a man from his voice alone.”

“Of course. Each of us, Mr. Scott, is an individual, singular, unique, different from all others in all ways. You are a policeman—”

“Detective.”

“—and therefore know a man’s fingerprints may be used to positively identify him. In the same fashion, each man can be identified by the individual structure, quality and vibration of his voice, which is peculiar to him alone.”

“Well, you make it sound simple enough.”

“Of course. You see, intelligible speech is effected essentially by controlled dynamic manipulation of the articulators—including tongue, lips, teeth, jaw muscles, and soft palate—plus both the fixed dimensions of the individual’s vocal cavities—throat, nasal, and two oral cavities, even sinus cavities—and the transitory influence upon those cavities of the tongue’s position in the mouth. That’s simple enough, isn’t it?”

“I like the way you said it the first time.”

“Since individuals possess neither identical fixed dimensions of the vocal-tract cavities,” he went on cheerfully, “nor identical dynamic-use patterns of the muscle-complexes controlling articulator movements, the fact that each individual’s voice—and thus Voiceprint—is unique should be obvious even to the most obtuse.”

“Just so you can do it,” I said.

“Of course. It is merely necessary to prepare from the individual’s voice, or a recording of it, a visible representation or graph which faithfully corresponds to the aural pattern—a picture, a record in line instead of sound. A Voiceprint.”

“OK, say you have a Voiceprint of a guy named Tom. If ever you make another of Tom’s speech you’ll know it was Tom and not Joe. Right?”

“Loose, but reasonably accurate.”

“Assume I give you a tape with seven voices on it. Then I give you a separate tape with maybe fifteen voices on it, including some of the original seven. Can you—in a reasonable length of time—tell me which of the fifteen speak on the original tape?”

“Certainly. What is your conception of a reasonable length of time?”

“Eight hours.”

“Oh, dear, no. Let me explain, Mr. Scott. Basically, we use spectrographic impressions of ten spoken English words: the, to, and, me, on, is, you, I, it, a. We like to have at least eight spoken words, thus eight prints must be made, and of course the true expertise is in analysis and comparison. We look for a minimum of twenty points of similarity—technically, points of identification—and I like to have about two hours for making of prints, and comparison, in each case. One must be very sure, in legal work, or when appearing in a courtroom—”

“This doesn’t have to stand up in court. It might later, but in that case there’d be much more time available. Probable identification would be enough for me.”

“But I have—other work, my new book—”

“I mean if you did nothing else. I simply want to know if what I ask is possible.”

“Oh, it’s possible.”

I told the professor in more detail what I was after. I also told him everything I’d said to the stenographer, and more. It didn’t faze him a bit.

“Phaugh,” he said. “I am a scientist. I am not concerned in the slightest—”

“These guys shoot scientists, too. They don’t give a hoot who they shoot.”

“Whom. But I do rather like the sound of that hoot-shoot. The whom does ruin it, doesn’t it? It’s the mm sound. You’re right. ‘They don’t give a hoot who they shoot.’”

“Professor, I’m talking about real shooting. Real bullets. Real whos—or whoms—”

“Phaugh.”

“Well, if you don’t give a hoot, it’s OK with me. I just wanted you to know what you might be getting involved in.” I paused. “Will you do it?”

He patted his mouth with a napkin—he’d finished eating. Took him about seven bites. I figured he must have a fantastically efficient digestive system, or a cud. “It would be interesting,” he said. “These persons are true criminals? The real—real McCoy, I suppose you would say?”

“They are genuine, copper-plated, A-Number-One criminals. Marvelous specimens. About as good as any you could find anywhere, Professor.”

“You have the specimens with you?”

“Specimens? The criminals?”

“The voices. The recording.”

I took the reel of tape and seven folded sheets of white bond paper from my pocket, placed them on the tabletop. “Recording, and a double-spaced typed transcript of the last six minutes on the tape,” I told him. “The six minutes—and seven voices—I’m interested in.”

“I might make notes on the transcript, if you’ve no objections.”

“No objections.”

“I shall do it.”

By golly, it was as easy as that.

Or, rather, arranging the professor’s end of it was.

The other end—my end—was going to be a little tougher.

CHAPTER TWELVE

Lucrezia blinked at me from the doorway, then smiled sweetly. And hotly. I imagined she did everything hotly. “What in the world are you doing at the back door?”

“Well, I get tired of the same old thing,” I said. “A man can get in a rut—”

“Oh, I’ll bet it’s because … Dad explained what’s been going on, Shell. I pestered him till he told me everything. You were afraid someone might be watching the house?”

“That’s it. And I guess it’s just as well Tony told you, Lucrezia. Only I don’t think he realizes how serious the mess is now—in fact, I know he doesn’t.”

She was silent for a moment., “Oh, thanks for the flowers, Shell. They’re lovely. What can I do to thank you?”

“You might start by asking me into the house.”

She laughed and stepped aside, saying, “You can’t imagine how curious Dad is about that note you sent with the roses. He’s in the den.”

She led me there and inside it. Brizante was sitting on the green couch scowling. After I expressed my admiration of the hues of his left cheek and eggplant-colored left eye, we all sat down and I said, “First thing, Tony, did you get the meeting set up?”

He nodded. “For ten A.M. just like you said in your note with the flowers. I’m going to feel damn foolish if I called a special meeting of the whole council and there’s nothing I can tell them that makes sense.”

“You won’t feel foolish when I get through. You may feel like grabbing the first plane to Australia, though.”

I’d carried my portable AIWA recorder in with me, and when I put it on the low table before the couch, Tony stared at me for long seconds. “You—did you find the tape?” he asked me quietly. “The other one?”

“Yeah, I found it.”

“Why didn’t you let me know? My God—”

“I didn’t want to phone you here. Hell, that’s why I sent the note.”

“Of course.” He nodded. “I forgot.”

It bothered me a little when he said, “I forgot,” but only a little. Not enough.

I was going on, “Besides, I’ve been pretty busy since I left you this morning. Main thing is, this is the tape. And it—well, you’ll hear it yourselves in a minute or two. Have you had any word from Sergeant Striker yet?”

“No. Who is he?”

“Local cop, one of the Villa Security Guards. I’m pretty sure we can trust him. Going to have to trust somebody.”

“We will hear from him?” Lucrezia asked.

“Yeah, he’s coming over. I called him at his home this morning. Didn’t tell him everything, but enough so he’s got the big picture. Interestingly, Striker wasn’t very surprised, he’d felt for a long time some funny stuff has been going on here at the Villas.” I looked at Tony. “Like some of the complaints at that council meeting I attended yesterday—bum sewers, plumbing, potholes in streets. Fishy real-estate deals—like the unusual delay in building whatever you call the Doctors’ Hospital. Plus items I doubt even you know about. It’s the sort of thing to be expected anywhere when the Mob moves in. The Mob boys get fat, while the Ginsburgs and Okiyames—and Brizantes—get leaned on.”

“The Mob? You mean, like this Lecci, or Letch—”

“It will all be explained in a few minutes, Tony. In, well, just a little over six minutes. First, you should know Striker’s coming here—if he can work it out, that is—on duty, as a special guard assigned for your protection. Just as an added discouragement to anybody who might feel like holding a match against your house, or taking even more vigorous action.”

That, which I assumed would bother Tony most, wasn’t the subject of his next question. He said, “The delays, troubles, potholes and that, we have discussed these things in the council over and over. The last two years it gets worse and worse. But we never spoke of crooks. You think crooks are doing some of this?”

“Not necessarily. But when you find fox tracks in the chicken yard, and dead chickens, it kind of makes you think. Take this Doctors’ Hospital of yours. The Building and Trades Union in charge of construction is the same union my recent client in L.A. had trouble with.”

Lucrezia said, “The one you told me of, Shell? When you were shot by those terrible men?”

“Right, and ‘terrible men’ is a very apt description. One of them being Jimmy Ryan, whom I encountered here at the Villas last night. Another reason I figure Striker’s OK, he gave me an additional interesting item of information. When I picked up the tape this morning, I shot a hood named Frankenstein. Around dawn, a Lieutenant Weeton found his body two miles from here, clear out at the end of something called Jackrabbit Street—and wherever that is, it’s not where I shot him. One of his front teeth was broken off in the middle. Apparently recently, since he had also a fat lip.”

Tony touched his swollen-shut eggplant eye. “I did it? When I got this?”

“I’d say that’s a very safe assumption. Well, you might as well listen to the tape.”

I pushed the “Forward” or “Play” button. Six minutes later there was a half-minute, at least, of complete silence.

Lucrezia broke it with a soft explosion of rippling Italian. Tony looked at her sharply. “Lu, you shouldn’t say such things.” Then he added, “But I forgive you,” and ripped off some very similar-sounding stuff himself.

I looked at my watch. “We don’t have much time. Five men on that tape are still unidentified, but the way I see it one of them damn near has to be Pete Lecci. If so, with your help I can prove it, and maybe a lot more. We know The Letch is Mafia, very big once, not so big today. But still alive—and mafiosi as long as he lives. That doesn’t mean the whole meeting was Cosa Nostra, but the rest of those guys aren’t choir boys, which is all we need to know.”

Brizante was squinting at me from his one, stern, hawklike eye. “With my help, you said. How—”

“I’ll get to it. All hoods, mafiosi or not, know their main weapon is fear, terror in the victim, and their two strongest shields are protection—the fix, grease, friendly or bought-and-paid-for cops and judges and politicians—and secrecy. The absolute minimum of publicity about their activities.”

Lucrezia was watching me with interest, but that was all. I judged from Tony’s expression, though, that he felt I was building up to something. Which, of course, I was.

I went on, “These creeps have been making most of the moves so far. I figure it’s time we called a few shots. When you’re up against hoods, if you can shake them around a little, confuse them, keep them off balance—”

“My God,” Tony said. I think he got it right then. He went on in a strange voice, “What are you going to do?”

“At the council meeting, I want you to introduce me. And then I want you to let me, in front of the entire council and whoever else happens to be present, play this tape.”

Silence.

Finally Tony said, “I thought it. But I didn’t believe it.”

“Think about it some more, then,” I told him. “Those bums already know their meeting was bugged. They chased Jenkins and caught him—with you, Tony, which means they know you were almost surely in on the bugging with him. Yet we assume they took off with the tape and Jenkins—but left you behind. Why? For one thing, they knew Fred Jenkins was the guy listening to them while recording their lovely conversation. Fred, not you. They knew Fred had just met you, and obviously you had no chance to play the tape. So if they grabbed Jenkins and the tape and took off, they were home free, no need to worry about Brizante.”

I paused. “That name’s part of it, too, as you just heard toward the end of those six minutes. Unless they feel they have to, they aren’t going to hit Lucrezia Brizante’s papa. Not that guys like these may not come to feel it’s necessary. And …” I paused again. “All of this, of course, applies to the time when they believed they’d grabbed the tape—”

Tony interrupted. “But by now they know there is another.” He poked a finger at the recorder. “That one, where they say at its end, there is a bug, someone is listening.” He was nodding slowly, holding onto that crazy moustache of his with both hands. He gave the handlebars a gentle yank, first on one side and then the other. “Fred, you think he is dead, like Gil?”

“I wouldn’t take any nickel bets he’s alive. Not if they did haul him off with them, which we’re probably a hundred percent safe in assuming.”

“If he is dead, then before he died—Shell, these men, these assassinos, they not only are aware there is another tape, they also know you found it. I mean, they know. Because Fred must have told them, even where he threw it away.”

“You can depend on it.”

“Unless … maybe he could have kept from telling—”

“He did, Tony. As long as he could. It was a good hour and a half after they grabbed him before Frankenstein and a guy named Bludgett showed up on Willow Lane, where I found the tape. Right where Fred had tossed it.”

He sat very still, and he squeezed his lips tightly together, and his face twisted as if he were in pain. But then he gave his moustache a great yank and said, “That’s a long time. That’s a goddamn long time.”

I agreed with Tony. I hadn’t met Fred Jenkins, but in my book he was—more likely, had been—a helluva man.

Tony blinked his good eye at me several times. “Hey, there is something else. Me. I am in the soup.”

“That does begin to become apparent, doesn’t it? But I think we can cool the soup a little.”

“This playing of the recording,” Lucrezia said, “that is so others know what was said by those men?” She smiled slightly. “This is cooling the soup?”

“Part of it. Those guys can’t knock off a half-dozen or dozen local citizens—and for that matter don’t want to. So let’s make sure they soon understand that a lot of people know what those seven characters talked about, including Reyes’ murder. Besides, the only people identifiable from that tape—which our boys will also realize if any of them hear it or even hear about it—are Ace and Fleepo. Who should suddenly become scarce, which won’t hurt our side a bit.”

Lucrezia had been listening more intently than I’d assumed. “You mean, because they are the only two who answered when spoken to by name.”

“On the button. There’s no way to tag the other five from what was said, or even from the sound of their voices. Which, by the way, should make those five feel safer. And we want them to feel safer—for a while.”

I looked at my watch. It was twenty minutes of ten, so I wrapped it up. “The last part of it is this.” I pulled the left lapel of my jacket away from the transistorized and battery-operated mini-recorder nestled snugly next to the holster of my .38. “I want every one of those council members to say something, so I can get their voices recorded.”

“A vote?” Tony asked. “Each must say Yes or No?”

“Yeah, something like that. Maybe this will help.” I hadn’t mentioned the Voiceprint angle to them, and there was no need to now, anyway. But when I’d had the stenographer make the transcript, which I’d given to Professor Elliott Irwin, I’d had one carbon made. I pulled it from my coat pocket and gave it to Tony, explaining what it was. “Maybe you can use it at the meeting.”

“Ah, fine,” he said, good eye skimming the first page. “Like, I suggest we forward the transcript to the mayor and the City Council. For information and possible action. And, on that, we take a vote. Or would you object—”

“No, sounds like a good idea. The main thing is, try to work it so each of the men has to speak a few words. Ask them for an opinion, to repeat their vote, anything, but get at least half a dozen words out of each of them if you can. Also, I want them to speak in order, right around the table, so I can keep track of them.”

“I can handle it.”

“Now, look, Tony—and you, too, Lucrezia—you don’t have to go along with any of this. That’s why I’ve spent so much time explaining, so you’d both know—”

“Please, no more of that. I want to hear no more.”

The way he said it, I believed him. Lucrezia was equally emphatic that she approved. Though she was less concerned, since she wouldn’t be going to the meeting with us.

“You also understand, I suppose,” I told them, “that the making of this tape was extraordinarily illegal. And simply my playing it may make me personally eligible for much legal, not to mention extralegal, action. However, you can be certain the hoods aren’t going to admit they were bugged, so we might get away with it.”

Lucrezia said softly, “Shell … I see that doing this may, for a little while, help Dad. And me. Make us—safer, a little. But you, will not these men be more—”

“Don’t worry about that. Nothing I do—or don’t do—is going to change their minds about me.” I looked at Tony. “One thing, you know from nothing. Just introduce me and I’ll take it from there. Don’t act a bit different toward Lecci—DiGiorno—or anybody else. The hoods already know the score, sure. But if the law also gets peeved, let it be with me—I’ve been there before. Besides, no sense all three of us being involved if it isn’t necessary, and it isn’t.”

Lucrezia stood up. I haven’t mentioned—though I had, of course, noticed—that she was wearing a cream-colored turtle-neck sweater which was very loose-fitting, and tight jeans or slacks which were very form-fitting, and as she stood up she pulled down on the bottom of her sweater, thus for a moment causing the top half to be as form-fitting as the bottom half. I have mentioned that hers was an exceptionally fit form to begin with, and the sight threatened to exhaust my entire reserves of testosterone.

It was a brief and lovely moment, which she shattered completely by saying, “Let’s go.”

“What do you mean, let’s?” I said. “Tony and I are going—”

“Tony and you, and Lucrezia.”

For thirty seconds there was a great deal of pyrotechnic Italian and a little English. It ended when Tony, his upper arms pressed against his sides, elbows bent and hands open and pointing outward near his shoulders lifted and dropped his shoulders in a very expressive gesture, saying something like, “… la sua mamma,” and a few other things, none of which sounded like a direct order to Lucrezia.

“Tony,” I said. “What the hell? Why don’t you just tell her she can’t go?”

He did that funny little hands-spread-out-near-the-shoulders thing again. “She’s just like her mama.”

“But—you—you wear the pants,” I said. “You’re her father. I mean, last night … You simply said, ‘Lucrezia! This is not for women! Go to your room!’ Things like that. It was, well, kind of thrilling. Do it again, Tony.”

He didn’t speak. He did give me a look of profound disgust, however. Or maybe it was pity.

“Lucrezia!” I said. “Go to your room!”

She laughed. “You both sound so silly,” she said.

I gave Brizante a look. Same kind of look. We were beginning to understand each other.

Lucrezia said, “If my father can go to the meeting, and my”—a little smile grew, and stayed, on her face—“my detective can go, then I can go.”

The doorbell rang.

Lucrezia started out of the den but I said, “Hold it.” She stopped. “Don’t let power go to your head, baby. I’ll get it.” She obeyed me, just as if she were my slave.

Every day, I thought, I may learn a little more about women. Then, again, I may not.

I stood next to the door, not in front of it, with my Colt in my hand—it may sound silly, but just such silliness has helped me live to a ripe old age. Well, to thirty. Which is a lot riper than it would otherwise have been.

“Yeah?” I said. And if a man’s voice replied, “Teluhgram from Western Uhnyun,” I was going to shoot him right through the door.

“Striker.” I recognized his voice, but didn’t put the Colt away until I’d gotten a look at him.

When he came inside he watched me shove the gun into its holster, his expression almost—not quite—bored. “You’re a little itchy?”

“Just careful.”

“Good way to be. You want to fill me in a little more?”

I did. Quite a bit more. Then we were ready to go, and we went.

Brizante rode with Striker in the sergeant’s car, and I followed them in the Cad with Lucrezia. Two blocks from the Town Hall I pulled up at a stop sign, and noticed a man on our right walking toward the intersection. He looked at the car, smiled, and waved one hand at us.

It was Henry Yarrow.

He’d already had a good look at me—and Lucrezia—so I hit the horn lightly, motioned him over. As he started toward us I put my hand beneath my coat, near my gun. Not because I meant to yank it out; it was merely that the recorder’s “On-Off” switch was there. My coat was unbuttoned, so no cloth covered my very sensitive tie clasp.

Yarrow leaned on the side of the car, Lucrezia’s side, and looked in the open window at me. “Hi,” he said pleasantly, and by that time was looking at Lucrezia.

“Just curious, Mr. Yarrow. Any more trouble about the—problem last night?”

“No. I had to make a statement and sign it, that’s all.”

“You on your way to the council meeting?”

“Meeting?”

He’d been heading straight toward the Town Hall, only two blocks away. But I said, “There’s a special meeting, starts at ten o’clock.”

“I did hear something about it,” he said.

“I think you’d find it very interesting.”

“Well, perhaps I’ll look in.”

“See you there if you do,” I said.

He took one last look at Lucrezia, stepped back and gave us a little wave again. I switched off my recorder, then took out my notebook and jotted on a blank sheet. “No. 1—Henry Yarrow.”

Lucrezia said, “Yarrow. Is he—”

“He is. The bug was in his house. That’s where those seven jokers were holding their little murder meeting.”

She looked shocked. “He’s such a … nice-looking man. That’s the man Mr. Reyes talked to—Tuesday morning when he was with Dad?”

“Uh-huh. That’s what makes it so interesting.”

“You mean … he was one of those seven men?”

“Probably, but I’m not sure. I will be sure tonight. I just took his prints.”

Lucrezia wondered what that meant, but I didn’t enlighten her. Instead I put the Cad in gear and headed for the Town Hall.

The first three or four minutes of the meeting weren’t much. Routine, getting date and time into the record and such. But then it stopped being routine. It became the most unusual meeting of the Sunrise Villas Community Representation Council, ever, at least to that date.

Half a dozen people were seated in the spectators’ section. Not many, but a pretty fair turnout for a special and very recently called meeting. Particularly considering that I knew two of them. Henry Yarrow was not present, after all. But Mrs. Blessing was. Yarrow hadn’t been planning to attend the special meeting? Well, maybe not. Also present was burly Lieutenant Weeton. He gave me a cold glare, then ignored me.

All twelve members of the council had been at their seats around the long oval table when Lucrezia and I walked in. A few looked slightly annoyed at having had their day unexpectedly interrupted. They continued to look annoyed as Brizante explained the meeting had been called solely in order that a certain presentation could be made by a Mr. Sheldon Scott, an investigator, not a resident of Sunrise Villas. He then introduced me and I walked to the head of the oval table as Brizante moved his chair aside.

The cassette in my portable recorder was rewound and ready to go. So I simply lifted the compact machine onto the table and said, “I want to play a tape recording for you, gentlemen. I can’t tell you how it came into my possession, precisely where it was recorded, or anything else about it. It will have to—well, speak for itself. I will merely say that it is authentic, and was recorded here, at Sunrise Villas. Among other things, the individuals you will hear speaking—not, of course, realizing a record was being made of their words—discuss the murder, by members of their company, of a Sunrise Villas resident named Gilberto Reyes.”

All traces of annoyance vanished. That even caused some hubbub and mild tumult. I was trying to watch for extreme reactions, but spotted nothing of the kind. On my left was an elderly gentleman who vaguely resembled a graying beagle, and on my right “Mr. DiGiorno.”

When I looked at him, at The Letch, he simply lifted his eyes to mine and let them stay upon them, unblinking. There was death in those old eyes of his. I don’t mean he was necessarily shooting thoughts of hate or murder at me, merely that there was in them the coldness, the tombstone chill, the almost-emptiness, often seen in the eyes of men who have killed, and killed again, and again.

Of course, if Lecci was on the tape, he knew it—and he knew damn well what I was doing. Further, if his voice was on the tape and he did not yet know how poor was its quality, his self-control was remarkable.

I added, “There is, as you will note, gentlemen, extended discussion about the desirability, even the necessity, of killing a man referred to only as Scott. The Scott referred to is Sheldon Scott. I mean, I am the fellow to whom such reference is so often made.”

That didn’t cause a lot of hubbub. So I said, “Well, I thought you might get a boot out of that. One other thing, there is some profanity upcoming, which I mention in the event any ladies in the audience desire not to hear such language, and prefer to leave.”

There were only two gals besides Lucrezia present, one of them Mrs. Blessing, the second a more-than-middle-aged babe who had brought along her knitting. Mrs. Blessing remained in her seat, but looked around. For the exit? For the president of her real estate agency? The other gal also remained in her seat, knitting. It was my hunch, had fifty old gals been present, fifty old gals would have remained in their seats. But, in some ways, I’m a cynic.

I didn’t say any more. I merely punched the “Forward” button, and the tape began to play.

CHAPTER THIRTEEN

For the next six minutes there was, except for the flat voices issuing from the machine’s speaker, silence. I mean silence, total and complete.

And a thought occurred to me which I had not really considered before this moment. Most of those present—not all, but certainly most—were experiencing a moment unique in their lives. This was something they were hearing for the first time and would probably never hear again: hoodlums, professional muscle-men and killers, discussing—with a casual bluntness that made it more chilling than even the most expert professional actors could have made it—murder. Murder accomplished, murder planned. The real thing, the “hit,” the shot from darkness, the taking of human life.

Even if there were many in the audience who did not believe this was what I had claimed it to be, the words and phrases carried a peculiar conviction of their own. It would be difficult, I thought, for anyone to hear this recording, even if he knew nothing of thieves and mafiosi and hit-men, without feeling a kind of combined fear and revulsion, a feeling that “Maybe …”

And then:

“… The bastard can’t be far from here right now—”

“Sonofabitch—”

“Fleepo, get the heap—”

I punched the “Stop” button, slipped the recorder into its carry bag, took the machine with me as I walked in silence—still that silence had not been broken—to a chair in the spectators’ section, next to Lucrezia.

Tony did his bit. The vote was unanimous to send the transcript to the mayor and council, with some tacked-on recommendations, consulting the sheriff and such. Lucrezia had given me the names of the council members and they were already written down in my book, so as the eleven members, other than Tony, voted or spoke I merely checked off the numbers, made a few notes.

Some gave me more words by far than I needed. For example, Reverend Archibald stood up and, I do believe, began to deliver a speech—or possibly a sermon—in that syrupy, sonorous, oracular style of his, but Tony chopped him off after a few sentences. He sat down reluctantly, but managed to get off a final oboe-like “‘Sinners and whoremongers!’” plus a bit more. I missed the chapter and verse; no matter, it was something Holy. I listed Archie as No. 6. DiGiorno-Lecci was No. 2, first of the council members to speak. The Beagle, on Brizante’s left, became No. 12. So I switched on my mini-recorder again, then walked over to Lieutenant Weeton for No. 13.

It wasn’t necessary to draw a comment from him. I no sooner sat down in an empty seat next to him than he said, his voice imbued with no less grating whininess than when last we’d chatted in front of Yarrow’s, “Scott, I never heard nothing so dumb. What’d you do, hire some out-of-work actors for that crap?”

“Actors?” I said, raising my eyebrows. “It sounded authentic to me. Matter of fact, Lieutenant, it was the legit.”

He lifted one of his hamlike, almost misshapen fists, and shook it gently. “If I thought for a minute that was the up-and-up I’d have to guess somebody broke the law.”

“Presumably you do not mean those lads who were talking about hitting Reyes. So I suppose you imply you’d have to arrest me. In front of all these people. Who just listened to all those actors. Something like that?”

His jaw muscles bulged. “Maybe it’ll come to that, Scott.” He paused, continuing to exercise his jaws. “For crissakes, everybody on your supposed authentic tape sounded like the same guy. Could’ve been anybody talking—even you.”

“Sure. Or you. Or Cary Grant. Or Ace. Or Fleepo. Can you tell me anything about those two actors, Lieutenant?”

He didn’t answer. I had enough, anyway. And I’d come to this meeting with a slight worry that Weeton might actually arrest me. That, of course, would mean he believed in me—and in my tape. And it did seem the lieutenant wasn’t a believer. I assumed he’d be glad to put the arm on me anyway, should a complaint be filed. But the complainant would almost have to admit his voice was on my recording, and I didn’t expect that to happen.

So I left him with one final comment. “Just suppose this was the McCoy, Lieutenant. Maybe it isn’t possible to tell from the sound who was speaking—I’ll admit that much. But … deductions can be made.”

“What does that mean?”

“I can tell you one guy who, for sure, was not at the party.”

“Yeah? Like who?”

“Like Lucky Ryan.”

He stared at me, touched his tongue to his upper lip, and sort of wiggled it there, as though thinking with it, and continued to stare. I told him good-bye, politely.

Lucrezia and I left, sat in the car until Tony and Sergeant Striker came out, then followed them back to Brizante’s home. I had told Lucrezia I’d be taking off right away, and before she and Tony went into the house, she asked me if I’d come in for a minute before leaving.

Striker had been as impressed by the recording as Weeton had not. I talked to him for a few minutes, then asked, “Sure this won’t get you in any trouble? I know it may get you killed, but I mean any other trouble.”

“Nope, I made arrangements. With the captain.”

“Weeton might not be happy with your going over his head.”

He laughed, as though the thought pleased him.

Lucrezia met me at the front door and asked me into the empty living room. Then she stood in front of me, about a foot away, pushed her head forward a couple of inches, pooched her lips out in a perfect pucker—there really should be a better word for it—and said, “Shake, stranger.”

And if that strikes you as even vaguely sickening, you have led the wrong kind of life. You have been misled. You are malconditioned. You salivate to the ding-dong bell.

You have, at least, not seen and heard a “Shake, stranger,” in the presence of the pucker—there really should be a better word for it—of luscious Lucrezia Brizante.

I shook.

Back at Mountain Shadows, I had a thick, blood-rare steak with all the trimmings in the main dining room. I even requested a table overlooking the pool—despite the fact that the drabness of sky I’d noted at dawn had become dark grays and near blacks almost ominous—for it had struck me that these might be the last moments of calmness and peace I would enjoy for a while.

It was my firm conviction that, somewhere behind the scenes, there was not only consternation—mixed with some relief—among the evildoers, but plans being laid for more evildoing. And that in connection with the evildoing my name was being bandied about in all kinds of reckless ways. I doubted, however, that any bombs or machine guns—or even small artillery—would go off before dark, thus I meant to prepare myself as much as possible for whatever my immediate future might be, if I had any. So, after a splendid and long-overdue meal, I went back to my suite, left a call for six P.M., and turned down the sheets on my dandy double bed.

It was about one minute until noon, so before conking out I switched on the TV, then climbed into the sack and caught the noon news. I thought there was a chance mention might be made of this morning’s events at the Sunrise Villas council meeting. To be perfectly candid, I kind of hoped there would be, maybe including even a complimentary, if fleeting, reference to me. I did feel the morning’s adventure had been quite newsworthy. If, of course, one didn’t mind being sued.

Sunrise Villas, yes; council meeting, no.

First crack out of the box, the announcer mentioned the Villas and I pricked up my ears and maybe smiled, sort of hopefully. But, no; the reference was to Sunrise Villas as one of four retirement communities in Arizona—the others being Sunrise Villas’ “twin” or sister-city at Tucson, called Tucson Villas, Del Webb’s Sun City, and Festival Town up near Flagstaff in northern Arizona.

And: to AGING, to Kerwin Stephens, and to the glorious opportunity just around the corner for many of Arizona’s senior citizens. I listened with only half an ear, and watched with a droopy eye, but when Congressman Stephens himself appeared on the screen I recognized not only his avian features but his huskily cooing voice.

He mentioned the Commission of the Agency for Gerontological Investigation and Need-Grants—using the whole handle—and the fact that, as its chairman, he was deeply concerned with the need evidenced in Arizona and elsewhere, which I gathered meant all fifty states.

Then he said something like, “We begin with the premise that as long as some men have more than others, we have not achieved social justice. Thus it is our task to work diligently until no man has less of anything than everybody else, or more of everything than anybody else. I am sure we all look forward to the day, perhaps in the not-too-distant future, when no man is more underdeprived or less overpoverished than any other man.”

Well, it was something like that. Whatever he said, it was pretty tough to take on a full stomach. So I let my mind wander. On my way back to the Shadows I had stopped by Professor Elliott Irwin’s home and left with him the cassette of tape I’d recorded at the Villas. By now he was, I imagined, playing with it and letting out little elfish yips of excitement. Having by then heard the original tape, he’d been having a great time making spectrograms of the seven “definitely criminal” specimens, and had attempted to involve me in his enthusiastic elucidation of this decibel level and that apparently vestigial epiglottis, and had even showed me some of the black-on-white spectrograms or “contour Voiceprints” which he’d already made. They resembled aerial maps of aerial maps, a bunch of waving lines forming squarish circles and oblongish dollops, and had not been of huge interest to me.

Of huge interest to me was the fact that the professor’s work was progressing well, and he was certain he’d be able to get the results to me—by telephone—within a few hours, perhaps before sundown. He agreed to call as soon as possible, and we worked out a simple method for him to convey his findings to me.

There were, I realized, other avenues of investigation I could pursue, but the professor’s research might well make some of them unnecessary, and even open up entirely unsuspected directions in which I might more profitably go. So I didn’t feel I was losing any time, really, but merely recharging the physical battery while awaiting—hopefully—revelation.

Nothing about me on TV yet.

In fact, though I was pretty sleepy and may not have caught every single one of his words exactly, Congressman Kerwin Stephens was really going lickety-split now: “I am happy to say we are making real progress, my friends. We have made great advances in aiding the underprivileged and providing advantages for the disadvantaged. But this—even AGING—is only a beginning! We must—and we will—aid not only the overaged and the underyouthed, the underaged and the overyouthed, but also the overpovertied and the underluxuried, the underovered and the overundered. This, of course, will cost money.”

I shook my head in sleepy wonder as Kerwin cooed, or so it seemed to me he cooed: “The Committee on AGING is at present funded with only one and one half billion dollars, a mere pittance. In time, of course, a few more pittances will be required. But surely the wealthiest nation in the world can afford a small percentage of its Gross National Product to bring security, health, joy, happiness, intelligence, success, peace, prosperity, and superiority to every man, woman, and child …”

Believe it or not, even though there was a chance something nice might yet be said about my morning’s work at Sunrise Villas, I didn’t even get to hear Kerwin finish telling me, and everybody else, what he was going to do for us. I fell into dreamland, with the TV still on.…

The insistent ringing pulled me out of sleep, and my first sluggish thought was of Professor Irwin. But it was the operator, calling me at six P.M. I hung up, clicked off the TV, phoned room service and ordered coffee. Then I dressed—with care, and in a brand-new suit, since the first wearing of a new suit always elevates my state of mind, which could use some elevation.

When I sat down to coffee I was clad, gorgeously, in a lovely custom-tailored garment of shimmering fabric, sort of bluish with a little green and slight pinkishness and faint gold threads running every-which way—I thought of it as the color of a drunken dragon’s eye. Thus appareled, like a matador going forth to joust, after my second cup of coffee I was not only nearly awake but felt splendid, recharged and optimistic.

It was a bit too early for Elliott Irwin to call. In the meantime, I felt it would be wise to figure out what I intended to do this night no matter what the results of his Voiceprint comparisons were. While my public playing of the Jenkins tape had undoubtedly been helpful in many ways and, I believed, necessary, in another way it had at least diminished what might have been a golden opportunity. Because I felt it would be very helpful if I could get my hands on one of the hoods I’d run up against in the past twenty-four hours.

I knew Ace and Fleepo had been present at that meeting of the seven, and thus would be able—if I asked them in a way sufficiently persuasive—to tell me who the other five had been. Or, rather, the other four, since I figured Frankenstein had been there, too. He wouldn’t be of any help to me now, however, not in his condition. But neither would Ace and Fleepo if they’d skipped as far and fast as I assumed they had.

There was also Lucky Ryan, who might know much I would be pleased to hear. But unless a very slick con job was pulled on him—or info about the Jenkins tape failed to reach his ears—Lucky was not likely to be available, either. I ticked them off. Frankenstein, Ace, Fleepo, Lucky Ryan. Thus from the total of five, Lucky Ryan plus the four boys with whom I’d tangled at a distance there on Willow Lane last night, only one likely choice remained. There was …

It was funny, but every time I thought of that monstrously wide and massive egg, the same treacherous little words I’d thought upon first lamping him sneaked in, unbidden, and scampered around inside my skull like tiny rats: Man, I hope I never get clobbered by Bludgett.

It wasn’t that I was afraid of Bludgett. Not really. Not exactly. It was merely, I told myself, that it would be infinitely simpler to extract information of value from comparative weaklings such as Ace and Fleepo, or a gorilla, if I could get them off alone someplace. Probably you could pound on Bludgett with a ball-peen hammer until he yawned. The problem, then, was how to get my hands on one of those other creeps. Hell, maybe some were still around. It was possible. Sure. There was hope.

At that very moment there was a soft knock on my door.

For a few seconds I almost believed my problem had been solved, that one of the lads I’d been thinking about had come here to kill me. What luck! After all, thoughts are things, and if you think about something long enough and hard enough you usually get it. All I had to do was dream up something sufficiently clever, and capture whoever it was who’d come to kill me, and—

My plans were interrupted by a voice outside the door.

“Mr. Scott? You there? This is Artie Katz.”

I let him in.

“I just saw something I figured you ought to know about.”

“Oh?”

“Yeah, I went out to pick up a Lincoln for a guest and I saw a guy looking inside your car. You know, like he was looking at the registration, making sure who it belonged to.”

“That’s interesting. And it might be a very lucky break for me, Artie. You keep it up, you’re going to retire awfully young.” I slipped him a bill.

“Thanks a lot,” he said. “It just seemed peculiar to me.”

“Seems peculiar to me, too. Can you describe the guy?”

He smiled. What’s to smile about? I wondered.

“No trouble,” he said. “He was a real big guy, actually enormous—”

“What?”

“Not real tall, no more’n six or seven feet, I guess. I mean, six feet. He’s so wide, you just naturally think of him like, seven feet tall maybe.”

“You do, huh?”

“I never saw anybody so wide—”

“Forget that for a minute. We want to be sure of … identification. Precise and accurate identification. Mustn’t accuse anyone falsely, or even think falsely about any innocent—”

“Why’d you sit down so quick, Mr. Scott? You feel all right?”

“Of course I feel all right, you idiot.”

“Can I get you some water or something?”

“Will you shut—I mean, I’m trying to think. Can’t seem to … get it working up there. Ah, identification. Tell me—think carefully now—the color of this man’s hair.”

“It didn’t have any color.”

“Come, Artie, everybody’s hair has some—”

“He didn’t have no hair. Bald as a egg.”

I sighed. “It’s him.” I sighed again. “It’s him. Can’t be two monsters on one earth like Bludgett.”

“Bludgett?”

“Bludgett. I hate the sound of the word. Bludgett!”

“Who’s he?”

“Merely a thug who took a shot at me last night. Who tried to kill me last night. Merely a human Alp who—”

“Shot at you? Tried to kill you?”

I’d forgotten Artie was still there. I had been talking to myself. I looked up. “Yes,” I said. “He did that. And I daresay, had the opportunity presented itself, he would have done infinitely more—”

“Oh, boy!”

“That’s a funny—what do you mean, ‘Oh, boy!’?”

“Well, if he tried to do that to you, you’ll sure get even with him, I’ll bet.”

“Artie—”

“I’ll bet you fix his wagon, huh? I’ll bet he’ll be sorry he tried to shoot you, Mr. Scott.”

“Artie—”

“You’re going to catch him and beat him up, aren’t you?”

“Artie, what kind of grades do you get in school?”

I don’t think he heard the question. In his mind’s eye, David again—after all these years—was going to slay Goliath. I had often wondered if that story was apocryphal. And never had I wondered more than now. “Tell me, Artie,” I said, “how did it go when you delivered the flowers this morning?”

“Not so hot. Some old lady with flour on her face came to the door. But this huge guy, Mr. Scott, are you going to go get him now?”

“Will you shut—Artie, let me put it in the form of a stupid question. Do you, ah, visualize me going out there and squaring off with Bludgett, and striking him down with tremendous blows?”

“Isn’t that what you’re going to do?”

“Well …”

“He’ll get away if you don’t hurry.”

“Artie, you’re old enough to begin learning the real truths of life. I feel I should pass on to you some of the wisdom I’ve gleaned over the years. Consider: what good would it do me to beat this man up?”

“Well, he shot at you, he tried to kill you—”

“That’s all well and good—bad. Artie, look at it this way. Brute force is the weapon of the savage, right? The instinctual reaction of the primitive, the animal, the throwback to the jungle, the hulking beast. Now, surely man is more than a hulking beast. Man’s brain elevates him above the savage, his intelligence raises him beyond the brute. What would I prove by beating Bludgett up? Merely that I’m stronger than he is, right? Where’s the joy, the pride, in that? No, I propose to outwit him.”

“Outwit?”

“Yes. It seems more sporting, a battle of mind against mind, brain against brain!”

“How?”

“Well …”

It was a good question. How was I going to outwit him? It was a good question, because first I had to catch him. How do you catch an elephant? I sent Artie on his way. Then I futzed around in the room a little, took a deep breath, squared my shoulders, and went out.

I walked around behind the hotel, down an alley there, approached the Mountain Shadows parking lot from the east. In only three or four minutes I’d spotted Bludgett. I used up another five minutes before moving toward him, though, because if Bludgett was here, one or more of his pals might be nearby. But, finally, having spotted nobody else in the lot, I made my move.

Bludgett sat in the front seat of a gray Chrysler sedan, parked where he had an unobstructed view of my Cadillac, on his left. He was keeping his eyes fixed so intently on my car that moving close and getting the drop on him was easy.

I leaned in the open window on the driver’s right and said, “It’s loaded, Bludgett. All you have to do is get smart, and I’ll unload it.”

He didn’t even jerk.

“It, by the way, is a Colt Special aimed at your ear.”

Still looking to his left he said a foul word, then without haste cranked that big bald head around and let sad eyes, above the little nose, rest on me. “I had a feelin’,” he said. “I had a feelin’ it wasn’t gonna work.”

“Where are your pals?”

“There ain’t none. I come alone.”

“I’ll believe that the day you take up toe-dancing. How many, and where?”

“Lord’s truth,” he said. “I come by myself.” He shrugged. The sedan wiggled slightly. “Come to get you, I admit, but it wasn’t nobody else’s idea.”

“Why?”

“You hit little Frankie in the biscuit,” he said simply.

“Frankenstein?”

“He didn’t like being called that. He was funny-lookin’, like me. I always called him Frankie.”

The words gave me an odd feeling. But I said, “I had a little reason, didn’t I, Bludgett? Franken—Frankie, and you, were flinging hot little pills at my biscuit.”

“Sure. So what? Fact still is, you drilled his conk. So I figure I come and get you.”

Simple, matter of fact, his tone was. I hadn’t any doubt he was telling me the truth, telling it his way. Still, there was something quite grisly about the flat, unemotional words: “I come and get you.”

There was a newspaper on the seat beside him. I opened the door and, with care, lifted the paper. Beneath it, as I’d expected, was his gun, a Colt .45 automatic. I took it, dropped it into my coat pocket, and said, “Come on. Out this side.”

His eyes dropped to the revolver in my hand, then flicked over my face. He didn’t try anything. Apparently Bludgett—like most men who know guns, who have used them—had a healthy respect for the heat.

We walked back the way I’d come out, passing only a young couple on the way. For the few seconds while they were near us I put the snub-nosed Colt into my pocket, but kept it pointing at Bludgett’s back. He just kept marching ahead.

When he reached the door of my suite I said, “Here it is. Take a right. Inside.”

I closed and locked the door. Then I looked at Bludgett. Well, I had him. My dream had come true. And what the hell was I going to do with him?

“Sit down, pal,” I said. “We’re going to talk a spell. You’re going to tell me a few things I’m curious about.”

“Not me, Scott.”

That was all. He didn’t make a big thing out of it. But I’d have bet my Cad against a scooter that to him it was a simple statement of irrevocable fact.

It was, also, a fact that I couldn’t—or at least wouldn’t—beat the big ape over the head with a monkey wrench until he spilled. For one thing, I’d need an ape-wrench. For another, though I feel it is entirely acceptable to ruin a guy when he’s attempting to do the same to you, simply to pound on a man who is sitting quietly, stolidly, waiting for it—well, it’s a little out of my line.

I remembered telling Artie I proposed to outwit Bludgett. I had not told Artie how I proposed to do it. That was because I hadn’t the faintest idea how to do it. Bludgett was not so bright that beams of light shot out of him, true; but that didn’t mean I could outwit him.

What I needed was a brilliant flash of—of brilliance, like one of those light bulbs that meant “Idea!” which cartoonists used to draw in cartoons.

And, quite naturally, that was—or, rather, those were—the ideas which gave me the idea.…

CHAPTER FOURTEEN

The problem was how to crack a tough nut like Bludgett.

One man might stand up to physical punishment all day but grow faint at the sight of snakes. Or rats, or spiders. Or bugs might bug him. Another might cheerfully climb Mount Everest barefoot but refuse to fly in a plane. And another—well, it was worth a try.

It took me a bit more than three-quarters of an hour to set it up. Because, first, I had to find out if it was possible, and then discover how to set it up. I had to call on Artie Katz again to get some items from the luggage compartment of my Cad, items like plastic cord and handcuffs so I could leave Bludgett alone in my suite, bound and gagged, for half an hour—during which time, among other things, I hunted up Dr. Fretsindler and became for a little while his eager student. After that, I had to remove some of Bludgett’s bonds temporarily so I could walk him from my rooms to another and much larger room at Mountain Shadows.

There were other problems, but by twenty minutes after seven P.M.—with distant thunder rumbling and lightning beginning to flash outside—both Bludgett and I were in one of Mountain Shadows’ convention halls, with seats for perhaps two hundred and fifty people facing a raised platform or stage. Those seats were empty now, because Bludgett and I were alone in the room; but here, in less than forty minutes, approximately two hundred conventioneers would be gathered to hear and see the first of tonight’s lectures and demonstrations.

Or, rather, the second. Because the very first lecture and demonstration of the evening was going to be mine. I, the lone professor; Bludgett, the attentive audience of one. At least, I hoped he would be attentive. And it was, I thought, a reasonable hope. We were not only alone but on stage, Bludgett sitting in the heaviest wooden chair I could grab on short notice, ankles securely tied to its legs, but with his hands before him and free, except for the handcuffs around his massive wrists.

Also on stage was a long wooden table atop which were four items, the two nearest us being a large metal kitchen pot, turned upside down, upon which rested at approximately the level of Bludgett’s head, a rock, a solid hunk of granite about the size of a man’s head—actually, larger than that, since I’d hunted around till I found one the size of Bludgett’s head.

Already aimed at the rock was—well, the laser.

It didn’t look like much. The unit, or rather the two components of the unit, somewhat resembled a pair of oversized rectangular black-metal suitcases. Maybe it didn’t look like much, but neither does a bullet unless you know what it can do. And, just as a cartridge case conceals the powder which makes the bullet go, so did the “suitcase” nearest the chunk of granite conceal an extremely powerful light source which provided the “powder” or power for the laser. It was of much the same brilliance as a strobe or flashlight used by photographers, except that it did not pulse but focused a constant beam of light on one end of the active material, the laser rod, which turned ordinary light into the laser’s coherent “bullet.” All of that was hidden, but the rest of the rod projected for two feet from the end of the black-metal box and was aimed at the small boulder because that was where I had aimed it.

That rod—the real magic or wizardry—looked to me like merely a strangely murky-gray tube of solid but transparent glasslike material. What it actually was, so I’d been told, was YAG.

I know it sounds like something one might take for an upset stomach, but that is what I had been told by none other than Dr. Fretsindler, one of the world’s foremost scientific authorities on everything from the original ruby laser to molecular gas lasers to the newest of all, the YAG laser. He was, in fact, the world’s foremost authority on such a contraption as now rested on the table before Bludgett and me, since it was his very own experimental laser, designed and built by the doctor himself.

Dr. Fretsindler had told me a great many things, few of which I fully, or even emptily, understood, since one does not become an expert during the kind of quickie cram course he had so kindly—and, I blush to admit, unsuspectingly—given me. Among other things, he told me that he was the first man to solve the formerly insoluble problem of “growing large rods of multiply-doped Alphabet YAG.” I swear, those were his exact words, for they rang so strikingly in my ear that I shall probably never get them out.

He also told me that YAG could be described “simply”—again, his word—as Y_3Al_5O12, or a compound of yttrium aluminum, and oxygen, which he had “doped with various rare-earth ions” and otherwise maneuvered so cleverly that he had not only become the first man ever to produce YAG rods more than a few centimeters long, but had also achieved a remarkable increase in YAG efficiency.

I told him that was swell. I didn’t even ask him what a centimeter was. If I’d been going to ask the doctor any irrelevant questions I would have asked him why Y_8A1_5O_12 was called YAG instead of YAO, but what I really wanted to know was how you turned the laser-thing on. And he finally told me even that. You pushed a little switch, that was how. You turned it on like you turned anything else on.

Fortunately he also told me the laser produced such heat inside the black box that it was necessary to cool it with water, which was what the second black “suitcase” contained. From it two copper tubes reached forward and down into the innards of the laser, and finally into a concealed heat-exchanger, and thus—I certainly hoped—all was ready to go. I had even remembered to plug the electrical cord into a wall outlet. Just like you plug in anything else. I was learning.

Thus, with everything in readiness, and Bludgett still looking phlegmatic, calm and composed, even bored, I turned to him and began the lecture.

“Bludgett,” I said, “behold. Do you see this magical instrument before you?”

He was quite cooperative, as long as the conversation was general. “Yah,” he said. “I see a bunch of junk and a rock.”

“That’s what you think,” I said. “Before you is an instrument capable of the most fiendish torture devised by man.”

“You are full of beans,” he said. He didn’t say beans; but whenever he said what he said I shall report it as beans.

“That, Mr. Bludgett—by the way, is Bludgett your first or last name?”

“It’s all you get.”

“All right, Bludgett. Before the torture begins, I will—because at heart I’m not a cruel man—give you a chance to tell me all I wish to know. First, who were the seven individuals present about two A.M. this morning at a meeting held at Henry Yarrow’s house in Sunrise Villas? Where is Fred Jenkins, and is he dead, and if so who murdered him? What do you know about Pete “The Letch” Lecci, and his grandson Joe Civano—and is it not only certain but damned certain that Crazy Joe is truly deceased—”

“Knock off this beans, Scott. I ain’t gonna tell you nothin’ and you know it.”

“Well, you had your chance. Later, I will give you one more chance. But only one, Bludgett. First, let me explain what we have here. This instrument is a laser, the name being an acronym for light amplification by stimulated emission of radiation—”

“You’re pullin’ my leg.”

“No, but soon I may do worse than that. This is, in fact, a very powerful experimental laser which emits, from the end of this YAG here”—I pointed to the end of the rod near the head-sized rock—“light beams in the spectrum which we call infrared. Now, you probably know that infrared light is invisible.”

“No, I didn’t know that.”

“Well, now you do. To be really scientific—which is what we are going to be here, Bludgett—we should speak not solely of light but of heat, because the laser achieves its astonishing effects by means of high thermal shock, or heat akin to that of the sun itself. Focused heat, really big heat, such hot heat you would not believe—”

“I don’t, at that.”

“I said the same thing once myself, in my innocence. For ease of expression, we shall speak of light. Now, this light, though invisible, because it is all in phase, of one wavelength, coherent, not scattered—like that—is capable of transforming the hardest rock, or skull, into, well, practically into its component molecules.”

“What’s component molec—whatever you said?”

“No matter. Leave us say that, if this invisible light can cause a granite rock to crumble, then surely it can also, if aimed at a man’s head, turn his marbles into little marblecules. Is that clear?”

“It ain’t to me. Is it to you?”

I wished he hadn’t asked that question.

I hadn’t absorbed all Dr. Fretsindler had told me. But I had learned enough to be convinced that what Paul had told me last night in the cocktail lounge—when discussing another experiment with a laser and a rock—was not, after all, the blatherings of a drunk. For one thing, he hadn’t been drunk. There had not been time to take up with Paul the very serious matter of that drink check, but there would be later. I hoped.

That hope was in part predicated upon what Bludgett—if he had any sense—was going to tell me.

“No matter,” I said. “Chinese say, one picture worth ten thousand words. If so, one demonstration worth ten thousand pictures, ah so? You don’t have to answer that.”

From my pocket I took a plain old screwdriver and handed it to Bludgett. I wanted Bludgett to become personally involved in this experiment. It is the same psychological principle that is involved when a high-pressure salesman tries, and usually succeeds, in getting his product into your hands—whether it’s a vacuum cleaner, pot or pan, gardening tool, no matter. The salesman feels, correctly, that when you handle and fondle the thing, your personal participation combined with his artful semihypnosis, which occasionally is not so semi-, helps to hook you, helps to convince you, helps to make a helpless pawn of you. And, of course, I hoped to hook, convince, and make a helpless pawn of Bludgett.

For that, I needed all the help I could get.

So I gave him the screwdriver and said, “Chip away at that piece of rock, will you?”

“What for?”

“Because I have a surprise for you.”

With that bait dangling in front of him, though he hesitated, he reached forward, holding the screwdriver in both manacled hands, and hacked away at the hunk of granite.

Nothing happened, of course.

Bludgett said, “What’s so surprisin’ about that?”

“The surprise comes a little later. I simply wanted you to be sure, in your own mind, that on the table before you is a real, genuine, solid chunk of granite. Are you?”

“Am I what?”

“Sure it’s a solid chunk of granite.”

He looked at me with dull eyes. “You really want me to answer that?”

“Never mind.” It didn’t matter. Obviously, he was convinced. That was the important thing. First stage completed.

“It’s a cow egg,” he said. “That what you want me to say it is? Something dumb like that?”

“No, you were right the first time. Bludgett, I’m not joshing with you. This is serious business. It’s a—”

“It’s a blueberry pancake. I love blueberry pancakes. Pour a little syrup on it and I’ll eat it.”

He probably would, at that. This was getting out of hand. And when you intend to sell the customer, you’ve got to stay in control all the time. So I looked at him sternly and said, “Bludgett, quit the goddam horsing around. That’s a rock. You know it’s a rock, right?”

“It’s a lotta bullbeans, you ast me.”

“It’s a rock!”

I think he was getting a little confused about that time, because he reached out, still holding the screwdriver, and gave the chunk of granite two or three good digs. “By golly,” he said, “you may be right.”

“O.K. Now, here’s what I’m going to do.”

I told him I was merely going to turn on the laser. He wouldn’t see anything or hear anything—except the sound of my throwing the switch to turn the deadly instrument on—but the invisible beams, sort of an infrared death ray, would be squirting against the piece of granite.

He didn’t seem very impressed yet. But probably that was because I hadn’t done anything except have him dig at a rock with a screwdriver. “Here goes,” I said.

I stepped to the laser, reached for the switch which would activate it, supplying power from the 110-volt outlet into which it was plugged, and turned it on. At the same time I clicked a cricket in my pants pocket. It was one of those simple metal instruments which make a sharp clicking sound when you squeeze them, and I wanted Bludgett to have no doubt about when the laser was being turned on. The little cricket made a distinctive and clearly audible sound, which I intended he would associate with activation of the laser. Then I stepped near him—not too near—and fired questions at him.

He refused to answer any questions not merely those concerned with his associates and his life of crime. But he did say, “I don’t get it. I figgered you’d be poundin’ on me by now. Or cookin’ my feet like marshmellers.”

“That wouldn’t be scientific,” I said. “Besides, it would leave horrible marks on you. And even though you are a bloodthirsty hood, I might get in trouble with the fuzz.”

“Well, you ain’t gonna get me to talk without you doin’ something like that—and even then you ain’t.”

“Oh, but I am, Bludgett. But I am going to break you down scientifically.…”

We had been looking at each other, not the rock, but I could now from merely the corner of one eye detect something of more than passing interest. When I looked at the small granite boulder the face of it was actually glowing. Glowing because it was white-hot. No light could be seen coming from the laser rod, but the stone itself was so hot light was coming from it.

“I think it has been long enough,” I said.

I stepped to the laser again, turned it off and simultaneously clicked my cricket, then returned to a point near Bludgett’s chair. He, too, had become aware of an oddness occurring, and his expression underwent a slight change. While I spoke to him, letting a little time pass, he absently reached up with his manacled hands and poked a finger into a nostril. I was almost bemused; I hadn’t thought he could get a finger into his entire nose, much less a single nostril. He eyed the rock suspiciously, but then shrugged. Nothing had happened, after all.

I was a little worried about that myself. But I said, as seriously and convincingly as I could, “It’s done. That invisible infrared light I told you about has already—right before your eyes, Bludgett—totally changed the molecular, atomic, and even mineral structure of that solid hunk of granite. Stick it with the screwdriver again.”

He looked at me as if he were sorry for me. He shook his huge bald head. “You really want me to?”

“I do.”

He shrugged, looked at the screwdriver still in his paws, then reached out and gave the rock a little chop.

The screwdriver plunged right through it and clanged on the kitchen pot.

CHAPTER FIFTEEN

A good third of the granite chunk flopped off and hit the table.

Hit—and broke into a dozen or more separate pieces.

I don’t know which of us was more surprised. No, that’s not true. I was surprised, even though I’d been expecting something similar might happen. But Bludgett—

Well, there was simply no describing Bludgett.

If I was surprised, he was astonished, flabbergasted, shocked, shaken, and aghast. He simply didn’t believe it.

“What the beans,” he said. And “What the beans,” again.

His mouth sagged open, his head bent down, and he looked at the rock with his eyes rolled up toward it. His lower lip hung loosely and, slowly, a bit of saliva gathered there, dripped off. “What the beans,” he said for the third—and last—time.

Then he reached out, very gingerly, as one might reach when preparing to fondle a poisonous viper, and tapped at the rock with his screwdriver again. With each tap more of it crumbled. It was—even to me—amazing. To Bludgett, God only knows.

His mouth remained open and his lower lip was still hanging down wetly and his eyes were enormously wide, and he kept poking and poking at the chunk of rock and then the parts of the rock and finally the little bitty bits of the rock.

When I figured he was ripe, I said, “Now, it’s time to do the same thing to your head, Bludgett.”

It took a few seconds for my words to penetrate. He pulled his eyes off the bits of rock and sandlike particles on the overturned kitchen pot and on the table, and looked at me. “To—what?”

“You want to spill, Bludgett? All you’ve got to do is tell me—”

He told me to go to hell, or words to that effect.

I didn’t say any more, just moved to the far end of the table and pulled it around so the two-foot YAG rod was aimed at Bludgett’s face. Then I said, gently, “I’m really not quite sure what this will do to you, Bludgett. But when I’m through, I’d suggest you don’t scratch your head.”

Then I pretended to turn on the switch, and at the same time clicked my cricket.

“Noooo-OOOOO!” he yelled.

He also jerked aside so vigorously and suddenly that the chair he sat in toppled over and cracked against the floor. That sound was minor compared to the resounding thump of Bludgett’s huge bulk thudding down onto the stage. His ankles were bound to the chair’s legs, but he could move his arms, and he was reaching out with his manacled hands and clawing frantically at the wood, not getting anywhere, but sure as hell trying.

I clicked my cricket and yelled, “There, it’s off. It’s off, Bludgett!” It was true. I thought it unnecessary to add that it hadn’t been on.

He clawed for a few more seconds and then became still. He put his head down on one arm, mouth still open, staring, a faraway look in his eyes.

For just a second, maybe half a second, I wondered if I could go through with this. It was such a humiliating position for a man, especially a big strong brute like Bludgett, to be in. He was, it appeared, also scared at least halfway out of his mind—which he presumed would soon be mindless. Naturally I wouldn’t really fry his brains. But he didn’t know that.…

My moment of weakness passed. He was ripe; he was ready. I didn’t think I’d even have to use my cricket again.

I squatted on the floor a yard or so from him and said, “Bludgett, you can stay right there. I’ll simply aim the laser beam down toward your chops, and we’ll see what occurs. I’m really interested to know what’s going to happen to your conk.”

Lying there on the floor with that faraway look in his eyes, he had been saying, or kind of moaning, “Noooo,” for some time. I went on, “Since you so stubbornly refuse to cooperate, Bludgett, there is obviously darkness within your skull. I merely propose to bring light into the darkness—”

“NOOOOO—”

Finally I relented, and instead of experimenting upon his head, allowed him to spill his guts. And he spilled, unhesitatingly, lying prone on the floor, unmoving except for his haunted eyes which from time to time during the next fifteen minutes rolled toward what he had once—but no longer—thought of as “a piece of junk.”

“First thing, Bludgett, when you and Frankenstein—Frankie—spotted me on Willow Lane this morning, was anybody else with you?”

“Not right at first. Two of the boys showed.”

“Who?”

“Ace and Fleepo.”

“Gil Reyes was knocked off a few nights ago. Who did the job on him?”

“Same ones. Ace and Fleepo.”

Those had been questions to which I already knew the answers. So, convinced Bludgett was telling the truth, I asked him, “Who told Ace and Fleepo to hit Reyes?”

“You got me there. I dunno that one.”

“There was a meeting of seven men—at least—early this morning at Henry Yarrow’s home on Palma Drive. Who were they?”

“I don’t know nothin’ about no meeting. I don’t even know who’s Henry Yarrow.”

“Fleepo and Ace were two of the seven. And so, I’m pretty sure, was your late buddy.” Bludgett frowned but didn’t say anything, so I went on, “That meeting was bugged. I think Frankie’s the one who spotted the transmitter and a little later all three of them caught up with a guy named Fred Jenkins and took a tape recording from him.”

“Yeah, that. Frankie tole me about that. Didn’t say nothin’ about no meetin’, just he was with some of the boys, none of who he named to me, except them two who helped him catch the old gaffer.”

“Frankie and Ace and Fleepo grabbed Jenkins?”

“Yeah. There was one other guy along, but he stayed in his heap, didn’t get out.”

“Who was he?”

“Nobody said that. There was only the three of them and him, though.”

“What happened after they grabbed Jenkins?”

“Well, then’s when Frankie come and got me and we went to his place to wait. Like, on standby, you’d call it, since there was some excitement in the air, them being bugged and all.”

“OK, Frankie picked you up. What about Ace and Fleepo?”

“Well, they …” A small crease appeared between Bludgett’s sad eyes. “They put the john they’d caught in the heap, which the other guy, that fourth one I mentioned, was still in. Then they all went off somewheres, and Frankie didn’t see Ace and Fleepo again for about a hour and a half. By then I was with Frankie myself, having been with him since he come and got me.”

“What happened to Jenkins?”

“Well, I guess he kind of got himself kilt.”

“Who kind of helped him get killed?”

“That—I …”

“The hell with it. I’ll turn the goddamn laser on.”

“NOOO—it’s just the way it was is confusing.” The crease appeared between his eyes again. “See, some of this I’m tellin’ you I got from Frankie, but after around four A.M. there, he is croaked, and don’t tell me nothin’ any more, which is natural. And some I hear later from Fleepo, and a very little I get from Ace, and it’s confusing.”

“OK. What about Jenkins?”

“Well, maybe a hour and a half after they grab him, Ace and Fleepo take the john, who was kilt by then, beat up pretty good and kilt, and dump him in their heap. Then just them two took him off and dug a hole and sort of left him in it, all covered up with dirt.”

“Dug a hole where?”

“Place where they’re fixin’ to put in a new golf course. Or half of one. Nine holes. They put him where the ninth tee’s gonna be, barely got him covered over before the sun come up, Fleepo said to me. He said it was a larf, thinkin’ of them old goats teein’ off standing on top of two stiffs.”

“Two?”

“Well …” His eyes rolled. “That’s where Ace and Fleepo put the other one.”

“Reyes?”

“Yeah, him.”

“Both in the same spot?”

“Well, the ground was soft to begin with since they was fixin’ to put in part of the golf course there. Ace and Fleepo knew where the other one was at, from them putting him there in the first place, which made it more easier to dig the hole again. Seemed pretty smart to me.”

I jumped to another subject of personal interest. “Why was Lucky Ryan brought here to the Villas?”

“Beats me. Nobody never tole me, and I didn’t pay it no mind. Frankie and me only been in this damn godforsook town ourselves less than a week, and look at me. Nobody tells me much of anything—except Frankie. He did. He was a good friend, Frankie was.”

“Well … I’m a little sorry about Frankie, Bludgett. Mainly I’m sorry he took a shot at me. Barely before you did, by the way.”

“Hell, we was supposed to shoot you. That was the whole idea—”

“Who put out the word to hit me?”

“Well, Frankie passes it on to me. This was just a couple or three minutes before we popped at you, he gets a call at his place. We’re to get a tape from a oleander bush, but if you was around, to shoot you and take you away somewheres.”

Bludgett was scattering my clues all over the place. Still, it seemed apparent that the word to hit me—and to look for a tape in “a oleander bush”—had reached Frankie, and probably others, a good hour and a half after the boys snatched Jenkins and the tape around two-twenty A.M. Which probably meant they hadn’t really started working him over until they’d played that first hour-long recording and realized there must be another one.

On that point Bludgett was unable to enlarge, so I said, “Frankie told you I was to be hit. Who told Frankie?”

“Letch. He says it was Letch tole him to do it.”

The idea of Pete Lecci’s ordering my murder was not a vast surprise, but hearing the name—that ancient name—fall so casually from Bludgett’s mouth did kind of grab me and shake me gently.

“What the hell is Letch up to here at Sunrise Villas?”

“I don’t know what the hell. Like I tole you, I only been in the godforsook—”

“Yeah, you, Frankie, Lucky, maybe others here at the Villas all of a sudden. How come?”

“Look, I just come and go when they tell me to, I don’t know what for. How many times do I got to tell you—”

“OK, OK. Let’s—get back to that little party when you and Frankie let some fly at me.” I had the feeling Bludgett was sort of stirring inside, coming out of the original shock induced in him by the incomprehensible crumbling of that granite. And while the words were flowing smoothly I wanted to keep them flowing. “How come you took a powder instead of coming after me?”

He hesitated only momentarily. “I got to kind of put it together, like I mentioned. Part from what Ace says, when we hear the sireens and he tells us we got to get our asses out of there, and some from what Frankie says to me before. There was some big shots right then in what they call the King place. Nobody says who to me, but one of them was some kind of big apple, and it would screw everything up if the fuzz got onto him there, which they’d do if they busted into the joint. Which they might of done—though it would of took them some time even was they in tanks—if we hung around. Particular on account of the stiffs. When I speak of my friend, Frankie, to who I refer as a stiff, it don’t mean no dislike for him. It’s just you’d made a stiff out of him by then.”

I threw the next one in kind of quick, because I didn’t want him dwelling overlong on that. “I got the impression Lieutenant Weeton was a friend of Lecci’s—and most of Lecci’s pals. So why worry about fuzz if it was maybe Weeton coming?”

“They knowed it wasn’t Weeton, he was one of them in the King place there, so it couldn’t of been him. Besides, there was two cars anyhow, we could hear two sireens.”

“What was Weeton doing in the King place?”

“How would I know? All I know, there was some guys in there, and this big shot. So we had to blow—taking the stiffs with us—making it look like everything there was peaceful. That way the fuzz wouldn’t do nothin’, but run around blowing their sireens for a while, without finding out nothing.”

Again, I was trying to put some scattered comments together. The time of about “an hour and a half,” if I could assume Bludgett was being reasonably accurate, seemed to apply to several separate but interrelated areas under discussion. Adding that period to two-twenty A.M., it meant that in the very short time between approximately three-fifty and four much of interest had occurred:

Frankie, by then with Bludgett, had received his call about hitting me, and looking for a tape; I had found the tape; Frankie and Bludgett had let go some shots at me, and had also seen Ace and Fleepo again for the first time since Frankie left Jenkins with them; and if I had heard it correctly, it was also about the same time that Ace and Fleepo had dumped Fred Jenkins, by then “beat up pretty good and kilt,” into their car. What really triggered that line of thought was Bludgett’s reference to stiffs every time he spoke of Frankie, and Frankie added up to only one stiff.

“Bludgett,” I said, “these stiffs you’ve mentioned. One of them, of course, was Frankie. And the other …?”

“Yah.” The little crease between his eyes again. “Yah, I noticed when I done it. Stiffs, I said. Well, maybe you already figgered it. Me and Frankie and some others was to go find the tape everybody was having the fits over, while Ace and Fleepo was to plant the other stiff, this Jenkins gaffer. He was in the trunk of Ace’s heap at the very instance when Ace is yelling we should get our asses outa there. Which makes it even more sensible why he done it, wouldn’t you say, pal?”

There was an odd ring in that “wouldn’t you say, pal?” Helpless Bludgett was getting quite free and easy with his conqueror. I examined his pumpkin-sized face with growing interest. His eyes had ceased to roll. There was a different look—not a faraway look—in them now. It was more like a verynear look. I didn’t like it much. But I was far from through with Bludgett.

“All right,” I said briskly. “Tell me more about this King place.”

“That’s where they took the guy, Jenkins, before he was in Ace’s trunk and then in the golf course. How I figure it, that’s where they asked him questions, in a way they have of doing. Part of it’s like a big dungeon. Down in the basement part you could pull a guy’s leg off and nobody outside would hear nothing. And it’s a place where nobody can get in nor out without them knowing it.”

“Where is this joint, Bludgett?”

“Hell, you was there. Right there where you was at. Great big wall around the whole joint.”

“Uh-huh. Yeah, I saw it. Looked like a retired mansion.”

“Guess that’s what. Some old millionaire gapper name of King built it, way the hell back. Or maybe it was some king built it for a castle back in the old ages. All I know is they call it the King place, and that’s where they was at when we was popping at you. Until Ace come along, I mean. He tells us we gonna run you down, we gonna get you, only it would have to wait on some other time, disappointing as that was to us all. Me in particular.”

I got him off that “gonna get you” bit and kept him talking about the old two-story house with the wall around it for a while. From his description it was apparent the joint was virtually impregnable, no way in except a solid steel gate, with a light-beam and photo-electric-cell system atop that high wall to make it impossible for anybody to climb over it without silently triggering an alarm, and between the wall and house a fifty-foot open space or “courtyard” which could be flooded by spotlights from inside the house, lights which automatically went on if anybody interrupted the electric-eye alarm system above the wall—though those weren’t Bludgett’s exact words. He merely summed it up by saying, “Anybody tried to get in, no matter how, and they didn’t want him in, well, pretty quick somebody’d be teein’ off on top of him.”

He even smiled at his little joke. In my opinion, that was not a good sign.

He hadn’t yet actually larfed out loud, but Bludgett’s new and comparatively devil-may-care attitude was giving me some concern. Indeed, it was filling me with severe unease. For he also seemed to be flexing his muscles, and though the monster was bound and handcuffed with his ankles tied to the chair legs, and was lying flat on his side, when Bludgett flexed his muscles it was an awesome flexing.

More, the thought, “lying flat on his side,” started a little alarm bell ringing in my head. I couldn’t figure out what had started it, what was bothering me. Nervously, I shifted my position, and there was a sharp crick!

“What … was … that?” Bludgett said. He spoke very slowly, as one to whom a great revelation was about to come.

I didn’t tell him. I knew what it was, but I sure didn’t tell him. You can bet I didn’t. That damn little cricket, which I’d used as part of my psychological-warfare arsenal, to simulate the turning on of my infrared death ray, was in my pants pocket. In shifting my position while squatted on my haunches, I had cramped it between my thigh and approximately the lowest edge of my rib cage.

Well, you know how those goddamn crickets are. They’re little metal dummies, and when you push them in they go crick! and then when you release the pressure they go cket! Which, I suppose, is why they call them crickets. Actually, it didn’t matter what they called them. What mattered was that as soon as I moved even slightly the pressure on that taut piece of metal would be released and—

“I ast you a question,” said Bludgett.

“What was the question?” I said.

“There was a funny noise, like when you turn on the thing what done it to the rock.”

“Oh—oh, come now, Bludgett,” I said.

He was not to be soothed. “You didn’t do nothing to that piece of junk, but I heard the funny noise anyways. Like, crick, it went. How could it do that?”

I was in trouble.

He was suspicious. Worse, he’d even gotten the crick sound exactly right. He might even be wondering what had happened to the cket. But clearly worst of all, my firm psychological grip upon him had suddenly become so loose he could once again refer to my diabolical machine as a “piece of junk.” And if for even a moment he lost the fear that his entire head would collapse about his ears if he blew his nose, and flexed any more vigorously than he was already flexing—

What was that alarm bell trying to tell me?

First things first. The very first thing was that I mustn’t move. I didn’t dare move. Because if Bludgett heard me turn on—or off—the machine again, the way his suspicion was already growing, well, I’d lose him. And right then I began slowly to realize something else of possible importance. Not only didn’t I dare move, it was possible I couldn’t move. At least not with real speed.

I had been squatting on my haunches for so long—naturally intent on Bludgett’s every word—that I now had the feeling, or rather lack of feeling, that circulation in my lower extremities bad been cut off entirely for some time. There was only a kind of faintly tingling numbness in my calves and knees and thighs and even to a large extent my hind end. And that wasn’t good; I knew you’ve got to have circulation in your lower extremities if you hope to use them with real speed. Should, say, an emergency arise. Like …

I had it. The alarm had begun with the thought “lying flat on his side,” because unconsciously I realized Bludgett had not been able to utilize all the power in those massive thighs and calves to thrust his legs away from him and down, and strain at those bonds around the wooden legs of his chair—not while sitting erect with his feet on the floor. But, lying on his side, with nothing beneath his feet but air to hinder the thrust of those Gargantuan limbs, if he decided to make the supreme effort there would be nothing to hold him back.

Yeah. I was in trouble. I was in real trouble.

If ever, I thought, I had heard of the horns of such a depressing dilemma. I didn’t dare move because that might be enough to launch Bludgett into a state of frenzied activity, which could produce a serious emergency, but I had to move so I could get some circulation in my lower extremities, which are so important in emergencies. That numbness was becoming worse, because I was holding very, very still, so I could keep that little metal dummy cramped between my thigh and approximately the lowest edge of my rib cage. And I was trying to think clearly at the same time.

I was confronted by a problem, requiring a decision, but my terribly strained position was not helping my mental processes at all, though of course for a while there I didn’t realize that. I merely thought of what could happen, feeling trapped, backed up against the wall, no way out, like a captured spy about to be—

Enough. It took an effort of will, but I got a grip on myself. What had I to worry about? Nothing. I was in control here, it was merely my mind that was becoming overexercised. I had simply been letting my imagination run away with me, become too vivid, too real, too free. That sometimes happens to me. It’s a good thing to have a vivid imagination. It is simply necessary at times to keep a tight rein upon it. Fortunately I know how to do that.

It had only been for a brief moment there, anyway, when thinking of the appalling strength of Bludgett, Bludgett flexing, the elephant straining at the gnat of his bonds, his great mass filling with more and more suspicion, that I had felt a severe unease, a sense almost of imminent doom, what a spy must feel when caught and with his back to the wall and the Mafia firing squad with its heaters leveled and Bludgett about to say “Fire!” and—

Cket!

Dammit.

CHAPTER SIXTEEN

Man, there was all kinds of noise, all of a sudden. Some was near and some was far, but I was still trying to get a tight rein on my imagination and I looked at the wrong noise.

What attracted my attention was a kind of crash and a lot of voices at the front of the room. Half a dozen men were coming inside, and one of them had pushed the door so hard it swung around and banged against the wall. Even as I realized the first conventioneers were arriving a bit early I became aware of a bunch of noise near me. Very near. And horrible noise it was.

It was a cracking and snapping of wood breaking and splintering, a grunting and snarling, a sound savage and awesome and blood-curdling. It was the sound of Bludgett.

By the time I got my head around and was looking at him with something approaching anguish his ankles were no longer bound to a chair but merely attached to splinters of cracked wood. And Bludgett was kicking speedily, reaching with his manacled hands, very close to getting the bonds off his feet. Even as I watched he got them off entirely. He was standing up, looming in the air, looking awful.

Immediately, just as soon as it was an instant too late, I realized the emergency, the serious emergency, had arisen; and now that Bludgett was unbound there was nothing to stop him—except me—and you have no idea with what emotions that filled me.

First thing, I shut off my imagination entirely.

It had already failed me, utterly. So I would use my other weapon: logic. And even elementary dumbness said there was no point in trying to strike this guy down with tremendous blows unless there was no other way. Fortunately, logic indicated another way. I had long ago stuck the Colt back into its clamshell holster, and as Bludgett got his legs free enough to move and took a giant step toward me, I slapped my hand to the Colt’s butt and started springing to my feet.

In my mind was the knowledge: I am springing to my feet.

But somehow that knowledge was not in my feet. Nor in my calves and knees or even, to a large extent, my hind end. It isn’t that I failed to move at all. I moved. I moved very much like that guy I’d seen upon first arriving at Sunrise Villas, the one bowling on the green.

I sort of rose a little bit, and stuck, and got up a little bit more, unfelt muscles turning me involuntarily toward my left, a move which if speeded up a hundred times or so might have been quite graceful. As it was, I probably resembled a man in a strange half-squat slowly peeking around to see if anybody was watching. But not for long.

I had turned a bit left, but I could see the looming bulk of Bludgett on my right, and something swinging, and then a force not of this earth smacked me partly on my right shoulder and partly on my back, and at last I was moving with real speed. Such speed in fact that to this day I cannot recall if my feet touched the floor as I flew off the edge of the stage. The only clear memory is of my head crashing into the front row of seats after my body hit the auditorium floor and skidded for …

Well, I don’t know how far I skidded, either.

People were around me. Men were talking.

After a little while I got my head out from under the seats. Then I groped around until I was sitting up. The people looked pretty blurry.

“What the hell was that?” one of them asked me. “We’d just walked in and I noticed something or other on the stage, then this big guy swung both his hands around together and smacked you right across the back. Why, I never saw anybody take such a terrible tumble as you did. You just went sailing—”

“Will you quit telling me what I already know?” I snarled. “What happened then? Where is he? Uh, let me at him.”

“He ran out of here like a wild moose two, three minutes ago.”

“That long?”

While I struggled to my feet, other men volunteered additional information. It was all a bunch of beans, as far as I was concerned. The vital fact was that Bludgett by now would be long gone. I could probably trace him partway, simply by looking for holes in various walls, like you see in animated cartoons when the villain runs through houses. But—outside the hotel, in the darkness? Hell, he was gone.

I’d learned a number of things, however. One thing I’d learned was that I was damned lucky Bludgett had not got me with all his force, and had hit me across the back and shoulder—lucky even though it would be tough to manage a quick draw immediately. I still couldn’t quite get my right hand up any higher than my pants pocket. Probably I wouldn’t be able even to work a cricket for a while. Not that I gave a goddamn if I ever worked another cricket.

Still, I thought, what if he’d cracked me a good one, boom, smack on the kisser? Wow, that would—No, mustn’t even think about it. Some things shouldn’t be thought about at all. Better I should think of what he’d told me. For while events had been going my way he’d told me quite a lot.

Perhaps two dozen men were in the big room now. I looked at my watch. Seven-forty-five P.M. Only fifteen minutes until the lectures and demonstrations would start. Lectures and demonstrations … That reminded me.

I had not informed Dr. Fretsindler, who so kindly explained the operation of his immensely valuable, unique, one-of-a-kind YAG laser, that I was going to operate it. The two suitcase-sized segments of the unit fit snugly into a small specially built trailer normally hauled behind Fretsindler’s car. I had noticed this when I removed the apparatus from the trailer. And it struck me that it was about time I put it back.

The first guy who’d spoken to me said, “What were you doing up on the stage? You giving one of the lectures?”

“No, I …” My glance fell on the laser. “I just clean up around here.” It hurt a little that he believed me so readily.

But at least nobody interfered while I “cleaned up” by lugging the laser and water-container off stage. Outside, what was probably going to be one of Arizona’s thunderingly dramatic storms—which sometimes strike with a fury unexpected of July—seemed to be building from adolescence toward full maturity. It was much colder and a light rain had begun to fall. Thunder rumbled in the air. Lightning flashed not far away. I replaced the good doctor’s equipment where it belonged, trotted to the door of my suite, poked my key at the lock.

Inside, the phone was ringing.

I reached it before the ringing stopped—but realized as I picked it up that in my haste I’d left the door standing open behind me. Probably it didn’t make any difference, but the sight of a virtual hole in the wall made me uneasy. Especially with one such as Bludgett running around loose—like a wild moose as one chap had expressed it—somewhere out there in the darkness. Another flash of lightning turned everything white for a split second and outside the darkness following it seemed even more intense, more black—until it was ripped suddenly by two nearly simultaneous flashes. The thunder hit almost immediately, not only the speed of its arrival but the almost solid and shocking crack evidence of how close those bolts had been.

“Hello,” a voice in my ear was saying. “Mr. Scott?”

“Yes, who’s this?” I noticed the message-light indicator near the phone was glowing.

“It’s Elliott, Mr. Scott. Professor Irwin. I called you twenty minutes ago, but—”

It was five past eight. “I was … elsewhere,” I said. “Have you got the information for me?”

“Yes, yes.” He sounded excited. “Three of them match. Beautiful, simply beautiful!” He was excited.

Well, now, so was I. “Which three—wait just a second, Professor.” That open door was bugging me. I walked to the door and shut it, made sure it was locked, then went back and grabbed the phone again.

It was doubtful that anybody would be listening in either on the professor’s end of the line or mine, but we’d arranged for him to convey his information to me in simple and clear fashion which nonetheless would be mere gibberish or code to anyone else. I’d given the professor a copy of the transcript on which the speakers had been assigned letters from A to G, and my list of numbered names. In my notebook I had listed Henry Yarrow as No. 1, then all eleven members of the council, not including Tony Brizante, and finally Lieutenant Weeton. So there were seven letters, thirteen numbers. Match a letter with a number and, hey presto, you’ve got one of the bastards pinned.

“Fire away, Professor. What’ve you got?”

“Number Two is A, Six is D, and Thirteen is E.”

It started sort of humming in my head, as the significance—the full significance—of what the professor had said began to hit me.

He was going on, saying it was “beautiful,” and he was certain of those three and that they were the only three, and after a few seconds I said, “Professor, I’m very much in your debt for this. It’s more important than you know, sir. I hate to hang up, but there’s a great deal for me to do.”

“We must discuss this another time, then, Mr. Scott.”

“We will, Professor. That’s a promise.” I hung up.

Two is A, Six is D, Thirteen is E.

The second man to speak on the tape I’d recorded at Sunrise Villas this morning had been the first man, A, on the tape recorded by Fred Jenkins. Which was to say: Pete Lecci. No great surprise there. Only a little surprise, certainly no shock, that No. 13, Lieutenant Dan Weeton, was the “E” so willing and even anxious to “do the job,” that is the job of killing Shell Scott, his way if the Lucky-hits-him-and-gets-hit plan came a cropper. The surprise might have been greater if Bludgett hadn’t told me about Weeton’s being inside the old King mansion at the time I’d been outside it getting shot at. It seemed apparent that Weeton, and perhaps other “big apples,” had gone there soon after Jenkins’ transmitter was spotted.

But the rest of it was enough to keep my brain spinning, almost reeling, as in the space of a few seconds at least half a dozen ideas tried to crowd together in my mind. The first thought beyond the obvious teetered on the edge of my mind, then fell, exploding and spreading, like a small soft bomb. Friday night, last night, when I’d had my pleasant chat with Henry Yarrow, I had not been talking with Henry Yarrow. More accurately, not with “Henry Yarrow.” And like a second bomb gently exploding I realized what Gil Reyes had meant by saying—swearing—to quote Tony Brizante, “Jesus Christ. Mary, Mother of God.” And then, “Stop, stop the car.” I knew I’d made one hell of a mistake when listening to the Jenkins tape.

I knew—well, all that and more, for it all followed from Professor Elliott Irwin’s telling me that No. 6 was D—or: the Reverend Stanley Archibald. Oddly, in my mind I could almost hear him saying syrupily, “‘Also unto thee, O Lord, belongeth mercy: for thou renderest to every man according to his work.’ Psalms: Sixty, Two-twelve.”

But I remembered his quoting something else about, “Be ye strong therefore, and let not your hands be weak,” and I took my hand off the phone and lifted it up before mine eyes and made it into a rather formidable fist and smiled upon it. For I had—according, at least, to Reverend Archie—a Commandment from the Lord. And I meant to keep that Commandment. Meant to keep it despite the slings and arrows and bullets of the evildoers, despite even the much more formidable fist of Bludgett. Verily, I had my work cut out for me.

Beyond the drawn blinds white incandescence flared, thunder cracked, banged against the walls and in my ears. After it the rumble of much more distant thunder rolled, fluttered upon the air.

My copy of the tape Fred Jenkins had made—and died for—was in an envelope in the Mountain Shadows safe. I wanted to hear it again, for a lot of reasons. I went out and headed for the lobby desk, walking through rain becoming heavier now, letting the thoughts form, get fixed in my mind.

When I’d first talked privately with Reverend Archibald a bit more than twenty-four hours ago, he had of course been lying to me. It followed from simple premise to QED that Mrs. Blessing had been lying, and Henry Yarrow had been lying, and I knew finally why Gilberto Reyes had been murdered, who had ordered his murder and why. It wasn’t important, at least not now, that Ace and Fleepo had done the actual killing. The whole thing—almost the whole thing—was starting to become clear.

When I’d listened to the Jenkins tape this morning part of the answer had been banging away at my ears, obvious, unmistakable, if I’d had the sense to realize it. An answer not in those last six minutes but in the three-quarters of an hour before then. I was a little late getting it—but better late, goddammit, I thought, than never.

Jenkins recorded only when there was something of interest, a phone call, the arrival of somebody at the house—no point in recording silence. In other words, on that fifty-one minutes of tape was a record of everything said between, roughly, two or three P.M. Friday afternoon until a little after two A.M. this morning when the transmitter had been spotted.

I had been so intent upon listening for talk of murder, a damaging revelation, even a voice I might recognize, that I had completely failed to note the most important thing on the first forty-five minutes of that tape. Or, rather, the important thing which was not on it: Me.

The words I had spoken last night to Henry Yarrow, in his home, were not on the tape. Interestingly, too, Professor Irwin had told me three of his comparisons matched and only three. Yet No. 1 on my comparison tape, made this morning at the Villas, had been Henry Yarrow. Thus Yarrow’s voice was not on the Jenkins tape, either.

As I trotted past the pool the sky above me was black. Before I reached the glass doors of the lobby fat drops of rain were churning the pool’s surface and splattering heavily on cement. At the desk I gave the clerk my claim check and asked him to get the envelope I’d left in the safe. He did, but before handing it to me checked my box and plucked a slip of paper from it.

“Did you get your call, Mr. Scott?” he asked. “From the lady who phoned?”

“What lady?”

“She didn’t leave her name. I mentioned it because she spoke to me personally, asked if I knew where she might reach you—apparently she had already phoned your room. She requested that we have you paged.”

I couldn’t think of any ladies who might have called and paged me except Lucrezia and—maybe—my “old gray-headed” Mary Blessing, widow with the hotly hypnotic thighs.

“Is the message from her?” I indicated the slip of paper in his hand.

He shook his head. “This was from a gentleman who phoned, oh … perhaps three-quarters of an hour after we paged you.”

I read the note. “Shell, call Tony. Very urgent. Call this number.” But the number was not Tony Brizante’s.

I turned away from the desk, then stopped. I was getting a very funny feeling. The time of the message had been logged as seven-thirty-six P.M. It was ten minutes past eight now. According to what the clerk had said, I must have been paged only a few minutes before seven P.M. That would have been when I was trying to set things up for my episode with Bludgett—probably while still speaking with Dr. Fretsindler in his room.

“Let me talk to your switchboard operator,” I said.

She told me she had logged the call from the lady who’d spoken to the desk clerk at sixty-fifty P.M., then added, “There were three other calls for you about that time, Mr. Scott. All four within ten minutes or so. I remember because I knew you weren’t in your room, but I had to keep ringing it anyway. I was ringing your room for the third time while you were still being paged from the call before—”

I interrupted. “The one call that was completed, to the desk here. If it was a toll call, the woman would have had to give her number to the operator. I want that number.”

It didn’t take long. The six-fifty P.M. call had been from Sunrise Villas. The number was Tony Brizante’s. And Tony’s phone was probably—almost certainly by now—tapped.

I shoved the note and envelope with the tape into my coat pocket, mumbled some kind of thanks and was gone, running.

The rain was coming down like water squirted from a hose. I ran through it, slipped once but kept my balance, dug for my key as I reached the door of my suite. Inside, dripping on the carpet, I grabbed the phone and had the operator get for me the number on the soaking-wet slip still in my hand.

Tony didn’t answer. It was a woman. “Who is this?”

“Shell Scott. I got a message—”

“Oh, yes. One minute. You wait. Please.”

I could hear the sound as she put the receiver down. Silence. A minute. A minute and a half. My throat was getting tight. And dry.

Then: “Shell?”

“Yes, Tony?”

“It is Tony. I called you, they said—”

“Never mind. I got your message. What’s the matter?”

“It’s Lucrezia. Lu, she’s gone.”

“What do you mean, gone?”

“Just—gone. She left, took my car. I didn’t think she would leave. I had told her, Lu, stay in the house—”

He sounded like a man about to crack up. “Tony, cool it. Slow down. What the hell happened?”

“I was next door, I mean here where I am now—after our talk I did not want to use the phone in the house. I think, then, Lucrezia phoned somebody, maybe you. Mama said she heard Lu talking, but not what she said. When I got back to the house Lu had gone, taking the car.”

“That doesn’t mean she’s—”

“Wait. I was concerned, but not so frightened. I kept expecting her to come home. But—” He paused, and I could hear him breathing raggedly. “About an hour ago the Highway Patrol called me. They said on the road between here and Scottsdale they had found my car.”

“Found it? It wasn’t … wrecked, was it?”

“Not turned over or crashed. It was off the road, angled off. The left fender in the front was crushed, bent in.”

“Tony. Lucrezia, was she—”

“The car was empty. She was gone.”

“Oh, my God,” I said.

Words began pouring from him, but they made little sense to me, partly because half of them were in Italian. I was probably nearly as shaken as he was, but I said, “Tony, dammit, slow down. A lot of things have happened that you don’t know about. I may be able to help—if you’ll talk so I can understand you.”

“But she—” He cut it off. There was a short silence. When he spoke his voice was lower, steadier. “Yes. I will tell it to you just the way it came about. Late this afternoon, Lucrezia and I went to see Mrs. Reyes—for sympathy, from friendship. We did not go alone. Sergeant Striker drove us. Afterwards, when we were going up Palma Drive toward Claridge, where we turn to come home, there was a man walking from a house to his car in front. Lu said, ‘Dad, there’s Mr. Yarrow.’ I looked and it was him, yes, but it was a different car. And it was not the house where I saw him go Tuesday morning. I told Lu this, saying he must be visiting somebody, but she asked many questions, and had the sergeant slow down, almost stop, when we came to the house where I had seen Mr. Yarrow go before. It was nearly two blocks farther.”

“Yeah, that’s the place where the meeting was, the one Jenkins bugged. It’s the place Fred bugged because that’s the house you pointed out to him.”

“I don’t understand.”

“It would take too long to explain, Tony. Go on.”

“We came home. I still did not know if it was important, but I felt I should talk to you about it, maybe it would mean something to you. So I came next door here and phoned.”

“Did you tell Lucrezia what you were going to do?”

“No, just that I would be back soon. I called three times in maybe ten minutes but didn’t reach you, and when I returned Lucrezia had gone—as I said. On the table by the phone was our local paper, the Sunrise Villas News, and in it is the story of the shooting at you last night, there at Mr. Yarrow’s home. Lu, it must have been, had made a pencil line under the address given.”

“Sixteen-ninety-four North Palma Drive.”

“Yes … Is that important? I paid no attention to numbers, only that it was a different house—”

“Tony, when you first told me about following Yarrow Tuesday morning, you said you saw him turn off Claridge and go into a house about half a block down Palma Drive. When I called on Yarrow last night, I went to a house on Palma nearly two blocks from Claridge. I didn’t think of that or realize what it meant until a little while ago, unfortunately. But the house where you and Lucrezia saw Yarrow today was the one nearly two blocks from Claridge, right?”

“Yes. But that is where I saw him go. Do you mean when I followed Mr. Yarrow—”

“I mean, Tony, you did not follow Mr. Yarrow. I’ll explain when there’s more time. What else can you tell me?”

“That is all there is. The Highway Patrol phoned, and I told them my daughter had been driving the car. Then I called you, left the message. But I have heard no more—”

“What time did you first call me?”

“We got home a little after six-thirty. I called you the first time … about quarter to seven it must have been.”

“Tony, I know Lucrezia pestered you to tell her what was going on, and you explained most of it to her this morning. But did you mention the possibility of a tap on your phone?”

“No …” He was silent. “My God, if it is my fault—”

“Maybe that angle isn’t important, Tony. If it is, the fault’s more mine than yours. But let’s not jump to conclusions.…” I stopped. He started to speak, but I said, “Let me think, Tony. Just hold on a minute.”

It was clear enough that while Tony was trying to reach me from the house next door, where he was now, Lucrezia must have phoned me once from Tony’s house. The timing, all of it fit—but didn’t explain much yet. It was difficult for me to think with real clarity, not merely because I was so worried about Lucrezia, but because when Bludgett knocked me off the stage he hadn’t done me any good. I’d come to with a sizable headache, and I still had most of it.

Yeah, Bludgett—there were too damned many things to think about all at once. I looked at my watch. Twenty minutes after eight. Forty minutes since Bludgett had roared into the thunderous night. Plenty of time to get in touch with his pals by now, if he’d wanted to. And I rather supposed he might have wanted to. But the only important factor at the moment was Lucrezia. What had happened to her—and why. That was the part I couldn’t get, because I simply eliminated coincidence and assumed she’d been grabbed by the bastards I now thought of as Lecci and Company. Company like the Reverend, Ace and Fleepo, Weeton.…

Thunder still boomed and rumbled outside. Most of it in the past minutes had been soft and distant, but occasionally there was one of those solid cracks as a bolt struck the earth nearby. I could hear the rain, still coming down hard.

I went back to that why?

It was almost too much for me to believe the boys had grabbed her, and it’s a lot easier for me to believe the worst of hoods than it is for most. But it simply didn’t make sense. Not even hood-sense. She was Lucrezia Brizante, not Sally Smalk from Corn-Ear, Nebraska. She wasn’t a woman they could just snatch, knock around, kill. Unless … Unless she was, somehow, so enormously important to them they were willing to take the big chance—and had reason to believe they might get away with it.

Assume Brizante’s phone was tapped. So what? What could they have heard? Merely a gal—or, rather, Lucrezia Brizante—trying to phone Shell Scott, having me paged. Why get excited? They couldn’t have listened in on anything important. She hadn’t talked to me, the calls hadn’t been completed.…

I was missing something. In me was building that goddamned nervous feeling, the tension that tells you there’s something else—but not what else. It felt as if my nerves were prickly worms trying to crawl out through my skin. So the hell with it. I knew where I was going, even if I didn’t have all the answers.

Last night I’d plucked Jimmy Ryan’s Colt .45 from the limb of a tree; this afternoon I’d taken another Colt automatic from Bludgett. Both of them were now wrapped in a bath towel and tucked away on a shelf in my clothes closet, and—considering where I was going and what I had in mind—I would probably need more armament than merely my .38. What I really needed was a bazooka and a machine gun and immortality, but what the hell. I’d settle for my .38 and two Colt. 45’s.

I started talking again and told Tony that, as far as Lucrezia’s whereabouts and what had happened to her were concerned, the Highway Patrol could have the paint on Tony’s front fender analyzed and come up with the make and model of the other car and damn near figure out how much gas was in its tank, that they’d be working on it, and so would I—and short of hell and high water, earthquake and eruption, I’d find her.

Then I said, “We’ll keep hoping this has nothing to do with that probably tapped phone of yours, but just in case it does there might be trouble heading your way. So let me talk to Sergeant Striker. I’ll hang on while you go back to your place and get him. There are some things he should know, especially about Lieutenant—”

“He had to leave.”

“He left? When?

“About … seven, seven-fifteen. It was just a little while before the Highway Patrol called me—”

“Is he coming back? Why did he leave?”

“I don’t know if he’ll be back. Lieutenant Weeton phoned him here, and he had to go on some kind of special duty. He said the lieutenant is in charge of everything when the captain goes home at night, so he had to leave.”

It shouldn’t have affected me as much as it did, I suppose, but my face got cold and I could feel the sudden wetness on it.

“Tony, you’ve got a gun in your house, haven’t you?”

“Shotgun and rifle. But—”

“Go home. Load the shotgun. Keep the blinds drawn, stay in the house, and keep that boomer handy.”

“What? My God, do you think—”

“Don’t worry about what I think. I’ve got to go.”

“But, load the gun? And stay in—”

“Just do it, will you? I’ve got to get going. Good-bye.”

I had actually started to hang up the phone when it happened. I knew what it was. I knew immediately. Behind me there was a sort of calamitous-and-catastrophic-sounding CRASH and a somewhat lesser sound of splintering-booming-thundering. It was very much as though a bolt of lightning had landed three feet from my ear. But I knew it wasn’t that. It was merely hell and high water, earthquake and eruption.

My back was to the door. Even without looking I knew, I just knew, that someone—or something—had crashed through that door like those villains you see tearing through houses in animated cartoons.

I dropped the phone and swung around ducking and bending aside before I even started turning, and I saw him—need I say who?—coming at me like a great oak uprooted and flung at me on the winds of a typhoon. The cuffs still encircled each of his wrists, but they were separated, no longer joined in the middle.

But that wasn’t all.

Beyond Bludgett, who had one humanoid arm cranked back and was already uncranking it and the ridiculous fist at its end, were a regiment of other guys. They were jumping in over the door that Bludgett had hit and knocked absolutely flat on the carpet, their intention clearly to do the same thing to me.

If I hadn’t swerved and ducked even before starting to turn, Bludgett’s enormous fist would have caught me squarely in the head. As it was, the thing whistled by two inches from my skull, and I just kept on leaning to my left, got leverage for one foot and half hopped and half shoved myself aside.

Bludgett couldn’t stop, kept going. I heard him hit the wall. I hoped he’d keep on going through the wall, but knew it was a forlorn hope. Actually it didn’t matter much. What had looked like a regiment of hoods streaming in the door turned out to be only three others, but three—with Bludgett—was enough. Three without Bludgett was enough. Two of them I recognized: hard-muscled and slim-hipped Ace; the square milk-white face and short burly body of Lucky Ryan. The third man was dark-skinned, lean, with hard black eyes, thin black moustache.

Even as I recognized the two men, I wondered what Ryan was doing here with Ace and the third guy—probably Fleepo—his appointed executioners. But I would have to ponder that question another time, if ever.

There wasn’t time to get out my Colt or even think of getting it out. There were no other guns in sight. I guess they didn’t want the sound of gunshots to bring possible help—help for me, like bellmen and maids—on the run. Nearest to me was the guy called Ace. Despite his muscular build, he clearly wasn’t much of a man for the rough-and-tumble. He wasn’t planted, getting set. He was actually jumping at me, one foot clear the hell off the floor and both his hands reaching.

No matter what else happened in the next few seconds I knew I was going to get him. I did, and I got him good. Those reaching hands were before his face, so I didn’t even try to bang through them, just bent my knees a little more and then shoved as hard as I could, letting right hand and arm slice up toward his middle as my legs uncoiled, and when my projecting knuckles smacked against his gut he jerked astonishingly in the air, and the breath flew from his mouth like gas from a geyser, and I saw him spin off to one side atilt, falling, but I didn’t see him land.

I did see the leather-covered sap swinging and jerked my head aside. Almost in time. It barely clipped me, but it made my head ring like a lead gong and slowed me down a little. Enough. The sap was in Lucky’s hand. Almost on top of me was the black-moustached man. I was already bent to my left, but still balanced. I yanked my right leg up, snapped it out and felt the heel of my shoe ram into the guy’s groin. A knee came up and hit my chest hard, knocking me off balance. I spun around, trying to get my feet planted.

Turning, everything blurred, almost out of focus, I got a glimpse of Ace doubled up on the floor and saw the moustached boy six feet away on his back, so the guy yanking on me had to be Lucky—but that which was now before my eyes made all else pale into insignificance.

It mattered not that I was still on my feet, or that of the four strong lusty men who had attacked me two were now temporarily out of commission, or that with only a few more moments of grace it was at least possible I could have sent Lucky to join his friends on the carpet.

It mattered not. That was the stuff of which dreams were made.

What mattered was Bludgett.

Bludgett, all set, ready and eager and homicidal, feet spread, arm cocked again, cocked and then triggered.

I saw that huge fist coming at me and tried to move my head, but knew my head wasn’t moving fast enough, certainly not as fast as it would soon be moving, and in that elastic moment I remembered the many—too many—times I’d thought, Man, I hope I never get clobbered by Bludgett. The too many times, because I already knew if you hold the dumb goddamn thought long enough you are going to get it, and now, sure enough, I was going to get it.

In what remained of that sickening instant there was time only for very quick little thoughts, so I thought, “No!” And then “No!” But each time a dirty little voice from somewhere, somewhere smarter than where I was, whispered, “Oh, yes.”

With that fist merely a blur half an inch from my head, my very last thought was, That Which He Feared Has Come Upon Him, and even though it wasn’t original it was true as true could be. Because, right then, it sure did come upon me.

CHAPTER SEVENTEEN

The flood fell in sheets of thunder and the mud was filled with lightning. Wetness whipped me with a heavy lash. Freezing blackness oozed over me like cold napalm. For a while there was no pain, and then the pain began.

With the pain, memory. Very little at first. Memory of men and blows … of something blurred, too deep in mind to reach … And awareness of now. Now: I was lying flat, face down, in mud. Rain fell steadily on my back. I could hear thunder, swelling and fading. When I rolled over and sat up, my right arm almost buckled, pain darting in the muscles, and my head throbbed, throbbed, throbbed, a dull knife slicing through it with every beat of my heart.

Minutes passed while I sat there, and slowly memory returned. Not all of it, some of it. I remembered Mountain Shadows. Lucrezia Brizante, the lovely Lucrezia. Everything from meeting her in the cocktail lounge up until … the convention room, and Bludgett. Yeah, Bludgett, and the laser, and getting socked or pushed or flung off the stage.

And then—too suddenly—Bludgett again, his fist swinging at me, the other men with him.…

I couldn’t have been with Bludgett, getting smacked across the back, and then immediately afterward in my own rooms with Bludgett—and three other lobs—getting smacked in the head, smacked by Bludgett again.

But that’s the way it was. The space between, or rather the segment of time between, had been plucked out and thrown away. Or smacked out and thrown away. A minute, an hour, or hours—I had no idea how long, nor did I have any idea what had filled the minutes or hours.

Wouldn’t you know? I thought. Wouldn’t you know the one blank bit would be the bit between Bludgett and Bludgett?

The one blank bit, that is, except for the one just ended. The blankness which had begun when that huge fist connected with my forehead. There was, naturally, no memory of anything from then until now, since when unconscious one is not conscious. And I had sure been unconscious.

So how had I gotten here?

There was something … That thing “too deep in mind.”

Running, shouts, sharp sounds—shots, probably. Gunshots. But it was all thick and blurred, not real, confused, like one picture on a single film exposed a dozen times. I knew I’d been with the four hoods, had been knocked out. I remembered that vivid moment in my room. But how I’d gotten there—or here—I didn’t know. I didn’t even know where “here” was.

I stood up. At least I was able to stand. Everything worked. There were no bullet holes in me. Lights shone in the darkness not very far away. I walked toward them.

It was a gas station. Two pumps, a guy reading a paperback book. I rubbed mud from the face of my watch. It was still running, and the time was nine-sixteen, so I guessed I’d come to about nine o’clock. From the attendant I learned the station was on the road between Scottsdale and Sunrise Villas, about five miles from Mountain Shadows. I had change in my pockets, wallet inside my coat. Everything—except my gun.

I dropped a dime into the pay phone on the wall, dialed Mountain Shadows. I wasn’t able to reach Paul Anson, but I managed to get Artie Katz brought to the phone. He’d been parking cars at the hotel entrance, but when I told him who I was and where and asked if he could pick me up in a hurry, he said, “Right away, Mr. Scott. I’ll bet you’re surprised how quick.”

I hung up, smiling—probably for the first time in hours—and went into the rest room, and stopped smiling. Over the washbasin was a large mirror in which I caught sight of myself from the waist up. I seemed to be entirely mud. But by looking very closely I could see, under the wet earth, a huge lump on my forehead, plus a cut over my right eye.

I washed my face and hands but didn’t even try to do anything about my clothes—my lovely, brand-new, custom-tailored, shimmering, color-of-a-dragon’s-eye suit. What I needed was a complete overhaul; a dab here and there wasn’t going to make much difference. So I spent only a minute or so in the john, then walked outside and was trying to light a wet cigarette—it can’t be done—when I heard a sound.

It was a zooming sound, a muffled roar, and for a moment I thought it was a fan-jet flying low through rain and storm over the Valley of the Sun. But then I saw on my right, where five miles distant Scottsdale lay, a pair of headlights rushing toward me with astounding speed.

It was Artie Katz. It had to be. The tires shrieked, skidded on the wet pavement, he slid to a stop fifty yards past the station, backed up heedless of death, whipped his frail-looking buggy around, screeched the tires again, and with a grinding jerk made the heap spring forward to stop inches from my quaking knees.

“How was that?” he asked, grinning his toothy grin.

I didn’t say anything. I eyed his automobile dubiously, then opened the door and climbed in.

“I figured you’d think I got here pretty quick,” he said, presumably disappointed by my silence. “I did it in just over three minutes.”

“I don’t believe you’re here yet, that’s all,” I said. “Or, rather, I simply lost a little extra time somewhere—I’m good at that. Three minutes? Ha, I defy you to prove—”

Vrooom. My head snapped back. I’d barely got it forward again when the tires were screeching and we were swerving a little, a little too much, on the highway. “Are we there?” I asked.

“Not yet. I didn’t want them to hear me slowing down too near the hotel.”

I opened my eyes. We were almost there. And very shortly Artie had pulled up in the curving drive before the softly lighted entrance near the pretty rockwork with water trickling down its face, near the plants and all the pretty things—all of which hinted that my appearance was not quite up to Mountain Shadows usual standard. Artie seemed to notice it at the same time.

“What happened to you?” he asked me.

“The same old thing,” I told him noncommittally. “Many thanks for taking two years off my life, Artie. I’ll see you later. You wouldn’t want any wet money, would you?”

“I don’t care if it’s drowned.”

This boy was going to go far. “I’ll see you later,” I said, then strolled through the swinging glass doors into the brightly lighted lobby. If anybody asked me dumb questions I would merely tell them I was doing my thing. That covers anything these days.

I’d started tramping over the pretty orange carpet when I saw the girl Paul had been with at the bar last night. She was walking from my left, toward the cocktail lounge and dining room. She saw me and came to a full stop, then, like the nice girl she undoubtedly was, tried to pretend she’d seen nothing unusual, and walked right by me.

“Hey,” I said. “Miss.”

She stopped again, a yard past me, but didn’t turn around. She peeked over her shoulder. The one eye I could see was not filled with a happy light.

“Do you know where Paul is?” I asked her.

“Paul?”

“You’re Dinelle—something like that—aren’t you?”

“I’m … my name is Janelle.”

“Oh, yeah. Don’t you recognize me?”

She studied me. Her expression changed. She had recognized me. Janelle turned toward me, but even now that I could see both eyes, I could detect no happy lights in them.

“You’re that fellow with the Dogwatch people, aren’t you?”

“Watchdog. But, I—I quit them.”

“What have they done to you?”

“Nothing—ah, that was just a joke. Just for fun—lots of fun … Do you know where Paul is? Dr. Anson?”

There it was. The happy light in her eyes at last. “He phoned me a few minutes ago from downtown,” she said.

That’s why I hadn’t been able to reach him. He’d been downtown, phoning Janelle. What a life he led. At least he was a good doctor. Which was what I needed.

“I’m to meet him in the lounge,” Janelle said. “He may be there by now.”

“I’ll tell him hello for you,” I said, and walked speedily to the lounge and inside.

The room, perhaps because of the convention lectures, was less crowded than usual at this hour, especially for a Saturday night. Only half a dozen couples were seated at tables, two singles at the bar. One man was at a table alone, but he wasn’t sitting. It was Paul, and he was standing. Standing, with his right arm extended high in the air over his head, hand clutching a highball glass. “What in the hell is this?” he was yelling. “What is this? What is this?”

I walked up next to him. “You look like the Statue of Liberty,” I said. “A stoned Statue of Liberty. Now, drink it down like a nice boy. It’s good for what ails you.”

He spun his head around. “You!” he said. “You miserable—you—you’re responsible for this. Don’t tell me you’re not.”

“Of course not. I mean, of course I won’t tell you I’m not. It’s no more than you deserve.”

“What the hell is this gunk?”

“It destroys the sex drive—”

“Ah!” He sat down heavily. “No—you wouldn’t. Not even you, you freak …” For the first time he got a good look at me. “What the devil?” he said, eyeing me all over. “Are you all right?”

“You call yourself a doctor. Of course I’m all right. I’ve merely had the bejeezus beaten out of me, and suspect I have been stepped on by stampeding cattle, and I am thus in a very delicate condition—”

“You’re pregnant?”

“Probably that, too. I’ve come to you because you are a doctor, one of those kindly and dedicated men who heal the sick, and dying, and because I am sick and I have only five minutes to live—”

He laughed. “Yeah, you’re all right.”

“Doctor, I have work to do. I must be up and about. So will you get up off your butt and give me a shot of ether or something? You might at least try to save the baby—”

On one side of us was Janelle, saying in a plaintive voice, “Paul? Paul?” And on the other was Vera, looking warily at us as though expecting us to come to blows, saying, “Is something wrong with your drink, Dr. Anson?”

He smiled. Smiled, not smelled. Then he said, “Why, no, my dear. I am a doctor, and in the interests of science I have experimented upon myself with poison, lye, hydrochloric acid, deadly viruses, and fermented marula berries, thus I recognize this drink. But, really, I’m just not thirsty.”

He handed her the glass and she took it away.

Paul got to his feet. “Come on, I’ll patch you up.”

Janelle said, “Paul? Paul?”

Paul leaned over and put his lips next to her ear. I couldn’t make out the words, but it sounded as if he were humming. She smiled, and Paul and I walked out of the lounge. A minute later we were at the door of my suite. I poked my key at the lock, and the door fell down.

It landed with a great crash on the floor. I reached in and turned on the lights, then Paul and I went inside.

He looked at the door on the carpet, then at me.

“This is one of the cheaper suites?”

“I forgot about that,” I said. I remembered Bludgett swinging at me, and the other men who’d been in my room then, but the way they’d come in had slipped my mind. It was odd. Now I clearly remembered that crash as the door flew off its hinges. The boys must have propped it up again.

“Tell you about it in a minute,” I said to Paul.

Somehow, the crash of the door falling made that missing chunk of memory start bugging me more. I remembered everything up to the end of my session with Bludgett in the convention room, but the only thing that had been bothering me was the call I’d been expecting from Professor Irwin. For all I knew, I might already have talked to him. If not, I sure as hell wanted to know what he had to say.

The first thing I did however—after looking around the room and noting its disarray—was walk to the bedroom closet and reach up onto the shelf just above the level of my head. My hand felt the rolled towel; it was still there. I took the bundle down and put it on a table.

I took the two automatics out, checked them. Both clips were full. Fourteen slugs. Two each for seven guys, the way I felt about them. I stuck one of the guns under my belt, then walked to the phone saying to Paul, “I remember Bludgett’s slugging me, but I’d forgotten he strolled through the door.”

While we’d been walking here from the lounge I had told Paul about getting knocked out and coming to in the mud and rain, but I’d not yet mentioned the rest of it. So I said, “Aside from hoping you can patch this cut over my eye and give me something to muffle the explosions in my head, you might also provide a Band-Aid for my brain.” I finished placing the call to Professor Elliott Irwin’s number. “A piece of it seems to be missing.”

“Oh? Another joke? Not to imply there has yet been one.”

“Not exactly. Something I—forgot to mention.”

I hit the high spots for him. Bludgett, the slice of amnesia, and Bludgett again. Then blackness until the awareness of rain.

At the other end of the line, Irwin’s phone was ringing.

Paul looked at me, seriously for a moment, then removed the unaccustomed expression from his face and said, “Forgot to mention it? You really did get socked this time, didn’t you?”

“You wouldn’t believe it. This guy has to go sideways into airport hangars.” The phone had rung a dozen times. I let it buzz a little longer, then hung up.

I walked to the couch, folded the bath towel in which I’d had the guns, placed it on the cushions and sank rather squishily upon it. As Paul slumped in an easy chair near me, I said, “I remember being with Bludgett in the convention room sometime after seven-thirty P.M.—maybe five minutes later, maybe ten, I don’t know—and I recall his clobbering me there. But except for the vivid if unfortunately brief picture of him and his friends here in my room and Bludgett uncorking another one upon me, I recall nothing until I came to in the swamps about nine P.M.”

I looked at my watch. “Forty minutes ago. Naturally all’s blank from the second Bludgett clobbering until nine. That’s gone forever, lost in limbo. But I must have been ambulatory, from seven-thirtyish until whenever it was when the second Bludgett clobbering occurred. Certainly I got from the convention room to my suite. And I would very damned much like to know what else I may have done.” I paused. “I know you’re a genius—you’ve told me so a hundred times. So do something like a genius.”

“This,” he said enthusiastically, “is extremely interesting. I can’t tell you how glad I am that it happened. To you, I mean.”

“How do I get my memory—”

“Often when a patient suffers a blow, shock, or other trauma, there is amnesia for the immediately preceding period. This we call retrograde amnesia. Loss of memory for the period following trauma is simply amnesia—though when the patient is one such as you, who forgets his amnesia, he is obviously in serious trouble. Now—”

“How do I—”

“—your case is fascinating. Consider: you were struck a blow. You experienced simple amnesia—”

“I was unconscious.”

“I’ll get to that. A short time later you were struck another blow. This was a beauty—”

“It was an ugly—”

“—since from it you developed not only simple amnesia but retrograde amnesia and then forgot both your amnesias. This requires brand-new medical terminology. Which I happen to have right here. Obviously you are going through the menopause.”

“Don’t be ridiculous. Women go through the menopause. So men must go through the womenopause.”

“That is a brilliant hot-flash of insight. Sheldon, you should be a doctor.”

“One of us should.”

“Fortunately, that is my hobby. I am a veterinarian, and therefore should be able to cure you. I shall give you amnesia for your amnesia, which means you will not know you had it.”

I squinted at him. “I think you’re serious.”

“You’d better believe it. You know I’ve done a lot of work with hypnosis, right?”

“You don’t mean you’re going to try to hypnotize me?”

“Why not? I’m reasonably confident hypnosis can bring back your mislaid memory speedily and completely—bring back a good deal more, by the way, than you yet realize, Shell. Retrograde amnesia, when from a blow or shock, often clears up by itself in a short time. I know—you want it cleared up fast.”

“The sooner the better.”

“Merely being reminded of something that occurred during the time you’ve forgotten might stir up those little cells and bring everything back. Just as when the door fell you remembered quite clearly how that happened. Even though you still don’t remember anything of the period immediately before then.”

He lit a cigarette, took a puff, looked at me. “There could be another factor here, Shell. Possibly—just possibly—during that period something occurred that you don’t want to think about, something so painful you want to forget it. And you’ve forced it down out of sight, repressed it—not consciously, of course. If so, hypnosis is even more likely to be the indicated therapy.”

“I don’t know what could be more painful than getting smacked by Bludgett,” I said. “Of course, I’m concerned about Tony Brizante. And Lucrezia. But Sergeant Striker’s staked out at the house, and I don’t think the lads would try anything there anyway.”

“Do you mean Mr. Brizante and Lucrezia … might be in some kind of danger?”

“Paul, these guys are not jolly little—” I stopped.

Paul didn’t know what was going on, not really. I’d told him about my getting banged around by hoods, but—even last night in the bar—I’d said little about Tony, and as little as possible about Lucrezia.

I went on, “Well, the way things stand—maybe I should say stood, before Bludgett—I don’t think she and Tony are in any real danger from the bums. Seems clear to me the hoods’ major and almost sole interest at the moment is knocking me off.”

“Did you see Miss Brizante this afternoon?”

“No, I saw her when I left the Villas this morn—what do you mean, this afternoon?”

“She tried to phone you. Couldn’t reach you, remembered you’d mentioned me as a friend. Also I think she was with you at the desk when you left a note for me here yesterday.”

“That’s right.” I was getting a very strange feeling. An uneasiness in my stomach; a delicate pulsing, as if a tiny artery were moving in my brain. “You haven’t seen her, have you?”

“No. But when she couldn’t reach you by phone—even had you paged—she called me. Wanted me to try to find you, give you a message.”

“When was this?”

“A little before seven P.M.”

I would have been making my preparations for Bludgett then. “Message?” I asked Paul. “What message? Come on, spill it.”

“I’ll do this my way, Shell. Miss Brizante asked me to tell you that a man named … Yarrow?” Paul was speaking very slowly.

“Henry Yarrow,” I said.

“That he doesn’t live in the house where her father saw him go Tuesday morning … but she knows who does.” He paused. “Miss Brizante said there was more, but that was all she gave me. Mean anything to you, Shell?”

I nodded. Of course. I remembered Tony telling me much the same thing. That they’d seen Yarrow, but two blocks from …

It wasn’t a sudden shock, not a violent rush of energy through my nerves, I simply realized I was remembering. But my flesh grew cool and my mouth was suddenly dry. I remembered speaking to Tony Brizante on the phone. And—before that—Elliott Irwin. The professor.

I heard Paul saying, softly, “Just let it come … easy … don’t push it … relax and let it happen …” but it didn’t really mean anything to me. I was leaning forward, trying to reach for those thoughts with my entire body, as it all came back to me. All of it.

Paul spoke again. “OK, Shell?”

I looked at him. “I remember.”

I did. I even knew now the length of time blotted temporarily from memory. I’d been knocked off the stage by Bludgett at approximately seven-forty P.M. And I’d just finished talking to Tony Brizante about eight-twenty when Bludgett had conked me for the second time. Forty minutes.

In less than three-quarters of an hour: the Voiceprints tagging Lecci, Weeton, the Reverend; at the Mountain Shadows desk; talking to Tony Brizante about the phone calls, the car, Lucrezia.… The return of memory had happened in a way I didn’t understand and didn’t care if I ever did understand. Because all I could think about was Lucrezia.

Paul interrupted my thoughts, speaking gently. “That wasn’t quite all of it, Shell. Miss Brizante was telling me to have you phone her as soon as you could, but then she changed her mind—decided right then, apparently—and said it was important enough that she wanted to talk to you herself, so she was coming to Mountain Shadows. She told me she’d be here within half an hour, asked me to find you if I could and keep you at the hotel, and hung up.” He stopped for a moment. “I looked around for you until seven-thirty, assumed she must have arrived, and went downtown.”

I said, my voice so tight Paul was obviously surprised, “She told you she knew who the man was, the one in—the other house. Did she mention his name on the phone?”

“No … just said she knew who he was. Maybe she was going to tell me, but that’s when she decided to come in and see you herself.” He chewed on his lower lip. “Well, you say you remember now. Did she talk to you?”

“No. She didn’t make it here. She …”

I was quiet for so long that Paul said, “Shell, what’s the matter? Are you all right?”

“She’s dead,” I said.

CHAPTER EIGHTEEN

“Don’t be an ass,” Paul growled. “I think you got slugged on the head so hard it scrambled what few brains you had. You sit there guessing—”

“Maybe I am, but I know the whole story now, except for maybe one or two little pieces, and it’s a damn well-educated guess. I just didn’t know until a few minutes ago what reason those slobs would have to kill her—”

“Shell, no bunch of crummy hoods is going to kill Lucrezia Brizante—everybody in the country knows who she is.”

“Sure, I thought of that. You wouldn’t think the bastards would grab her, either. But they did.… Wait a minute.”

I got up, walked across the room and back, over and back again. They’d put the snatch on her, hauled Lucrezia out of her car. I still had no doubt about that—and I knew now it had happened right after she’d phoned Paul. But … I recalled thinking earlier, those bums wouldn’t kill Lucrezia unless they felt they had to take the big chance, and in addition believed they could get away with it.

And suddenly I felt, almost knew, she must be alive.

The hoods had reason enough to kill her—if not, they wouldn’t have grabbed her in the first place. But they damned well knew they couldn’t get away with it as long as one man was alive: me. As long as I was alive, I was the boy who could tag them for the kill. And make it stick. Not that I was much different, to those creeps, from anybody else they’d be happy to hit. Except that I knew enough—at least, almost enough—right now to rip them up.

I stopped in the middle of the room. If it was true that those crumbs wouldn’t kill Lucrezia as long as I was alive, the reverse was also true. And the other side of the coin wasn’t so bright: as soon as they could kill me, Lucrezia was dead. But I was damned if I was going to sit on my can while they had her.

I strode into the bedroom and grabbed the second .45 off the table, and with it in my coat pocket and the other automatic still stuck in my belt headed for the open door.

Paul said—very sweetly—“Don’t you say good-bye?”

I stopped. “Good-bye. Wish me luck. See you later.”

“And where do you think you’re going?”

“I’ll figure that out on the way. To wherever those boys are who clanged inside here tonight. Or any one of their pals. Only this time there won’t be any polite fun and games. This time I’ll start by breaking an arm or two. Then a couple legs. If it’s Bludgett, I may temper action with wisdom and first shoot a hole in each of his kneecaps and elbows. But I am sure as hell going to find out where Lucrezia is, and then—”

“Sheldon, I have long cherished the hope that one day you would do the sane and sensible thing. But no. Invariably you do the foolish, and possibly at last suicidal, thing.”

“Go to hell. This is the kind of thing I do my way.”

“Wouldn’t it help, just a little, if you knew what happened during those minutes you cannot now recall?”

“You’re dumber than I am. I already told you, I remember. It has all come back, all of it.”

“Not the time between the second Bludgett tap and your arising, like a primeval monster, from the desert ooze.”

“That, Dr. Anson, is the time during which I was totally unconscious. When tapped by Bludgett, one does not recall anything between the tap and the awakening, hours or days or weeks later. Those moments are gone, irretrievably.”

I turned toward the door. Or rather the doorway. And then stepped on the door, starting out.

“Those minutes are not gone irretrievably. They are not, as you earlier said, lost in limbo. You can recall them.” He paused. “I am the doctor, Sheldon. However, if you’re not interested …”

I turned and blinked at him. “You can’t be serious.”

“Oh, but I am.”

I just stood there. So Paul rose slowly to his feet and said, “Come on. We go to my rooms. I wouldn’t want to be telling you, ‘Your fat head is getting heavy, heavy,’ and discover your friends had returned.” Out he went.

I still figured he was nuts, but I followed him. In his front room I sat down while Paul rummaged in his bedroom for a minute, came back carrying two books, one in hardcover and the other a paperback. “Our experiment may proceed more speedily if I first eliminate some of your disbelief. Which is to say, your abysmal ignorance.”

He thumbed through the hardcover book. “This is one of the excellent Prentice-Hall volumes, Self-Hypnotism, by Leslie M. LeCron. See the bottom of page eighty-two. This other one is The Intimate Casebook of a Hypnotist by Arthur Ellen with Dean Jennings, a Signet Mystic Book published by the New American Library. I direct your attention, Sheldon, to … wait’ll I find it … pages fifty-four and fifty-five.”

While I obediently—but still unbelieving—glanced at the first line of an already underlined passage, Paul continued, “Some other time, if your already gratifying enthusiasm continues to grow, I shall provide you with other references, both in popular and technical literature, as proof that the unconscious mind forgets nothing and, even when under anesthesia, the patient hears and remembers—subconsciously remembers, to be sure—everything said and done in his presence.”

“You’re kidding.”

“More, that it records those words and actions indelibly and in exact detail, with even greater fidelity than the conscious mind. When a man is unconscious as the result of accident, anesthesia, sleep, even—I hope—being sapped on the head or bludgeoned by a Bludgett, hypnosis by probing the unconscious mind can uncover, and bring into consciousness, that which was said and done to him or near him. Things, by the way, which may unconsciously have been making him ill, crippling him, bugging the hell out of him—”

“You really are kidding.”

“Read! That is, if—I never did ask you, Shell—”

“Yeah, I can read. If I move my whole mouth.” I read the marked passages in both books. I had to admit it: maybe Paul wasn’t nuts. Either that, or he was not the only cuckoo about.

Paul said, “Ah-ha, my medical training leads me to believe a modicum of intelligence is leaking into your cranial disaster. Your eyes have less of their normal dull, glazed look.”

“I still don’t believe it. Paul—seriously, that bit about patients totally snoozed eavesdropping on the sawbones … you’re quite serious?”

“Of course. I’ve convinced some of my fellow surgeons. Others—well, some minds you can’t open with a meat-ax. These colleagues of mine continue to yak in operating rooms and, unquestionably in some cases, continue to lose patients who might have been saved if their gabby healers had kept their mouths shut.”

“You mean, say Myrtle is under anesthesia, and they’re carving away on her, if a doctor or nurse says, ‘Well, we might as well finish the job, but this one’s going to kick the bucket for sure,’ or, ‘Ugh, lookit that, I don’t know how she lived this long,’ or, ‘Hurryitup, willya, I gotta date in twenny minutes—’”

“You have the general idea. Some, who might otherwise have survived, kick the bucket. Shall we give it a go?”

“Hypnosis?”

“Of course, hypnosis. Quit stalling.”

“Well …”

“Consider: what have you got to lose? You’ve already lost it, have you not?”

“Yeah …”

“And you have everything to gain?”

“Well … yeah …”

“So? I do need your permission.”

I glanced at my watch. It was ten-four P.M. “So … OK. You’ve got it. Fire away.”

“OK,” I told Paul. “Fire away. Let the great experiment begin.”

“It began. It proceeded splendidly. And it has ended.”

“You mean I’ve already been hypnotized?”

“That’s right.” I noticed a portable tape recorder on the floor near him, reels still turning, a small microphone on a table between us. Paul pressed the “Stop” button.

“I gave you a posthypnotic suggestion that when I say a certain key word you’ll recall everything you revealed—you were talking quite a streak, by the way—during the twenty minutes or so you were under. You’re a fine subject.”

I thought of checking my watch. When I’d last noted the time—it seemed only seconds ago—it had been ten-four P.M. on the tick. Now it was ten-thirty. Twenty-six minutes. It shocked the hell out of me.

Paul went on, “I could simply have told you to remember everything upon awakening, of course, but—under the circumstances—if you revealed something under hypnosis which could be traumatic I intended to prepare you for the fact. Didn’t want to smack you with it cold.”

“If, for example, I’d heard one of the hoods saying Lucrezia was dead?”

“Something like that.” He hastened to add, “There was not anything like that, however.”

It was only now beginning to sink in. “You mean, I really remembered? I actually talked about what those hoods said—while I was unconscious?”

“You most certainly did, Shell. I recorded it all in case you want to listen to yourself describing what happened to you—or as insurance should you get hit on the head again, which I feel is destined. But there’s no reason for you not to remember it all right now.” He paused, then said: “Watchdog.”

It was fantastic.

I was sitting there, still watching his lips move as he completed the “g” of “Watchdog,” and instantly the blankness was filled. Every moment from the time when Bludgett’s fist smashed against my forehead to awakening in the mud was in my mind again—or, to me, in my mind for the first time. It was an almost brain-bending thought, that all of it, the sounds and voices, even feeling, had been in my memory, traced in pathways in my brain, all the time; there, but unknown; and now known completely, not in separate little bits and pieces which gradually formed a whole but as a solid mass that leaped into my consciousness and was simply there.

It was not, of course, like living it over again. But it was a remembering of something I had lived through, had experienced. Just as when you’ve read a book you know the middle, end, beginning, and can think of any part of it or go through it mentally from beginning to end, so could I now examine any single part of that recovered forty minutes, or relive it all in mind from start to finish.

There was much of importance that I knew now and hadn’t known before. But most important, still, was: Lucrezia. They’d grabbed her, all right—but she was alive. At least, when Bludgett and Ace and Fleepo and Lucky had been talking in those forty minutes or so she had been alive.

“Interesting, isn’t it?” Paul said quietly.

“That’s kind of an understatement.”

“Shall I play the tape? The recording only runs a few minutes. It took much less time to tell than to live it.”

“OK. If I go over it in my head while it comes in my ears it might help pin down something that’ll give me an edge. I’m going to need all the help I can get tonight.”

Paul began playing the recording of my voice again, the words I’d so recently spoken during a state of—well, whatever hypnosis is. And I began one of the most unusual and oddly disturbing few minutes of my life.

I knew the words now, but I also knew they had only minutes ago been forgotten completely. So, even though I still winced or smiled once in a while, and thought about the goddamned hoods and for scowling moments wondered how I’d be able to get the bastards, at the same time another almost bewildered part of me roamed like a stranger in the endless reaches of the mind. Strange … how very strange it was. From the words audible in the room, my spoken and tape-recorded words, and from that indelible tape of neuron and synapse and cell within the living brain—the subconscious memory of unconsciousness made conscious—I could put it all together, like a script, or a story, or dialogue and movement from a play.…

“Madre de Dios! I think you keeled him.”

“Nah. He ain’t kilt, Fleepo. He was movin’ away when I hit him.”

“He for sure was after you hit’m. I thod he was goin’ to fly clear outside through where the door was at and land—”

“Prop him up and lemme bounce him again. Turn my brains into marblecules, will he? I’ll learn the bastard—”

“No—hold it!” The hard flat voice of Ace. “Don’t mark him up any more.”

“Why not? We’re gonna kill him, ain’t we?”

“Yeah, sure. But—it’s better if it looks like a simple shooting, see? Besides, we got to get the hell out from this joint. Letch must be outa his crappy mind makin’ us come here to get the crud. Bludgett, pick him up. Lucky, get out to the heap and open the back door, then start her up. Fleepo, go glim around, make sure there ain’t nobody watching.”

I was able actually to feel—or at least remember feeling—the hands on me; being lifted, flung like a sack of cement over a big shoulder; movement, to the car, thud and clunk as I was tossed—not gently and reverently placed—onto the carpeted floorboards.

Soft purr of the engine, idling. Sounds of others getting into the car. A minute passed, another. Feet on pavement, a man climbing into the front of the car, door slamming.

The new voice, Fleepo: “Well?”

And Ace saying, “Yeah.”

Fleepo, “Well?”

Ace, “Yeah.”

“Do we sit here sayin’ well-yeah, well-yeah all night? What’s this well-yeah crap anyways, some kind of code?”

Ace, up front, “Drag ass, Lucky. I had to make a phone call.”

Louder sound of the engine, surge of movement. “What the hell for, at a time like—”

“Chop it. I had to tell Letch and the rest no sweat, we got him and all the … We didn’t have no trouble.”

Screech of tires, the car swaying and straightening out. After a few seconds, close by, in the back seat near me, Fleepo, “Hey, Bludgett, they tell me on the phone you say Scott knows where Reyes and Jenkins are planted? There on the golf course?”

“Yah.”

“How’d he find out that?”

“Beats the beans outa me.”

Silence. Fleepo again. “Be goddamn funny as hell if he found it out out of you. Goddamn, Ace and me wouldn’t never—”

“You wanna tap, too, Fleepo? I’m the one phoned you bums and tole you where he was at, ain’t I? I’m the one hangs around and sees him go in his room, ain’t I? You wouldn’t even have him if it wasn’t for me—”

“Don’t get riled up. Haysoos Creesto, all I do is ask a plain question. All I wonder, how in hell he finds out all these things.”

“He’s got ways,” Bludgett said.

Silence for a while, then Bludgett again, “What do you think, Ace, that tape you got outa Scott’s pocket—it the one he played there in front of The Letch plus all them square dudes?”

“Don’t worry about it, for crissakes. Let them worry about it.”

Lucky, at the wheel, “What tape’s this? Scott played a tape somewheres?”

“Forget it. It’s not important.”

“Well, where was that at? How come I didn’t hear nothing about it?”

“Chop it, Lucky, it’s not important. And easy on the gas. Real easy. We get a ticket with Scott laying on the floor, we’ll have to do more’n tear up a ticket. We’d have to shoot us a cop.”

“So why don’t we just blast the sonofabitch now and roll him outa the car?”

“No, we’re gonna leave him laying closer to the Villas.”

“What for? That don’t make sense.”

“Because Letch says do it there, that’s what for. They got it all figured. Weeton’s the one planned it out. You got to admit he’s pretty sharp, right, Lucky?”

“Yeah, I guess so.”

“Reason it’s gonna be at the Villas, it’ll be fixed so nobody finds Scott for a coupla days, won’t be no way to tell exactly when he got killed. It’ll look like he could’ve got it last night, when he was banging away at Frankenstein and Bludgett here.”

“I tole you, call him Frankie.”

“Yeah, I meant Frankie. Sorry, Bludgett. Didn’t mean no harm, just slipped my mind.”

“Seems like you don’t mean no harm all the time.”

“C’mon, Ace, you were saying what about leavin’ Scott around the Villas someplace?”

“Well, you know Weeton’s getting a warrant ready on Scott, for killing Frankenst—Frankie. Bullet he took out of Frankie’s noodle come all to hell apart when it went in there, but Weeton says he can manage it so it’ll look like it’s the same as the four he took outa The Nailer. It’ll look like Scott was shootin’ everybody in range. Hell, that’s for the science bugs to figure. There ain’t no doubt Scott killed Nailer, and we know he knocked over Frankie. So all we’re doin’ is plugging a guy already wanted for murder—who in fact is already dead when we plug him. What could be more perfect?”

“Slow down on that. He’s already dead? He’s layin’ there right behind us still breathin’—”

“Lucky, it’s a goddamn good thing there is guys like Weeton and Letch and Holyjoe to do the thinking. You—you and me, we’d leave it with lost ends. We kill him tonight. But it’s arranged so everybody thinks he got chilled last night. By Frankenstein—”

“I tole—”

“Frankie. It looks like Frankie killed him last night. That’s all I meant by he’s already dead when we plug him—forget it. Everything’s set. You been itching to plug Scott. So, OK, plug him good. Only you don’t use your heat.”

“I don’t? What the hell do I use? I grab his neck—”

“You use this, buddy. Here. And don’t bang Scott in the head. Put three-four in his guts, so it looks like he could’ve lived long enough at least to hit Frankie.”

“Hell, this is a .45, same as mine. I’d rather use one I’m friends with—”

“Will you use your head, Lucky? You want the fuzz to figure out the slugs come from your gun—like they figured it was Scott’s gun put the pills in Nailer and Frankie—and send you up to the slammer again?”

“No …”

“OK. So you use this one. It’s Frankie’s. You know he carried a .45, don’t you?”

“Yeah. But it don’t quite figure …”

“Will you listen? I told you this was all planned out by Lecci and Weeton. Using Frankie’s gun you poop Scott. Already in Frankie—and The Nailer—is pills from Scott’s gun, which Weeton by now took from out of them. We leave Scott pretty near where we dumped Frankie last night. By the time they find Scott he’ll be startin’ to get mold on him, and it’ll look like Frankie drilled him and Scott lived long enough to bang him with a lucky one in the noodle. They kill each other. Christ, don’t you get it yet?”

“I guess … They sure make killin’ a guy complicated, don’t they?”

“That’s so there ain’t no stink. It’s open-and-close-it, like they say, no lost ends. You get the kick of doing it, but there’s no way to tie you in. No way. See?”

“Yeah. Yeah, now I get it. Goddamn smart, now it makes sense.”

Tires hummed on pavement, the car swayed as it went around a curve. After a short silence the rumbling voice of Bludgett, “I been thinkin’. Supposin’ the fuzz don’t buy it, about Frankie done it to Scott. And it’s like … like we heard, if they figure it’s a bang-job, them L.A. fuzz could heat it up plenty—”

“Bludgett, will you for crissakes quit your worrying? Few minutes it’ll be all over.”

“Yeah. You’re right enough on that. Maybe—well, it don’t seem natural, I know it don’t but I almost wisht we didn’t have to bump the sonofabitch.”

“You outa your mind—”

“I mean, he ain‘t such a bad guy, once you get to know him a little, considering he’s the kind of bastard he is. I’d like to bounce him again, I’d like to beat the crud outa him. But—well, I won’t make no bones on it, I’m glad it ain’t me gonna drill him. I mean, him just layin’ there, and all.”

“You are outa your conk. And don’t worry about no heat, either. So what if there is some for a few days? There’s enough grub and booze we could hole up six months and never stick our heads from out of the place. Grub and booze—and babe. How about that, boys? Think on that for the minute. Once Scott’s chilled for good, we knock off the babe—Christ, seems a waste killing such a sweet looker, don’t it?”

“I been thinkin’ on that myself.” It was Lucky Ryan, but his voice was different. “I been thinkin’ a lot on that. Long as Letch says kill her, he can’t hardly give much mind to how we do it. Or what we do before we do it.”

Ace, laughing, “I had the same exact thing in mind, Lucky. But you can take what they call the first honors, buddy. One thing, even if she yells a little, nobody’ll hear her. And we sure don’t have no worries of being interrupted, not where she’s at.”

“Sometimes, is better when they do yell some.” That was Fleepo’s voice again. “Some at first, I mean.”

Lucky again, “Would you of believed it a couple days ago? A hot-looking movie star like her? A real movie star? Man, talk about gettin’ lucky.”

“I don’t think you ought to do nothin’ like that.” That was the rumbling voice of Bludgett.

“Come off it. What difference if she’s gonna be hit in the head right after?”

“It just don’t seem right. I don’t like it. I can understand she’s got to be kilt. But, that other—well, you shouldn’t do it.”

The hard, flat voice, the voice with muscles. “Quit worrying about every goddamn thing, Bludgett. You can stay outside in the yard. Play pattycake with Davey, take Lecci’s pulse—yeah, bring Letch his medicine. You can skip the party. Do anything you want, pray with Holyjoe if you feel like it. Just leave us have a little fun, OK?”

No more conversation for a few seconds, then, “Don’t go back on them first honors, Ace. I’d give you a little trouble, come to that. Now I been thinkin’ more about it.”

“She’s all yours, Lucky, buddy. Relax. She’s not going anywheres.”

“Yeah, OK. Man, more I think about it, more I’m ready to go! Yeah, I mean! Only thing would keep me from that sweet-built babe now is if I was dead.”

Silence.

Silence until Fleepo said, “About here, Ace? What you think?”

“Yeah.”

Right then, a strange, never-before-experienced moment or series of moments for me. For me, sitting in Paul’s room listening, and remembering. Because it was at that point—two hours ago in time—that I had begun regaining consciousness.

In a crazy way it was almost as if I were three people, or there were three compartments in me, each a little different from the others. I was the man sitting here now who knew the before and the then and the after-then; and the man to whom it had happened then and who had forgotten it; and the man then, coming out of nothingness without memory of the before, without memory of anything at that moment, merely a man becoming aware of sensations returning, the beginning of pain, of hearing, of consciousness, almost like a man being born out of a void into life, the beginning of life again.

Yes, a man being born again into life—just when those dandies decided they’d reached a fine place for killing me.

“OK, Lucky, pull over here. What are we, six, seven miles outa town? Good enough. Haul him out, Bludgett.”

Lucky said, “Why here? Why don’t we wait till we’re where we’re gonna leave him?”

“Too close to houses and that. Nobody’ll hear it where we’re at now. Get it done, then we lug him there and dump him.”

Bludgett’s hands on me, lifting, movement. Other movement around me. And Lucky saying in an odd voice, “What’s that little popgun you got, Ace? Little snub—funny. Looks a helluva lot like Scott’s heater.”

“Are you outa your conk? Come on, for crissakes, get the job done. You keep messing around we’ll have to tap Scott on the nut again.”

I was dumped on the ground—plenty of feeling in me by then. I lay still, getting ready. Maybe there wouldn’t be a chance to run, maybe when and if I tried I wouldn’t be able to run. But I lay still, waiting.

And Lucky was saying, “Sure a bunch of funny crap about guns tonight. Me with Frankenstein’s—”

“Frankie, goddammit, I tole you guys a hunderd times—”

“Lemme see that little heat, Ace. Scott carries a two-inch Special, and I’m goddamned if that don’t look—”

“You miserable fleeper, you want some hick to come along and pop his goddamn glims at us while we’re all standing around—”

“I said lemme see it. It’s funny, me with Frankenstein’s—”

“Frankie. Goddammit, Frankie. Do I got to—”

And then I was moving, trying to get up, scrambling, making it, starting to run. Slipping—aware finally of rain, of mud beneath my feet. Behind me, close behind me, shouts, swearing, a lot of four-letter words—and one gunshot. One, then what sounded like half a dozen all at once.

There were two or three more shots—but I just kept running. A long way, it seemed. Running, slipping and stumbling, falling. Finally falling and staying down. Then that confused sense of the flood falling in sheets of thunder … and the blackness like cold napalm.…

I sat and thought for a while.

There were a couple of minutes when, adding together all I knew—knew for sure—plus what I’d guessed, I thought I had enough fact and solid evidence, not to mention sensible deduction, to clap half the hoods in Arizona into the pokey. I should have known better than to feel like that, even for a couple of minutes.

“Do you have a pain somewhere?” Paul asked me.

“Sort of. I was just thinking of what I know about those bums, and I was preparing to cast them all into dungeons.”

“So?”

“So consider my evidence.” I pointed to Paul’s tape recorder. “Plenty of good stuff there. Shell Scott spilling the real inside dope about local—maybe national—crime, right? Wrong. I could be reading Alice in Wonderland—it’s nothing but my voice. The keen stuff I got from Bludgett? Coercion, torture, false confession extracted from quailing victim—besides which, it is merely in my head, which Bludgett failed to sign, thus it would be my word against his. Not to mention the fact that I failed to advise him of his rights and have an attorney in attendance. DiGiorno is Lecci? So? Can’t do anything until I can prove he’s committed a specific crime, and he’s merely a mafiosi multiple murderer. Add all of it up, Paul, and what have I got?”

“A look of pain. That’s why I asked you if—”

“The only thing that might—not in this case, of course, but some other case—stand up in court is the Voiceprint testimony. Such has elsewhere been admitted into evidence, and even helped lead to conviction. Unfortunately, the Jenkins tape was procured in a slightly illegal manner. Even I, in making my comparison tape, forgot to get permission of the tapees, such as Lecci, Reverend Archie, and Lieutenant Weeton, would you believe it?”

“What half-baked undertaking are you attempting to justify in your own mind, Sheldon?”

“Well, you know what they cliché, if you want a thing done right, do it yourself.” I paused. “This we’re sure of, those bastards kidnaped—that’s a crime—Lucrezia Brizante. I mean, that really is a crime. I know that. I know where she is, and all I have to do is go there and get her, and bring her out, and I shall have proved a crime.”

“What in the name of God are you going to do?”

I told him as little as possible, but did ask his help in getting some more “instruction” I needed, and a little equipment required for the job I had in mind. He managed to come up with everything I wanted in twenty minutes. Before then he hadn’t asked me any very serious questions.

But when I was ready to leave he said, “You really know where she is?”

“Sure. An old joint called the King mansion at Sunrise Villas. Oh, I’m not positive. And I couldn’t have figured it out from the hypnosis alone. But with that plus what I got from Bludgett earlier, and what I already knew, yeah.”

“I suppose some of your—friends will be there?”

“I’d say the four jollies you’ve met through me tonight, if they haven’t already killed Lucky Ryan or he hasn’t shot some of them up. But I’ll make a bet Ace still has him conned, and Lucky doesn’t yet know they were going to plug him—with my gun—just as soon as he banged me. Then, The Letch, I’d guess. Maybe one, two more. Who the hell knows?”

He shook his head. “How come you’ve lived so long?”

I grinned. “Obviously because of my keen intellect, my meticulous planning, my extraordinary insight into the hoodlum mind, my vast knowledge of criminology, criminalistics, criminal-crostics, crossword puzzles, and anagrams, plus, of course—”

“That’s enough. I just didn’t understand before.”

We walked to the door and I stepped outside.

Paul looked at me for a moment. “Shell, I—” He stopped. Then he went on, “Give me a call at eight in the morning, will you? Sometimes I sleep right through the alarm.” He shut the door in my face.

I stood there and burped. I was scared. Probably Paul was quite aware of that, but I didn’t give a hoot. I burped again. There was lots of gas on my stomach.

I didn’t feel well at all.

CHAPTER NINETEEN

By the time I had the laser in place, YAG rod aimed at the base of the high stone wall surrounding the King mansion, it was exactly midnight, and I was trying to decide whether to puke or merely throw up. I didn’t feel well.

I hadn’t asked Dr. Fretsindler if I could borrow his laser. There was, I’d felt, a chance he would reply No! Some might say I had stolen it, but that would be untrue. I intended to return it. Nothing in the whole world would please me more than to return it. It, and the car, of course.

A swell girl once told me, “If you’re going to do something wrong, do it right!” Though the hoods’ talk about Weeton’s preparing to “get a warrant out” on me was probably true enough, I felt sure neither he nor those hoods intended the real law to get its hands on me until after I was dead, so I doubted there was yet an APB out on me or a hot sheet on my car. But there were too many people other than the police, like Weeton and pals, who might recognize my Cadillac; thus, remembering the swell girl’s advice, I had also stolen the car attached to the laser’s little trailer. Borrowed it, that is.

It had taken me half an hour, after coasting without lights to a stop near the creepy old joint on Willow Lane, to find an opening in the oleander hedge and lug the two laser components from their trailer, and set them up in the slimy ooze.

Slimy ooze was right. It had stopped raining for the last several minutes, but you wouldn’t believe the muck. My feet went down into it at every step so deeply that most of the time thick mud was around my ankles. That, plus the fact that the sloppy earth slanted downward as it got farther from the wall, made it difficult to get my gadgetry aimed just right, but by shoving a couple of rocks under the rear end of the laser’s metal box I managed to get the rod pointed at the wall’s base, and was finally ready.

But the laser wasn’t. It still had to be plugged in.

Actually, all I wanted or needed the laser for was a little part of the job. I knew, from what Bludgett had told me, there was no point in trying to go over the wall. I had also seen the solid-steel gate he’d mentioned—though I had not walked around all four sides of the wall, since even with lots of luck I didn’t expect to find a hole already in it. Consequently I was going to attempt making my own hole. Just as soon as I got the laser plugged in.

The thing required merely an ordinary 110-volt source of power but, since I couldn’t walk up to the gate and ring the bell and ask Lecci or whatever answered if I might please use one of his outlets, that had been the bit of “education” or know-how I’d asked Paul to discover for me. It was simple enough. For an electrical engineer who climbed mountains during thunder-and-lightning storms as a hobby.

For me—well, even back in Paul’s warm, cozy room it had sounded like one more good way to get killed, and I know plenty of those already. Out here in the off-and-on rain, with thunder in my ears and frequent flashes of lightning in my eyes, it struck me as the best way of all. I had with me the only equipment required—a knife, and a long coil of two-wire electrical cable with three feet of its outer insulation stripped from one end and alligator clamps affixed to both wires thus exposed. The other end of the cable was already plugged into the electrical cord attached to the laser. All I had to do was climb a telephone pole and attach my two alligator clamps to the two correctly selected wires, thus completing the circuit, and, presto, the wizardry would commence.

With the cable looped under my belt and trailing behind me I walked to the telephone pole—the same pole by which I’d stood while looking at Bludgett and Ace in the headlights of my car—and started climbing. That part was difficult but not impossible. It was only after some mild agony, when I’d finally reached the top, that I realized the frequent lightning flashes which illumined everything for miles around with a brilliance marvelous to behold must naturally, whenever they did that, also illuminate me similarly. Thus if anybody in the old mansion happened to glance out this way they might see something which would puzzle them.

Well, the hell with it. I had other worries. Keeping Paul’s information firmly in mind I examined my immediate vicinity. I had to use a pencil flashlight for brief and occasional illumination, and also had to hope if anybody noticed it they would think it was tiny lightning, so that’s what I hoped.

In my immediate vicinity there was, first, the telephone pole, a couple of inches from my nose. That was about the only thing I was sure of. And there was the crossarm, and the transformer, and a whole bunch of junk. Most important, there were two wires, parallel and about two feet apart, leading from the pole off into the darkness toward the old King place. They simply had to be the 110-volt service for the house.

Sure they did. One of them was a bare aluminum wire—that would be the neutral line. The other was a black-insulated wire—and it would be the hot one. I got my first alligator clamp stuck onto the aluminum wire without great difficulty, except that I started to fall off the pole once. But before affixing my second clamp to the hot line, I was supposed to skin off, with a “skinning knife,” the neoprene insulation which, as it was intended to do, insulated the wire inside, and which, if it remained on, would effectively prevent efficient contact with my clamp from being made. I did a lot of thinking about that.

I didn’t have a skinning knife, but since I wasn’t an expert, maybe a pocketknife would do for me. It would have to. I took quite a lot of time making certain I’d found the correct place to affix my second clamp. Finally I was satisfied.

Yes, I said to myself, that’s the right place. Yes. Yes. It’s the 110-volt line supplying current to the old King mansion. It’s not one of those real hot 7,200-volt lines, which can be somewhat tricky. Yes. Yes, that’s the right one. Actually, I didn’t know what the hell I was doing. I’d never realized before that a telephone pole was such a complicated thing. Always before they’d just been goddamn poles sticking up in the air.

The thing was, if I had the right line, all was fine and dandy. But if I had the wrong one, zap, and the electrical wizard would go spinning through the ether, burned to a crisp. Wouldn’t hurt to wait another few seconds, I supposed.

I looked around. Lightning pulsed far off to the east, beyond the Superstition Mountains, silhouetting the Superstitions and Four Peaks near them. Beautiful view, I thought. Be a great place to build a house. Yeah, right up here where the top of the telephone pole was. That’s where I wished I was right now—up here in a house. Before a crackling fire, with a crazy blonde, getting soused, that’s what I wished.

I attacked the insulation with my knife, neoprene flew, I was down to bare wire, and—stuck my second clamp into place.

No zap.

Even so, I couldn’t be sure there was juice flowing through my electrical cable. You can’t wet a finger and go spat on it, like ladies do with irons. So I simply slid and half fell down the pole, then, presuming the laser would be doing its job, commenced a quick circuit around the base of the ten-foot wall. It was just a stone wall all the way. No cracks, no more gates. The spot I’d chosen was as good as any other.

All during the circuit I wondered if my laboriously pluggedin machine was doing anything at all, or just sitting there in the mud like a piece of junk. But as soon as I got back near it I knew something was sure as hell happening. For a couple of seconds I thought a car’s headlights were aimed my way, but then I realized the glow came from an area of wall glowing stupendously, like the little boulder on which I had performed for Bludgett.

I didn’t even need my pencil flash to see that the rocks on which I’d propped the laser’s rear end had sunk down slowly—and quite deeply—into the mud, so that the infrared beam being emitted from the end of the YAG rod was aimed four or five feet higher than it had been when I left.

So I simply hauled the rear end of the black case up out of the mud and stood there holding it, moving it around a little and aiming at the wall’s base, and as the glow dimmed above and brightened below I began thinking this really might be going to work. Finally I turned off the switch, picked up the foot-long chisel and heavy rubber-faced lead hammer I’d brought along, and moved to the wall. When I chopped at its base with my chisel—sort of tentatively exploring the area before banging away with my hammer—the stone crumbled astonishingly, even more easily than the granite rock had when Bludgett poked it with his screwdriver. So I simply kept working away with the chisel until I had a hole nearly three feet wide and a couple of feet high, not quite all the way through the wall. I had to punch with the chisel while lying flat on my stomach to finish the job, but it required merely a half-dozen raps and—that was it.

I was already on my stomach. I simply wriggled forward, squirmed through the hole—a few pebble-sized hunks of weakened rock, along with a sprinkling like sand, falling down on me as I went through—and then I was inside.

The easy part was done.

I made a trip around the big two-story house—very carefully. I didn’t expect there’d be any guards outside, partly because of the foul weather, but mainly because of the wall itself. With that, who needed guards? I nonetheless kept one of the two Colt .45’s I’d brought along ready in my hand.

At the rear of the house and on the ground floor, at what would have been the left corner if I’d faced it from Willow Lane, there was one room with lights burning inside. Heavy drapes were drawn over the wide window, and I stood for two or three minutes outside it. I could hear voices, but it was merely sound, a mumble, without individual words. No matter. It told me somebody was in there.

In front again, I went to the window I’d chosen—almost as far from the lighted room as I could get—and using a roll of tape I’d brought for the purpose, stretched strips of it in a crisscross pattern over the surface of the glass. The window was about four feet square, its base nearly four feet off the ground, so I had to hoist myself up and stand on the projecting ledge beneath. It was tricky, but not too difficult. Not for a guy who’d just climbed a telephone pole.

Then I tapped away at the window. It cracked, slivered, glass clinging to the tape. A couple of pieces fell inside with small tings but I ignored them. I had more important tings to worry about. It required little time to pull enough of the glass free so I could climb through what was left of the window. Inside, I used my flash as little as possible, but had to flick it on occasionally. It was a very old house with long narrow hallways, the walls of raw wood, unstained, without wallpaper. There was a musty odor of age and rot in the air. In a couple of places the floorboards beneath my feet creaked alarmingly. But in two or three minutes I could see light spilling beneath the door of the room I’d been headed for.

And I could hear the voices from inside.

Suddenly I got a little weak. I mean, my knees felt limber, the muscles of my thighs and calves seemed to get rubbery, loose. In the space of a couple of seconds, my knees began to wobble slightly, and I could feel the thin film of sweat ooze out on my face.

Maybe it was everything that had happened tonight piling up on me. Maybe it was overworked glands, giving up and falling by the wayside. Maybe it was those voices. Or that I—still—wanted to throw up.

Whatever, it wasn’t good. And it didn’t help my concentration a whole lot—when I needed a whole lot of concentration. Wouldn’t it be just great, I thought, if I got this far, right up to the door—to death’s door, so to speak—and fainted? Just keeled over with a big clunk and lay here?

I could imagine the boys inside coming out to investigate the big clunk and looking at it on the floor and saying such things as, “Lookit that, wouldya?” and “Will wonders never cease?” or at least various things about which I wouldn’t give a hoot.

I stood unmoving, breathing deeply until my skin felt more normal and my legs were nearly as steady as before. I was thinking more clearly, too. I was pretty sure of that. And thinking clearly was really important at this juncture. For one thing, when I went inside I was simply going to twist the knob and jump in. The simplest logic revealed that there was absolutely no reason for the men in this walled fortress to lock themselves inside a room in the house.

So I got ready. Both guns were cocked, safeties off. I didn’t know how many men were inside, of course. But I knew they, or at least most of them, would be on my right when I leaped in, because I’d stood here long enough to know several men were speaking, there were several voices, and all of them so far had come from the right side of the room.

I took one last deep breath and reached for the knob, and stopped. Just in time. I was armed—logically—for battle, with a Colt .45 automatic pistol in each hand. Right for battle; wrong for twisting a doorknob.

It gave me a little ting of worry, but I shoved the gun in my left hand under the belt holding up my pants, got all set again, stood there, sort of psyching myself up until I felt I was ready and the moment was right—and went in.

I wasn’t wrong about the door; it was unlocked. The knob twisted easily and I shoved hard and jumped into the room. I jumped a good six feet and landed in a crouch, heart pounding as if it were going to climb right up out of my chest and into my mouth and swell there like a red balloon—but I landed the way I’d wanted to, facing the room’s right, my left hand slapping the butt of the gun in my belt, Colt .45 in my other hand ready and leveled at the tape recorder, and …

Tape recorder?

From it was issuing, “It’s a bug! I dropped my smokes and just happened—”

It was too much. Every time I turned around these days, there was a goddamned tape recorder. I’d already drawn a bead on the thing, and I felt like shooting it. I really did. I wanted to kill it.

That wasn’t enough. When I’d slapped my left hand against the other Colt’s butt, the one which was under my belt and pointing—well, pointing down—I’d suddenly started worrying if I’d thumbed the safety up, thus locking slide, sear, and hammer so the gun couldn’t go off and shoot me. When you stick a cocked .45 under your belt you’re supposed to thumb the safety on. Unless you just don’t give a hang. But the little lock is on the left side of the receiver, and with the gun in my left hand, my thumb was on the right side, thus I couldn’t have thumbed the safety on. But … had I fingered it on? I couldn’t remember. There wasn’t time to sort of ease the gun out of my pants gingerly, either. I had to leave it where it was, or else give it a helluva yank.

“—to look under the—Oh, godalmighty, some bastard—”

I hadn’t even had time to look around at the man behind me. Of course, behind me. But I recognized that voice. Now I recognized it. Frankenstein. Or, Frankie, according to—the hell with it. Frankenstein. Who was dead.

Dead.

Dead.

The word kerplunked in my brain like stones being dropped into a well.

BLAM!

A pill whistling by my right ear galvanized me into action. I jumped to my left. Jumped turning, trying to spin halfway around in the air and come down facing the guys I’d come to get. Well, you try that sometime. Unless you’re a ballet dancer, you’ll do pretty well to get even a quarter of the way around. I came down facing those heavy drapes over the windows I’d seen from outside.

But by twisting my head I could see—on two long couches at the intersection of the walls, and in three big wide overstuffed chairs—Lecci, Reverend Archibald, Lieutenant Weeton, a guy I didn’t recognize but who looked familiar, Ace, Fleepo. And—Bludgett.

Almost behind me now: “—is on the earie while we’re talkin’—”

The speediest of the bunch was Ace. He’d just jerked off one shot at me and was swinging his gun around. Weeton was yanking at the revolver on his hip, pulling it free. Fleepo’s Colt .45 was already in his hand, not yet pointed at me. Bludgett’s hand was starting to move.

The things that happened in the next three or four seconds I didn’t figure out logically. Maybe it’s just as well. I simply acted, or reacted, automatically. I flipped my gun around and fired, practically over my shoulder, yanking the trigger twice and not shooting very near anybody, but spoiling Ace’s aim and making Weeton jerk enough that he missed me by a foot when he fired. Then I was jumping, not thinking of why or where, straight toward those drapes ahead of me, and on the second bound I left my feet and dived right into the drapes and the glass beyond them, and felt cloth against me and over my eyes, the cloth cutting off most of the light but at the same time protecting me from the worst slashes of the glass as I crashed through it and fell, landing heavily and rolling. Rolling, still tangled in the draperies—but outside.

Then I was free, able to see, not tangled in the cloth and slapping my left hand into the mud, getting up. A face appeared above me in the broken and now uncovered window, and I snapped off my third shot at it, saw the man duck. Then I was up and running.

Running as fast as I could in the thick deep mud, sprinting in darkness—then in brilliant light. For a moment I thought it was lightning. But it persisted, brightness flooding the house, muddy courtyard, the high wall. Inside, somebody had thrown a switch, turned on floodlights. I kept running.

Behind me I heard shouts, knew at least some of the men were coming out that way after me. Others might be racing through the house, heading for the front door. I slid around the corner pumping my legs with every bit of strength in me, heading for the one chance I had of living, that two-foot by three-foot hole I’d made at the bottom of the wall.

I ran past the front of the house into the open courtyard and a shot cracked out from behind me. Not from the front door on my right. From somebody who’d come out the window after me—not just one somebody, because following that first crack two more shots were fired so rapidly they couldn’t have come from one gun. I kept going, but I wasn’t going to make it. I knew I wasn’t going to make it.

Little more than a second after those two shots which blended almost into a single sound, there was another big BLAM from a .45, and this one came from the front door.

I snapped a glance that way. Bludgett. Next to him, gun leveled at me, Lucky—Lucky Ryan, who had not been in the room just now while that “Jenkins tape” was being played. I didn’t know who was behind me, but it didn’t make any difference. The only way I could get out of here was flat on my belly, wriggling through that hole, and before I could manage even my second wriggle I knew I’d have four or five slugs in my rear end, at least, and then several in my back, and finally a couple in my head for good measure.

There were too many of them, too close. And too little time. I thought, OK, then we’ll finish it right here if that’s the way it has to be, but I’ll give eight to five I kill at least two or three of those sonsofbitches before I go down, and I started to stop and turn, actually started to stop, when the idea hit me—there was another way.

Maybe. Maybe there was another way.

Again, no logic in what I did. No conscious reasoning, at least, even though there must have been some kind of unconscious logic behind it. I just looked at the hole in the base of the wall now not more than fifteen feet from me, and I remembered that while I’d been making my circuit around the wall the laser’s infrared beam had been spraying the stone high above the spot where later I’d bored my hole, and whether I thought or hoped the wall would be weakened enough up there so I could get through it somehow I don’t know and I’ll never know for sure, but I took one more step and then left my feet, giving it all I could, the thrust and drive of foot and ankle and calf and thigh, lying back in the air, flying toward the wall feet first—and at the last moment I gave a kick, either hoping it would somehow help add more to the blow of my body on the stone or in the natural reaction to the fear of smashing into a solid wall.

I hit.

My feet slammed into the stone—and it wasn’t like slamming sand or putty. It was a solid jar. I felt the pain in my feet and ankles, had time for the sudden fright to leap up and clutch my throat—and then I was through.

I mean, through. Clear the hell through the wall, landing on my butt in the mud and sliding, coat ripped and arm stinging, a cut on my face that I knew was bleeding. But through the wall, outside.

And that did it. That did it for me.

If I could be that close to death, that close to being shot maybe forty times by as many as seven or eight guys, and still be alive, even if I was sliding on my behind and filled with more cuts and bruises and aches and pains than I could have counted in a leisurely hour, well, by God, nothing was going to kill me tonight.

I dug in my heels, squirmed around, jumped and clawed my way back to the hole—now one hell of a big hole—in the wall. It wasn’t a gap, from the bottom all the way up, but more like a ragged arch. Three or four feet of stone still formed a bridge over the top, but below was a hole at least three feet wide, more than that in a couple of places, and a good six feet from top to bottom. I slid up into the bottom of that hole—and by that time I’d pulled out the second .45, pressed a finger against the safety. It had been on. I shoved it down and off.

Even while shoving it off I had the Colt in my right hand leveled and was pulling it left, because there was the nearest man, and it was Lieutenant Weeton, trying to slide to a stop and kill me at the same time. Because that bastard had already fired once as I started pulling the Colt toward him and he was leveling his gun again, his thick face twisted, lips pulled apart, teeth showing.

I got off my first shot at him before he let go that second one at me. He didn’t let the second one go. Not at me. The heavy .45 slug hit him and spun him as if he’d been smacked by a truck. The gun flipped from his hand and arced through the air, glittering in the light, flying at least twenty feet up and heading for mud at the base of the house. I didn’t see the gun land. There were too many other things going on.

But, strangely, after I hit Weeton and he spun, reeled sideways and fell, the shooting stopped for a couple of seconds—longer than that, as it turned out—and in the almost shocking silence a voice like the bellowing of a bull getting crushed between two mastodons boomed in the wet air: “Good-God-Christ-Almighty-Damn did you see that? Did you see that?”

It was, of course, Bludgett.

He was standing about forty feet away, a few feet from the front door of the house, pointing with a rigid finger at the ragged hole. Pointing, in fact, at me. “He went right through the gawdamn wall!” he yelled. “Right through the wall.”

And then—I swear it’s true, as true as true can be—Bludgett cried, “I’ll get him, boys!” and got his huge feet and enormous legs moving, got them moving lickety-split, moving with astounding rapidity for a man almost the size of a full-grown male gorilla, and as he ran toward the wall—yes, smack toward the wall, and smack is sure the right word for the way he was running toward the wall—he cried in a voice of thunder, “Shee-it, if that goddamn Scott can do it, I can do it!”

How wrong he was.

CHAPTER TWENTY

Bludgett was truly going to try leaping through a solid stone wall. Just as I had. Well …

Not exactly as I had.

Because he was not going through the wall where I had gone through it.

He wasn’t going through that hole, for one reason, because I was there in it, shooting bullets at people.

No, he was going to make his own hole.

At least, there was no doubt that was the thought he had in mind. And I must admit to a little sadness that, though he had few thoughts in his mind at any time, it appeared highly unlikely he would ever have even one again.

Because you wouldn’t believe the velocity he had attained in thirty feet. Yes, thirty; ten to go.

I had to see this.

I knew it would be dangerous, probably extremely dangerous, for me to stick my head out where those other guys—and they seemed to be all over the place—could spot it and take aim at it and blow it off. But I was going to do it anyway. Not often—hell, not once—in a lifetime does a man have the opportunity to see what I was about to see. I simply wouldn’t have been worth my salt if I hadn’t stuck my head out in order to get a really clear view of the impending—now immediately impending—event.

I stuck my head out.

Undoubtedly the main reason my head was not immediately drilled from three or four directions was the obvious one. Obvious to anyone there. There, listening to Bludgett roaring, the smack-smuck of his feet tearing through the mud, watching him as he left his feet—

Yes, everyone else was watching.

If there’d been just one dirty guy in the whole bunch he could have shot all of us.

But we all watched. Watched as Bludgett left the ground ten feet from the wall and sailed through space, doing the whole bit as neatly as I—no, doing it even more neatly—those giant legs propelling him as though from a catapult, laying himself back in the air, just as I had. Bigger, of course, a much huger projectile, but doing it all the same way that I had done it.

Not only I but all the hoods were watching Bludgett with total and absolutely undistracted fascination, perhaps each of them with the same thought in his head that I had in mine: would Bludgett, with his huge mass and bulk, do it? Could his weight and determination and unbelievable speed turn the trick? Would he go through? Would he commit a miracle? Was it possible?

Nope.

He had run as I had, jumped as I had, spread out in the air as I had, and at the end he even gave a little kick with his feet, just as I had.

There, the resemblance ended.

He didn’t commit a miracle.

It looked more like suicide.

His feet hit the wall, and—of course—stayed against the wall. Unmoving. But the rest of him was not unmoving. Oddly, his legs did not bend or buckle, those mighty thighs and sinews holding firm. He did bend in the middle. That was what ruined him. He bent like a well-greased hinge. His great bald head flew forward in an arc like the stone at the end of a sling, and it was moving so fast one would have thought nothing short of a solid stone wall could stop it. Well, that’s exactly what happened.

Bludgett’s head smacked on stone with a sound which even though heard could not be believed, and for what was only an instant, but an instant that seemed a small eternity, he seemed to stay there, folded in the middle, his feet pressed against the wall, and above his toes—just a little way above his toes—his hairless head, also pressed against the wall.

Then he fell down.

He didn’t even unfold, just fell down still folded.

And in all ears anywhere in the area reverberated the sound of Bludgett’s head.

For me, it still reverberates, when I listen, intently, in the still of the night. Not only for me, but for all who were there at that incredible moment, and who still live, Bludgett’s great bald head still goes SCHMOCK! That is about as close as English can approach the sound made there at the old King place in the small hours of that Sunday morning.

It thudded out over the valley, causing citizens to stir restlessly in their sleep, but in the Alps that sound would have echoed and reechoed, perhaps endlessly, getting fainter and fainter but never totally dying, as possibly Bludgett had done. A great SCHMOCK! and then the first echo: SCHMOCK! Followed by more echoes from near and far, SCHMOCK-Schmock! Schmock-mock-ock-ck. Bounding from peak to pinnacle, from Alp to Alp, a blood-chilling, mind-curdling ear-schmocking sound never heard on earth before.

Perhaps because I had felt most exposed, perhaps because I was obviously outnumbered—certainly, after this night of nights, not because I was any smarter than they were—I was the first to recover my wits.

Weeton was no longer a worry. Bludgett, for sure, was out of it. But before me in the brightly lighted courtyard there yet stood three hoods, all three of them transfixed, gazing aghast at the prone, still body of Bludgett, their almost-hero, eyes riveted upon him and ears still pierced by that hideous dull crackophony, that medley of a head breaking and again breaking.

There were those three. And inside the house, only three or four more. And Lucrezia.

I sure as hell wasn’t going to leave while Lucrezia was still here. And if I hesitated, these guys would either shoot me or take cover in the house—and then I’d never get across that muddy plain. To Lucrezia. If I was ever going to charge, now was the time. Even logic said the time was now. They, whoever they are, say the best defense is a good offense, and I sure needed plenty of defense.

So—I charged.

Lucky Ryan saw me coming and let out a yell, yanking his gun up and toward me, and ten feet on his right Fleepo—somehow—already had his gun aimed at me. Beyond Fleepo, Ace was turning fast. I snapped a shot at Lucky and missed, let two go from the gun in my left hand and hit Fleepo. I don’t know where I hit him, but when a man takes a .45 bullet you know he’s hit. He went back at least ten feet, both arms flying out loosely from his sides. I squeezed off one more at Ace but he merely bent down, far down in a low squat, and the gun jumped in his hand.

In the bright light I could barely see flame lick from the gun’s muzzle, but I saw it, and felt the slug slide by my neck so near it must have been no more than an eighth of an inch from the skin. Lucky’s gun blasted from so close it startled me that I wasn’t hit and, still running, I snapped my head around, kept my eyes and my gun on him and squeezed the trigger twice. Both bullets smacked into him, and the way they rammed him, the way he went down, I knew that sonofabitch was dead.

I swerved, tried to run toward Ace, and my feet slipped in the thick mud. I slid, went down. If I hadn’t gone down that way, I’d have gone down Ace’s way, and for good. Because he let go three in a row, pulling his gun down right at me for the last one—at least I thought it was right at me, but the slug went past between my arm and side, ripping through my coat but not through me.

Then I was up, running toward him, and the gun in my right hand was empty. From twenty feet away I hurled it at him and, by God, I hit him. I got him low on the leg, and it was a freak of luck that I touched him at all, but I hit him, and the shot he triggered went way the hell off to one side instead of near me or maybe in me. I triggered the Colt in my left hand and it blasted once but only once, so I threw it at him but two hits in two throws was more than a mere mortal could hope for. I missed him by two yards, but when he pointed his gun at me and squeezed the trigger, nothing happened.

Except that I reached him, ducked the hand swinging his empty gun at me, and slammed a left into his gut. It was like hitting a steel boiler. It moved him back, but it didn’t knock him down or even bend him over. He caught me high on the cheekbone with a right hand, and it was a good one. It jarred me.

It also sent a little more juice into me, fired me up enough that the long hard right I swung had more steam in it, and this time when I hit his gut it was still like hitting a steel boiler, but it bent him. He made a soft sound, like a man with smoker’s cough, but he was kind of atilt and his hands weren’t in my way. I had time to set myself, not much time but enough, and when I brought my left hand up from near my knee and the balled fist smacked his chin, the sound alone would have told me I had him.

I did. But I got to hit him one more time. I was glad. I wanted to hit him one more time. His head snapped back in the way a head sometimes goes when the neck’s going to break, but it rolled forward a little again as he sort of straightened up and then started to drop. I barely had time to get one last shot in as he went down. I got it in.

I stood there for a moment, heart pounding heavily enough to shake me. Then the blood cooled, the fever stilled, a little. I looked at Ace near my feet in the mud, then slowly turned around. Bludgett lay motionless at the wall’s base. Near me was Fleepo, still breathing, froth of blood wiggling on his lips. I walked toward Lucky Ryan, but didn’t go close. There was no question about him.

I started wondering about the men inside, still in the house. Bludgett had run, perhaps unaware of it, with his gun in his hand. It lay a few feet from him, a gleam of metal in the mud. I walked toward him, passing near Weeton. The lieutenant was on his stomach, side of his face in the mud, but his mouth had room for air to get in, and some was getting in. So he was alive, too.

Bludgett’s long-barreled revolver was a murderous weapon. Not another Colt like the one I’d taken from him yesterday, but a .44 Magnum, the closest thing you can get to a cannon in a handgun. Solid, shocking, powerful, heavy. It matched the man. I swung out the cylinder. Every chamber full; no empties. He hadn’t fired a shot.

I was in a hurry, but I took time to press a finger against Bludgett’s massive neck. A pulse still beat there. Not a very vigorous pulse, but I could feel the push of his blood against my finger. Maybe it didn’t make good sense, but I was glad he wasn’t dead. I had, I guess, a kind of mild, warped affection for Bludgett—one more indication, I suppose, of my basic depravity.

Then I straightened up and ran—walking would have pressed even my luck too far—around behind the house again. I stayed close to the building’s side. It was still bright as day. As I approached the shattered and open window, I could hear men talking. I thought: What the hell?

It sounded like two men, not a tape recording, but I wasn’t going to make up my mind about that—not this time—until I was in the room, or had at least looked into it. The base of the window here, too, was about four feet above the ground. I moved on hands and knees to its middle, and didn’t wait when I got there, didn’t even let myself wonder if maybe some guy was inside with a gun pointed my way. He couldn’t point it at every spot where a head might pop up, and I was getting too damned tired to worry a hell of a lot about it anyhow.

So I just stood up and leaned in a little, looking over the barrel of the Magnum, finger very tight on the trigger.

Nothing. Two men just to the left of the door, standing, talking. I heard the end of one sentence. “… over by now.”

I presumed he’d said, “I guess it must be all over by now,” something like that. Well, he was almost right. It was almost over.

The man speaking was Pete Lecci, and the guy he was talking to was the halfway-familiar man I’d gotten such a quick squint at minutes ago. I glanced around. On my right, the three big wide overstuffed chairs—empty—and the two couches at the intersection of the walls. Those were empty, too.

I didn’t see Reverend Archibald.

Lecci and the other guy were eyeballing me in the true “eyeball” sense of the word. It appeared if their lids spread open any further those orbs might roll out on their cheeks. I kept the gun pointed in their general direction as I climbed through the window, after a look right and left. Still nothing.

“Where’s Holyjoe?” I said.

Lecci said, “He went upstairs. To the girl.”

I started toward them, got almost up to them, before it struck me that, for Lecci—especially for Pete “The Letch” Lecci—such sudden and almost bountiful helpfulness was perhaps too good to be true.

It may be a fault. Sometimes, a fault. But I’ll never regret that I am such a suspicious lad.

The only place the bastard could be, if he was still in the room, was behind one of those big wide chairs. I damn near muffed it anyway. I jerked my head around—but kept my gun pointed at the two men.

So when I saw the Reverend Stanley Archibald he was rising from behind his chair much as I’d risen from beneath the window sill, and his gun was already aimed at my chest, and upon his face was an expression seldom if ever seen in a pulpit, except perhaps those where the Black Mass is performed.

I moved about as fast as I’ve ever moved, unquestionably as fast as I had at any time during the last thirty-six hours—straight toward Lecci. I jumped at the wrinkled old creep and flipped my hand and the gun in it toward Archie and was pulling the trigger before the muzzle was even pointed at the wall behind him. I wanted to make noise, and you can bet I did. The Magnum roared in the room, making the sound of Archibald’s .38 caliber revolver sound, comparatively, like a pop—a deadly pop, true. Deadly when the slug hits you. His didn’t hit me.

He fired once and missed. I fired four times and missed him twice. To put it positively, I hit him twice.

And to express it simply, but accurately, it was horrible.

The first heavy .44 Magnum bullet hit him with such stunning force that even to hear the sound would tell a man it was the sound of death. The impact hurled him back toward the wall and while he was moving the second slug hit him, hit him and seemed to hammer him into the wall. He slammed the wood, his head thudded back against it. For a long slow moment he hung there, then he fell.

It was queer, crazy, freakish. But he fell on his knees. There was just a little bit of life left in him, and while he was still on his knees the Reverend Stanley Archibald’s lips moved slightly, very slightly. Then his head dipped, and he simply slid forward and died.

In all the commotion, I had hardly noticed that I’d banged into Lecci and creamed him pretty good.

He was on the floor, kind of sprawled out every which way, with his shriveled lips wiggling and his dark, sunken eyes apparently unfocused completely. While he tried to figure out how he was ever going to get on his feet I looked at the other man.

He was big, maybe two hundred pounds, around six feet. A lot of chest and stomach on him. Rather pleasant, slightly heavy face, with a broad chin and sharp nose. He had a healthy head of brown hair, gray at the temples, and he was tanned, looked fit, the kind of skin you associate with steam baths and rubs and either sun or sunlamps.

I’d never seen him before. But I said, “Now I know why you looked familiar. You remind me very much of Henry Yarrow.”

He stared at me with what appeared to be near panic in his dark brown eyes. Those brown eyes rolled toward Archie’s body, dragged over Lecci—looked like The Letch was going to make it now—and then stopped on the huge gun in my hand. Finally he looked at my face.

“I’m not going to shoot you,” I said irritably. I was irritable. “Unless you sneeze or something.”

“What … where are—the others?”

It was entirely in the way he said it, but it really was funny. I said, “Don’t worry about it. You better worry about me.”

He nodded. I think if I’d told him to spin around on one toe he would have tried to do it.

“Where is she?” I asked him.

He told me. It was a kind of tower room at the upper-left corner of the building’s front, one of the towers I’d noticed when I had been outside this house for the first time an hour or two before sunrise Saturday morning.

“Is she all right?”

“Yes. Absolutely.”

“Absolutely? Lucky Ryan wasn’t in this room when I banged inside. Why not? Where was that bastard?”

“They sent him up outside her room.” He looked a bit closer at my face. “Outside, not in it. Really. They just didn’t want him in here. They wanted him to think he was guarding the door or something. It was just so he’d be out of the room.”

“Because they were playing the tape.”

“Yes,” he nodded. “She’s all right, believe me. She hasn’t been hurt—or anything.”

“Let’s hope, for your sake, for the sake of everybody around here, that you’re correct.” I paused. “Anybody else in the house? Besides Lucky and those who were in this room when I first came in?”

“No. Eight of us. That’s all. Where—”

“Never mind. Who are you? What’s your name?”

“Stephens. David Stephens.”

I looked at him silently for at least ten seconds. “Kerwin Stephens’ brother?”

“Yes.” He nodded. “Yes.”

“Well.” I said. “So you’re the guy Gil Reyes talked to early Tuesday morning.”

CHAPTER TWENTY-ONE

For quite some time I’d known, by combining information from three sources—the Jenkins tape itself, Voiceprints, and Bludgett—the identities of six of the seven men on that tape: Lecci, Weeton, Archie, Ace, Fleepo, and Frankie. It would have been logical to assume Henry Yarrow was number seven, except that Professor Irwin had assured me my No. 1, Yarrow, was not on the Jenkins tape, which eliminated him.

Enter: David Stephens. The seventh man.

“Tell me, Davey,” I said—using the name one of the hoods had used for him when I’d been eavesdropping on them, while unconscious—“Kerwin’s the boy handing out the federal loot, the millions of the billions, right?”

“Yes,” he nodded. “Yes.”

Very cooperative. I couldn’t help wishing all crooks were like this. Of course, he wasn’t the ordinary kind of thief. Neither was his brother.

I said, “Kerwin Stephens, chairman of the Commission on AGING. The one lad, above all, who can report that Sunrise Villas does—or does not—qualify for, say, fifty or a hundred million bucks from the AGING fund.”

He nodded. Silently this time.

“Would I maybe be not too wide of the mark if I guessed any fat grants to Sunrise Villas would have been administered and distributed by Lecci’s handpicked do-gooder? And that Sunrise Villas is—was—about to qualify absolutely?”

He swallowed. “Was is right.”

There was a little spark left in him yet.

He even started to go on, “Only it wouldn’t have been Le—” and cut it off abruptly, his eyes rolling away from me toward “Le—” which is to say, Lecci.

It was all right. I was reasonably certain he’d been going to say, “Only it wouldn’t have been Lecci’s handpicked do-gooder,” something like that. I’d used the name myself merely to shorten the conversation. Which had already lasted long enough.

“OK,” I said. “We can wrap up the details later.” I shifted the heavy Magnum in my hand, gripped it by the barrel. “You want to turn around?”

“What? What for?”

“I don’t have any rope. Look, you’re getting off easy. I’m going to feed your brother poisoned birdseed.”

“What?”

“Well, you can watch if you want to.” I lifted the gun.

He got it then. He turned around. He turned around and just stood there. Not a squawk out of him. David Stephens. A born loser. Whop. And he’d lost again.

Lecci had finally struggled to his feet, amoeba-splotched gray skin corpse-pallid from the exertion, that crepey wattle beneath his chin still wiggling. He’d struggled to his feet just in time to see what happened to Stephens.

I turned toward him.

“You—” he said.

I raised the Magnum over my head.

“You—wouldn’t.”

“Wouldn’t what?”

“You—you wouldn’t hit a ninety-year-old man!”

“Wouldn’t I?” I said.

I stood outside the door upstairs and yelled, “Lucrezia!”

The hallway was dark. In the beam of my pencil flash I saw a switch on the wall, flipped it. The hallway stayed dark, but a slice of brightness slid beneath the door. Sure; the boys would have wanted illumination inside when necessary, but not a switch that might be used—like dot-dash-dot, maybe—by the occupant, or prisoner. Prisoner … Lucrezia!

“Lucrezia!” I yelled, even louder.

“Shell?”

“Yes. It’s me! Are you all right?”

“I’m all right. But—you! Are you—”

“I’m … swell.” I’d already tried the door, which naturally was locked. “Lucrezia,” I said, “I suppose this will sound like a silly question. But I turned on the light from my side. I don’t suppose you can unlock the door from your side, can you?”

“You’re right. It’s a silly question.”

“Stand against the wall the door’s in, this wall. But clear over in the corner. I’m going to shoot the lock out!”

In a few moments she said, “I’m ready!”

“I’m ready, too!” I called.

After a little while she said, “Aren’t you going to shoot the lock out?”

“Oh, yeah. Stand back!”

“I’m already back.”

“Oh, yeah. Well, here goes.”

I gave it a blast. Terrible crashing roar. Shot hell out of the lock. It was absolutely ruined. But it seemed so grand, so dramatic … I gave it another shot.

Then I flang the door open and jumped inside.

Lucrezia was standing in the corner.

But not for long.

I no sooner stopped staggering around the room—caught my balance, that is—than she cried, “Oh, Shell … Shell!” and started rushing toward me.

It was romantic, exciting, keen. Like movies. The girl rushing toward her guy, arms flang out, and on her face an ecstatic expression … On her face … What was going on?

Lucrezia had come to a stop, a fast stop, almost a skidding stop, and her expression as she looked at me—at my face, hair, chest, feet, coat, pants, just about everything—was … Well, it wasn’t ecstatic.

I kept forgetting that I’d been wallowing about in the muck for what seemed a week. First escaping from those four would-be killers and lying in the mud for a while. I’d never gotten around to really cleaning up after that, I recalled, a little sadly. Then, of course, there’d been climbing under the wall, leaping back through it, all that junk.

Lucrezia stared at me. “Are you Shell Scott?” she asked.

“Am I who?”

“You never heard of him?”

“Don’t be ridic—listen, I mean, what the hell do you mean asking me am I … Of course I’m Shell Scott! Who else would be up here, bleeding from every pore, for a—for a girl!”

“It is you!”

“I’m glad we got that settled.” I paused, scowling. She probably couldn’t tell whether I was scowling or not. “Lucrezia,” I said, “it is I, truly I, under all this slop.” I paused again. “Somehow … I expected … well, Hello there! or something.”

I’ll say this for Lucrezia, once she was sure some dirty old man wasn’t trying to trick her, she didn’t let a little untidiness throw her offstride. She strode the rest of the way to me, threw her arms around my neck, and said, “Well, kiss me, you nut.”

It didn’t offend me. If I was a nut, and this was what nuts got, then the crazier I got the better I’d like it.

Well, there’s only so much you can say about kisses. And I’ll say it if I get half a chance. But I’d already had two kisses from Lucrezia, and about all there is to say is that this third one was twice as good as those two first ones put together. Or, imagine you put those two first ones together, and they mated. And had about a million babies. And then the babies grew up. Like that.

Oh, hell, it was just a kiss.

When it was over, Lucrezia dropped her arms to her sides, and I stepped back a little. I don’t usually do that, but I was trying to get my bearings. I looked around, but didn’t see them anyplace.

“What are you looking for?” Lucrezia asked.

“Ball-bearings,” I said. “Don’t know why, really, just a—a thought that occurred to me.”

She sighed. “That was quite a kiss.”

“You said a mouthful. Let’s do it again, huh?”

“Shell, how—how can you be so unconcerned? Aren’t some of those men still in the house? You didn’t—you didn’t kill them all, did you?”

“Don’t be ridiculous. I only killed a couple of them. And then I think one guy committed suicide. Just—don’t worry, there’s plenty of time.”

“Time for what? You don’t mean—you can’t mean—”

“Who says I can’t?”

“Shell, really!”

“Yeah, really.”

“I mean, we’ve really got to get out of here.”

“I suppose you’re right. There’s a couple of those guys might come to, and come up here, and come in and … yeah, we better get out of here.” I paused, thinking. “Hey, Lucrezia.”

“Yes?”

“None of those guys, they didn’t, well, didn’t—ah, rape you or anything, did they?”

“What do you mean, or anything?”

“Hell, I don’t know. Pinch you, maybe?”

“They didn’t do anything! They didn’t even rape me!”

“Don’t sound so disappointed.”

“Oh, Shell, you—you—”

“Can’t a guy be jealous?”

“Shell, I saw you. I saw you.”

“Saw me what?” I’d just been standing here, simply standing. Except for that kiss, of course. She sure said some funny things.

“I saw you.”

“There you go again.”

“In the courtyard. Down there.” She flang an arm out, in the general direction of the mayhem and havoc below. “I even saw you on the telephone pole—in the lightning. Only I didn’t know it was you, then.”

“Well … That’s all right. I wasn’t at my best on the telephone pole. It’s not my bag. To tell the truth, I wasn’t feeling well at all up there—”

“And then, when the lights came on, I saw you again.” She pointed. “See, I could look down right from there and see everything!”

This was the sort of turret room, wall curving out and around, so I guessed she would have had a pretty good view at that. There were bars over the window, but she could have seen me through the bars—and, I thought glumly, might again. Too bad Lucrezia’s first good look at me had been when I was running like a scalded orangutan away from all those apes. Maybe she wouldn’t mention it.

“I saw you running away from all those men,” she said, “and when you went right through the wall!”

“Well, I probably should explain about that, but …”

“And then shooting, and yelling and screeching—”

“I didn’t, either—”

“—and roaring and bellowing, and shooting, and fighting. I even saw that great huge man jump at the wall. He was the funniest thing!”

“How do you mean that? Funniest? Like funny, funnier—Who else was funny?”

“Oh, Shell, you were just magnificent! You were wonderful!”

“I was?”

“I never saw anything so thrilling and exciting in my life. There’s never been anything like it, even in the movies.”

“Well, I don’t know—”

“I was so proud of you. Of course, I thought you were going to get killed. But you didn’t.”

“No, that’s about the only thing I didn’t do.”

“But I was—and I am. So proud of you.”

“Ah … I’m sorry if I was a little snippy. Didn’t really mean it. It’s, uh … Well, it’s been a hard night.”

She smiled. Then she said, sweetly and softly, “I know. I know. But I’ll take care of you, my darling.”

And, somehow, I knew she would.

There was another special council meeting. Tony Brizante called it. I addressed it. The council members—the ten who were present, since naturally two couldn’t make it—knew merely by looking at me either every word I spoke was the truth or I was just naturally dirty.

I gave them a fast fill-in on the Cosa Nostra or Mafia, told them about DiGiorno-Lecci, hit a few bits of background and described a little, only a little, of what I’d been running up against since Friday afternoon.

Then I said, “So here’s a quick summing-up, gentlemen. Lecci, restless in retirement, got the itch to come a little way out of retirement, and being a creature of unalterable habit brought in some helpers, got a black finger—of a black hand—into many little pies here at Sunrise Villas. Not enough action for the big boys, the Dons, the Commission to worry about. Until: AGING. DiGiorno putting the squeeze on a small Arizona community—a little rakeoff here, some muscle there, skimming a few thousands from too-cheap paving or sewers or corrupt contracting or strikes, that was one thing. But ex-capo Pete Lecci with his hooks in Sunrise Villas when the millions—dozens and scores of millions if it was handled right and by the right men—were about to start pouring in, that was another thing entirely. That was the big pie, and the top dog couldn’t be The Letch himself, he was too old, too far behind the new times and new ways.

“So the Cosa Nostra Commission met and, with some wisdom, decided to take over. In a way, you should be flattered, gentlemen, because more than a year ago, when AGING legislation was barely out of the cradle, the Commissione, the twelve most powerful mafiosi bosses in this entire land, held a special meeting—much as you’re now meeting in special session yourselves—concerned solely with Sunrise Villas. They decided the first step should be to send in their own man not merely to guarantee effective control of your community but to make sure Letch made no serious mistakes in the little time left to him. And I do mean, even if Lecci might normally have lived to be a hundred and ninety-nine, the little time left to him. Because he had to go, and the members of his small organization, anybody ‘loyal’ to him, either had to switch over to the new bosses or else—well, or else.

“They sent in the best-qualified man they could find for the job, an unusually intelligent hood whom you knew as the Reverend Stanley Archibald, but whose monicker or hoodlum nickname was Holyjoe because he had read the entire Bible and could even quote parts of it. Besides, he looked right and sounded right and had once taken a prison course in psychology, and for three years on the legit had sold vacuum cleaners.”

Well, I went on from there, and by the time I’d given them the whole thing, chapter and verse in clubs, diamonds, hearts and spades, they were charged up like cadmium-nickel batteries and went out into the town, among their fellow citizens, spreading the word; from door to door, on the phone, in one ear and out another mouth, it spread like the most-recently-invented Cambodian or Laotian flu, and in half an hour I was out there with them—and we were charging down the street.

Well, maybe not charging. Nearly all of my fellow chargers were past the half-century mark, some in the eighties and more, but most of them got along at a pretty good clip, and they were armed. Armed with bats and sticks and golf clubs, even canes and crutches. There were even a few handguns and rifles with a shotgun here and there. The first destination was the headquarters of the Sunrise Villas Security Guards.

From those of Lecci and Company still alive and conscious we’d learned that of the eighteen-man force five were Lecci’s men. Strike Weeton. That left four. So the Sunrise Villans marched. At first I was leading the parade. At first.

You’d be surprised how fast some of those old boys could go along. It came upon me, too, that I wasn’t the man I used to be. I wasn’t the man I used to be last night, much less two nights ago. I sat on the curb and watched them go. It was quite exciting.

I’d pooped out a block from the Guards’ headquarters. But I was able to see three uniformed men there, maybe tipped off or else attracted by the growling of the mob, and I guessed those three were three of the four because they all gave little jumps, then spun about and ran into the building.

Pursued. By the most motley crowd of vigilantes or avengers mine eyes had ever seen.

Well, it went on, and on. On most of the day. By mid-afternoon, if there was a crook left in town, he was seriously considering straightening out. A few were in the jug. Some had made it to the desert, and police helicopters were whirly-birding over the sands, spotting a fugitive now and then among the cacti.

I didn’t wait to watch it all. When I figured Tony would be home again, I headed for Mimosa Lane.

I sort of staggered into the living room when Tony opened the door for me. Mrs. Brizante and Lucrezia came in, then Mrs. Brizante went back into the kitchen where she began either dancing a wild flamenco or making more raviolis.

I declined Tony’s gracious, perhaps sacrificial, offer of a chair and did not sit down. I was afraid simply because of my standing here he might have to send his whole house to the cleaners.

After a litte talk I told him, “God knows what might have happened if you hadn’t followed the guy you thought was Yarrow Tuesday morning. In strange and unfathomable ways our days are fashioned, what?” I was, at that point, mentally so dull I actually liked the sound of those words. So dull, in fact, that I said them again, or at least started to. “In strange … and unfath—”

“I still don’t know exactly what the hell,” Tony interrupted. “You mean the man I talked to at the church wasn’t Yarrow?”

“No, that was Henry Yarrow. But it was not the man you saw Tuesday morning, and followed—that guy was David Stephens. They pulled a switch on you. Having you meet Yarrow at the church was to make sure you would accept Yarrow as the man you’d seen—in dawn light from a distance of forty feet or more—Tuesday morning.” I paused. “Tony, to put it bluntly, the whole point of that confrontation was to con you, stick you with the convincer, and it worked. But, my friend, be damned glad of it, because if you hadn’t accepted Yarrow as Stephens you simply wouldn’t have come home from the church.” After a moment I added, “Either.”

He was silent, frowning. I looked at Lucrezia. “By the way, Paul Anson gave me your message, about seeing Henry Yarrow but not at the house Tony had tailed him to. Or, rather, tailed Stephens to. Including your telling Paul you knew who the guy in the other house was—which, of course, is why those hoods grabbed you. I take it you didn’t actually mention Stephens’ name to Paul on the phone, but did say you knew who he was, right?”

She nodded. “Yes, that’s when I decided to drive in and talk to you myself, Shell. After Dad showed me the house where he’d seen the man go Tuesday morning, I found out David Stephens was staying there, and I already knew he was Kerwin’s brother, so I was sure you’d want to know about that.”

“Found out he was Stephens? How?”

“Oh, that was easy. When Dad showed me the house where he thought Mr. Yarrow lived, I noticed a mailbox next door with the name ‘Murphy’ on it. When we got home I looked up Mr. Yarrow in the phone book, and his address was the same as where Dad and I had just seen him—same as the one in the Sunrise Villas News story about you, for that matter. So I looked up the only Murphy on Palma Drive and called that number. It was easy.”

“It was, huh?”

“Mrs. Murphy answered the phone and we had a nice little talk. I asked her who lived in the house next door, and she said it was empty for a couple of months but that David Stephens had been staying there for the last week or so.”

“Just like that, huh?”

“Well, it’s no secret about Mr. Stephens being here at the Villas. He’s just doing his job—that’s what everybody thought, anyway. The only secret was that Dad followed him and saw him go into that house.”

“Yeah. You realize those bad men were listening to you talking to Mrs. Murphy, and telling Paul about all this snooping you were doing.”

“Well, I know that now, but I didn’t know it then. How could I? Nobody told me they were listening.” She paused. “And it wasn’t snooping. I was just trying to—help. Everyone else was being a detective, so I did it, too. There wasn’t anything very difficult about it. Actually, it was kind of fun.”

“Kind of … fun?”

I thought about Lucky frolicking around the tree outside the nice new church … Ace and The Nailer playing “Hit” in front of Henry Yarrow’s home … the fun and games on Willow Lane … Bludgett, Bludgett, and Bludgett … the gang crowding excitedly into my suite at lovely Mountain Shadows for that swinging party … running bareheaded through the rain … and the kicks at the old King place with all the kids from Cosa Nostra.…

“I suppose it is,” I said. “Kind of …”

I gazed, dully, at the wall. I don’t know how long I gazed. But somehow I got the impression Lucrezia had left the room. She hadn’t, of course, because if she had, then I couldn’t have put my foot in it, and naturally I put my foot in it. One simply should not become as tired as I had become. When one becomes that tired, one’s brain fails to function like a well-oiled machine.

“Well, Tony,” I said. “I’ve got to go. Have to see a gal, and then hit the sack.”

“Gal?”

“Yeah, though I could probably think of a better word if my brain were functioning like a well-oiled machine. This one is an incendiary babe who should not be allowed within six feet of anything inflammable. Looking into her eyes is like watching two little stag movies. And built? Gotta go. Gotta go see Mary—”

“Who?” said Lucrezia, putting a lot into the one word.

“Well,” I said, “where did you come from?”

“Who?” she said, putting even more into it.

“Ah, Mary—Mary Blessing. Mrs. Blessing. The widow. She’s an old gray-headed … Well, no—I’ll tell you about it some other time.”

I knew it was time to go. The shape I was in, if I didn’t leave right away I’d get in trouble.

So I walked to the door and out, passing close to Lucrezia on my way. And maybe I imagined it, but I thought I detected an odd expression in Lucrezia’s lovely eyes.…

CHAPTER TWENTY-TWO

Mrs. Blessing opened the door.

I couldn’t hear any music from behind her, and she wasn’t doing her little dance, or making the little fun movements. But anyone could tell they were still in her, just waiting to break out.

She gave me a strange look. Everybody had been doing that, but hers was a stranger strange than any of the rest. I’d known it would be. She invited me inside anyhow. I remained standing. She sat, in that way she had. I admired her thigh. Why not? It was an admirable thigh. And she was quite a girl.

But then I got down to business. Real business. My business. “Mrs. Blessing,” I said, “it took me longer than it should have—until almost precisely six minutes past eight P.M. last night, to be … precise—but I finally figured it out.”

“Figured what out?”

“You know. When Gilberto Reyes came by here with Tony Brizante early Tuesday morning. And looking from the car saw, so the carefully contrived story went, Joe Civano. And, in some excitement, cried, you should pardon the expression, ‘Jesus Christ. Mary, Mother of God! Stop the car,’ and so on. He said it in Spanish, since he often lapsed into Spanish when excited, but also—and this is important—the punctuation should be different. Like, ‘Jesús Cristo. María. Madre de Dios!”

“I don’t understand—”

“Sure you do. Should be a period after Maria. What a difference a dot makes, what? He wasn’t talking about the Virgin Mary, was he, Mary?”

“I won’t sit here—”

“Sure you will. Gilberto didn’t see Joe Civano, didn’t even think he saw Joe Civano. He saw you. He saw Maria Civano.” I smiled at Mrs. Blessing, born Maria Civano. “Right, Maria?”

She protested, and denied, and showed me lots of thigh, but somehow it had lost its enchantment.

“Let’s go way back,” I said. “Start with The Letch. He married and fathered Antonio, who got shot by a cop in an alley, and Angelica. Angelica married Massero Civano and they had four children, Pete Lecci’s four grandchildren: first, Giuseppe—or the late Joe Civano—born nearly forty-seven years ago; two years later Andrea came along; a bit more than three years after that, Felicca; and in another two years Maria Civano was born. Which means you’re over the hill, you’re forty-one years old, Maria.”

“I’m thirty-nine.…”

I smiled. “Of course. How could I have made a stupid mistake like that?”

She pulled her skirt down with a jerk. She’d known the jig was up long before her little goof. So had I, of course. But a guy has to keep in practice.

“All the Civanos,” I went on, “lived for several years in Gardena, California. For some of those same years—in the same block, even—so did Gilberto Reyes. He knew Joe. He knew Joe’s little sister Maria, too. Pretty well, if I may hazard a guess. Gil hadn’t seen Maria Civano in sixteen years, but I doubt he had a lot of difficulty recognizing her Tuesday morning.” I paused. “I’ll give you that, Mrs. Blessing. Men would remember you. Hell, once in a while I may think of you myself … while you’re away.”

She sat primly, as primly as she could sit, the wide red lips pressed more tightly together than when we’d chatted before, arms folded beneath what I had at first sight thought of as astonishingly protuberant jugs, the huge dark eyes with their long, long lashes glaring at me from under the black brows—she was quite a girl—and remained silent as I continued.

“Anyhow, Gil naturally walked up to your door, and, probably not yet at all sure if the lovely lady was indeed Maria, spoke, first to you, then to the guy you were with. Now, that was a remarkable moment, worth examining closely. Coloring everything else, motivating virtually all which followed that moment is the money, the grants all set to start pouring in from AGING, and—you know about that. Add the Cosa Nostra, black hand itching for great gobs of those great gobs of federal loot and this brief moment becomes one which, should its full implications become widely known, almost surely would prove disastrous—primarily to the mafiosi, that is—even catastrophic, everything wrecked, blooey. Are you following me, Maria?”

“I stayed with you up to wrecked, blooey,” she said.

She was taking this surprisingly well so far, I thought. “Fine,” I said, “because now it gets fascinating. Here is Gil Reyes standing there asking you if you’re Maria Civano. That’s bad. Can’t have him going around blabbing that sort of thing. The possibility others might learn Maria Civano—Crazy Joe’s sister, member of a Mafia-connected family, granddaughter of Pete “The Letch” Lecci—was very early in the A.M. meeting with David Stephens—the AGING Commission chairman’s brother, personal representative and official right-hand man to the dispenser of the goodies—therein lay not merely the seed but the entire flower of catastrophe.”

I asked her if she minded if I smoked. She told me she didn’t care if I burned. It wasn’t an original comment, but at least she was still talking to me—and, though it had been light so far, I had a hunch she soon would not be speaking to me at all. I found an ashtray, lit a smoke.

“Naturally, you told Gil he was mistaken, insisted as convincingly as possible you were not Maria Civano, all this undoubtedly with some help from Stephens. You put some doubt into Gil’s mind, some but not enough. So when he left he was still wondering if you were really Maria, and if so why you’d denied it. He knew the Civanos were a crime-connected, actually Cosa Nostra-connected, family—even in Gardena he’d known Crazy Joe was a crook. And still very fresh in his mind was the horribly impressive hit of Joe he’d witnessed only two mornings before. Maybe he even wondered about the increasingly visible mess here at the Villas. Certainly he was concerned, worried, confused, so what did he do? Why, just what many good, religious, confused or worried people do, he decided to talk to his spiritual advisor, the Reverend, to partake of his wisdom, seek his aid and comfort and advice, and he did, and he died.”

Mrs. Blessing’s eyes, which at times could look like little copies of those vats they pour the hot stuff from in steel factories, were cooling.

“Tony Brizante’s good friend Gil just plain disappeared,” I went on. “And what confused Tony most of all was thinking Gil had said that he thought he’d seen Joe Civano. But Gil never said any such thing—because he never thought any such thing. Gil told Tony he thought he’d seen ‘Civano,’ but maybe he was wrong—to quote him exactly, ‘That looks like Civano’—and that was all he said. Tony dropped Gil off at work and never saw him again. There was nothing at any time—not from Gil Reyes—about believing he’d seen Joe Civano. The Joe, Maria, was supplied by Reverend Archie.”

You wouldn’t think such hot eyes could reach a cold close to freezing in minutes, much less seconds, but that’s what they had done. “Let’s separate fact from fiction—the Reverend Stanley Archibald’s fiction,” I said. “What really happened is, Tuesday evening Gil Reyes called on the Reverend to talk about Maria—not Joe—Civano, and right then he was dead. Very close to death, anyhow. Gil Reyes didn’t go anywhere after that, not of his own free will. He didn’t see you at the church, or Henry Yarrow at the church, he didn’t see anybody except Archie and his other executioners. But before he was dead you knew he’d told Tony Brizante he thought he’d seen ‘Civano,’ and that was all he’d told Tony.” I paused. “Incidentally, sometimes when I say ‘you’ I refer not merely to Maria Civano but Letch and Holyjoe and all the brothers in blood clear up to the Commissione.”

I dragged on my cigarette, dropped ash into the tray. “Well, it was fortunate Tony didn’t know any more than he did, but as Gil’s friend you knew he’d be poking around, could cause trouble, maybe big trouble. You could have killed him to make sure he didn’t say the wrong things to the wrong people or ask embarrassing questions, but that was out if it could possibly be avoided. In part because he was the father of Lucrezia Brizante, but also because too many guys dropping dead or disappearing could be real trouble, could even lead to an investigation that might uncover what was going on here at Sunrise Villas, and above everything else you had to avoid any heat in that area—the big heat, as Letch himself referred to it early Saturday morning. But if Tony could be misdirected and misled—conned—you could cool it, the problem could be solved simply and cleanly. So that’s what happened. Tony Brizante was conned, and expertly.”

I looked silently at Maria Blessing for a while. No change in her. Expression and posture the same, eyes fixed coldly upon me, quite blank. It was like talking to a very shapely iceberg.

“So we get to the fiction,” I said. “And in a way I’ve got to hand it to you, I really do, because the problem was complex. You couldn’t let Tony even suspect that Gil had walked over to talk with the woman that morning, because your true identity had to be concealed and even a hint of the truth could lead Tony to the truth to Maria Civano. So you had to shift attention from the woman to the man—but you couldn’t shift attention to David Stephens either, because his presence and identity also had to be concealed. The horns of a double dilemma right there. To make it hornier, the story had to be tailored to fit certain other unavoidable requirements: making it explain that dangerous name, Civano—plus having Gil’s trail lead away from the Reverend, especially the Reverend, and also away from you, Maria. But, by golly, you managed to pull it off—almost.”

I smiled at her. “That’s such a sad word sometimes, isn’t it? Almost?” Still no comment from Maria. “At any rate, it was ready for Brizante, by the time he went to the Universalist Communion Church, hoping to learn what had happened to Gil. There the Reverend Archie told him, ‘Yes, Mr. Brizante, poor old Gil was here, and he really did think he’d seen Joe Civano, he seemed to be convinced of his error when he left but was still quite distraught.…’ or some such blah. The key words there, in case you weren’t listening closely, Maria, were ‘the Reverend Archie told him.’

“And Archie told Brizante that the man Gil really saw was not Joe Civano but a gentleman named Henry Yarrow, who with good and sufficient reason had been calling upon that nice Widow Blessing, and the Reverend himself had arranged for them to come to his church to meet poor deranged Gil, who in consequence realized he’d made a terrible mistake.… None of which actually happened, of course, none of which was the truth, since every bit of it was from Reverend Archie, Holyjoe fiction carefully constructed to con Brizante.”

I beamed at Maria. “There. Did I make it clear for you? Well … if I missed a vital point, you could at least yawn or something. Come, Maria. Look, I’ll sum it up very simply for you: Tuesday morning Gil saw Maria Civano talking to David Stephens, went to church that night and got killed, then when Tony came along Holyjoe told him Gil had been there and thought he’d seen Joe Civano with Mrs. Blessing and such, and for corroboration brought in not David Stephens but Henry Yarrow, who merely parroted to Tony the tale Holyjoe—or, more likely, you—had told him to tell. And Tony went away, and later told me, ‘Yes, Shell, turns out Gil really did think he’d seen Joe Civano.…’

“You’re sure a lousy conversationalist,” I said after a long pause. But even that didn’t get a rise out of her. “Maria,” I went on, “surely you’ve guessed by now that I am not a man who gives up easily. I intend to find something that’ll tickle you if it takes all day. Ah—Henry Yarrow. Substituting him for David Stephens must have been your idea, right? Maybe with some help from Stephens? I imagine that was the toughest part, getting Yarrow to cooperate, even though he didn’t really have much to do. Just going to the church once—because he did not go there to see Gil Reyes, remember, but only to talk to Brizante, lie to him, say he’d been the man with you Tuesday morning. Maybe this will tickle you: once I realized the story was set up primarily to con Brizante, I finally understood that Henry Yarrow was chosen, not because he resembled Joe Civano, but because he looked a lot like David Stephens.”

No reaction yet. But I felt maybe a little reaction was coming. “Yarrow looked enough like Stephens to fool Brizante, who’d been forty or fifty feet away when he saw Stephens. But Henry Yarrow wouldn’t have fooled Gil Reyes, not for a minute.”

She blinked and said, “Oh.” Not much, but it was enough for me. Apparently she hadn’t thought of that before.

“Sure,” I said, “good enough for Brizante, even confused the hell out of me for a while. But Reyes knew well what Joe looked like. I won’t bore you with a full catalog, but even after sixteen years Joe’s very dark eyes—dark like yours, Maria—wouldn’t have changed to the very striking light bright blue of Henry Yarrow’s eyes. Forget Joe’s facial scars and all the rest of it. Just those eyes are enough. If the Reverend Archie’s story to Tony was true, it meant Gil stood talking to bright-blue-eyed Henry Yarrow for a couple of minutes, and after that still thought he might have been talking to Joe Civano—whom he knew to be dead, anyway.”

She said something else. It was a swear word. She didn’t swear like a girl. Probably the only thing she didn’t do like a girl.

“Obviously,” I went on, “Gil would not have thought, and did not think, he’d been talking to Joe Civano—yet that’s what Reverend Archie told Tony Gil Reyes had said to him. Therefore, Reverend Archie was lying. Why? Well, let’s remember Gil did still feel maybe he’d been talking to a ‘Civano,’ even after that early A.M. conversation. We now understand it could not have been the man he referred to. Who else? Only the woman. Mrs. Blessing. Or, a Civano—named Maria. And, finally, since both you and Yarrow told the same story as the Reverend, and the story could not be true, then all three of you were lying.”

This time she didn’t even swear. Just sat there, looking as if she’d swallowed a bug.

“This may amuse you, too,” I said. “A hood named Lucky Ryan made a try for me but it turns out that was his own idea, not a contract, and it was too soon after I got here to have a connection with my investigation anyway. The first real, planned Cosa Nostra hit was tried only a little while after I asked you about Pete Lecci. You expected questions about Joe, sure, but not about his—and your—grandpa, so naturally you had to go blab it to Letch or the Reverend, didn’t you? And who would do that but Maria?”

She sure didn’t say much. I took a drag on my cigarette, snubbed it out, and wrapped up the last of it. “If I hadn’t come along, or if you’d managed to kill me, the whole shmear would have worked, and it almost did anyway—there’s that ‘almost’ again. Reyes and Jenkins gone. Shell Scott could go. Tony himself could be hit if necessary. Even Lucrezia Brizante—if you could’ve managed to kill me.

“I know, Maria. Mere bagatelles, once you’ve swallowed, without gagging, the code, omerta, the religion of Cosa Nostra. I will burn if I betray the secret of this Cosa Nostra! Live—and die—by the gun and the knife! We are now one family! Before all, before religion, before country, before blood family, is this Cosa Nostra. I realize all the dead and almost-dead people I’ve mentioned aren’t part of this thing of yours, and therefore don’t really count. So none of it bothers a sweet girl like you. But what about Joe?”

“What? What do you mean?”

A real question, at last.

“Sweetie,” I said, smiling, “don’t you know it works both ways? Don’t you know once you join the club you have to take the bad rules with the—can we call it good? The Commissione sent out the word, ‘Hit Crazy Joe.’ I don’t mean sent it out all over, it wasn’t an open contract—”

“You’re a liar.”

I kept smiling. “Dear, if creepy old Letch failed to die of old age in another day or two, he’d have been on his way like Joe. Others of the brothers, relatives of the blessed family are—were—moving in, and those who didn’t fit had to go. Your brother was too close, too loyal, to The Letch. Crazy Joe was also too—well, too crazy.”

“You’re a—”

“Please, Maria. I know David Stephens, even though he’s not Mafia himself—for one thing, he talks much too readily—came by here Tuesday morning to cool you out about Joe Civano’s murder. Helping, as his brother’s emissary, to assure you the big bosses would find out who’d so foully assassinated your brother, and wreak vengeance—well, you remember. Just another part of the con, sticking in the convincer. Only this time it was for you, Maria. A present from the Family.”

I waited for her comment.

And waited. So I used her phone and called what she would have referred to as Uncle Angelo or the fuzz, or possibly even pigs. Which is to say I called my friends, and invited them over.

As I hung up I gave it one last try. “Maria—Mrs. Blessing—about Henry Yarrow, he had to know he was in on something rotten, but I’ve held the thought that he wasn’t in on this, not all the way—not, at least, like the rest of you. But he cooperated, went along with it, he did everything you wanted him to do. He even kept up the pretense when I dropped in on him Friday night, lied very convincingly to me. I’m personally convinced he didn’t have any idea what a helluva bloody mess he was getting involved in, but, still, how did you get him to go along with it even as much as he did?”

She told me. I guess finally she figured, correctly, that she didn’t have anything to lose. However, it is not the kind of statement I care to air in mixed company. So I will merely say that her brief and pithy comment ended with, “—the hell out of him.”

Yes, Maria was quite a girl.

CHAPTER TWENTY-THREE

I drove out of Sunrise Villas the same way I’d come in.

The storm was long over, and it was a blindingly bright day, the air washed clean, a day much more typical of Arizona than the one just ended. I rolled along the same streets I’d driven with Lucrezia Brizante at my side. Past the two brown-and-white buildings of the Town Hall and local-government offices, the building where I’d first seen Tony Brizante and Lecci and the Reverend and Kerwin Stephens—and made my two appearances before the council, for that matter.

When I stopped to turn right off Palos Verde into Saguaro I glanced at the velvety bowling green. Fewer players there this day. The old gaffer wasn’t there. I sighed. By now he might be gone to that Great Bowling Green in the sky. Or maybe it was merely that this was Sunday, and people were going to, or in, or recovering from, various services in various churches. But not, I felt reasonably sure, the Universalist Communion Church.

I glanced at my watch. One P.M. it was, on a Sunday afternoon in July. Just two days minus a few ticks since Lucrezia Brizante had nearly blackened my eyes, simply by walking toward me in the Mountain Shadows Cocktail Lounge.

I drove out of the Villas, but before going on to Mountain Shadows I stopped to take a look back—I don’t suppose you could call it a sentimental look, exactly—at the huge orange sign, arched like the rim of the rising sun, at the entrance to the town:

SUNRISE VILLAS

And beneath it the slogan, or legend: “Where the Golden Days of the Golden Years Begin.”

Well, could be, I thought. Could be.…

The drapes were drawn and it was cool and dim in my suite. Even the door had been fixed. But even if it had still been flat on the floor, I would have left it there. I was tired. Barely enough gas left to make it into the shower and then into the clean cool sheets of my just-soft-enough double bed.

Ordinarily I hang up my clothes, no matter how pooped I may be. But this time I took everything, my shirt and tie and shoes and shorts and socks and suit … my wonderful, brand-new custom-tailored, gorgeously shimmering color-of-a-drunken-dragon’s-eye suit, and dropped it all and kicked it into a corner.

Then—ah, luxury—into the shower. Some of the strange garbage I washed off me, out of my hair, even from my ears, had been clinging to me for twenty-four hours. More, since my awakening in the desert last night.

Last night? It was difficult to believe this was only Sunday afternoon. Hell, I still had the rest of Sunday to sleep, and three days left of my week’s vacation. A quantity of that time would of necessity be spent among representatives of the law—with whom, as may possibly be suspected, I had already spent some. But I was free. As to whether I would remain free forever and ever there was some small question.

At least Dr. Fretsindler, owner of the YAG laser, its trailer, and the automobile to which all that had been attached, was not also going to put me in jail. I had returned the entire shebang—undamaged, astonishingly—to the doctor, and he seemed to bear me no ill-will whatsoever.

When I explained why I had done what I’d done, of what immense help to me the laser had been, and a few of the other circumstances—only a few, since it would have taken till August to tell of them all—he hadn’t protested. Now that I considered it more closely, he hadn’t said much of anything. Fretsindler had merely looked at me. Just looked and looked. When I was through he sort of edged away and said, “That’s all right. Perfectly all right. No harm done. Splendid, old chap. I’m … sure it won’t happen again.” Then he shut the door, and I’d heard him lock it.

So that was another worry off my mind.

I had also put Paul Anson’s worries to rest. About ten A.M. when I’d gotten a free half-minute, I phoned to tell him, “I’m alive, I’m alive!” or words to that joyous effect. After mumbling a few hardly audible mumbles he had finally said, clearly, just before hanging up in my ear, “Damn you, Sheldon, I told you to give me a call at eight o’clock.”

It made me feel good all over. It’s nice to know people really care.

I let the hot water pound me for a long time, scrubbing off not only the dirt and caked mud and easing some of the aches, but maybe washing away the invisible film of Letch, Weeton, Lucky Ryan, Holyjoe Archibald.… Those last two were dead, of course. Weeton and Fleepo were in the hospital, Lecci and Ace in the clink. David Stephens and even Congressman Kerwin Stephens were being interrogated in a manner which might at the least be described as determined.

I knew now why his pals had given Lucky Ryan Frankie’s Colt .45—which wasn’t Frankie’s, but a heater used months before to knock down a liquor-store owner. Since the boys felt sensibly nervous about Lucky Ryan with his own heater handy, they had helpfully given him an automatic with only two cartridges in the clip, and instructions to “put three-four into Scott.” Along about number three, it could be surmised with great confidence, three-four would instead have gone into Lucky.

But his luck had held. Because when I took off running like a fleet hippopotamus, that saved me—and Lucky. Following which, Ace was able to take back the gimmicked Colt. They’d wanted so badly to kill him after he hit me, and it turned out I killed him myself with his own gun. Just, or almost, the way they’d wanted it.

And, finally, there was big, bald—now not so much bald as scalped—Bludgett. He, too, was in the hospital, with a rather unusual head. There was no question but that he would recover. He might, however, in the future, have a mite less self-confidence in his ability to dream the impossible dream and then do the impossible do.…

At last I stopped using up tons of the hotel’s hot water and, much refreshed rubbed down briskly with a towel, brushed my teeth, examined the new me in the mirror, peered into my eyes, stuck out my tongue, beat my chest like Tarzan, pranced out of the bathroom and hopped into bed.

And leaped out, emitting a great yell, like Tarzan.

There had been something in my bed.

That was enough to scare hell out of anybody.

God knows what it was, but it was something soft, and warm … and rounded … and … Come to think of it, whatever it was hadn’t felt that scarey.

She sat up in bed, holding the sheet an inch under her chin. “I hope you don’t mind,” Lucrezia said.

“Mind? Mind?” My mind wasn’t functioning smoothly yet.

“Well, that horrible noise you made.”

“I—won’t do it again.”

“I didn’t know you were afraid of girls.”

“I didn’t know it, either.”

“I thought I’d surprise you,” she said.

“You surprised me, all right.”

“I was afraid you might think I was mad at you—about Mary. But I figured that out.”

“Well, then I guess you’re not mad at me. Yeah, I guess—”

“I thought you’d be pleased.”

“Pleased isn’t quite the word. I’ll bet I could think of maybe a thousand—”

“Are you just going to stand there like that?”

It was the two words “like that” which started my mind clicking like a well-oiled machine again. Thus reminded, I looked at myself. Yeah, she had a good idea there. Wouldn’t do to just stand here like this. So I jumped into the bed and covered myself with the sheet.

And the sheet was pulled from Lucrezia’s fingers, brushed the magnificent, thrusting breasts as it fell, brushed and then bared them. It fell to her waist, crumpled upon her thighs. I held the sheet in one hand. For a long moment. Then I stripped it from us, threw it to the foot of the bed.

She sat silently, still erect, head tilted slightly back. And—something changed. Always before, before this moment, we’d been joking or half-joking, there’d been no time to be serious, no time for leisurely words, or glances, or caresses.

There was time now.

The air itself seemed changed. Heavier. Thicker. It was very quiet. Then it was something more than that. It was oddly still. Still the way it must be in the Garden of Kam when the wind dies suddenly and nothing stirs. It was a strange quietness, a stillness, a hush. A hush, here in my room. Or maybe it was merely that something changed in her, and in me.

Whatever it was, that hush was broken by the slow soft rise of Lucrezia’s breath, and the rise of her brazen breasts as she breathed. She didn’t speak, not then. Nor did I. I leaned toward her, saw her eyes half close, her lips soften and part. Then she was smooth loveliness against me, melting against me, her mouth on my mouth, her body pressed to mine, her lips my lips, her flesh my flesh.

I kissed her and held her close and breathed her name, and heard that voice born in dreams of houris and wantons and bawds, soft as night winds in my ear, “Oh, my darling. Oh—my darling,” and knew that unimaginably warm and wondrous body, the perfection of her breasts and thighs, the fire in her eyes and lips, and the sweet fast beat of her heart.

Much later—a little while after dark—she said to me, “Shell … you murmured something in your sleep. I liked it!”

“What did I—murmur?”

“My name.”

“Lucrezia?”

“Lucrezia.”

“Well, naturally,” I said. “You don’t think I’d dream about anyone else, do you?”

“You’d better not,” she said. And then she smiled that lotus-cooking smile, the smooth lids drooped, embers of burning Rome glowed brighter in velvet eyes, and she said, or murmured, “At least—not tonight.”

I didn’t, either.

About the Author

Richard S. Prather (1921–2007) was the author of the world-famous Shell Scott detective series, which has over forty million copies in print in the United States and many millions more in foreign-language editions abroad. There are forty-one volumes in the series, including four collections of short stories and novelettes. In 1986, Prather was awarded the Lifetime Achievement Award by the Private Eye Writers of America. He and his wife, Tina, lived in Sedona, Arizona.

All rights reserved, including without limitation the right to reproduce this ebook or any portion thereof in any form or by any means, whether electronic or mechanical, now known or hereinafter invented, without the express written permission of the publisher.

This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, events, and incidents either are the product of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, businesses, companies, events, or locales is entirely coincidental.

Copyright © 1969 by Richard S. Prather

Cover design by Mauricio Díaz

ISBN: 978-1-4976-4965-1

This edition published in 2015 by Open Road Integrated Media, Inc.

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Table of Contents

Cover Page

Title Page

Dedication

Chapter One

Chapter Two

Chapter Three

Chapter Four

Chapter Five

Chapter Six

Chapter Seven

Chapter Eight

Chapter Nine

Chapter Ten

Chapter Eleven

Chapter Twelve

Chapter Thirteen

Chapter Fourteen

Chapter Fifteen

Chapter Sixteen

Chapter Seventeen

Chapter Eighteen

Chapter Nineteen

Chapter Twenty

Chapter Twenty-One

Chapter Twenty-Two

Chapter Twenty-Three

About the Author

Copyright Page