The old-fashioned arched sign over the entrance to the private road read:

I swung my car off the Silverado Trail and took it beneath the sign and past another one that appeared in my headlights: GUIDED TOURS. VISITORS WELCOME TASTING ROOM OPEN 10-4 � The road was narrow but well graded, and it began to climb and dip almost immediately through low rolling foothills. The hillsides were carpeted with curving rows of grape vines, most of which had been stripped clean of fruit because it was the first of November and the harvest season was all but over. Here and there were some of the big truck gondolas the pickers used, and oaks and madrone and eucalyptus dotted the terrain, but there was nothing else to see except the black-shadowed vineyards and a black moonless sky. The winery was tucked farther back in the foothills, a mile and a half from the Silverado Trail and a few miles southeast of the village of St Helena.

It was just past nine o�clock and the night was cool, but I rolled my window down a little so I could smell the good vinous, earthy scent of the vineyards. A summer fragrance, though, not an autumn one, because the drought that had plagued California for more than a year continued to linger with no signs of abatement. Even the grape leaves had not taken on their fall colors � yellow, scarlet, purple � as they would have by now if the rains had come as usual.

Alex Cappellani had told me it had been a poor harvest, one of the poorest in the Napa Valley in years. The big wineries which owned the bulk of the 16,000 acres of vineyards in the valley would survive all right on volume; but unless the drought ended soon, Cappellani and the other small cellars could be in serious trouble. They made most of their profits on vintage-dated varietals � Pinot Noir and Grignolino and Grey Riesling � and without a yield of high-quality grapes with which to manufacture these wines, they had little hope of competing in the marketplace.

This was the latest in a long series of problems that had beset the Cappellani Winery since Alex�s great-grandfather founded it in 1878. Poor harvests and labor squabbles had almost closed it down in the 1890s and in the early 1900s; Prohibition had closed it down for the duration, and there had been an added difficulty when Alex�s grandfather was arrested in 1923 and fined a substantial sum of money for illegally conspiring to produce alcoholic beverages; Alex�s father, Frank Cappellani, had apparently been more interested in reactionary political causes, and as a result of apathetic management the winery had nearly gone into receivership in the early �60s. Frank�s death of a heart attack in 1964 put the cellar in full control of his wife, Rosa, who had turned out to be a capable and hard-nosed business woman. With the help of Alex�s elder brogher, Leo, and later Alex himself, Rosa had gotten the winery back into the black: until the drought it had been flourishing.

But the drought and poor harvest were not the only things Alex was concerned about these days, and had nothing to do with why he�d hired me three days ago in San Francisco. What he had come to me about was a man named Jason Booker, an enologist � a wine and winemaking scientist � whom Rosa Cappellani had signed on six months ago. Booker was forty-six, nine years Rosa�s junior, but they had evidently become intimates; and although Rosa insisted there was nothing serious in their relationship, Alex was convinced that Booker was pressing her to marry him. He was also convinced that Booker was a shady opportunist who cared not at all for Rosa, who wanted only to gain control of the winery through marriage. So he wanted me to run a check into this Booker�s background to see if there was anything there that would corroborate his suspicions.

You can find out a lot about a man in three days if you have a basic fact sheet on him to begin with � where he went to school, where he has lived and worked, things like that � and Alex had provided me with a copy of Booker�s job application and references from the Cappellani offices in San Francisco. Since Booker had lived in California all his life, the first thing I had done was some routine checking with police and credit agencies. Which got me nothing much; he had an average credit rating and no police record of any kind. Then I had driven up here and spent the past two days talking to people at the four wineries which had employed him during the last twenty years, two in Napa Valley and two in the Valley of the Moon. The consensus was that he was a good enologist but nothing much as a man: arrogant, ambitious, charming when he wanted to be, ruthless when he saw an advantage to be gained.

One other thing I learned was that, his job application to the contrary, he had not worked anywhere for an eight-month period in 1970. This morning, I had found out why: a viticulturist at the Sonoma winery which employed Booker prior to that eight-month gap told me Booker had left there without giving a reason but that he had let it slip he was planning to get married. There had been nothing on the job application about a marriage � he had listed himself as a bachelor � and so I had gone to Santa Rosa and checked the Sonoma County records. Married, all right, to a woman named Martha Towne in February of 1970. According to the marriage certificate, she was sixteen years older than he and a resident at that time of Petaluma.

The Petaluma address turned out to be an expensive home in an affluent west-side neighborhood. It also turned out to still belong to Martha Towne � a bitter Martha Towne who was more than willing to talk about Jason Booker, to me and to anyone else who might want to listen.

It was an old story, old and sad and ugly; and it pretty well corroborated Alex Cappellani�s suspicions. Martha Towne had been recently widowed and had inherited a considerable estate from her late husband when she met Booker at a party. She had also been lonely, and flattered and overwhelmed by his attentions, and she had married him three months later. Only to discover, after five months together, that he was far more interested in her money than he was in her. He had gotten her to open joint checking and savings accounts and had then appropriated fifteen thousand dollars for personal investments about which she knew nothing. When she found out she told him to pack his bags, and divorced him and managed to get a sympathetic judge not to grant him a community property settlement.

She had not remarried again, and all you had to do was look at her to tell that she never would. Booker had taken a lot more from her than the fifteen thousand dollars; he had taken her faith and her trust, and she had never recovered them either.

I asked her if she would sign a formal statement of what she had told me, if it proved necessary; I also told her why I might want it, omitting the names of the Cappellani family. She said she would, gladly, and her eyes shone with a kind of malice when she said it. I did not blame her much, but I got out of there pretty fast just the same.

It was after six when I called the winery from a pay phone and asked for Alex. But the woman who answered said he wasn�t there; he was expected at eight o�clock. So I ate cannellone and drank a couple of beers in an Italian restaurant on Petaluma�s main drag and then drove the fifty miles to St. Helena and called the winery again from there. Alex was in this time; he asked me to come straight out and to meet him at the office in the main cellar building.

The road wound across a stretch of bottomland, where the vines were laid out in long straight rows. I still could not see the winery from there, but beyond the crest of another low hill there was the faint glow of lights against the dark sky. The night seemed vast and still and touched with a kind of old-world serenity, and you could imagine that this was a foothill vineyard in France or Italy or Switzerland at the turn of the century. That same flavor of Europe long-ago permeated the Napa Valley; you felt and saw it not only in the vineyards and the old stone wineries, but in the quiet villages and the ancient mills and factories and railroad depots, and in the attitudes of the people who lived there.

All the driving I had done today was beginning to make me a little logy. I rolled down the window another couple of inches, to let in more of the cool night air, and yawned, and the yawn triggered a series of small dry coughs that brought a tightness into my chest. When the coughing stopped I took several slow deep breaths. The tightness eased then, but a dull ache lingered in the region of my left lung.

There was a lesion on that lung. It was benign, as I had learned after an agonizing week this past summer, just prior to my fiftieth birthday; but there was still the possibility that it would turn malignant, or that other malignant lesions would form on one or both lungs. That was what a doctor named White had told me � and he had also told me that if I wanted to keep on living, I had to give up smoking cigarettes.

So I had given them up. Cold turkey. I had consumed an average of two packs a day for thirty-five years, and had tried to quit several times with no success; but when a doctor tells you point-blank that you�re going to die if you don�t quit, you do it and you stick to it. I had not had a single cigarette in five months. Every time I thought about having one, which was less and less frequently now, I reminded myself that it would be like putting a knife in my own chest. And the craving would go away.

The lesion, and the specter of death, had changed me in a lot of ways over these past five months. In the beginning, while I was waiting for the pathology report on whether the lesion was malignant or benign, I had been obsessed by death � so obsessed by it that I was having difficulty functioning. But then, as a result of a complicated case I had been on in the Mother Lode, I had finally come to terms with my own mortality. I was no longer afraid of the specter of death; I had made peace with myself and with the world around me. I was no longer inclined to view certain things and certain people with cynical eyes. I was no longer inclined to care too much and too deeply about the lives and the suffering of others � what the unemotional and intellectual types like to label dismissively as weltschmerz, as if it were some sort of curious affliction. Not that I have stopped caring; it is just that human pain and human folly do not hurt me so much anymore.

When I got to the top of the low hill beyond the bottomland, the winery buildings appeared in another shallow valley below. What looked to be the main cellar was off to the south, built before a cut in a limestone ridge; nightlights shone across its stone facade and its huge domed roof, illuminated part of a wide gravel yard and a parking area for visitors. Vineyards stretched away on its far side, and at an angle beyond the cellar�s north side were a couple of smaller stone buildings that probably housed bottling and shipping facilities and some of the winery�s smaller cooperage. A stand of oak trees and two hundred yards of open ground separated those buildings from an old stone house, shaded by more oaks, that had the appearance of a nineteenth-century Italian villa. There were lights visible in some of the house�s facing windows.

I took the car down there, past where the road made a loop toward the main cellar and a gated lane branched off it and led up to the house, and pulled it into one of the slots in the parking area. There was no sign of activity around there; pick-up trucks and a big diesel rig and a handful of empty gondolas sat dark and silent around the north side of the yard. If this were the height of the crush, or if the harvest yield had been a good one, there might have been some nighttime work going on. As things were, it did not seem that anyone was collecting overtime pay tonight.

I got out and walked across the yard to the cellar. The cool air was pungent with the heady odor of crushed grapes and fermenting wine, and I had the thought that maybe I ought to change my drinking habits too, learn how to enjoy good wine. Wine, at least, did not give you a belly that was starting to hang over the belt, the way beer had with me.

The only doors in the front wall of the cellar were a pair of brassbound black-oak jobs, set into an archway, that looked as if they had come off a church or a European castle. Above them was a redwood sign that gave the winery�s name, and beside them was a bulletin board that told you the tasting room was inside and what the hours were. I looked for a bell-push of some kind, but there was nothing like that set into the stone wall. So I reached out and tried the doors, and one of them swung inward beneath my hand.

Inside, the temperature was several degrees colder and the fermenting-wine smell several degrees sharper. There was a dankness too, created by the stone floors and walls and the high stone ceiling. A pale light burned in the tasting room straight ahead, and another glowed in the foyer where I stood, and there were still others spaced at wide intervals along corridors that extended the width of the building on both sides; but they were only diffused pockets of light that made the shadows around them seem deeper, that gave heavy old wood casks and tables and beams an unreal cast, like half-formed lack ghosts.

I moved forward a couple of paces. From somewhere in the building I could hear the faint hum of machinery; otherwise there was nothing but silence. The corridor to the south, I saw, led into an area filled with huge redwood aging tanks. The one to the north went past a dark enclosure with windows on two sides and rows of wine bottles glistening dully on shelves inside � a sales room � and then past another enclosure that had a palely lighted window, as though from a desk lamp inside. That was probably the office, I thought, and when I glanced up at the foyer wall an arrow sign there confirmed it. I took a step in that direction.

And something made a scraping sound down there, the kind of sound a person makes when he drags a heavy object across a stone floor.

I hesitated, listening, but the noise was not repeated. Sounds in the night, I thought, and shrugged, and started down the corridor. My footsteps echoed on the floor, were magnified by the stone walls until they reverberated like the hollow clopping of wood on wood.

The light in the office went out.

That brought me up short again. A faint uneasiness began to work inside me, an intimation of something being wrong. Why would Alex Cappellani shut off the light when he heard someone approaching? Unless he planned to come out and greet me � but the office door remained closed.

I listened. Silence. All right then, he was waiting in there, or somebody was. For what? To find out who was out here?

�Mr. Cappellani?� I called. And identified myself.

Silence.

The uneasiness grew stronger, but the need to know what was going on carried me forward, on the balls of my feet now, until I was standing just beyond the dark office window. It was pitch black in there; I could not even make out the shapes of furniture.

�Mr. Cappellani?�

Nothing but the echo of my voice.

With the hackles coming up on my neck, I eased forward to the door and put a hand on the knob and turned it. It opened inward an inch or two. I shoved it wide with the tips of my fingers, tensing, looking inside but not moving my body.

Breathing � somebody breathing just inside the door.

The scuffling of a shoe sole.

Those sounds warned me, but not in time to do anything more than take a half-step backward. The dark shape of a man lunged into the doorway, and I had a fleeting perception of something upraised in his hand, something swinging down toward my head, and got my arm up in panicked reaction � and the object glanced off my wrist, glanced off my right cheekbone, brought a bright flash of pain and confusion and sent me sprawling backward across the cold stone floor.

The blow and the impact with the floor created a wild roaring in my ears, distorted my vision, but neither stunned me enough to put me out or keep me down. I slid a couple of feet on my back, caught my momentum and scrabbled around on reflex until I was up on one knee, turning back toward the office. I saw the man-figure standing there, two of him, through wavering shadows and a blurred nimbus of light, saw him move and the object he had hit me with leap free of his hand. Reflex made me duck this time, and over the roaring in my head there was the explosive crash of glass shattering on the floor close by. Wetness and glass shards spattered my hands and arms, I could smell the sharp sourness of red wine � the son of a bitch had tried to brain me twice with a goddamn bottle of wine � and I let out a sound that was half grunt and half bellow of rage and pain, and heaved up onto my feet like a wounded bear.

The man-shape had spun and was running away along the corridor.

Shaking my head, pawing at my eyes, I staggered after him. Bounced off one of the stone walls before my vision wobbled back into focus and I could see where I was going, where the guy was. Hunched shadow forty yards away, racing past the entrance to the tasting room, heading toward the narrow corridor that led into the area where the aging tanks were. I locked my teeth against the pain in my head, the pain in my wrist, and kept on lumbering in pursuit.

He was halfway through the forest of redwood vats by the time I cleared the foyer. But then he seemed to slip on something and reeled into one of the tanks, almost fell, got his balance back and threw a look over his shoulder. I was thirty yards behind him then, but I could not see enough of his face in the murky light to get an impression of what he looked like; it was just a dim blur, and he was just a man-shape in dark clothing. I shouted at him, for no rational reason � I was still groggy, still caught up in emotional reaction � but he had already pushed away from the tank and was running again, this time in quick choppy steps like somebody trying to run across ice.

I saw the reason for that when I came into the vat area: the floor there had been hosed down sometime during the afternoon and the stones were wet and slick and puddled with water. I slowed in time to keep myself from slipping the way he had, adjusted my own strides to match his. The distance between us was still thirty yards.

There was an archway at the far end of the area, and beyond it, in another room, were the steel vats the wineries use for aging white wines. The floor in there was wet too, but the guy got across it all right and into a third room, this one lined on both sides with horizontally laid oak casks that had been stained a glistening black by millions of gallons of fermenting red wine. A rubber hose was stretched out loosely and carelessly along the stones, and I got my feet tangled in the damned thing and cracked my elbow against the rounded edge of a cask. I finally managed to kick loose just as the guy reached the far end of the room and vanished into a right-angle corridor toward the rear of the cellar.

The roaring in my ears had diminished and I could hear the hollow drumming echoes of his footfalls and of my own as I ran up there. When I swung around the corner he was just going into a big room with a shadowy maze of overhead refrigeration piping and metal catwalks, and a cluster of stainless steel fermentation tanks. I pounded after him, breathing through my mouth now because the dankness and the overpowering wine smell were beginning to make me nauseous.

In the room down there the guy broke stride and I saw his head jerk from one side to the other, as if he were looking for a place to hide or some sort of escape route. Then he made a quick glance back toward me again, and must have decided there wasn�t time to do whatever it was before I caught him or got close enough to identify him; he shifted back into a hard run. And when he got to the far end he made another turn, to his right this time and without slowing, into a second north-south corridor.

What turned out to be down there were areas filled with more oak casks, with smaller aging cooperage stacked in tiers on wooden chocks, with some type of shadow-obscured equipment. He went straight through them all, and I still could not get any closer to him than thirty yards.

Another archway loomed ahead. A few feet beyond it was a blank stone wall: he had reached the end of the building. But along that end wall was yet another east-west corridor, and the guy veered into it to his right, and two or three seconds later I heard a clattering metallic sound, followed by a sharp creaking � the creaking of hinges. There was a sudden draft of cool fresh air.

Panting, I stumbled to the archway and lunged through it. A heavy wooden door stood open five yards away; the corridor was empty. I thought something obscene, ran through the door onto the gravel surface of the yard. At first I didn�t see him and I thought he had gotten around to the front or the rear of the cellar; the night seemed dark and still and deserted. Then there was movement off to my right, in the shadow of a black oak growing between the south edge of the yard and a wide, shallow-looking pond. I picked him out then, running toward the pond or toward a dirt-and-gravel road near it that curved up through the open vineyards beyond. He had better than sixty yards on me now.

I went after him � across the yard, past the oak, over toward the pond. Once he got to the road he ran straight up the center of it, head down and body bent forward, feet kicking up thin puffs of dust. I came onto the gravelly bed and plunged upward in his wake.

It was rough going. The road climbed steadily up the hillside to a broken line of eucalyptus trees across the crown, and the loose gravel made it difficult to maintain traction. The night air was sweet after the winey dampness of the cellar and it had cleared the last of the grogginess from my mind; but it did not help the throbbing pain where I had been clubbed, or the tightness that was building in my chest from too much exertion. I could feel myself slowing up, starting to stumble like a drunk trying to follow a straight line. But he was slowing up too, I could see that � because he was somewhere around my age or because he was not in the best physical condition. It was all coming down to which one of us gave out first.

We were well up into the vineyards now � rows of old gnarled leafy vines curved out on both sides � and the guy was coming in on the line of eucalyptus at the brow of the hill. The road hooked near there, through the trees; I could not see from where I was the point at which it came out of them and went down the far slope. Which meant I was going to lose sight of him pretty soon, if only briefly.

And that was what happened: one second he was there, running through the curve, and the next he was gone into the deep shadows cast by the eucalyptus.

A bird screeched in a startled way up there, as if it had been disturbed from its sleep; the only other sounds were the scrape of my shoes on gravel and the wheezing rasp of my breath. I staggered finally through the hook in the road, to where it leveled off at the crest and the trees began. Then I could see the direction it took, and beyond the eucalyptus, in another hollow, I had an impression of lights glowing against the sky; but I still could not see the guy.

I started into the trees � and off to my left there was the faint rustling of leaves, the sound of a snapping twig.

I pulled up sharply, turning in that direction, sleeving sweat from my face and eyes. Blackness, crouching shadows. But then I heard the rustling again, and it was no more than fifteen yards away, back toward the slope I had just come up; he must have gone in there to hide and been too exhausted or too panicked to bring it off. A second later there was movement that I could perceive even in the darkness, the crunch and slide of retreating steps. He knew I had heard him and he was making a run for it again.

All right, you bastard, I thought. I veered off the road and cut into the trees, and I had glimpses of him dodging and weaving with more agility than he had shown before. Maybe he had gotten a second wind � but there was a smoke-and-fire pain in my lungs and my chest felt as though it were being squeezed in a vise. I would not be able to keep on like this much longer. If I was going to get him at all, it would have to be now, right now.

The eucalyptus were beginning to thin out and between their trunks the black rows of grape vines were visible ahead. He saw that too, cut sharply to his left and came out into the open, down onto the clotted black earth between two rows of vines. Running downslope on that surface was even harder than running up the gravel road; he stumbled, lurched sideways, and fell jarringly to his hands and knees. He struggled up immediately � but the fall had cost him the last of his advantage.

I had him then. I had him good.

I threw myself forward with my arms outstretched and hit him in the small of the back with the fleshy joining of my upper chest and upper right arm. The air went out of him explosively, like a balloon bursting, and my momentum knocked him sprawling into one of the vines and carried me down on top of him. A vine branch splintered and caught me a scraping blow across the temple, showered me with juice from a burst cluster of grapes. None of that did any damage but it made me lose the grip I had on the guy�s clothing. He kicked out from under me and tried to pull away, making little mewling gasps the way somebody does when he�s had the wind knocked out of him.

I twisted around and got another grip on his jacket. He lashed out in a frenzy, all arms and legs and hard edges of bone; I had to keep my head tucked in against my chest to protect it from the blows. But I seemed to have more weight and more strength and I managed to pull myself over him again, smothering his movements, and then cuffed him a couples of times awkwardly with my free hand.

Only then I became aware of his body beneath mine on the loose earth, squirming, and there was something about the touch of him that was not quite what it ought to be. I reared back, straddling him now, holding him down with the one hand while the other one cocked back on reflex. And got a look at the white face and a pair of wild glaring eyes. And realized with astonishment and another sudden rush of confusion just what it was that was wrong.

It was not a man I had under me, it was an outraged woman.

I stared down at her, shock-frozen, and she used that moment to lunge upward with her head and shoulders and sink her teeth into the flesh below my collarbone. I let out a yell, pushed at her head and wrenched it aside; skin came tearing loose with her teeth, there was more stinging pain and the wetness of blood. She kept on struggling frantically, dangerously, and I had no choice except to force her back down again and hold her pinned until I could get my breathing and my thoughts under control.

�You son of a bitch,� she said. It came out in thick stuttering pants. �If you try to rape me I�ll be the last woman you ever do it to.�

I said, �Jesus Christ.�

She was not the one who had clubbed me back in the cellar, not the one I had been chasing; he had been a man, all right, I was sure of that. He must have stayed on the road, gone down into the hollow on the other side of the hill. Long vanished by now. The woman was somewhere under forty, slender and muscular and small-breasted, and her hair was cut very close to her head in one of those mannish styles; she was also wearing a dark shirt and jacket, dark trousers. All of which, along with the black night, explained why I had mistaken her for the guy.

But what the hell had she been doing up in those trees?

She was still struggling, still glaring up at me. There did not seem to be much fear in her; just fury and determination. She called me a couple of things, still fighting for breath, and told me what she would do to me if I tried to rape her. Hardboiled language, and all of it razor-edged.

�Listen,� I said, �listen, I�m not trying to rape you.�

Her mouth worked and she let go with a blob of spit that splattered across my cheek.

�Goddamn it, I tell you I�m not trying to rape you.� I was having trouble drawing enough air, just as she was; my lungs burned malignantly. �I was chasing somebody else, a man, I thought you were him in the dark.�

I had to say it again before she finally stopped thrashing around. She lay there tensed and wary, breasts heaving, hating me with her eyes. �Why were you chasing somebody out here? Who the hell are you?�

�A friend of Alex Cappellani�s,� I said. �I drove out to the winery to see him and this guy came out of the cellar office and tried to brain me with a wine bottle. So I went after him.�

�What guy?�

�I don�t know. I didn�t get a look at him. He shut off the light in the office when he heard me coming.�

�None of that makes any sense.�

�Yeah,� I said. �Look, I�ll let go of you, let you up, if you don�t try to mix it up anymore.�

�That depends on what you try.�

�A little more conversation, that�s all.�

�Then let me up.�

I released one of her arms and she did not move. So I let go of the other one and slid back off her and made it up painfully onto my feet. My legs felt weak now, and I seemed to have half a dozen pulsing aches all over my body; the place where she had bit me stung like fury. I wiped her spittle off my cheek, stepped back and over to one of the vines and rested my weight on a grape stake there.

The woman got up slowly, not taking her eyes off me. She brushed the dirt off her clothing in an angry way, put a hand up and ran fingertips across her jaw where I cuffed her. �You play pretty damned rough, don�t you,� she said.

�I�m sorry. Are you all right?�

�I�ve been treated worse.� She slapped again at the front of her jacket and the blue jeans she was wearing. �You said you were a friend of Alex�s. What�s your name?�

I told her.

�I never heard that name before.�

�I only met Alex a few days ago.� My respiration was just about back to normal, but the constriction in my chest had not lessened any yet. The damned cough started up again, thin and dry.

She stood there watching me, speculatively now, not saying anything.

When the coughing quit I said, �What about you? Do you live here?�

�No, I don�t live here.� She hesitated then, but only for a moment; most of the anger seemed to have gone out of her. �I work for the Cappellanis, in their San Francisco office. I�ve been staying up here as their guest since last night.�

�Why were you in those trees?�

�Because the guest quarters are over on the other side of the hill and I was walking over to the main house. On the road. Somebody came running up from the other side, and as soon as he saw me he veered off into the trees. I thought that was pretty odd so I went in there a little ways to try to see who it was. Then I heard you, and you heard me and came after me, and I reacted stupidly and ran. I didn�t know what the hell was going on.�

�You didn�t get a look at the guy?�

�It was too dark. Look, you said he shut off the light in the cellar office and then came out and hit you with a wine bottle. Why would anybody do a crazy thing like that?�

�I don�t know,� I said. �Unless he�s a thief and he panicked. Or��

I stopped abruptly, because for the first time since I had been attacked I was beginning to think logically instead of emotionally � and I was remembering all at once that scraping sound I had heard, the sound of something heavy being dragged across the stone floor.

The woman said, �What�s the matter?�

�Alex Cappellani,� I said. �He asked me to come out to see him tonight. He was supposed to be in that office when I got here, waiting for me.�

She understood right away what I meant. �My God,� she said, �you don�t think that man might have done something to Alex?�

I did not answer her; there was nothing to say. I just turned and started back toward the dirt-and-gravel road, not running because of my lungs but moving pretty fast just the same. After the first few steps the woman was right beside me.

When we got down to where I could see the yard in front of the cellar, the figure of a man appeared there, walking toward the entrance doors from the direction of the Cappellani house. I tensed a little � but there was nothing furtive about his movements. He noticed us at about the same time, slowed and then stopped in the light from one of the night globes burning above the archway.

The woman and I left the road and hurried across the yard. The man stood with his arms at his sides, watching us approach. He appeared to be in his forties, wiry and pinch-faced, and he was wearing a sports jacket and an open-necked shirt and slacks, all of them dark-colored. His expression was one of curiosity at first, but as we came up and he got a good look at what was in our faces, at the condition of my clothes, it changed into an anxious frown.

He blinked at me and said to the woman, �Shelly? Is something wrong�?�

I went right by him, and she did the same thing without offering a response. The dark winey coldness enveloped me again as I stepped inside; I had to breathe through my mouth to keep from gagging. I went at an angle across the foyer, into the corridor to the north and along it to where the office was. Echoes from my footfalls and the woman�s bounced hollowly off the stone walls. On the floor up there the spilled wine gleamed blackly, like blood, amid the shards from the broken bottle.

When I got to the open office door, the woman � Shelly � said, �There�s a light switch on the wall inside, to your right.�

I reached in there, fumbled around and located the switch and flipped it. Bright fluorescent light from a pair of overhead tubes consumed the blackness; the sudden glare made me squint. Behind me I hear the sharp intake of Shelly�s breath.

Alex Cappellani was lying face down in the middle of the floor, and there were streaks of crimson matting the curly hair on the back of his skull.

I moved to him and went down on one knee, pressed fingertips against the artery in his neck. There was a pulse, irregular but strong enough. I let out the breath I had been holding, started to shrug out of my jacket.

Shelly leaned down next to me. �Is he � alive?�

�Yeah. But he needs a doctor, fast. That head wound��

�Good God!� a man�s voice said. It was the pinch-faced guy; he had followed us inside, and he was standing now in the doorway with his eyes wide and shocked. �Alex! What�s happened to him?�

�Somebody cracked him over the head,� I said.

�Hit him? But who? Why?�

Shelly said, �Logan, for Christ�s sake.� Then, to me, �I�ll call the hospital in St. Helena.�

I nodded as I covered Alex with my jacket. �But we�d better not touch anything in here. There another phone close by?�

�In the sales room.�

The pinch-faced guy was still standing in the doorway, gawking. He said to Shelly, �Who is this man? What�s he doing here?�

�What are you doing here?�

�I came down to talk to Alex.� He looked me up and down. �He�s been in a fight��

�Never mind that now,� Shelly said, and crowded past him into the corridor. �Mrs. Cappellani had better know what�s happened. And Leo.�

The guy blinked at her. �Yes, you�re right.�

�Then don�t stand around here, go tell them.�

He did not like her commanding tone � the resentment was plain in his expression � but he didn�t give her any argument. When she turned toward the sales room, he glanced at me again, briefly, and then hurried after her along the corridor.

There was nothing else I could do for Alex. You don�t move somebody who has been badly hurt, if you have any sense, and you especially don�t move somebody with a head injury. I straightened up and backed over to the door, stopped there to look around the office. Cluttered mahogany desk set against the far wall, between two filing cabinets; an oversized phone on the desk with two rows of buttons on its base unit; a couple of round-backed chairs and a table with a wine rack on it full of dusty bottles. The wine rack told me where the bottle came from that the attacker had used on me, that he had probably used on Alex as well. But there did not seem to be anything out of place in there. The file drawers and desk drawers were closed, nothing was strewn around anywhere on the floor, and the clutter of papers on the desk had a natural appearance, not as if someone had been rummaging through them.

So maybe I had interrupted the assailant before he could steal anything. Or maybe he had found what he was after with a minimum of mess. Or maybe he had not come to steal anything in the first place. That scraping sound � why would a thief, why would anyone, have been dragging Alex across the floor?

Well, Alex himself had the answers, if anyone did. It was not up to me in any case; the matter was a police one.

I went down the sales room. Lights blazed in there now, illuminating shelves and displays and stacked cases of wine, and Shelly was behind a counter along one wall, speaking into a telephone receiver. That telephone, too, was oversized and had the two rows of buttons on its base; when I came up and looked at the buttons I saw that two of them were marked �Open Line� and the rest were numbered. Which meant that the winery buildings, and no doubt the main house too, were interconnected by a series of private lines, so you could call directly from one extension to another.

When Shelly finished talking to the hospital I took the handset from her and dialed O and told the operator I had a police emergency. She put me straight through to the sheriff�s office. I identified myself to the officer who answered, gave him a brief account of what had happened; he said they would be out as quickly as possible.

Somebody had left a package of Kools on the counter, and Shelly helped herself to one and then extended the pack to me as I dropped the handset back into its cradle. I looked at it longingly for a moment, felt the lingering tightness in my chest, and thought: Just like putting a knife in my lungs, just like committing suicide.

�No thanks,� I said. �I don�t smoke.�

She lighted hers, blew a long sighing stream of smoke at the ceiling. �I suppose it was necessary to call in the sheriff,� she said, �but I wish you hadn�t done it.�

�Why is that?�

�I don�t like cops much.�

�Oh? Any particular reason?�

�I was married to one once.�

She said that as if it were a complete and final explanation. But her voice was matter-of-fact, without any trace of bitterness. I wondered, not altogether relevantly, what she would say if and when she found out I was a cop of sorts myself.

This was the first chance I had had to take a close look at her, and I saw that she was around thirty, that she had gray-green eyes, that her close-cropped hair was a dark auburn color and very fine, like a child�s. But there was nothing childlike about her features. They were strong, intelligent, maybe a little hard around the mouth � the face of a woman who has not had an easy life but who knows exactly who she is and what she wants. A survivalist. Tough and probably cynical about some things; nothing much in this world would suprise her anymore. For all that, though, she was more than a little attractive. Not beautiful, certainly not pretty, but very damned attractive.

I realized that she had been studying me too � but there was nothing in her eyes to indicate what impression she had formed, or if she had formed any impression at all. In that same matter-of-fact voice she said, �You�ve got blood on your shirt where I bit you.�

I looked down at the area under my collarbone; the shirt there was torn and stained a dark red. The bite still stung, and as soon as my mind focused on the stinging I grew aware again of the throbbing in my head and the dull ache in my wrist and the bunched muscles in my legs. Christ, a walking-wounded.

She said, �Does it hurt?�

�A little. It�ll be all right.�

�I guess we both played rough up in the vineyards.�

�Yeah, I guess we did.�

Neither of us said anything for a time, thinking our own thoughts. I broke the silence finally with a question: �The pinch-faced guy � who is he?�

�Logan Dockstetter,� she said. �He�s the winery�s sales manager. And a fag, if you hadn�t already guessed.�

That last comment was uncalled for; Logan Dockstetter�s sexual preferences had nothing to do with anything. But I did not say that to her. Apparently she did not like homosexuals any more than she liked cops, and there is never any point in calling someone on his prejudices.

I said, �Is Dockstetter staying here too?�

�No. He came up from San Francisco tonight, along with his boyfriend, Philip Brand. Brand is the Cappellanis� accountant. The two of them��

She broke off because there was an abrupt commotion out in the foyer � the echo of hurrying footsteps, the excited babble of voices. I shoved away from the counter, and Shelly came around from behind it, and together we went across to the doorway and out into the corridor just as five people came crowding up.

Three of them were men, Logan Dockstetter among them, but it was the older of the women who was in the lead. Rosa Cappellani, I thought. But she was nothing at all as I had pictured her, nothing at all like the popular conception of an Italian matriarch. She had a lean but heavy-breasted body that seemed well preserved in a blue pants suit; silver-streaked hair, and features that were too angular to be called anything other than handsome. Those features were set now in firm lines that gave her an imperious, no-nonsense demeanor, and though she had to be pretty upset she gave no outward indication of it. My immediate impression was that here was a woman who was always in perfect command of her emotions, who possessed a good deal of strength and self-assurance.

She went past Shelly and me without looking at either of us, as if we were not even there. Which gave us no choice but to turn and follow her, along with the three men and the other woman. When she got to the office door she stopped and stood stiffly, staring inside. I saw her face in profile, and nothing changed in it; she did not even blink.

I stepped up to her. �I checked his pulse and it seems strong and fairly stable,� I said. �It would be best not to touch him.�

She pivoted to me, acknowledging my presence for the first time, and gave me a long probing look. Then she said, �I had no intention of touching him,� and she had a voice to match her demeanor. �Has an ambulance been called?�

Shelly said, �Yes. I phoned for one a few minutes ago.�

�And the police?�

�Yes,� I said.

�Good.� Mrs. Cappellani took her eyes off me and put them on one of the men � a guy about her own age dressed in work clothes and a poplin jacket, with eyes set deep under a craggy forehead and a nose as sharp as a rock spire. �Paul,� she said, �find a blanket somewhere. A heavy blanket. We won�t touch Alex but he has to be kept warm.�

He nodded and hurried off.

�Where�s Leo?� Shelly asked.

�He went out for a walk,� the other woman said. �I don�t know where he is.� She was in her early thirties, attractive, with thick coils of dark hair and breasts even larger than Mrs. Cappellani�s. There was vulnerability in her face and a kind of detachment in her manner, as if she had withdrawn into herself as a defense mechanism against all the things which could hurt her. The exact opposite of Shelly. I thought that she was probably Leo Cappellani�s wife; Alex had told me Leo was married.

The third man said, �Do you want me to see if I can find him, Mrs. Cappellani?� He had a deep and very precise voice that surprised you a little because of his physical appearance: round soft face, bright eyes, prim mouth. He was about Dockstetter�s age.

�Yes,� she said. �Do that, Philip.� Philip Brand, I thought. �And take Logan and Angela with you.�

She looked at me again as Dockstetter and Brand and Angela Cappellani went toward the foyer. �Now suppose you tell me who you are and what happened here.�

I told her. But I did not say that I was a private detective hired by her son, because of the nature of my investigation and because it was not up to me to discuss my findings with her. And I did not say anything, either, about the scuffle with Shelly up in the vineyards; I was embarrassed by it, and it had no particular relevance anyway. I said only that in the darkness I had mistaken Shelly for the man I was chasing and that he had gotten away for that reason.

�You have no idea what this man looked like?�

�No, ma�am. He was just a dark shape, average height and build. But Alex probably saw him and can identify him.�

�Yes. I�m sorry for what happened to you, but I�m grateful just the same that you arrived when you did. You may well have saved my son�s life.�

There was nothing I could say to that, and the craggy-featured guy saved me from having to find words by coming back with a folded Army blanket. Rosa Cappellani took it from him, went into the office and shook it out and draped it carefully around Alex�s inert form. Then she straightened up, but she did not come back out of the office; she just stood there, stoically, staring down at him with her hands clasped in front of her.

The wine smell had begun to get to me again; I could taste sour bile in the back of my throat. I said to Shelly that I was going out for some air, and went into the foyer and through the double doors. As soon as I stepped outside I could hear, in the distance, the faint ululating wail of an ambulance siren. They made good time out of St. Helena, I thought � and I hoped the county sheriff�s people were as efficient. The sooner they got here, the sooner I could find a hotel or motel and get some rest.

I took a couple of deep breaths, and the doors opened behind me and the craggy-featured guy came out. He paused to fire one of those misshapen Italian cigars called a Toscana, that smell like smoldering manure, and then walked over to where I was.

�Paul Rosten,� he said, �I�m the winemaker here.�

I nodded, gave him my name.

�What the hell happened in there?�

Before I could answer that there was abrupt movement to the north, over by the two smaller cellars, and three figures materialized there and came running toward us. When they pounded up into the glow of the nightlights, I saw that two of them were Dockstetter and Brand and that the third was obviously Leo Cappellani; Angela had evidently remained at the house. Leo had the same dark angular features, the same wide mouth and curly black hair as his brother. But he was a few years older, a few pounds heavier. He also had quite a bit of his mother�s imperiousness, something which Alex did not have. You could tell that about him right off.

He gave me a once-over look and said to Rosten, �Alex � how badly is he hurt?�

�We don�t know yet,� Rosten said grimly. �It looks like he was hit pretty hard on the back of the head. He�s probably got a concussion, if not worse.�

�Christ. Is he conscious?�

�No.�

Leo glanced at me again. �Who are you? Why are you here?�

I did not want to go over it again before the police arrived, but he had a right to know, and the others too. So I gave them a somewhat abbreviated version, while the shriek of the siren got louder and eventually headlights � three sets of them, in tandem � appeared at the top of the far hillside.

When I was done, Leo shook his head and said, �Doesn�t make any sense. There�s nothing in that office worth stealing, no money or anything else of value.�

�The police will get to the bottom of it, Mr. Cappellani.�

�I hope so.�

He turned abruptly and went inside the cellar. Rosten went with him, but Dockstetter and Brand stayed where they were and looked alternately at me, as if I were some sort of curious specimen, and at the headlights coming down the road toward us.

The siren cut off as the ambulance rolled into the yard, but the flasher light on its roof kept going, streaking the darkness with stroboscopic red patterns. The other two vehicles were Napa County sheriff�s cars, neither of which had flasher lights or sirens. They all came to stops near where we were standing, and a couple of interns jumped out of the ambulance and opened the rear doors and hauled out a wheeled stretcher. Three uniformed deputies came running up; one of them asked where the injured party was. I said inside, and Dockstetter said he would show them where and led the interns and two of the deputies into the cellar.

I identified myself to the third deputy, a guy about my own age. We went over by the county cars and I explained to him what had taken place; I had told the story enough times now so that it was like delivering a set speech. Then I admitted to being a private investigator, showed him the photostat of my license, and said that I had been doing some confidential work for Alex Cappellani. The deputy wanted to know what work, if it could have any bearing on the attack on Alex. I told him I had no ideas on that. But I gave him a rundown of Alex�s reasons for hiring me and of what I had learned about Jason Booker. When I asked him if he could refrain from saying anything to Rosa Cappellani or any of the others until he was able to talk to Alex, because it was a delicate family situation and maybe not related to the attack, he agreed to handle matters with discretion. He seemed to be a decent sort and I thought that he would keep his word.

While we�d been talking another set of headlights had appeared, this time up in the vineyards to the south, coming down the same dirt-and-gravel road that I had been running on earlier. Now the car, a dusty station wagon, pulled up on the edge of the yard and a man got out and jogged toward us. He was a slender fortyish guy wearing slacks and a turtleneck sweater, with a handsome ascetic face and a Kirk Douglas cleft in his chin that you could spot at ten paces even in the spinning flasher light.

Just before he reached us, looking half agitated and half perplexed, the cellar doors swung open and the interns came out wheeling Alex on the stretcher. Rosa Cappellani, and Leo, and Shelly and Rosten and the two deputies, followed in a bunch. The slender guy went straight over there, gaped at the stretcher, and then moved quickly to Mrs. Cappellani�s side and put a hand on her arm.

I heard him say, �My God, Rosa, what�s going on? What�s happened to Alex?�

�Someone attacked him, Jason,� she said in her brusque way. �One of the others will explain.�

Jason Booker, I thought. I watched him stand there scowling as Rosa stepped away from him. The interns were loading the stretcher into the back of the ambulance now, and Mrs. Cappellani stood in a rigid posture with her arms folded across her breasts until they had closed the doors and started around to the front. Then she turned abruptly to Leo.

�We�ll follow them to the hospital,� she said.

Leo said something I didn�t catch, and the two of them hurried off toward the house, Rosa without looking again at Booker.

Her apparent indifference to him made Booker scowl all the harder. He spun around and went over to Shelly and got into a conversation with her, presumably to find out what was going on.

I glanced at my watch as the ambulance pulled away, and the time was a few minutes past eleven. I asked the deputy beside me if I was going to be needed much longer; he said he didn�t imagine I would be. But then one of the other deputies joined us, and he had questions, and I ended up having to tell my story still another time while he took notes and copied down my name and address and investigator�s license number. It was eleven-thirty before they finally decided it was all right for me to leave.

I thanked them and started wearily to my car. Halfway there, a voice called my name behind me. Shelly. I stopped, turned to her as she came up.

�Leaving us?� she said.

�Yeah,� I said. �It�s been a long night.�

�That it has.� She watched me for a moment and then smiled faintly. �Maybe we�ll see each other again, one of these days.�

�Maybe we will.�

�Ciao then, big man.�

�Sure,� I said. �Ciao, Shelly.�

And I left her and got into my car and went away from there.

I spent the night in a hotel in St. Helena.

When I woke up a little after seven on Friday morning, after a good deep sleep, I felt better than I might have expected. I still had a headache, but it was muted and tolerable; the pain in my wrist was gone, and my lungs were clear of phlegm and my chest felt normal. I was even pretty hungry.

In the bathroom I had a look at myself in the mirror. Nickel-sized bruise on my cheekbone � but it hurt only when I touched it. The bite wound under my collarbone also hurt when I touched it. It was some bite too: torn skin, raw flesh, the teeth marks sunk so deep they were visible even now. The iodine I had swabbed on it last night before going to bed, from the first-aid kit I keep in my car, made it look even worse. I put more iodine on it and covered it with a gauze bandage, to guard against infection; the bite from a human, I had heard somewhere, can be even more dangerous than one from an animal.

After I was done with that I shaved off the gray stubble on my cheeks. Then I put on a change of clothes from my overnight bag, went out and hunted up a copy of the San Francisco Chronicle � morning habit � and took it into a cafe on St. Helena�s picturesque main street.

Over eggs and toast and coffee I had a look at what was going on in the world. Most of the front page concerned Fidel Castro, who had been in Washington the past three days for talks with the President � his first visit to the United States in nearly twenty years, and naturally a controversial one. There had been another demonstration by Cuban exiles protesting his presence in the country, but like the others before it, it had been small and well controlled. The President was quoted as saying that the talks were proving successful, which the political columnists were interpreting to mean that re-establishment of diplomatic relations with Cuba was imminent. Castro and his entourage were expected to leave Washington today for a swing through other parts of the U.S., including a brief one-day visit to San Francisco on Monday. On the local scene, the mayor was being roasted by right-wing opponents for inviting Castro. And there was more flap over water rationing; and the Gay Task Force was planning another human rights demonstration. I read Herb Caen�s column: he was grousing again about the infighting in San Francisco�s city government. I turned to the Sporting Green, and one of the columnists there was alleging that the 49ers would be a .500 team at best this year because of poor coaching and dissension between players and management.

So much for the news. And so much for breakfast. I finished the last of my coffee refill, left the paper to enlighten somebody else, and walked back to the hotel. It was eight-thirty and time to put in a call to the hospital to find out what the situation was with Alex Cappellani.

But I did not find out much, as it developed. The nurse who answered my call said that his condition was �satisfactory,� a term which can mean anything at all; that was all she would tell me because I was not a relative and because the injury to Alex was a police matter. When I asked her if he could have visitors, or at least take a call, she advised me firmly that the family had issued instructions that he was not to be disturbed.

I hesitated, thinking: Now what? I could leave a message and then hang around here for the day, on the chance that Alex was well enough to want to get in touch with me and to see me. But that would mean paying out another twenty dollars for the room, and it might also mean a wasted day. I decided the best thing to do was to go back to San Francisco and get a report ready for him of my findings on Jason Booker. So I gave my name to the nurse and requested that Alex be told when possible that I had called and that I could be reached either at my office or at my flat.

I got my things together then and checked out and headed home for the first time since Tuesday.

The Boar�s Head was a popular restaurant and tavern at Vallejo and Sansome, not far from the Embarcadero and the ugly elevated freeway that spoiled the view of the waterfront piers, the Ferry Building, the Bay beyond. The area used to be industrial and was dotted with old brick warehouses that, in recent years, had been converted into office buildings. One of those ex-warehouses, a block and a half away on Vallejo, housed the San Francisco offices of the Cappellani Winery.

The place was modeled after a British pub: black-beamed ceiling, heavy wood tables and chairs and booths; walls decorated with boar heads and dart boards and old English hunting prints. The bartenders and waiters all wore derby hats and dispensed Guinness stout and English beer and ale, along with thick meat and poultry sandwiches from a long chefs table up front.

Most of the lunch crowd had already gone by the time I came in at five of one, but it was still far from empty. I looked around for Shelly, did not see her; I did, however, notice two other people I knew � Logan Dockstetter and Philip Brand � sitting in a booth toward the rear and having what appeared to be an argument. I sat down in another booth diagonally across from them, where I could see the entrance. Neither of them noticed me. They were too wrapped up in whatever it was they were arguing about, Brand making angry gesticulations and Dockstetter stiff-backed and glaring.

The waiter appeared beside me, and I ordered a pint of Bass ale, and he went away again. Brand and Dockstetter were still going at each other across the aisleway, not making much effort to keep their voices down. Because of that, and because there was no one else carrying on a conversation in the immediate vicinity, I could hear most of what they were arguing about.

�I tell you, Logan,� Brand was saying in his deep, precise voice, �we damned well are in trouble. I ought to know, for God�s sake I�m the accountant.�

�You�re also a silly pessimist,� Dockstetter said.

�You�re the one who�s silly. You won�t admit what is staring you in the face. Sales are down, we�ve had complaints about the quality of our estate-bottled varietals, we�ve had a miserable harvest. And now God knows what more complications there might be with Alex.�

�Alex? What happened to him last night has nothing to do with the winery.�

�How do you know that? None of us knows what the attack on him has to do with.� Brand made another waving gesture. �The point is, we�re in trouble and the sooner we all admit it, the sooner something can be done about it.�

�Such as what?�

�Such as getting rid of Paul Rosten and Jason Booker, to begin with. Rosten has turned into an incompetent winemaker; he�s old-fashioned and ultra-conservative and he�s gotten careless. I don�t know why Mrs. Cappellani keeps him on, unless it�s because he�s been with the family for so long. Or because he�s been sleeping with her all these years.�

Dockstetter said something I didn�t catch.

�Well, it wouldn�t surprise me,� Brand said. �And Booker � all he�s interested in is getting next to Mrs. Cappellani himself. A disgusting man. You can almost feel the friction between him and Rosten, or at least anyone with perception can feel it.�

Silence from Dockstetter.

Brand said, �And I still say we ought to increase our production of generic table wines��

There was more, but it was all shoptalk that did not mean much to me. In the middle of it the waiter returned with my pint of ale. I took a long draught, lowered the stein again, and with its bottom made interlocking circles of wetness on the table while I listened to Brand finish his diatribe over there.

Dockstetter said stiffly, �I�ve told you and told you, Philip, I don�t agree with any of that. Mrs. Cappellani is an intelligent woman, she�s done a marvelous job with the winery since that bastard husband of hers died. If you were right, she would have taken action herself long ago. Or Leo would have.�

�Mrs. Cappellani is becoming less and less involved with internal matters every year. And Leo � and Alex too � is too busy with his private life to pay proper attention to what�s going on.�

�That�s some way for an employee to talk.�

�It�s the only way for an employee who gives a damn to talk,� Brand said. �If you�d accept the facts of the situation, we could go to Mrs. Cappellani and between us make her understand that changes have to be made before it�s too late.�

�I won�t help you make unnecessary waves.�

Brand stared at him with a mixture of exasperation and contempt. �No, of course you won�t. Hear no evil, see no evil, speak no evil � that�s your credo. You�ve got no backbone, Logan, none at all.�

�I don�t have to take that from you.�

�No � you don�t have to take anything from me.�

�What is that supposed to mean?�

�What do you think it means?�

Brand slid out of the booth, got on his feet.

�Where are you going?�

�Away from you.�

�Damn it, Philip��

�Oh go diddle yourself,� Brand said, and turned and stalked over to the entrance.

Dockstetter glared after him. In profile his face was white and so pinched now it looked deformed. He sat there rigidly for several seconds; then he got out of the booth in slow, measured movements, took a couple of bills from his wallet and put them on the table, and walked out after Brand. His back could not have been straighter or stiffer if he had had a steel rod strapped to his spine.

I watched him go, wondering if he was right about the status of the Cappellani Winery, or if Brand was. Well, in either case the Cappellanis appeared to have more than their share of problems. Dissension in the ranks along with everything else.

I looked at my watch, and it was ten past one. So maybe Shelly had gotten tied up at the office, or maybe she was one of those people who are chronically late for appointments. Not that it mattered much, except that I could smell the aroma of barbecued meat coming from the chefs counter and it was making me pretty hungry.

Waiting, I sipped my ale and glanced around at the boar heads and the other wall decorations. Now that I was alone with nothing to occupy my attention, the place gave me a certain nostalgic feeling. Five years ago, when I had been in love with a woman named Erika Coates who worked in the financial district not far away, I had had lunch with her here on several occasions. Good, intimate lunches that seemed, in retrospect, to have been filled with warmth and laughter.

But it had not been quite that way. Erika had plenty of good qualities, but she was also an uncompromising, unyielding person: if you wanted to play with her, you had to play by her rules. Two of those rules were that I had to give up smoking for my own good, and that I had to give up my profession because it was shabby and pointless and I was living a lie by trying to emulate the detectives I read about in the pulps. She had been right about the first and wrong about the second, as I had finally proved to myself, but the combination of the two had built an unmendable rift between us.

It took me a while to get over her � and I suppose I never really did get over her, despite not seeing her once in those next five years. I might have gone on that way, plagued by vague ghosts, if it had not been for the things that happened this past summer and the changes they had brought about in me. But with all of that, I had decided at last to put away my pride and get in touch with her if I could. I did not believe there was anything left between us; what has been lost and buried in the passage of time can seldom be resurrected. And yet I felt I had to know for my own peace of mind.

I had no trouble locating her; she still worked for the same company, and she was still unmarried. At first she had not wanted to see me, but because it was my fiftieth birthday she had finally consented to have dinner. And it had turned out to be a strained evening, both of us reserved and uncomfortable. When I told her about the lesion on my lung, she was sympathetic but she could not resist an I-told-you-so. When I tried to explain about the changes in me, she said they were a step in the right direction but until I quit being a private eye I was still living in self-delusion. Uncompromising, unyielding � the same old Erika.

At the end of the evening I told her I would call her, but we both knew I would not and that we wouldn�t see each other again. I did not know her and she did not know me; we no longer had anything at all in common.

I had no regrets about seeing her, though, because in doing so I had gotten rid of the vague ghosts and put my soul at ease. Still, sitting here now in The Boar�s Head, with memories on the walls and memories playing across the screen of my mind, I felt just a little sad for what once was and for what might have been.

I finished my ale, looked again at my watch. One-twenty. I considered calling the winery office � and while I was considering the street door opened and Shelly came inside.

When I leaned out of the booth and waved at her, she saw me and then came over wearing a lopsided grin. �Sorry to be late,� she said. �A couple of last-minute things to take care of.�

�No problem,� I said.

The waiter showed up as soon as she sat down, and we got our orders out of the way: two roast beef sandwiches, another Bass ale for me, a pint of Black-and-Tan � half Guinness and half lager � for her. After he drifted off, Shelly brushed a hand absently through her fine, short-cropped hair and looked at me in a frankly appraising way. She was dressed in a tailored three-piece wool suit and a blue silk blouse; the outfit, and some carefully applied makeup, made her look less hard-edged than she had last night. And even more attractive.

�So,� she said. �Tell me what it�s like to be a private eye.�

I shrugged. �Like any other job. Interesting sometimes but mostly pretty dull.�

�Which category does what you�re doing for Alex fall into?�

�What makes you think I�m working for Alex?�

�Aren�t you?�

�If I am, I�m not at liberty to discuss it.�

�Top-secret stuff, huh?�

�Nope. Professional ethics.�

�Uh-huh. Well, I�ll bet it concerns Jason Booker.�

�Why do you say that?�

�Because it�s pretty obvious that Alex hates Booker and that he�s afraid Booker will marry Rosa. It would be just like Alex to hire a private eye to get something on Jason, or beat up on him, or whatever else it is you do.�

�I don�t beat up on people,� I said a little sharply.

Her gray-green eyes were amused. �No? How about me last night?�

�That was a different matter altogether.�

�God, you�re sensitive, aren�t you?�

�A little, I guess. People always seem to have the wrong idea about the kind of work I do. I don�t strong-arm people and I don�t �get things� on people. I operate strictly within the law.�

�I stand corrected,� she said. Her gaze had turned speculative, as it had a couple of times up at the winery; but she did not seem to be put off. �Okay?�

I smiled at her. �Okay.�

Our sandwiches and drinks arrived, and we went to work on them. I said between mouthfuls, �If Alex hates Jason Booker, how does Leo feel about him?�

�Booker? The same, I gather. But Leo says Rosa has no intention of marrying anybody and she�s too tough and too sharp to let Booker talk her into anything she doesn�t want to do. Alex is the only one who�s worried.�

�What�s your opinion of Booker?�

�He�s a turd,� she said.

�That bad?�

�At least. He tried to get me into bed with him not too long ago, at the winery; big macho come-on, as if there wasn�t a woman in the world who could wait to screw him. I laughed in his face.� The lopsided grin again. �He�s never bothered me since.�

�Nice guy, all right,� I said.

�Yeah. You don�t suppose he could be the one who clobbered Alex � and you � with that wine bottle?�

�It�s possible, I guess.�

�It wouldn�t surprise me,� Shelly said. �He�s the type that�s capable of doing anything to get what he wants.� She paused. �If it was Booker, you know, he might try to go after Alex a second time.�

�He might, yeah.�

�So are you planning to stay on the scene?�

�I don�t quite follow.�

�Keep on working for Alex. Give him protection.�

�We don�t know that he needs protection. The man who hit him could still have been a sneak thief.�

�That doesn�t answer my question.�

�I can�t answer it,� I said. �I haven�t talked to Alex.�

�Make you a bet that when you do, he�ll want you around. He needs people to lean on, particularly in a crisis. He�s not at all like his mother, or like Leo. Why do you think he�d hire a private eye in the first place, instead of working things out himself?�

�If he hired me.�

�Sure, right.�

�Anyhow,� I said, �this whole business will probably be over before much longer. The Napa sheriff�s people should see to that.�

�But will they?� She laughed ironically. �I doubt it. They haven�t found out a damned thing so far.�

�You really are down on cops, aren�t you?�

�You bet I am.�

�Then how come the lunch with me?�

She gave me a long look over her stein of Black-and-Tan. �Two reasons,� she said. �One is that I�m curious as hell about you and Alex and what happened last night. As if you hadn�t already figured that out.�

�Uh-huh,� I said. �What�s the other reason?�

�Chemistry,� she said.

That gave me pause. �Pardon?�

�Oh come on, big man, don�t play dumb. You know what I mean.�

I knew what she meant, all right. I had been too tired and too battered to attach much significance to it at the time, but I remembered now the way she had looked at me inside the winery sales room, and later, just before I was ready to leave: the sort of looks a woman gives you when she�s interested in what she sees.

So maybe I was interested too. She was a damned good-looking woman, and I do not know very many good-looking women who find me interesting � not at my age, and not with my shaggy looks and my overhanging belly. No great passion on either side, but you don�t need great passion to begin a relationship.

Shelly said, �Mutual, right?�

�Mutual.�

�Good. Now we can go on from there.�

We went on from there. I told her a little about myself, and she reciprocated. She was from Florida, she said, and she had been married to a county sheriff whose idea of fun was to get drunk twice a week and rape her � not make love to her, forcibly rape her. She divorced him finally, knocked around Miami and Fort Lauderdale for a while, came to California a few months ago to visit a friend, decided to stay on, and got the job with the Cappellani Winery through another acquaintance who knew Leo. What she did there was handle marketing matters. She thought San Francisco was a good place to live, �except that there are too goddamn many fags here,� but she would probably go back to Florida eventually because of the climate there.

It was a relaxed and casual conversation, without much intimacy � just two people getting to know each other a little better. When she said at three o�clock that she had to get back to the office I was sorry to have it end. I liked her, despite her narrow opinions on some matters; she was frank and open, and she did not seem to play games.

We left the Boar�s Head together, and out on the street Shelly said, �Call me tonight or tomorrow night, big man. I�m in the book. On Beach Street in Marina.�

�Count on it,� I said.

We touched hands. Standing close to her that way, I found myself wondering what it would be like to go to bed with her. Typical male: get to know a woman and right away you think about getting laid.

The only thing was, there was a look in Shelly�s eyes which might have meant she was wondering the same about me.

It was three forty-five by the time I got back to my office. I checked in with my answering service � no calls � and then finished the report on Jason Booker and wrote a letter accepting the Mystery Writers� invitation to speak at one of their meetings. At five o�clock I closed up for the day, stopped at a store on Van Ness to buy some groceries, and eventually drove up to my fogbound flat on Pacific Heights.

The telephone started ringing as soon as I keyed open the door.

I had an armful of the groceries and a handful of my overnight bag and my house mail; I kicked the door shut, put the groceries down on the highboy along the inside wall, the bag and the mail down beside them, and clicked on the light switch so I could see my way through the bachelor�s clutter of newspapers and magazines and clothing on the living room floor. I keep the phone in the bedroom and I hustled in there past the laminated wood bookshelves that contain my pulp collection, caught up the receiver on the fourth ring.

�Hello?�

�Good � you�re in,� a man�s voice said. �Alex Cappellani.�

I sat down on the rumpled bed. �How�re you feeling, Mr. Cappellani?�

�Lousy. But not as bad as I�d feel if you hadn�t showed up at the winery last night.�

�When will you be able to leave the hospital?�

�I�ve already left it. Earlier this afternoon.�

�But I heard you had a concussion��

�Mild concussion. They wanted to keep me in there for observation, but I wasn�t having any of that. I don�t like hospitals.�

I could appreciate that; but I did not say anything.

�Look,� Alex said, �what is it you found out yesterday about Jason Booker?�

�You want me to give you the full report now?�

�Just the meat, that�s enough.�

�Okay,� I said, and told him about Booker�s marriage to Martha Towne, about the fifteen thousand dollars of her money that he had appropriated for private investments of his own.

�I knew it,� Alex said grimly. He paused for a moment. �All right. Can you meet me in twenty minutes?�

�Twenty minutes? Aren�t you calling from the winery?�

�No. I just got into the city, I�m in a service station down on Lombard.�

Well, Christ, I thought. Leo Cappellani had said Alex was headstrong and sometimes exhibited a lack of good judgment; driving seventy-five miles with a concussion and a bad scalp wound was a prime example of both.

I said, �Why do you want me to meet you?�

�Because I�m going to have a showdown with Booker and I want somebody there. I don�t trust him and I don�t trust myself.�

I frowned. And Shelly had said he always needed somebody to lean on in a crisis: here he was wanting to lean on me, all right. �Why don�t you trust him, Mr. Cappellani?�

�For all I know he�s the son of a bitch who hit me last night, that�s why. Maybe he found out somehow that I�d hired you to check into his background.�

�That�s not much of a reason for attempted murder.�

�Not for you and me, maybe. But how do we know how a bastard like Booker thinks? He stands to gain access to a lot of money if he�s able to convince Rosa to marry him. The kind of guy you proved him to be, if he realized how much of a threat I am he might have figured his only chance was to get rid of me.�

You�re going off half cocked, I thought. But I said, �You wouldn�t be planning to accuse him, would you?�

�That depends. Probably not; I don�t have any proof. But I damned well do want the satisfaction of telling him to his face what I know about him and what I think of him.�

�That might not be a good idea,� I said. �Wouldn�t it be better if you talked to your mother first�?�

�I�ll talk to my mother later,� he said stubbornly. �Listen, you probably saved my life last night and I�m damned grateful � but I�m not after advice from you. All I want is for you to back me up when I see Booker.�

I hesitated. Did I want to get mixed up in an emotional and potentially volatile scene between Alex and Jason Booker? The answer was no. But then again, if I refused and he saw Booker alone, there was no telling what might happen. Hell, Booker could be the one who had taken that wine bottle to Alex in the winery office�

He said, misinterpreting my silence, �I�ll pay you for your time, don�t worry about that.�

�I wasn�t worrying about it,� I said. �I wasn�t even thinking about it.�

�Okay � sorry. Will you meet me?�

�Yeah, I�ll meet you. Where�s Booker?�

�At our town house, up on Russian Hill. He told my mother he had something to do down here and she gave him permission to spend the night at the house.�

�Anybody else there? Servants?�

�No.�

�What�s the address?�

�Chestnut and Larkin.� He gave me the number.

�I�ll see you out front, then. We�ll go in together.�

�Right. Twenty minutes?�

�As soon as I can get there.�

We rang off, and I sighed a little and went into the bathroom and took four aspirin for my lingering headache. Then I got the groceries and carried them into the kitchen, talked myself out of taking time to have a beer and look through my house mail, and left the flat.

When I got to my car a block away � parking on Pacific Heights is always a hassle � I found that in the half-hour since I had left it somebody had slammed into the rear end. There was a piece gone out of the left taillight and a big dent in the trunk lid. I scowled at the damage, went finally around to the front. And saw with amazement that there was a note on the windshield, under the wiper blade. I took it out and looked at it, and the amazement went away. Uh-huh, I thought.

What the note said was, �Whoops, sorry about that.�

I watched Canelli bring my cruiser down the spiral parking ramp. The car bounced to a jerky stop at the broad yellow line at the bottom of the ramp � then stalled. Through the windshield, I could see Canelli�s lips moving as he restarted the car. To myself, I smiled. As long as I�d known him, Canelli had been on the losing side of a long, grueling battle with machines. Anything mechanical defeated him. A typewriter ribbon or a cassette cartridge left him helplessly muttering. Cheerfully, he volunteered to get coffee from the machine � but often returned to the squadroom apologetically carrying cocoa, or tea, or soup. Yet, before he�d wandered into police work, he�d been a skilled electrician. Electricity, he said, made sense.

Finally the car stopped at the curb in front of me, and the door swung open.

�I think this car needs a tune-up, Lieutenant,� he said earnestly.

Not replying, I closed the door, fastened my seat belt and motioned for him to get under way. �Go to Van Ness,� I said, �and turn right.�

�Yessir.�

Concentrating on his driving, Canelli maneuvered the car out of the garage and onto Sixth Street. The night was cold and d& the fog was so thick the pavement glistened. On Folsom Street, the garish glow of neon signs was softened to misty pastels. As Canelli switched on the windshield wipers he asked, �Where�re we going?�

�Chestnut and Larkin. The corner.�

�Hey, that�s a pretty fancy part of town. One time when I was an electrician, I worked in a house on that block that had an observatory on top of it. Honest to God.�

�An observatory?�

�Right. No fooling. It had a telescope that I bet was ten feet long, at least. I was working on the servo system, that operated the overhead doors. They were half clamshells, I remember, just like the big observatories. It was unbelievable. Except that the servos shorted out when it rained.�

I didn�t reply, but instead let my head fall back against the seat. I was tired and sleepy. At ten o�clock last night, Ann had called. She�d been deeply disturbed, almost in tears. She�d just had an unexpected call from her ex-husband, a society psychiatrist named Victor Haywood. The purpose of the call had been a demand that she �do something� about their younger son�s grades. In Haywood�s terms, the boy was a �low achiever.� Ann, a fourth-grade teacher, had protested. Billy was bright and happy: an imaginative, lively boy. A bitter argument had flared, during which Haywood had superciliously questioned Ann�s choice of a �bed partner.� Translation: Haywood thought I was a low achiever, too. Ann had hung up on him � and then called me. We�d finished talking at midnight. At 2 A.M. I was still awake � still angrily brooding.

Beside me, I heard Canelli elaborately clearing his throat. He couldn�t tolerate long silences. He couldn�t tolerate curiosity, either. So he began to probe:

�The guy that called it in�� Canelli hesitated. �I had the feeling that he knows you.�

�He does. We�ve played poker a few times.�

�Is he on the force?�

�He used to be. Now he�s private detective. He�s an old friend of Lieutenant Eberhardt�s. They served together on General Works.�

�As long as I been on the force,� Canelli said, �I never knew a private detective. Not personally, I mean. But whenever I run across one in the line of duty, so to speak, I gotta say that they give me the creeps, sometimes. I mean, there�s this one guy I met that seems to make his living snatching kids from one parent to give to another parent. And he seemed to be proud of what he was doing. And he also seemed to be getting rich from it, too. He was driving a Mercedes, I remember. And he even said he had an airplane, too.� Canelli shook his head. �I couldn�t get over it.�

I pointed ahead. �Van Ness is next. You�d better get in the right lane.�

�Oh. Right.� Canelli glanced hurriedly over his shoulder and abruptly jerked the steering wheel to the right. His broad, swarthy face furrowed as a horn blared from behind.

�Those sportscars,� he muttered. �They�re always coming up on you from out of nowhere.�

I often wondered why I�d chosen Canelli as my driver � or, for that matter, why I�d picked him for my squad. At age twenty-eight, at a suety two hundred thirty, Canelli looked and acted more like an overweight fry cook than a homicide detective. His brown eyes were innocent. His normal expression was either puzzled or beguiled, depending on the problem. His only professional asset was a perpetual run of incredible good luck. If the entire squad spent days sifting through garbage for a murder gun, Canelli would accidentally stumble over the weapon lying under a rosebush. His luck protected him behind the wheel, too. In hot pursuit, Canelli drove with a kind of inspired lunacy � all the while muttering to himself. Once, mopping my face at the end of a chase, I�d told Canelli that he reminded me of W. C. Fields in The Bank Dick. Canelli�s large brown eyes had reproached me for days. He was the only detective I�d ever known who could get his feelings hurt.

�If he�s a friend of Lieutenant Eberhardt�s, I suppose he�s all right,� Canelli ventured. He was probing again.

I shrugged. �He seems all right to me. He�s one of these people who doesn�t talk unless he�s got something to say. And, if it�ll reassure you, I don�t think he�s got much money.�

�That probably means he�s honest.�

�It probably does.�

I was yawning as I unlocked my office door the next morning. Canelli and I had arrived at the murder scene about seven-fifteen the previous evening. The technicians hadn�t arrived until quarter to eight, and hadn�t finished the first phase of their investigations until almost nine. They were still on the premises when the second wave arrived: the D. A.�s man, the light crews and the additional lab men who would search inch by inch for evidence. At the same time, three men from my own squad arrived, called from their homes. Their responsibility was the interrogation of witnesses. I put them under Canelli�s command while I performed the on-site investigation�s final ritual. Before witnesses, I moved the body and searched his pockets. I found sixty-three dollars in cash inside his wallet, together with the usual credit cards and identification. He�d carried his wallet in his hip pocket. In another pocket I found less than a dollar in loose change and a Swiss Army knife. A third pocket yielded a key ring and ten .32 caliber cartridges. None of the keys fitted any of the locks in the Cappellani house or garage. However, when I searched the victim�s shearling coat, still in the study, I found a separate key to the front door. At about ten P.M. I told the D. A.�s man that, based on my tentative appraisal of the physical evidence, I�d concluded that Booker had arrived on the premises at about four-thirty, driving his own car. He�d probably been alone. Using a key, he�d entered the house through the front door. He�d bolted the door behind him and gone directly to the study, where he�d possibly waited for an hour and a half. At about six, he may have heard someone entering the garage through the service door. Since we�d found no jimmy marks, we assumed that the intruder�s entrance had been effected by a key � unless he�d come through the overhead garage door, using an electronic door opener.

The assistant D. A. had been satisfied � and anxious to return to a Friday-night party. My next problem was the reporters: one each from San Francisco�s two daily papers, and two TV reporters. I made them wait until the body had been taken away, then allowed them to photograph the scene of the crime. An informal press conference had taken three-quarters of an hour. By that time, additional information had been developed. One neighbor thought she heard a shot �sometime during the six o�clock news.� At about the same time, a teenage boy had seen a man run from the garage and get into a compact car. At the place where the teenager said the car was parked, we�d found the blood. Because of the fog and the gathering darkness, the boy hadn�t gotten a license number.

I�d stayed on the scene until eleven-thirty, then left Canelli in charge. His responsibility hadn�t ended until everyone in the neighborhood had been interrogated and every foot of the house and grounds searched.

Thursday night, thinking about Ann, I�d gotten less than five hours� sleep. Last night, thinking about the Booker murder, I hadn�t done much better.

Now, at eight-thirty Saturday morning, I dialed Parrington, in the lab. My muscles ached with fatigue. My eyes felt hot and dry.

�Do you have anything?� I asked.

�Yessir,� he answered promptly. �I don�t have it written up yet. But I can tell you about it.�

�Fine.�

�Everything we found more or less confirms what you thought, Lieutenant. The blood inside the garage was two different types, for instance. And the blood beside the service door matched the blood on the sidewalk. We got some real good prints off that cigarette package, too � just like you thought. I calibrated the prints and put them into the computer about an hour ago. With luck, Identification could have something for you before too long.�

�Good.�

�I also found some clothing fibers caught under the victim�s fingernails. The fabric was brown polyester, and it didn�t match anything the victim was wearing or anything in the house. Which makes me think that he ripped open one of his attacker�s pockets. That would account for the stuff spilled on the floor � all of which, incidentally, had latent prints that matched the prints on the cigarette wrapper.�

�Did that �Twospot� note have the same prints too?�

�Yessir.�

�What about the gun and bullets? Anything conclusive?�

�It�s a Beretta .32 caliber. I just called Sacramento for an ownership printout on it, but I haven�t heard anything yet. The victim�s prints were on the gun, but no other prints. They were on the bullets, too. If the magazine was fully loaded, and there wasn�t a cartridge in the chamber, then he fired two shots. Which also adds up, assuming he shot his attacker. We found one bullet in the wall of the garage.�

At that moment, I heard a quick double knock on my office door. I knew that knock. It was Pete Friedman, my senior co-lieutenant. I called for Friedman to come in, and thanked Parrington for his work. Either he�d been up most of the night, or he�d started working at six-thirty this morning. Or both.

I watched Friedman enter my office and sink down into my visitor�s chair with his customary grateful sigh. It was Friedman�s long-standing contention that my visitor�s chair was the only one in the Department that could comfortably accommodate his considerable bulk. Therefore, according to Friedman, it was only in my visitor�s chair that he could properly formulate the ideas we needed to solve the city�s homicides.

�Even for a Monday-through-Friday day,� Friedman said, �you�re up early. Not to mention that it�s a Saturday.�

�You�re up early, too.�

Ruefully, he nodded. �I�m up early because, about midnight, I got a call from his eminence Chief Dwyer.�

�What about?�

�About taking over security for Castro�s visit, if you can believe it. Which I couldn�t � especially at midnight. And especially when Dwyer told me that Castro�s coming to town the day after tomorrow. Christ, I thought it was a week from Monday.�

�What happened to Captain Duncan? I thought he was in charge of security.�

Friedman sighed, at the same time unwrapping a cigar and rummaging through his pockets for a match. �Captain Duncan had a gall bladder attack. He�ll be all right. But not in time to throw himself between Fidel and an assassin�s bullet.�

Sympathetically shaking my head, I pushed my ashtray across the desk toward Friedman. His cigar ash almost never found the ashtray, but I continued to hope.

�What�s this Booker thing?� Friedman asked. �Give me the rundown. Not that I�ll be able to help until after Monday.�

It took almost fifteen minutes to describe the case, during which time Friedman complacently smoked his cigar � spilling ashes at random on the floor, my desk and his vest. While I talked, he regarded me with his typically lazy-lidded stare. Occasionally he grunted, signifying either surprise or puzzlement � or both. When I finished, he sat silently for a moment, thoughtfully regarding the tip of his cigar. Finally:

�That �Twospot� note is a nice touch,� he said dryly. �A little theatrical, maybe but still nice. It suggests some sinister presence. A mastermind, maybe. Or maybe an inspired red herring.� He nodded approvingly. �Either way, I like it.�

�I thought you would.�

�I�m also intrigued by the sock-and-sand weapon,� he continued. �To me, that smacks of professionalism � or, at the very least, premeditation.�

�Right.�

�Also,� Friedman said, �the sock and the sand might smack of conspiracy not to commit murder, but merely to stun. Ever think of that?�

�To be honest,� I answered, �I haven�t got around to theorizing. I�m still trying to put the pieces together.�

Friedman nodded ponderous approval. Then, speaking slowly and thoughtfully, he said, �There�s something about the whole situation that doesn�t add up.�

�How do you mean?�

�I mean that Thursday night Alex gets his skull cracked. The next night, Jason Booker gets his skull cracked � fatally. Why? What�s the connection?�

I shrugged. �Apparently Alex suspected that Booker was running some kind of a con on his mother. But maybe Booker was trying more than just a con. Maybe he was involved in something really heavy. And maybe Booker thought Alex knew more than he really knew. So Booker tried to kill Alex. Don�t forget that Bill didn�t actually see Alex�s assailant, up at the winery. It could have been Booker.�

Friedman nodded judiciously. �That much, I can buy. But�I don�t buy the part about how maybe Alex talks his way out of the hospital and comes down to the city and asks a private eye to meet him at the site of Booker�s proposed murder � which happens to be the family home away from home. It just doesn�t figure. It also doesn�t figure that Alex would need a note reminding him of the address of his family�s town house.�

�Then why did Alex run?�

Friedman spread his hands. �Maybe he didn�t run, ever consider that? Maybe he was killed too. And hauled away.�

�Who hauled him away?�

�How should I know? It�s your case. I�m just trying to stretch your mind.�

�Our witness didn�t see anyone hauled away.�

�I shouldn�t have to tell you,� he said, �that single witnesses are about as reliable as weather reports. Until you�ve got two witnesses who saw the same thing at the same time, you don�t have crap.�

�Well, there�s one way to tell whether Alex was shot in that garage.� I pulled my notepad toward me and wrote �Alex�s blood type?� on the top sheet. At that moment, my phone rang.

�This is Fenster, Lieutenant Hastings. Identification.�

From his voice, I knew that he had a positive make for me. I turned to the notepad�s second sheet. �What�ve you got, Fenster?�

�It�s the prints on that cigarette wrapper. Relating to the Booker homicide.�

�Yes.�

�They�re listed as identifying one Malcolm Howard, of this city.�

�Did you pull his jacket�

�Yessir.�

�Give me the rundown.�

�Caucasian male. Age thirty-four. Last known address, 469 Eddy Street, apartment 670. Previous convictions�� He paused. �Do you want them all, Lieutenant?�

�Yes.�

�1961, grand theft auto, this city. Suspended sentence. 1964, receiving stolen goods. Sentenced five to fifteen years. Served � let�s see, about four years, I guess. Maybe a little less. Released on parole. In 1968, he was indicated for possession of a firearm and for attempted murder. Tried, and acquitted. In 1970, in Florida, he was indicated for illegal possession of machine guns and possession of illegal explosive devices. Gun-running, in other words. Tried, and convicted. That�s all his indictments and convictions.�

�How long has he been back in San Francisco?�

�About a year. He was arrested six months ago in a sweep of gay bars, out on Castro Street. He wasn�t booked. He�s a homosexual, I guess.�

�Are there any current intelligence reports on him?�

�Yessir�� I heard papers rattling. Then: �He�s apparently trying to get into pornography. Male pornography. He bought a rundown movie house on Eighteenth Street, and he�s showing dirty movies. He may be making some porno films, too. All gay.�

�He came back from Florida with some money, then.�

�It looks like it. From the gun-running, probably.�

�Have you got a current picture?�

�Yessir.�

�All right. Inspector Canelli will be down to pick up the jacket. Wait for him. And thanks.�

�Yes, sir. Thank you.�

I turned to Friedman. �Ever heard of Malcolm Howard?�

Friedman nodded.��I arrested him once.�

�Is he a murderer?�

�Not when I knew him, he wasn�t. But he was certainly going in that direction. He�s a smart, vicious punk with very kinky sexual preferences and a very strong profit motive. Mal will do anything for money. That�s what his friends call him. Mal.�

�Excuse me.� I called Canelli, and ordered him to organize a search for Mal Howard. �When they find him,� I finished, �they�re to put him under close surveillance, and call me. Don�t apprehend.�

�Yessir. Do you want me to take charge in the field?�

�No,� I answered. �I want you here. Lieutenant Friedman is going to be busy with security for Fidel Castro. That leaves you and me to hold down the fort.�

�Oh. Well. Jeeze.� Canelli was plainly flustered. A combination of Castro�s visit and a Saturday morning�s skeleton crew in Homicide had suddenly elevated him to command status. It was the first time it had happened. �Well, okay, Lieutenant. Sure. And thanks.�

�You can get some extra men from General Works, if you need them � on my authority. Let�s use three teams � six men, altogether. Get the best you can.�

�Yessir. Six men. Is that all? I mean, is that all you wanted?�

�No. When you�ve got the search for Howard organized, I want you to see how many people involved with the Cappellanis are in San Francisco. You got the names from Bill, last night. Right?�

�Yessir. Right. I was just typing up my report on his statement, as a matter of fact.�

�Okay. When you get the names, set up an interrogation schedule for you and me. Beginning in, say, an hour. Clear?�

�Yessir, that�s� Oh. Say. I forgot.�

I sighed. �Forgot what?�

�Mrs. Rosa Cappellani and a guy named Paul Rosten just came in. He�s the foreman up at the Cappellani Winery, according to that private detective. I was just going to call you, when you called me. You want to see them?�

�Yes,� I answered. �Bring them in.�

Canelli pulled into a parking place, switched off the engine and sat for a moment staring out over the yacht harbor.

�Jeeze, Lieutenant, did you ever stop to think how much money there is in San Francisco? I mean, every once in a while when I�m downtown, I can�t believe how many Cadillacs I see. Not to mention Lincolns, and Mercedes, and all. And then this�� He gestured to the long rows of pleasure boats moored side by side to wharves ranked endlessly along the shore. The Yacht Club was built on a stone breakwater that protected the harbor. The largest, most expensive yachts were moored closest to the club. The smaller craft, mostly sailboats, lost definition in the distance: a constantly criss-crossing tangle of masts and rigging lines, gently shifting with the swell.

For a moment we sat staring out across the harbor. Last night�s fog had burned off; sunlight sparkled on the water. To our left, a small sailboat, bright white, was just clearing the breakwater, heading out into the bay.

Marveling, Canelli shook his head. �It�s another world, you know that, Lieutenant? It�s a whole other world.�

Instead of replying, I glanced at my watch. The time was exactly noon. I reached for our microphone and pressed the �transmit� button.

�This is Inspectors Eleven,� I said. �Lieutenant Hastings.�

�Yessir, Lieutenant.� It was Halliday, my favorite communications man.

�We�ll be in the San Francisco Yacht Club for thirty or forty minutes. Any messages?�

�No, sir.�

�Any developments on either Mal Howard or Alex Cappellani?�

�No, sir.�

I sighed. In addition to the six men looking for Howard, I�d detailed two men to watch the Cappellani house and another two men to watch the Cappellani offices. Including Canelli and myself, twelve men were assigned to the case. For a �routine homicide,� I�d reached the departmental manpower limit.

I signed off and got out of the car. As we walked across the parking lot I asked, �Is there anything yet on those blood types?�

Canelli exhaled loudly, irked with himself. �I forgot to tell you. Booker�s type is AB negative, which was most of it. The blood, I mean. The type at the garage door and on the sidewalk outside is O positive.�

�Alex�s type.� I pushed open the huge front door of the Yacht Club, gesturing for Canelli to precede me.

�Right,� he answered. �Except that I couldn�t find out about Howard�s type. And O positive is the most common. So I guess there�s a better than even chance that it could be Howard�s type, too. At least, that�s what I�� His voice trailed off. A middle-aged man who looked like a successful investment banker stepped forward to greet us, subtly blocking our progress into the club�s elegantly paneled interior hallway. The man was deliberately assessing Canelli, head to toe. Plainly, the verdict wasn�t favorable.

�We�re meeting Mr. Logan Dockstetter,� I said, stepping forward. �We�re expected.�

The man�s gaze transferred itself to me. Resignation clouded his voice as he asked for our names.

The receptionist�s face was expressionless as she examined my badge. She was a pale, fussy woman of about thirty, with a narrow head and a scrawny body. A bright red mouth accented the unhealthy pallor of her face. A tight sweater clung to a torso that was barely pubescent. Dark eyeshadow enlarged eyes that were already protuberant.

�Is Mr. Cappellani expecting you?�

�He�s expecting me at two. I�m early, but I hope he�ll see me. I�m having a � busy day.�

Plainly displeased, she lifted her phone and spoke in a hushed voice. She handled the phone as if it were covered with germs.

�He�ll see you, Lieutenant.� Disapprovingly, she gestured to a tall walnut door with brushed chrome fittings. A matching chrome nameplate was inscribed L. CAPPELLANI. The effect was understated elegance.

�Go right in, please.�

The Cappellani offices occupied a suite on the third floor of one of the huge brick warehouses that had been built close to the waterfront at the turn of the century. As shipping declined, the fortresslike warehouses had fallen vacant. Then, during the last decade, developers had profitably restored the old buildings, remodeling them to accent worn wooden beams and the timeless texture of natural brick. Leo Cappellani had a corner office. On two sides, big plate-glass windows set into the massive exposed-brick walls offered a magnificent view of San Francisco Bay.

Leo Cappellani sat behind an oversized rosewood desk. As I entered the office he rose to his feet and gestured me to an armchair placed about five feet from the desk. As I sat down, I realized that my chair was several inches lower than Leo�s. He didn�t offer to shake hands.

�I hope this won�t take long, Lieutenant. I don�t mind telling you that I�m having a hell of a day.� He ran his fingers impatiently through dark, curly hair as he threw himself back into his elegant black leather swivel chair. �First, there�s Alex � and then Booker. And then, in addition to everything else, we just had a goddamn shipment of wine hijacked, if you can believe that. And, as if that weren�t enough, my secretary phoned in sick.�

�You had a wine shipment hijacked?� I asked incredulously.

He nodded angrily. �I�ve just got off the phone with the FBI. They think the shipment was hijacked by mistake.� He shook his head disgustedly, as if someone had played a bad joke on him. �It seems that the hijackers were looking for a shipment of pocket calculators, for God�s sake. And they�� His phone buzzer sounded. Grimacing, he picked up the receiver. �Miss Farwell,� he said acidly, �I thought I told you to hold my calls.� He listened for a moment. �My wife?� As he listened again, frowning, I had a chance to assess him. He had his mother�s large, high-bridged nose and dark, restless eyes. His face was squared off, with a strong jaw, prominent cheekbones and heavy ridges above dark, full eyebrows. It was a willful, powerful face. Wearing a helmet and breastplate, he could have been a Roman centurion.

He had apparently agreed to talk to his wife. He listened impatiently for a moment, still frowning. I saw him clench his right hand hard into a fist, and begin rhythmically striking the desk � suffering her silently. The gesture revealed a strong, dominant man who bore frustration badly. Even from across the desk, I could hear a strident, metallic voice on the phone. Finally Leo interrupted.

�Listen, Angela, I simply don�t have time for this. Now, I�ve already told you to stay out of it. Rosa doesn�t need your help, and I don�t want your help. You�ll just � what?�

The frown became a furious scowl. The fist was white-knuckled now. On the phone, the metallic voice continued its shrill protestations. Again, he roughly interrupted her.

�What you�re doing, Angela, is trying to make a big production number out of this. But the facts � the simple, unvarnished facts � are that Booker got himself killed, which was good riddance, and Alex�s got himself in yet another scrape, which was inevitable. Now, if it�ll make you feel less left out, you can go downtown and buy yourself a black dress, just in case Alex is dead, too. But in the meantime, please � please � get off my back. And�� Suddenly he stopped speaking. He took the phone away from his ear, glared at it for a moment, then banged it down. His wife had hung up on him.

Immediately, the phone buzzed again.

�Goddamn son of a bitch.� He lifted the phone. Speaking in a low, dangerous voice, he said, �Miss Farwell, for the last time�� He paused, blinked, then sat for a moment in irresolute silence. Finally he said shortly, �All right. Tell her to wait for me. It�ll just be a few minutes.� As he hung up, he glanced quickly at me, as if to assess how much I�d heard � and guessed. Now he swiveled in his chair to face me squarely. He allowed a moment of silence to pass as he eyed me speculatively, taking my measure. As he stared, his hand strayed to his expensive silk tie, absently adjusting the knot. Finally:

�What can I do for you, Lieutenant?� His voice was clipped, his eyes cold. He could have been speaking to an employee � or a servant.

I matched his manner. �I�m looking for your brother. His car�s been located on Grant Avenue, near Telegraph Hill. Does he know anyone in the area?�

�Not so far as I can remember.� The answer came so quickly that he couldn�t have given it an instant�s thought. Before I�d asked the question, he�d decided on a negative reply.

I pointed to the phone. �I gather that you don�t keep very close track of your brother�s life.�

�What�s that supposed to mean?� he asked truculently.

�It means that you don�t exactly play the role of the devoted brother.�

�I don�t have time for role playing, Lieutenant. I�d rather just tell the truth. I�ve found that it saves a lot of time and energy. And the truth is that I�ve never really liked Alex very much. And he�s never liked me much, either. We�re two different people.�

�He could be dead, Mr. Cappellani. Or in danger. Aren�t you concerned?�

�Of course I�m concerned. But I�m not going to let his mistakes dominate my life. I learned that little trick a long time ago.�

As I rose slowly to my feet, I decided I didn�t like Leo Cappellani. I looked at him for a moment in silence before I asked quietly, �Do you know anyone named Mal Howard?�

�No.�

�Does the word �Twospot� mean anything to you?�

�No.�

�Do you think that Jason Booker intended to marry your mother?�

He drew a deep breath. �I think he intended to try and marry her. But he never would have succeeded. I can assure you that my mother would never have been taken in by Booker.�

I nodded. �I think you�re probably right.� I laid my card on the corner of his desk. �If you hear from your brother � or about your brother � I�d like you to call me.�

He didn�t reply. Realizing that I could expect nothing from Leo Cappellani, I turned and left the office. In the reception room outside, on a leather sofa, I saw a handsome young woman seated with her legs crossed, leafing through a copy of Time. She was wearing beige wool slacks, a Levi-styled jacket made of the same material and a brown turtleneck sweater. The close-fitting jacket modeled round, high breasts and a trim, exciting torso. When I opened the door, she lifted her head to look at me over the magazine. Her face was a classic oval, with a firm mouth, a straight nose and calm, level brows. She was a small, slim woman, almost petite. But the squared-off set of her shoulders and the arch of her neck suggested vitality, determination and strength. Her hair was dark auburn, cropped close. Her gray-green eyes were coolly appraising. Under my scrutiny, she lifted her chin a disdainful half inch. She held herself as if she was accustomed to having men look at her.

From Bill�s description, I could guess her identity.

�Are you Shelly Jackson?� I asked, at the same time slipping my shield case from my pocket. Watching my gesture, she raised her hand. �You don�t have to show me your badge. I know who you are.� She put the magazine aside, recrossed her legs and turned on the couch to face me fully. �I understand you want to talk to me.�

�Not especially. We want to talk to everyone who was at the winery Thursday sight. And I understand that you�� I hesitated, searching for the right phrase. �I understand that you participated.�

It was an awkward, ineffectual opening � a mistake. I should have begun with a question, putting her on the defensive. It was a basic police tactic, based on the premise that every interrogation is a contest.

Questioning desirable women, I always made the same mistake.

As if she sensed my momentary dissatisfaction with myself, her mouth moved in a small, condescending smile. The green eyes regarded me calmly, with an aloof, supercilious tolerance. Suddenly I knew how Canelli must feel, trying to cope with a constant succession of citizens who caused him to blush, or perspire, or otherwise surrender to confusion.

�How do you mean that, exactly?� she asked.

�I mean that you were apparently very helpful.� As I sat beside her on the sofa, I saw the inefficient Miss Farwell enter Leo Cappellani�s office. Shelly Jackson and I were alone in the reception room.

This time maintaining eye contact, I pitched my voice to a crisp, official note as I said, �I understand that you gave statements to the Napa County Sheriff�s office indicating that, except for the private detective, you didn�t see anyone in the vineyards Thursday night after the attack on Alex. Is that right?�

�That�s right.�

�Is there anything you can add to what you told them?�

She raised her shoulders, shrugging. Her eyes were steady, never leaving my face. Her hands were clasped easily in her lap, relaxed. Innocent or not, most witnesses betray nervousness during questioning. Not Shelly Jackson. She was a cool customer.

�I probably can�t add anything to what you already know,� she answered. �You�re apparently pretty well informed about what happened.�

�You work for the Cappellanis, I gather.�

�Yes. I�m in their marketing division.�

�You know Logan Docksetter, then.�

�Of course.�

�What d�you think of him?�

�As a man, or a sales manager?�

�As a man.�

�I don�t think he�s much of a man.� She let a deliberate moment pass before she added, �You can take that any way you like � and you�d probably be right.�

�How long have you worked for the Cappellanis?�

�Just a few months.�

�What�d you do before that?�

Again she shrugged. The slow movement of her shoulders suggested a self-confident sensuality. I found myself thinking that she would be a bold, exciting lover.

�I was in marketing. I�m pretty good at it, as a matter of fact.�

�Did you work here in San Francisco?�

�No,� she answered shortly. �In Florida. My�� For the first time, she hesitated. Then: �My marriage broke up. So I came west.� As she said it, she challenged me with her eyes, putting the subject of her broken marriage off-limits.

�I wouldn�t think there�d be much wine marketed in Florida. They don�t grow grapes, do they?�

The comment seemed to amuse her. �As a matter of fact,� she said, �I was in nuts, as they say. Pecans. But marketing is marketing, Lieutenant.� Her eyes still held mine, coolly waiting.

�You�re an intelligent woman, Miss Jackson. I�d like you to tell me how the Cappellanis strike you � as a family, I mean.�

She looked at me for a moment, obviously deciding how much to say � how far she could trust me. Finally she said, �Alex is a lightweight and Leo is a light-heavy. The mother, Rosa, is the only one who knows who she is and what she�s doing. But she apparently can�t do without a man, so that�s a weakness, I guess. Anyhow, Booker could get her giggling like a schoolgirl, sometimes.�

�You didn�t like Booker.�

She shook her head.

�How about Paul Rosten?�

�I don�t know him very well. He never talks. At least, not to me.�

I was trying to decide whether to ask if she thought Rosa and Rosten had been lovers when, suddenly, the paging device at my belt buzzed. It was Halliday again, asking me to phone him. I crossed the office, punched an outside line and dialed Communications. In spite of himself, Halliday was exicted as he said:

�Inspector Canelli just called to say that he thinks he has Mal Howard pinned down at 1976 Scott Street. He wants instructions.�

�What does he mean by �pinned down�?�

�I�m not sure, sir.�

�Tell him I�ll be there in ten minutes. Tell him not to take any action until I get there. He�s to keep the place buttoned up, nothing more. Clear?�

�Yessir.�

I drove past the Scott Street address twice before I spotted Canelli. He was across the street from the house, crouched down behind a laurel hedge. Whenever I saw Canelli concealing himself behind a tree or bush, I thought of an amiable hippo bulging out on all sides of a small hummock.

I surreptitiously nodded to him, drove around the corner and parked out of sight. Moments later, he slipped into my car.

�What�s the situation?� I asked.

�Well,� Canelli said, �what happened is that they been backtracking on Howard all day, the way I get it � going from one old address to another. You know. So anyhow, at one of the addresses, Marsten ran across this guy he�d busted a couple of months ago, when he was in Vice. So Marsten thought, what the hell, he�d give the guy a toss, for old time�s sake. So he finds the guy carrying some cocaine � which makes the guy think about making a deal, of course. And, besides, the guy had a beef with Howard, about some dirty movies, and was pretty pissed off, the way I get it. So anyhow, the guy cops. We�ve been here for about an hour and a half, showing Howard�s picture around. And it sure seems like he�s in there, all right. I mean, people saw him go in, but nobody saw him come out.�

�Have you got the back covered?�

�Sure, Lieutenant.� Canelli�s soft brown eyes reproached me for asking the question.

�How many men have you got?�

�Six, including me. I figured I should pull the whole detail in.�

I nodded agreement. From where I sat, I could see the building. It had once been a large, elegant two-story Victorian town house, built on a double lot. One side of the house was attached to its neighbor. An alleyway five feet wide ran along the other side of the house. The alleyway was secured by an iron gate. The gate was more than six feet high. The house itself was in fair repair � not completely restored, but not beyond hope, either. It wasn�t the kind of place I�d expect to find a hoodlum. Like the house, the neighborhood had been down as far as it would go, and was starting up on the other side. Most of the homes in the area had been built before 1900: spacious, ornate Victorian buildings, elaborately constructed for some of the city�s best families. In recent years, a city-sponsored Victorian restoration program had started the process of reclamation, reversing the slide toward decay. Private enterprise was finishing the job.

�Does he live by himself?� As I asked the question I studied Mal Howard�s picture: a thin, drawn face, sparse sandy hair, small eyes set deep over unusually high cheekbones, a flattened streetfighter�s nose and a tight, sullen mouth. Howard would be easy to identify.

�No,� Canelli answered. �It turns out that Howard�s gay � at least, if you want to believe the guy with the cocaine, he�s gay. And apparently there�s three or four of them living together, there. They�re all gay. The gays like those old Victorians, you know. They fix them up, and everything. You know � artistically.�

�Are Howard�s friends hoods, too?�

Canelli nodded. �According to the guy with the cocaine, they�re all hoods. And pretty heavy types, too, Marsten says.�

�How many of them are in there now?�

�I don�t know, Lieutenant. I didn�t want to ask around the neighborhood too much, in case some wise guy should call them up, and warn them. That happened to me a few months ago. Remember?�

I remembered. The shootout had sounded like a war.

�How are your men dispersed?�

�Did you see that blue van with the white letters parked across the street from the house? It says General Alarms on the side.�

�No.�

�Well, it�s there. A friend of mine has a burglar alarm business. His name�s Pat Harvey, and he�s one of those eccentric geniuses, I guess you�d say. When I was an electrician, I used to work with him. So I borrowed the van from Pat. I put three of our guys in the van with a walkie-talkie and two shotguns. Then I sent Marsten and a guy from General Works to cover the back of the house. I forget the G. W. guy�s name. But they got a walkie-talkie.� As he spoke, Canelli withdrew his own walkie-talkie, and offered it to me. �You want to check out the positions?�

�You do it. Designate the van position one. Marsten is position two.�

He spoke briefly to Marsten and the men in the van, then left the walkie-talkie on the seat between us, switched on. Neither of the positions reported any movement, either inside or outside the house.

By the book, I should order the surveillance continued until Mal Howard was identified either entering the house or leaving it.

But, during the ten-minute drive from the Cappellani offices, I�d received a report of another homicide: a housewife in Noe Valley had followed her husband to another woman�s house, and killed them both in the woman�s bedroom. The housewife�s father had once served on the city�s board of supervisors, and the woman in bed was the daughter of a four-star general. Already, the reporters were hot on the scent. Friedman was handling the case until I could take over, but he was still muttering about Castro. And, on a Saturday afternoon, half our detectives were unavailable to us, except in an emergency.

�Things are piling up downtown,� I said. �Maybe we should go in. You and me. Want to give it a try?�

Canelli knew what the book said, too. He knew that I wasn�t giving an order. I was asking for a volunteer.

�Well � sure.� He shrugged. �Why not? Should I�� He cleared his throat. �Should I get a shotgun, or what?�

�No. Let�s do it slow and easy.�

�Yeah. Okay, Lieutenant. Slow and easy.�

�Where�s the burglar alarm van in relation to the house? How far away?�

�About two, three houses away. It�s on the opposite side of the street, though.�

�I�m going to order them to wait until we ring the doorbell. Then I�ll tell them to approach the house slowly. When we get inside � if we do � they can double-park directly in front of the house, ready to come in behind us. Is that all right with you?�

�Well, sure, Lieutenant. Anything you say.�

I gave the orders, handed Canelli the walkie-talkie and swung the car door open.

With Marsten a half block behind me, I drove slowly past 2851 Greenwich. During the fifteen-minute drive from Scott Street, I�d ordered Halliday to contact both Leo and Rosa Cappellani, asking whether the Greenwich Street address was known to the family. It wasn�t, apparently.

Like the Cappellani town house, 2851 Greenwich was an example of choice six-figure San Francisco real estate. It was a �lowrise� apartment building, built to the city�s code that protects an owner�s right to a view. The building was new: a stark, squared-off stucco box, architecturally undistinguished. But it was located on the north slope of Telegraph Hill. From the rear of the building, floor-to-ceiling windows would command a vista of San Francisco Bay and the Golden Gate Bridge, with the low green hills of Marin County for a background and Alcatraz and Angel Island in the foreground. Full-width balconies would allow affluent tenants to drink martinis and barbecue steaks while they admired the view.

Two entrances fronted on Greenwich, designating two large flats, numbered 2847 and 2849. The number 2851 was fixed to a gate on the uphill side of the building, and marked a garden apartment with a rear entrance and access through the gate. The front windows of the two flats showed no signs of life. Circulars littered the two entrances, and the mailboxes were full. The gate on the uphill side was closed � but not littered with the same circulars.

The building was only two blocks from Alex�s car, still parked on Grant Avenue. He�d probably borrowed the apartment from a friend, to hide. He�d parked his car close enough to get it in a hurry � but not close enough to betray his hiding place.

Just ahead, Greenwich Street began a tight uphill curve that ended in the tourist parking circle that served Coit Tower, on the crest of Telegraph Hill. The circle was less than two blocks from 2851. Following a green Porsche, I drove to the crest and made a circuit of the parking area, finally pulling into a red zone. Using my walkie-talkie, I told Marsten to pull in beside me. I rolled down my window.

�I�ll leave my car here, and walk back. You follow me in your car, a half block behind. If it looks all right, I�ll go in by myself. There�s a gate beside the house that leads back to the apartment. When I go through the gate, I�ll leave it open. You take up your position opposite the gate. Stay in your car. Clear?�

�Yessir.�

�I don�t think there�ll be a problem. He�s scared, probably, and wants to talk. He might talk to one man, rather than two.�

�Right,� Marsten said shortly. Displeasure was plain in his voice. He�d been hoping for action. Marsten was still in his thirties � a hard-working, ambitious, savvy cop. But he was hot-tempered. He�d grown up a tough kid, and hadn�t changed. Working on the vice squad, his street sense had helped him second-guess the hoods and the whores and the hustlers. In Homicide, though, his temper worked against him. He was too quick with his fists � and his gun, too. As a partner, Marsten was a calculated risk.

I raised my walkie-talkie. �We�ll stay on channel ten.�

�Right.�

I locked my car, slipped the walkie-talkie into my inside pocket and began walking back the way I�d come. It was a clear, warm Saturday afternoon, and the observation circle was crowded with tourists. But, despite the balmy weather, most of the tourists remained in their cars, staring at the sights through their windshields. A few of them � children, mostly � clung to the big coinoperated telescopes, focusing on Alcatraz, or the Golden Gate Bridge, or the ships sailing into San Francisco Bay. Some of the tourists emerged from their cars long enough to take a shapshot or pose for one. Then they quickly returned to their cars.

As I walked down Greenwich Street, I glanced to my right, down the steepest slope of Telegraph Hill. The rock slope was overgrown with wind-stunted laurel and juniper, as impenetrable as a forest thicket. Yet, despite the steepness of the terrain and the denseness of the undergrowth, I could see tunnels burrowed through the tangled branches. The small, twisting tunnels could have been made by animals � but weren�t. They were made by children, playing. I�d grown up in San Francisco. I could remember playing on this same wild slope during a time when tourists were a novelty, not a nuisance. One of the tall rock outcroppings had been my Indian fortress. I�d been a cowboy, stalking the enemy, attacking with shrilly shouted �bangs� and �pows,� followed by equally shrill arguments and arbitrations.

Thirty-five years later, I was still stalking the enemy.

I paused at the side gate of 2851 Greenwich, and casually looked up and down the street. On both sides, the sidewalks were deserted. From my right, a station wagon filled with squirming children came up the hill. From my left, Marsten�s car was coasting down toward me.

The gate was made of thick redwood planks, secured by a simple black iron latch. I tripped the latch and pushed the heavy gate slowly open. A flight of cement steps led down to a redwood deck. The stairs were about three feet wide. On my right was a high wooden fence. The stucco side of the house rose on my left, a sheer wall with only two small, high windows. Pine and laurel grew across the top of the redwood fence, touching the stucco of the house. Even though the time was only three-thirty, the fence and the overhanging foliage and the high stucco wall cut off much of the afternoon light.

I tried to leave the gate open, but it was spring loaded. I looked for a hook to latch it back, but couldn�t find one. As Marsten drew to a stop at the curb, I let the gate swing free, shrugged and raised my walkie-talkie, signaling for him to listen.

�It won�t stay open,� I said. �So listen for me. Okay?�

�Okay.�

I slipped the walkie-talkie into my pocket and began descending the cement steps. I saw a door leading from the redwood deck to the garden apartment. Beginning on the far side of the deck, a flight of wooden stairs ran down the hill to a tall privet hedge that probably marked the lower boundary of the lot. Except for a single huge pine tree, nothing grew on the property. The ground was covered with thick-growing ivy. A small wooden gate was set into the privet hedge.

The deck was about fifteen feet below street level. Before I stepped on the first of the deck�s redwood planks, I stopped to look � and listen. I didn�t like the silence � didn�t like the feeling of the place. I was confined by a fence on one side and a stucco wall on the other. I was isolated by trees and darkening foliage and an ominous silence. I felt closed in, cut off � threatened.

Why?

Was it because there wasn�t a sidewalk in front and an alley behind � because I didn�t have a man beside me, and men in the rear?

Did a city cop draw his strength and his courage from the pavements � from cars and radios and, most of all, from other cops close at hand?

I was on the deck now, walking lightly toward the door, moving one slow, cautious step at a time. I�d unbuttoned my jacket. My revolver was loose in its holster.

The door was half glass, but curtained. Beside the door was a narrow window, also curtained. The door opened inward. A small brass knocker was mounted on the door-frame to the right of the door. With my left hand I reached across my body for the knocker, so my right arm would be free. Another step, and�

The door flew open. An arm held a black iron poker raised against me. I threw myself back, pivoting away. My left shoulder struck a concrete bulkhead, hard. In the dim light, the figure of a man filled the doorway � a big man, still with the poker raised. My gun was in my hand as I dropped to a crouch.

Ready to kill him.

�Jesus, Frank!�

The private detective � Bill.

�What the hell�� Wrathfully, I holstered my revolver. �Where the�� I realized that I was sputtering. I straightened, brushing leaves and dirt from my left shoulder.

A big man spoke urgently. �A guy just tried to get to Alex � tried to get in the basement window. He�s about thirty, thin face, sandy hair, fighter�s nose.� He pointed down the hill, toward the small gate set into the privet hedge. �He came up from down there. He was carrying a handgun. He went back the way he came � through that wooden gate.�

It was Mal Howard. The description fitted perfectly.

�Is Alex all right?� I asked.

�Yes.�

�All right, get back inside.� Through the door, I�d seen a telephone in the entryway. I stepped inside and switched on my walkie-talkie. Bill closed the door behind us.

�Marsten?�

�Yessir.�

�Come down here. Bring your walkie-talkie and a shotgun.�

�Yessir.�

I went to the telephone and called Halliday, ordering him to dispatch two black and white units to the scene. The officers were to remain in their cars until I contacted them on channel ten � or until they heard shooting.

I saw Bill pull the door open. Carrying a shotgun across his chest, Marsten stood in the doorway. I explained the situation to him, then turned to Bill. �Stay with Alex,� I ordered. �Don�t let him take off again. And lock the door behind us.�

A moment later Marsten and I were cautiously descending the steep wooden steps that led down from the deck to the gate below. Taking the lead, I constantly scanned the base of the privet hedge. If Mal Howard was waiting for us, lying flat on the ground and shooting through the hedge, we�d be easy targets.

�Did you order reinforcements?� Marsten asked.

�Yes. But I told them to stay in their cars until they get orders. I don�t want them behind us, shooting.�

Speaking in whispers, we were standing in front of the gate.

�Ready?�

Marsten nodded calmly. He looked ready.

I slowly pushed open the gate, standing to the left as the gate swung wide to the right.

The terrain beyond the gate was similar to that higher on the hill: a wild, twisted tangle of low-growing underbrush and stunted trees. In the heart of San Francisco, I was facing a wilderness. To my right, a ragged line of tall pines ran down the hill, ending abruptly at a man-made cliff that had been blasted away to allow construction of the street below. To my left, the sheer concrete wall of an elegant high-rise apartment building rose fifty feet from the ground. The wall extended almost to the cliffside, with a cyclone fence running to the very edge � and even extending beyond, protection against prowlers. Two sides, then, were secure. He couldn�t climb the wall, wouldn�t have gone over the cliff. The third side, marked by tall pines, was bounded by another high wire-mesh fence. The fourth side � the uphill side where I stood � was bordered by three private pieces of property. One of the lots ended in the privet hedge. The second lot was bounded by a brick wall. A wooden fence secured the third piece of property. The enclosed tract of overgrown land measured about two hundred feet square.

�If he�s in there,� Marsten said, �we�ve got him. He can�t get out. But the cover�s so thick, you should order a helicopter.�

The remark was typical of Marsten. He was always suggesting, always pushing. Always bucking. I turned deliberately away from him and moved a few paces down the steep slope and into the cover of the first small, twisted trees. For a moment I stood alone, eyeing the wooden fence that adjoined the brick wall. The fence was no more than five feet high.

Howard could have escaped over the fence, the weakest point.

If he�d escaped, and I ordered a �copter, I�d look like a fool. Once every three months, the departmental comptroller called each unit commander into his office for a �cost of operations� review. For all of us, it was a dreaded moment of truth.

And a helicopter was charged out at three hundred dollars an hour.

I drew a deep breath. �All right, Howard,� I called. �Come on out. Bring the gun with you. Throw it on the ground when we tell you to do it. You�ve got one minute.�

Except for a woman�s head thrust out of a nearby window, there was no response. I called again, louder. Nothing.

By now, I knew, two black and white units were standing by, parked on Greenwich Street. I switched on my walkie-talkie and ordered the uniformed men to come down the stairs � with their units� shotguns. And flack vests and helmets, if they had them.

Less than a minute later, with all of us crouched like jungle soldiers among the low-growing trees, I was explaining the problem to the four uniformed men, two of whom I knew by name, two by sight.

I pointed to the uphill perimeter: toward the hedge, the brick wall and the wooden fence. �Two of you guard that line,� I ordered, indicating the two men I didn�t know by name. �If he�s going to break out, he�ll probably try to go over one of those fences, or else through the hedge, maybe.� The two men were young and nervous. Both wore khaki-colored Army flack vests and big white helmets with S.F.P.D. stenciled in front. The bulky vests made their arms look frail and spindly. The helmets made their necks look scrawny. Both swallowed hard � then nodded in unison. They looked like boys playing war, dressed in their fathers� combat gear.

�The rest of us will spread out,� I said. �We�ll work our way downhill to the cliff, through the trees. Each of you will carry a shotgun. Marsten, you take the far side�� I pointed uphill, toward the pines and the cyclone fence. �I�ll take the left. Let�s try and keep a line. And let�s not shoot each other.�

The two young patrolmen tried to smile � but couldn�t make it. Holding his shotgun high, Marsten began forcing his way through the underbrush. Watching the decisive, bull-shouldered way he moved, I realized that Marsten hoped to find Howard first � and kill him.

I drew my revolver and moved to my left, toward the towering concrete wall of the apartment building. The wall was blank, with only a series of vent holes, probably marking bathrooms on each floor. I counted eight balconies overhanging the cliff, one for each floor. On four of the balconies, figures had come to the railing, watching the show below. Sirens and flashing lights and screams and drawn guns attracted them: the rubberneckers, the impassive ghouls. They assembled silently, coming from nowhere � and everywhere. When it was over, when the sirens finally faded away and the blood was drying on the pavement, they silently disappeared.

I turned to my right, looking along the line. Three men with shotguns were working through the tangled trees. Two men with drawn pistols guarded the upper line of fences and walls and hedges.

�This is your last chance, Howard,� I called. �It�s the hard way or the easy way � your choice.�

Nothing.

The silence threatened a fiasco � an assault team assembled against an enemy long gone. Thank God I hadn�t called for the helicopter.

�All right,� I called out, �let�s get him out of there � slow and easy.�

In unison, the four of us entered the underbrush. Immediately I was surrounded by foliage. Here there were no tunnels burrowed by playing children. There were only bramble branches, tearing at my clothing. That morning, realizing that I would be interrogating the affluent Cappellanis, I�d have chosen one of my best suits. Now I was sorry. I should have�

A flicker of movement came from my right. Crouching low, I brought my revolver up � and saw the blue of a police uniform over my sights. I lowered the gun just as I heard a shout from my left, above.

�Policeman. Hey.� It was a high-pitched voice. A child�s voice, from high above me. From one of the high-rise balconies. Looking up, I saw two small arms waving.

�Policeman. Hey. I see him. By the fence, there. Right down there. Right down below me, there.�

And ahead something moved � something brown, not blue. Through close-growing tree limbs I saw a trouser leg � a shoe � a hand.

And a flash of metal, bright among the branches.

�Over here,� I shouted. �To your left. Here. He�s��

A shot cracked � and another shot. I flinched, then plunged ahead. I couldn�t see him now � so he couldn�t see me, either. So he couldn�t hit me if he shot again.

�Policeman. Hey. He�s climbing over the fence. Hey.�

Arms flailing, legs pumping, feet slipping and sliding, I fought free of the foliage, staggering into a cleared strip of rocky ground that paralleled the building.

He was climbing up the eight-foot wire mesh fence that ran from the apartment building to the edge of the cliff. Incredibly, he�d almost reached the top.

�Howard�� I raised my revolver, shot in the air � then lowered the gun, aiming at the desperately climbing figure. A part of my mind registered the image of a frenzied ape, trapped in his chain-link cage. The distance between us was less than thirty feet. If I squeezed the trigger, I couldn�t miss.

He threw his right arm over the top of the fence � then his right leg.

�Howard.� I took careful aim at the dangling left leg, and fired.

And missed.

With his left hand he reached for his waistband. The hand disappeared inside his jacket � then reappeared, holding a revolver.

�Howard. Drop it.�

Still hanging grotesquely on the fence, clinging to the top by an arm and a leg, he swung the big revolver toward me.

And fired. Once. Twice.

Close behind me, branches snapped, bullets whined.

I raised my revolver, steadied the sights squarely on his chest, and squeezed the trigger. I watched his body convulse, heard him sigh�

��and saw him slowly surrender his ape�s grip on the wire, then suddenly fall. The ground was rocky where he fell. He landed flat on his back, spread-eagled. His neck snapped; his head struck the rocks with terrible force. For a moment he lay motionless, staring straight up into the sky. Then, when his eyes began to glaze, his arms and legs began to twitch.

�Policeman. Hey. You got him.�

When the shooting started in the woods down behind the apartment building, Alex Cappellani jerked and twitched on the settee as if he were imagining the bullets thudding into his own body. His eyes were dark and frightened; his face had a grayish pallor. He had been edgy when I got here an hour ago, but the sandy-haired guy with the gun had completely unnerved him. He had that ostrich look � like he wanted to crawl into a hole somewhere and hide himself from the world.

I said to him, �I�m going to have a look back there. You stay here, don�t move.�

He gave me a convulsive nod.

Still carrying the fireplace poker, I left him and went into the dining area that was part of the L-shaped living room. The rear windows looked out over the woods, and in the distance over the Bay and the Bay Bridge and the hills of Oakland and Berkeley; I peered through them, but I could not see any sign of Hastings or his partner or the sandy-haired guy � just a uniformed cop with his service revolver drawn, running through the gate in the privet hedge below. There was the sound of distant shouting, and two more echoing shots; then the shooting stopped altogether and there was nothing to hear but the shouts.

I turned away from the windows and hurried back into the living room proper. Alex was up on his feet, one hand pressed against the bandage that encircled his head, his mouth pulled into a painful grimace. He said shakily, �What�s happening? Is it over?�

�I couldn�t see much,� I told him. �But it�s over, all right, one way or another.�

He sat down again and clasped his hands between his knees. �God,� he said. �God.�

It got very quiet in there for a couple of minutes. I replaced the fireplace poker and paced around on the balls of my feet, looking over at the front entranceway. Nothing happened. My stomach was knotted up and I wanted a cigarette in the worst way; the craving was sometimes intense in moments of stress.

Another minute crept away. Then there was the sound of heavy footfalls on the stairs outside, and seconds after that somebody pounded on the door. Alex�s head jerked up, but I gestured for him to stay seated; I went over into the entryway, up to the door.

�Who is it?�

�Hastings.�

I let out a breath and unlocked the door and opened it. Hastings was alone out on the landing. His big athletic body was tight-drawn and his squarish face was grim, damp with sweat. He gave me a brief nod and came inside past me. I shut the door again after him.

�You get him, Frank?�

�Yeah,� he said, �we got him.�

�Alive?�

�Barely. I had to shoot him. I don�t think he�s going to last long enough to answer questions.�

�Christ. Do you know who he is?�

�His name is Mal Howard. Strong-arm hoodlum, gun-runner, you name it.� Hastings looked past me to where Alex was visible in the living room, watching us with his frightened eyes. �That Alex Cappellani?�

�That�s him.�

He nodded. �Let�s have your story first, before I talk to him. What�re you doing here?�

�Alex called me at home a little after two,� I said. �Out of the blue. He said he�s been holed up here since Friday night. The apartment belongs to a girlfriend of his; she�s a model, in New York now on some sort of magazine assignment. He�s had her key for months, apparently.�

�Go on.�

�He swore to me he hadn�t killed Booker � that he found the body at the Cappellani house, lost his head because he was afraid he�d be blamed, and came here. But he�s not the fugitive type, and he said he�s been having second thoughts. He wanted my advice about what to do.�

�Why you?�

�I suppose because I was working for him and because I had something to do with saving his life the other night,� I said. �Anyhow, I told him to turn himself in, but he wasn�t ready to do that, not without talking to me in person. He sounded sincere and I decided to give him the benefit of the doubt.�

�So you agreed to come over here.�

�Right. It seemed the best way to handle it.�

�And you convinced him to give himself up?�

�Yeah. He balked at letting me escort him down to the Hall, but I talked him into calling your office. While we were waiting for you to come the sandy-haired guy � Howard � showed up and tried to get inside. Only he made too much noise doing it and we heard him. I armed myself with that poker, ran into the kitchen, locked the cellar door, and made a lot of noise about having a gun. I thought it was him coming up to the front door when I heard you on the stairs.�

Hastings inclined his head again, slowly, digesting all of that. Satisfied, he said at length, �Okay. Now I want��

Outside, on the stairs, there had been more running footfalls, and now somebody else began pounding on the door. Hastings turned and opened it. Past him I saw the other plainclothesman, the one I didn�t know, and a uniformed officer farther back on the landing, standing against the redwood fence. With the door open I could hear the excited babble of rubberneckers up on Greenwich Street, the pulsing wail of approaching sirens.

Hastings and the plainclothesman held a hurried conference. What they were saying was none of my business; I went back to where Alex was sitting. He looked up at me in a plaintive way, so I let him have a small, reassuring nod. The tension had gone out of me, if not out of Alex, and I felt limp and tired � the way Hastings looked. You don�t go up against somebody armed with a gun, whether directly or indirectly, without a drained physical reaction setting in.

When Hastings finished talking to the plainclothesman he shut the door and came in to where we were and stood in front of Alex. For several seconds he gave him a long, probing look; then he dragged up one of the free-form chairs � the apartment was furnished in somebody�s idea of ultra-modernism, all black and white and chrome, with huge impressionistic paintings that took up most of the wall space � and sat down. I sat down too, on the opposite end of the settee from Alex.

Hastings introduced himself. And immediately took a Miranda card from the inside pocket of his suit coat and read Alex his rights. �You understand all of that, Mr. Cappellani?� he said then.

Alex looked at him in a numb way. �Yes.�

�Would you like an attorney present?�

�No. No, that�s not necessary. I want to cooperate with you.�

�Fine. All right, to start with I want to know everything you�ve done since Thursday night.�

In a low, nervous voice Alex told him essentially the same story he had told me on the phone and after I arrived here. It still sounded reasonable and sincere. And foolish. Leo Cappellani had been one hundred percent right about his brother: Alex, it seemed, more often than not acted without good judgment.

When Alex was done speaking, Hastings said, �Let�s go over a couple of things. Booker was already dead when you found him?�

�Yes.�

�How did you get inside the garage?�

�Through the side door,� Alex said. �It was open. I saw it as I pulled into the driveway behind Booker�s wagon.�

�Did you see anyone else in the vicinity?�

�No. No one.�

�Did you touch anything in the garage?�

�No.�

�Did you go inside the house?�

�No. I just� ran. I was confused and afraid; all I could think to do was to get away from there.�

�Do you have any idea who would want him dead?�

Alex shook his head.

�Or why he was murdered?�

�No. No.�

�Do you know a man named Mal Howard?�

�Howard? No, I�ve never heard that name.�

�You�re sure?�

�Positive. Is he the man who tried to break in here?�

�Yes. Have you left this apartment since Friday?�

�No.�

�Not even for a newspaper or groceries?�

�Not at all. I didn�t eat much and I listened to the news on television.�

�Did you call anybody at all?�

Alex looked at me again. �Just him.�

�So no one knew you were here.�

�That�s right. No one.�

�Mal Howard knew it,� Hastings said.

That got him a couple of blinks and another bewildered headshake. �I don�t know how he could have��

�The woman who lives here � what�s her name?�

�Virginia Davis.�

�How long have you been seeing her?�

�About six months.�

�Is your relationship an open one?�

�Open one?�

�Do other people know about the two of you? Friends of yours, relatives. Or have you kept it a secret for some reason?�

�Oh, I see,� Alex said. �No, we haven�t kept it a secret. I haven�t taken Virginia to meet my family or anything like that; it�s just a casual thing � you know, a sex thing. But I�ve mentioned her to people.�

�Would you also have mentioned where she lives?�

�I might have. I don�t remember.�

�If you did, it would indicate someone you know fairly well has it in for you, wouldn�t it?�

�I guess so. But it doesn�t make sense. I don�t know why anybody would want me dead. Except Booker, and now he�s dead himself.�

�Whoever it is must want you out of the way pretty badly,� Hastings said. �What happened here this afternoon makes two attempts on your life in three days.�

�I don�t know,� Alex said again, and there was desperation in his voice now. �I just don�t know.�

Hastings ran a hand through his thick brown hair. �Do you have any idea what the word �Twospot� means, Mr. Cappellani?�

That was another one out of left field for Alex, apparently, because the police had not released anything about the Twospot note to the media. He just sat there looking blank. �Twospot?�

�That�s right.�

�Is that a name or what?�

�We�re trying to find out. There was a piece of paper on the floor beside Booker�s body, with the address of your Russian Hill house and the word Twospot typed on it.�

�Twospot,� Alex repeated, and the blank look transformed into a frown. �You know, it does sound vaguely familiar.�

�In what way?�

�I�m not sure. I may have heard it once � but I don�t know where.�

�Think about it, Mr. Cappellani.�

Alex thought about it. And came up empty. He spread his hands in a helpless gesture.

On the stairs outside there were more sounds � thudding footfalls, the clatter of something bumping down the steps, a voice grumbling a warning to somebody else to watch out for his end of the stretcher. Which meant that the city ambulance had arrived. I listened to the sounds recede down the stairs to the privet hedge, and then shifted my gaze to Hastings.

�Frank,� I said, �do you think Howard might be the man who attacked Alex at the winery?�

�It�s possible,� he answered. �There�s no way of knowing for sure now.�

Alex said abruptly, �Maybe this Howard is the one who killed Booker too. Maybe somebody hired him to do it.�

�Howard killed Booker, all right. There�s not much doubt of that.�

I leaned forward. �How do you know, Frank?�

�We found his fingerprints inside the Cappellani house,� Hastings said. �And he had a gunshot wound under a bandage on his left shoulder; I checked that before I came up here. It explains the different types of blood on the floor of the garage and what happened to the missing bullet from Booker�s gun.�

Relief had slackened the muscles in Alex�s face. �Christ,� he said, �why didn�t you tell me all of that before? I�ve been half out of my head sitting here, worrying that you still suspected me��

�You�re not off the hook yet, Mr. Cappellani,� Hastings said quietly. �Running from the scene of a murder, hiding out the way you did, doesn�t make you look particularly innocent.�

�But I told you��

�What you told me seems plausible enough, but it doesn�t clear you of complicity in Booker�s death. Not yet.�

Alex�s eyes turned plaintive again. �Are you going to arrest me?�

�Not exactly. I am going to take you in as a material witness, for further questioning. You can call your attorney from the Hall of Justice if you�ve changed your mind about wanting one present.�

Alex had nothing to say to that. He stared down at his hands, and the ostrich look came back onto his gray face.

I said to Hastings, �Do you want me to come down to the Hall, too?�

�I don�t think so. I�ll let you know later if we need you to sign a statement.�

So the three of us got on our feet and went out of there, Hastings locking the front door after us with a key Alex gave him. When we climbed up to Greenwich Street there were twenty or thirty people milling around, gawking, and half a dozen reporters and mobile camera crews from the local television stations. Alex covered his face with one arm as Hastings led him away to a parked police car. Most of the media people followed them, chattering questions and working their cameras, but a couple of them decided to come after me. I managed to get to my car before they reached me and locked myself inside. I started the engine, pulled away immediately through the crowd.

And damned if one of the cameramen didn�t stand in the middle of the street and film me all the way down to the corner and around it out of sight.

I drove straight home to my flat.

On the way the attempted break-in by Mal Howard, Howard�s apparent death, the things Alex Cappellani had told me, and then Hastings, kept replaying in my head. Along with the string of questions centering on this whole business: Who wanted Alex dead, and why? Why hadn�t his attacker killed him outright at the winery on Thursday night, instead of knocking him unconscious and trying to drag him off somewhere else? Why had Booker been killed? How and why had Howard been recruited as triggerman? What did Twospot mean? Was the Cappellani Winery a factor, or did the motive or motives behind the murder of Booker and the two attempts on Alex have to do with something else entirely?

Too many questions, no answers at all that I could see. Well, Hastings was in the best position now to get to the bottom of it, either through a break in further questioning of Alex and the others involved, or through police technology and legwork. And when the break came I�d have my answers. Meanwhile, there was not much point in brooding about the case. Now, finally, I was out of it, wasn�t I?

Sure I was.

It was after six when I keyed open my front door; the day was pretty well shot. I had called Shelly Jackson last night and again this morning, with the intention of inviting her out for dinner tonight, but she hadn�t been home on either occasion; I had planned to try her again after I got home from the meeting with Alex. Only the events on Greenwich Street had robbed me of all enthusiasm for a Saturday night out on the town, and now I did not feel like doing much of anything except vegetating � curling up on my comfortable old couch with a beer and a stack of pulp magazines.

So I got a can of Schlitz out of the refrigerator and half a dozen issues of Black Mask and Dime Detective off the shelves, and did that. I read one of the 1931 Back Masks straight through from cover to cover � great stuff by Raoul Whitfield, Horace McCoy, Frederick Nebel, and old Cap Shaw himself. Then I had a sandwich and another beer, and came back and sampled stories from the other issues. Two reporters called on the phone, but I put them off with �no comment�; nobody came to see me. By midnight my eyes were a little strained but I was feeling considerably better than I had earlier. You can lose yourself in the melodrama and the machine-gun prose of the pulps, and sometimes when you come back to reality again you find you�ve left things that were bothering you with the ops and dicks and newshawks in those brittle pages. They�re not just fictional crime-solvers for me; they�re birds of my feather, and watching them shoulder the burden of their work helps to ease the burden of mine.

I went into the bathroom and changed the bandage on Shelly�s teethmarks; the wound was healing all right now. Then I got into bed and drifted off immediately. A long time later I dreamed I was a pulp detective who joined forces with Jerry Frost and Jo Gar and Captain Steve McBride to clean up a gang of Prohibition rum-runners. It was a good dream and I was enjoying it � except that the damned phone kept ringing while we were trying to interrogate the boss rum-runner. McBride answered it, but it kept on ringing anyway. Race Williams came in out of nowhere and blew it to pieces with one of his .44s, and it kept on ringing, and the dream got confused and mixed up with reality, and I woke up.

There was daylight in the room: morning, early Sunday morning. Seven A.M., for Christ�s sake, by the clock on my nightstand. Beside the clock, the phone kept on jangling. I scraped mucus out of my eyes, pinched the bridge of my nose until I was awake enough to be coherent, and finally caught up the receiver and said hello.

A woman�s voice made a question out of my name. When I said yes, it was, she said, �This is Rosa Cappellani. I apologize if I�ve gotten you out of bed but it couldn�t be helped.�

God, I thought, now what? I threw the covers off and swung up into a sitting position with my feet on the cold hardwood floor. Outside the bedroom window tracers of broken fog chased each other across the roofs of the neighboring buildings. Which told me that in another couple of hours the fog would have blown inland and burned off and the day would be clear and windy.

I said, �What can I do for you, Mrs. Cappellani?�

�I�d like to see you this morning, as soon as possible.�

�About what?�

�I�d rather not discuss it on the telephone.�

�If it has to do with Alex and what happened yesterday, I can�t tell you anything more than you already know by now.�

�I don�t want you to tell my anything,� she said. �I want you to do something for me � something for which you�ll be well paid.�

The imperiousness was there in her voice, but it was muted somehow; I thought she sounded tired and worried. I ran my tongue over the sleep film on my teeth, thinking about it.

�Well?� she said.

Well. �Where are you?�

�At the winery.�

Another hundred-and-fifty-mile drive, round trip. But I was curious, and if she was willing to pay for my time I was willing to drive up to the Napa Valley again. I said, �Okay, Mrs. Cappellani. I should be able to get there by ten.�

�Fine,� she said, and she sounded relieved. �I�ll expect you then.�

She rang off before I could say anything else; I had wanted to ask her about Alex, if he was still in police custody or if the family lawyers had gotten him released. I sat there and looked at the silent handset for a couple of seconds, realized what a stupid thing that was to be doing, and put it down on its hook. Telephones. Every time one had rung the past few days, I seemed to get myself more deeply involved in the trials and tribulations of the Cappellani family.

Maybe Race Williams had the right idea, I thought. And got up and went into the bathroom to shower and shave.

Twenty minutes later, with money matters settled, Alex took me up to my room on the second floor rear, adjacent to his room. It was spacious but cluttered with the sort of old dark mismatched furniture that people replace individually with more modern fixtures, can�t bear to get rid of for sentimental reasons, and tuck away in guest rooms like this one. The windows overlooked the cellars and the pond and the green-and-brown vineyards beyond. There wasn�t a connecting door between the two rooms, but there was a connecting bathroom that amounted to the same thing.

I was only going to be staying here tonight, since Alex had told me he was planning to return to San Francisco in the morning; otherwise Mrs. Cappellani would have had to send somebody down to my flat for toiletries and changes of clothes, or I would have had to go down there myself with Alex for company. He had not sounded happy about returning to San Francisco; he still wanted to crawl into a hole for the duration, and the one that looked best to him was right here. But he had obviously decided � no doubt with his mother�s help � that it was best for him to keep his mind occupied by keeping up a pretense of normal activity. I could just hear the old dragon telling him that there was no shame in being afraid, only in letting others see just how frightened you really were.

After I had looked the room over I said, �What about today, Alex? You have any plans?�

�I�d like to get shit-faced drunk,� he said.

�That won�t help any.�

�I know that.� He smiled in an ironic, humorless way. �There�s a fest this afternoon; we�re all supposed to go.�

�Fest?�

�Wine fest. There are a lot of them in the Valley around this time, after the crush. This one�s being put on by the Simontaccis; they own one of the big vineyards a few miles up the Silverado Trail, and we buy most of their grapes.�

�Do you want to go?�

�Christ no. Music, dancing, picnic lunches � it makes me cold just thinking about it. But I�ve got to go anyway. The Simontaccis have been having these things for twenty years and the Cappellanis always attend in full force. It�s tradition, good PR.�

�Under the circumstances, I�d think you could bow out gracefully.�

�Tell that to Rosa. She�s going, and so are Leo and Rosten and Shelly and the rest of the people from here and from the office. She thinks I ought to go too. So I�m going � and you�re going.�

�Uh-huh.�

�Don�t look at me like that. I�m not a mama�s boy, despite appearances. It�s just that she�s one hell of a tough woman and I�ve learned the hard way that it�s easier to let her call the shots.�

�Does Leo feel that way too?�

�He wouldn�t admit it but he listens to her as much as I do.�

�Is he already here?�

�Yeah. He came up last night.�

�Does he know about this bodyguard idea?�

�No. Not yet. Nobody knows but you and me and Rosa.�

�They�ll all have to know eventually.�

�So they�ll know,� he said, and it was obvious by his tone and his expression that he did not care for the idea. Pride, probably � the Cappellani pride that Leo had alluded to and that was obvious in Rosa. Don�t let anyone know how frightened you really are. �Look, the fest doesn�t start until one o�clock and I don�t feel like being cooped up in here until then. You know anything about winemaking?�

�Not much, no,� I said.

�Then let�s go down to the cellar. I�ll show you around.�

So we went downstairs again and out into the sunlit morning. On the way I didn�t see any sign of Mrs. Cappellani, who was probably still in her late husband�s office, or of the silent maid. Or of anyone else. But when we walked down the lane and turned onto the road, I saw Leo and Paul Rosten come out from the direction of the nearest small cellar and start toward us.

Beside me Alex said softly, �Here we go.�

I said, �I�ll handle the explanations if you want.�

�Yeah.�

When the four of us came together on the road, Rosten was wearing a grave expression and Leo no expression at all. Neither of them seemed surprised to see me � maybe because too many surprising things had happened in the past few days.

�You do get around, don�t you,� Leo said to me. But there was no irony in the words; it was just a statement. He appeared cool and imperturbable, and the image was enhanced by his country-squire-casual outfit: a tailored white short-sleeved bush jacket and the kind of faded denims that cost upward of forty dollars.

�Your mother asked me to come up, Mr. Cappellani.�

�Oh?�

�She�s concerned that there might be another attempt on Alex�s life,� I said. �She thought it would be a good idea to have me around for a few days.�

�I see.�

Abruptly Alex said, with some challenge, �You don�t mind, do you, Leo?�

�What sort of question is that? Why should I mind?�

�You didn�t like the idea of my hiring a private detective in the first place. You�ve made that plain enough.�

�That�s an entirely different matter; you were meddling in Rosa�s private affairs. Now that Booker has been killed and your life is in jeopardy, we need all the help we can get.�

�Thanks for your concern.�

�Is that sarcasm, Alex?�

Alex just looked at him.

Around the cold nub of a Toscana cigar, Rosten asked me, �Are you going to be investigating what�s happened?�

�Private detectives aren�t allowed to work on murder cases,� I said.

�Well, the police don�t seem to be getting anywhere.�

�They will. They just need time.�

Leo said, �Have you had bodyguarding experience?�

�Enough.�

�Good. Then I�ll feel better about things with you watching over my brother.�

Alex did not like that. �The hell with this crap,� he said, and pushed between Leo and Rosten and started down the road again in short choppy strides.

I nodded to Leo, to Rosten, and went after Alex. When I caught up with him I said, �Take it easy. You won�t do yourself any good if you let things get to you.�

�Yeah,� he said.

�You don�t get along with your brother, is that it?�

�He�s a bastard. He�s just like my mother � thinks he�s superior, thinks I�m a weakling and a fool.�

He had nothing more to say after that, and we crossed the gravel yard and entered the cellar in silence.

For the next hour he showed me the grape crushers and the French continuous action wine presses and the testing laboratory and the bottling plant; he told me how grapes were vinified, how varietals were made, how samples were taken from dozens of different grapes and vines so that the total sugars and total acids could be measured for the best balance. It was all a little like being with a programmed automaton: a steady stream of facts and figures, with no interest or enthusiasm whatsoever. There was nothing I could do to bring him out of his funk, nothing I could say to reassure him; I just let him drone on, asking polite questions now and then to keep him going.

It was past noon when we came out of the bottling plant, and he had turned restless and sullen by then. He said, �We might as well go back to the house. It�s almost time for the goddamn fest.�

So we went back to the house. And a little while after that we filed out again with Rosa and Leo and got into the Lincoln Continental � it belonged to Leo � and drove off through the vineyards in an atmosphere of grim silence. Like people on their way to a funeral instead of a fest.

It was after four when we got back to the Cappellani Winery. I rode in the back seat with Alex; Leo did the driving and Mrs. Cappellani sat like a block of granite beside him. None of us had much to say. Alex was sullen and fidgety, and you could see the beginnings of withdrawal sickness in his eyes and in the blotchy pigmentation of his skin.

When Leo parked the Lincoln in front of the house, Alex got out immediately without saying anything to any of us and went inside in quick jerky strides: a man on his way either to his bed or to his toilet to do some vomiting. The rest of us got out and stood looking after him. As soon as he was gone, Rosa turned to me.

�He won�t drink any more today,� she said. �He�ll probably just sleep.�

I nodded.

Leo said, �He never could hold his liquor very well.�

She fixed him with a stony gaze. �Must you always make disparaging comments about Alex?� She said. �He�s not as strong as you, Leo, we all know that � and he knows it as well as any of us.�

Leo seemed about to argue with her, changed his mind, and said instead, �Yes, I guess he does. Maybe you�re right, Rosa. Maybe I have been a little rough on him.�

You said it, brother, I thought.

The two of them went into the house. I stayed out there in the warm sunshine, for no particular reason except that I did not want to shut myself up in any of those musty rooms. It was quiet in the vineyards and around the winery buildings; all of the grape pickers and the cellar workers had evidently gone home for the day. Shelly and Rosten � and Dockstetter too, I supposed � were still at the fest. Shelly had said, just before we left, that she would see me later tonight; I may have read promise in that where none was intended, but I found myself thinking now, again, about going to bed with her.

I killed five minutes doing nothing, decided that was hardly what I was getting paid for, and finally went inside. Neither Leo nor Mrs. Cappellani was around; the house had a hushed aura to go with its mustiness, like something out of a Gothic novel. Or maybe that was just my imagination.

Upstairs, I went through my room and into the adjoining bathroom and stood listening at the closed door to Alex�s room. Silence, except for a faint breathy sound that might have been snoring. I opened the door and looked in, and Alex was sprawled out face down on his bed, clothes on, shoes on, breathing heavy sour odors through his nose. I went in there and took his shoes off and opened his shirt and covered him with a blanket. He did not move through any of that; he was going to be out for a while.

Back in my room, I pulled off my jacket and my own shoes and lay down on the bed. I thought about reading, but I had not brought any pulps with me and the only books I had seen downstairs were those on military history and winemaking. So I closed my eyes, just to rest � but the day had already been a long one: I was pretty tired. I fell asleep within minutes.

Nothing happened to disturb me, and it was dark when I woke up. My watch read seven forty-five. I got up and put my jacket on � the air in there had turned a little chilly and a little dank; I did not like the feel of it in my lungs � and went to look in on Alex again. He was still sleeping, lying on his back now, the bedclothes rumpled around him.

That damned musty dankness drove me out of my room and downstairs. People can learn to like living in different places, different environments, but the Cappellanis could have this place and welcome to it.

When I stepped down into the foyer I saw somebody sitting in the big family room across from the stairs. Shelly. I detoured over there and went inside, and she smiled when she saw me and got to her feet. There was nobody else in the room.

�Sitting here all alone?� I said.

�Not until a couple of minutes ago. I was having a drink with Leo, but he�s gone into a business conference with Mrs. Cappellani. He�s leaving for San Francisco tonight.�

�When did you get back from the fest?�

�A little after five. It was pretty dull after you left. How�s Alex?�

�Still sleeping it off.�

�Looks like you�ve been sleeping yourself. Your hair�s mussed.�

Which told me I had forgotten to run a comb through it before leaving the bathroom. Old age or chronic slob, take your pick. I got the comb out and worked with it briefly and put it away again. �Better?�

�I liked it more the other way. Want a drink?�

�I don�t think so. I was going out for some air. How about joining me?�

�I�d love to � as they say in the old movies.�

We went outside and wandered down the lane and then down the road past the cellar. There were drifting clouds in the sky now, obscuring what there was of a moon, and the air had an autumn crispness that cleared my lungs immediately. We were the only two people out and around that I could see. The winery buildings and the rolling vineyards were dark shadows against the dark sky; the nightlights on the main cellar had a remote look.

Shelly took my arm and held it so that I could feel the swell of her breast, intentionally or otherwise. I began to think again about getting laid. She was thinking about it too, because when we got down beneath the black oak near the pond she stopped abruptly and turned to face me, and a couple of seconds after that we went into a clinch. As they say in the old movies.

The intensity of her kiss surprised me: there was a kind of violence in it. Violence, too, in the way she wrapped both hands not around my neck but in the material of my shirt, as if she wanted to tear it off me, and in the hard thrusts of her body against mine. It went on that way for twenty or thirty seconds before I stopped it; one of her clutching hands had dug into the wound where she�d bitten me on Thursday night.

�Hey,� I said, �take it easy. I�m an old man.�

�Sure you are.� Up close this way, her face had a kind of fixed intensity of its own. Even in the darkness I could see that her eyes were bright and excited. �Let�s go somewhere.�

�Where? Your cottage?�

�No. Come on.�

She let go of my shirt, reached down for one of my hands, and pulled me along the shore of the pond. But there was nothing where she was heading except the curving rows of grape vines. I said something to her about that, but she didn�t give me an answer; she just kept moving forward, hurrying, holding tightly to my hand. I had known eager women in the past, and I had been eager myself a few times � I was eager enough right now � yet there seemed to be something just a little odd about the way she was acting.

She led me straight up into the vineyard, between two rows of tall old vines where the ground was hard and clodded. Then she stopped and pivoted to me, kissed me again � quick, hard � and tugged on my jacket and my arm so violently that we both went down to our knees. She leaned in against me, breathing rapidly now, and began banging the side of my neck with a bunched fist. Not gently; with enough force to hurt.

Confusion and the pain from her blows made me grab both her wrists, hold her away from me. �Christ, Shelly,� I said, �what�re you doing?�

�Come on,� she said, and there was a kind of animal wildness in her face. �Come on, come on.�

�Here?�

�Right here, right now. Just like the other night.�

�What?�

�Rough, rough. Make me fight you, hurt me a little.�

I got it then, and it was like having cold water splashed on the back of my neck. I said, �Jesus.�

�What are you waiting for? Come on!�

Just like the other night, I thought. Out here in the vineyards. That was the big attraction for her, that was what all those looks had meant on Thursday and at The Boar�s Head on Friday and this afternoon at the fest. Make me fight you, hurt me a little. All the eagerness and all the desire went out of me; I released her wrists and pushed up onto my feet.

I said, �No. No way.�

She sat on her knees on the hard ground and stared up at me; the wildness faded out of her expression, the intensity faded, and what was left was bewilderment. Thickly she said, �What�s the matter with you?�

�I�m not into rough stuff. If that�s the impression you got of me the other night you couldn�t be more wrong.�

Silence at first while she came to terms with what I was telling her. Then things happened in her face, giving it a bunched, masklike appearance for an instant, and she called me something obscene that I was not and never would be. I thought I was going to have to deal with savage outrage � only she surprised me on that score too. As soon as the one word was out of her mouth, her features smoothed and her lips quirked upward at one corner in a wry smile. She got slowly to her feet.

�You like your sex all cozy and cuddly in bed, is that it?� she said. �Strictly missionary position, right?�

�Not exactly. But you�ve got the idea.�

�Then that�s your tough luck, big man. I stopped liking it cozy and cuddly the first time my ex-husband raped me.�

�I�m sorry.�

�For me? Bullshit. Different strokes for different folks.�

�If you like it that way, why did you fight me the other night when you thought I was a rapist?�

�You were a stranger then,� she said, as if that explained it.

The other night. Out here in the vineyards.

The thought made me frown because it kept replaying at the back of my mind. Out here in the vineyards; just like the other night. Then something else jarred in my memory, and all at once I was hearing Frank Hastings�s voice on the telephone this afternoon, saying to me at the tag end of our conversation, �Just take it easy out in those vineyards this time. No more nighttime wrestling matches.�

But how had Hastings known about what happened between Shelly and me on Thursday night? I hadn�t told him; I had not told anyone.

I said abruptly, �Shelly, did you tell anybody about the other night? About us, about what happened with us?�

The sudden shift of the questions made her blink. And then she misread my reason for asking them. Her smile curled up at the other corner of her mouth: contempt mixed with the wryness. �Worried about your reputation?�

�No. Listen, did you tell anybody?�

�No, I didn�t tell anybody.�

So how did Hastings know?

Unless�

Sure. The only other person who could have known, who could have seen me wrestling with Shelly, was the man I had been chasing � the man who had attacked Alex. And if that man had accidentally let a comment slip to Hastings at some time during his investigation, and Hastings could remember who it was�

I looked at Shelly for a moment. I did not condemn her for her sexual preferences; I had no right to judge her morality. But she was judging me, all right � hating me a little with her eyes as she had that other time in the vineyards. We had come full circle: we had no more relationship now than we�d had before I mistook her for Alex�s assailant.

So there was nothing to say to her except good night; I said that and then turned and made my way back between the rows of vines. She had one last thing to say, though, and she said it to my back. �Big man,� she said, but with different meaning and different inflection than any of the times before.

From the top of the hill where the dirt-and-gravel secondary road crested through the line of eucalyptus trees, I had my first look at what was in the shallow valley beyond. Six small cottage-type buildings, set well apart from each other in random arrangement, all but two of them showing light. More rolling acres of vineyards silhouetted against the cloudy black sky. A continuation of the road I was on, winding past the cottages and out of sight across the brow of another hill.

There was nobody on the road as I took my car down it toward the cottages. There had not been anybody in the vineyards on the other side either, or out around the winery buildings. I wondered if Shelly had gone back to her guest quarters here. Even though Paul Rosten was uppermost in my mind, I had not quite forgotten about her and what had happened a little while ago. The incident had left me with a vague undercurrent of depression, but I did not know if that was because of the discovery we lived in two separate worlds with no common ground, or simply because I had not gotten laid. Genuine regret or wounded male ego?

The hell with it. I concentrated on Rosten.

He could have been the man I had chased on Thursday, all right. He had come to the cellar later, with the Cappellanis and Brand and Dockstetter, but he could have doubled back to the house through the eucalyptus and through the vineyards; there had been enough time for him to do that and to catch his breath while I was struggling with Shelly. But what motive could he have for bashing Alex over the head? The two of them seemed to get along well enough, and I had not heard anything about bad blood between them. There evidently had been bad blood between Rosten and Jason Booker, if what I had overheard Brand say in The Boar�s Head was factual, which made it possible that Rosten had been the one to hire Mal Howard to dispose of Booker. But then if Rosten had bludgeoned Alex, why hadn�t he taken care of Booker himself? Another thing: Rosten did not strike me as the type of man to go around hiring hardcases like Howard; he was a follower, it seemed to me, not a leader. So was somebody else behind it all � somebody who gave orders to both Howard and Rosten and who, for whatever melodramatic reason, was known as �Twospot�?

I gave it up; I just did not know enough facts to begin fitting things together into a coherent pattern.

When I got down to the nearest of the cottages my headlights picked up the figure of a heavy-set man sitting on the porch steps, smoking a cigarette. I recognized him as the assistant winemaker, a guy named Boylan; Alex had introduced me to him earlier, during our tour of the winery. I had no idea which of the cottages belonged to Rosten, so I parked near Boylan�s place and went over to him to find out.

He was listening to pop music on a portable radio, and he shut down the volume long enough to answer my question. Rosten�s cottage, he said, was the last one on the east, the one with the oak growing in the front yard. I thanked him and moved along in that direction � and I could feel myself starting to tense up as I went.

Maybe bearding Rosten this way was a good idea, and maybe it wasn�t. It might have been better if I stayed where I could keep a close eye on Alex tonight and then had my confrontation with Rosten in the morning. But if Rosten was a threat, I wanted to know it as soon as possible. And I had checked Alex again before I left the house: he�d still been asleep. If anything else was going to happen to him, I could not believe it would happen while he was in his own bed.

So all right, I thought. I�m here, let�s see what goes down.

Rosten�s place was somewhat larger and set farther back than the rest; it was porchless, built of framewood anchored on a two-foot stone foundation. A dented, dark-colored Ford pick-up sat off to one side, and on the other side was what looked to be a small vegetable garden dominated by tomato vines. The oak tree was big and leafy and threw heavy shadows over the packed-dirt walk that led up in front. Light glowed behind a shaded window to the left of the door; the window was open a foot or so.

I came up to the door without making any noise: because I had learned to walk softly while I was on the cops and because of the packed ground, rather than with any conscious intent at silence. The night was quiet too, hushed except for the faint droning of insects and the distant rise and fall of music from Boylan�s radio. Both of those things � my silent approach, the night�s stillness � kept Rosten from hearing me and at the same time let me hear him when his voice said suddenly from inside, muted but distinct, �This is Paul. I�ve been trying to get you for the past five minutes.�

I came to a standstill two feet from the door. My first thought was that he had company, but then I realized he must have just called someone on the telephone � the bloody telephone again. Unlike the pulp detectives, I don�t make a habit of eavesdropping; but this was a special case. I stayed where I was and listened.

�Do you still want me to go ahead?� Rosten�s voice said.

Pause.

�I just don�t like it, that�s all. What if something else goes wrong?�

Pause.

�I know that. Don�t you think I know that?�

Pause.

�When?�

Pause.

�What about that private detective?�

Pause.

�All right. Yes � I understand.�

There was another moment of silence and then a banging, ringing noise, the kind a phone handset makes when it�s slammed down into its cradle. As soon as I heard that I made a half-turn and eased backward and at an angle through the deeper shadows of the oak, putting its thick trunk between me and the cottage.

The muscles in my chest and stomach were knotted up: apprehension, urgency. There was little enough doubt in my mind now that Rosten was Thursday night�s attacker. What I had just listened to did not have to mean anything ominous, but that was the way I had read it; instinct told me Rosten and whoever had been on the other end of the line were talking about another attempt on Alex�s life � and soon, maybe tonight. So there was nothing to be gained in my confronting him now; he would only deny guilt � or maybe even make a try for me, too, when my back was turned. There was no way of telling how dangerous he was, how desperate the motives were behind all of this. My obligation was to Alex; I had to alert him, convince him to leave here as quickly as possible, stash him somewhere safe, and then take my suspicions to the police and let them worry about breaking the truth out of Rosten.

I stepped out of the yard, still in shadow, and broke into a run toward the road, onto it. The front door to Rosten�s cottage remained closed. I ran up to where I had left my car, started the engine, swung into a U-turn, and headed back up the hill. There was still nothing to see behind me when I cleared the crest and started through the trees.

When I drove past the deserted cellar buildings to where the house lane intersected the road, a car was just coming out: Leo�s Lincoln Continental, with Leo alone at the wheel. He raised a hand to me as he made the turn, heading toward the Silverado Trail. I let him go; with his supercilious attitude, there was nothing I could expect him to do except get in the way.

I left the car half on the parking area and half on the road and hurried inside the house. Cold silence greeted me; you could have heard insects crawling in there. I went up the stairs two at a time, bypassed my room, caught the knob on Alex�s door, and pushed inside.

And came to an abrupt stop because the bed was empty, the room was empty.

Alex was gone.

It was a good two minutes before the reaction faded and I was all right again. When the sweating stopped and my hands were still I went around to the front of the car to look at the damage. Both fenders and the grill were pretty mangled; the bumper had been torn loose on one side and was hanging at a wobbly angle. The tires were okay. The left fender was buckled down to within an inch of that tire, but the clearance was enough so that it would not scrape against the tread when the car was rolling.

Pain lanced through my chest as I straightened up, made me wince until it went away. I felt my ribs and my breastbone, but there seemed to be no damage beyond a couple of bruises; I could breathe almost normally now, without coughing. I walked to the driver�s door and slid in under the wheel. Alex started to get in on the passenger side, but I waved him away. We were not going anywhere yet � and maybe not for a while if the engine failed to start.

The first three times I turned the key in the ignition, nothing happened except a grinding stutter. The fourth time, though, it caught and held and seemed to sound healthy enough. I put the transmission into reverse and eased backward away from the pool. The car was drivable, all right, if only for the distance between here and the winery.

I shut off the engine, got out and went around to where Alex was. He seemed to be coming out of it a little now; there was animation in his face and his eyes had lost their glazed look. He said, �Where did you come from? How did you know we were here?�

�I saw Rosten take you out of the cellar and I followed you.�

�God, I thought I was dead. You saved my life again.�

�That�s what you�re paying me for,� I said bitterly. �Listen, did Rosten tell you anything, give you any explanations?�

�No. He didn�t say a word the whole time � not a word.�

�What happened at the cellar?�

�He just came in and pointed that gun at me and shoved me outside. I�ve known him all my life, but he was like a stranger, a crazy man. I was� Jesus, I was petrified.�

I said nothing. I was thinking that we could wait here for the sheriff�s people to show up, but it might take an hour or better for them to come and find us and I did not care much for the idea of sitting here with Rosten and Alex for that length of time. Which meant transporting Rosten back to the winery. Alex was in no condition to drive or to hold a man at bay with a gun; the only safe way to do it, I decided, was to put Rosten in the trunk.

I got the key out of the ignition, took it around to the rear, and unlocked the trunk and raised the lid. Just as I did that Alex shouted, �He�s moving over there!�

Quickly I stepped out to where I could see Rosten. But he was not moving much � just twitches and spasms of his limbs. �Take it easy,� I said to Alex, �he�s not going to give us any more trouble.�

I took the Magnum out of my pocket, held it down along my right leg, and walked over to Rosten. The twitches and spasms were giving way to more normal movements, a sign of returning consciousness. I stopped a couple of feet from him, heard him make a groaning sound. Then his body stiffened and was still again � and that told me he was awake and functioning mentally, remembering where he was and what had happened.

�Get up on your feet, Rosten,� I said.

He stayed where he was, motionless.

�Get up or I�ll put a bullet in you.�

That was bluff, but he did not know me nearly well enough to realize it. Another three seconds passed, and then he rolled over slowly and with evident pain and stared up at me out of cold, blank eyes. No hatred, no frustration � no emotion of any kind.

He said thickly, �I can�t walk. My ankle�s sprained.�

�You can hobble. Get up.�

He got up, putting all his weight on his right let. I heard Alex approach behind me and to my right, heard him say to Rosten, �For Christ�s sake, why? Why do you want me dead?�

Rosten did not even look at him; he was watching the gun.

I told him where to go and what to do, and he went there and did it. No argument or hestitation; he just climbed into the trunk, grimacing at the pain in his leg, and curled himself into a half-fetal position around my spare tire. His eyes never left the gun; you could see him wanting it the way an alcoholic wants a drink.

I reached out and up with my left hand, caught the trunk lid � and said quickly and sharply, �Who gave you your orders on the phone tonight, Rosten? Was it Twospot?�

It was a shot out of left field, but a pretty good one. He reacted: even in the darkness I could see his head jerk, emotion ripple across his face, his eyes flick upward from the gun to meet mine. Then the mask came down again; he looked back at the gun and kept looking at it stoically until I slammed the lid to lock him in.

Alex said, �Twospot? You know what it means?�

�No, but Rosten does. And maybe you�ve got some idea.�

He shook his head. �I told you, I can�t remember where I heard it before.�

�Well, try � and keep on trying. Rosten�s not alone in this thing, and that means you�re not out of the woods yet.�

He fixed me with an alarmed stare. �Are you sure Rosten isn�t the only one?�

�Sure enough. You heard what I said to him; I overheard his end of that conversation.�

Alex said something sacrilegious in a nervous voice, but I did not bother to respond to it. I pushed him toward the passenger door, went around and took the wheel. And took us away from there.

I had to drive slowly with the lights broken and the front end in the shape it was; the car made a lot of noise but showed no signs of wanting to quit. Alex sat over against his door with his head in his hands, doing what I had told him to do: trying to remember about Twospot. I did not hold out much hope that he would get anywhere, in his condition.

But he surprised me, and probably himself. We were back into the vineyards, on the long rumpled section of terrain, when he said abruptly, �I�ve got it.�

I glanced over at him. �Got what?�

�Twospot. I remember now, I know where I heard it.�

�All right � where?�

�A dinner party down in the city, at the town house. It was Booker who said it.�

�Booker? In what context?�

�I can�t remember that. It was after dinner and we were having brandy in the living room. He said something like, �How�s the big Twospot project coming? You know, the one a week from Monday at noon.� �

�Who was he talking to?�

�I think it was Leo.�

�Who else was there?�

�Rosa. Brand and Dockstetter. But they didn�t hear it. They were on the other side of the room.�

�What was Leo�s reaction?�

�I�m not sure. I was only half paying attention.�

Twospot project, I thought. Monday at noon. And I remembered something myself, something from this afternoon. �Monday-noon project,� I said. �So that was what you meant at the fest.�

�Fest?�

�You said something to Leo about it while we were eating.�

�Did I?� He shook his head numbly. �I don�t remember.�

I was silent for a time, thinking. Then I asked him, �Why were you down at the cellar tonight? Did Rosten call you to meet him there?�

�No,� Alex said. �Leo woke me up and asked me to go down. He needed a statistical report prepared on our generic�� He stopped suddenly, as if the rest of the sentence had gotten clogged in his throat. When I glanced over at him again I saw that his face had twisted up and he looked even sicker than before. �Oh my God,� he said. �You don�t think Leo could be�?�

�I don�t think anything yet,� I said, but that was a lie. I was thinking Leo, all right � and something else occurred to me, a possible way to confirm my suspicions against him. It meant stopping at Rosten�s cottage, and unless the county police were already on the scene I would do just that on my own.

Alex had his head in his hands again; I let him alone with his thoughts. There was a kind of grim excitement inside me now, the sort that a cop feels sometimes when a case is about to break wide open. Things were beginning to make a certain sense to me: the random bits and pieces of this affair finally starting to slot together, like in those intelligence-test puzzles where you have to put multi-shaped blocks of wood into correspondingly shaped holes.

I began to work with the pieces as I drove. Leo has some sort of big and no doubt unlawful project going for noon tomorrow; Rosten is in it with him, and maybe Mal Howard too. And Booker? No. Booker had not gotten along with either Leo or Rosten, I had testimony to that. And he was a loner, a small-time opportunist looking to marry Rosa Cappellani. Blackmail? That added up: blackmail would fit Booker�s personality well enough. Figure, then, that he found out somehow about the project and put the screws to Leo. Maybe mentioned it to him in front of Alex at that dinner party to goad Leo, push him into paying off.

Only Leo isn�t having any of that; the project is too important to him and maybe he doesn�t trust Booker, and in any case he was the kind who would never stand still for blackmail. So he decides Booker has to die � and that Alex has to die too, because he�s afraid that Alex will tip himself to the project and jeopardize it. Which made Leo a sick, coldhearted son of a bitch, plotting the death of his own brother. But there are people like that in the world, too damned many of them; and it could be, too, that his evident dislike for Alex had evolved into a homicidal hatred. Whatever his exact motivations, he marks both Booker and Alex for execution.

On Thursday night he sends Rosten after Alex at the cellar. But wait, why not Booker first? Booker would be the logical first choice because he presented the major threat to the project. Unless Booker was also slated to die on Thursday. Unless Rosten was supposed to literally kill two birds with one stone: knock Alex out, take him away from the cellar to a prearranged meeting with Booker, and then eliminate both of them at once, maybe make it look like an accident. That would explain why I had heard Rosten dragging Alex�s body across the office floor. And why Booker had showed up in his car after the police arrived, looking agitated and perplexed: he could have been waiting for Rosten to come, could have been waiting for the promised blackmail payoff.

Okay, so far so good. Booker goes back to San Francisco after getting permission from Rosa to stay in the family town house. Figure he calls Leo and demands his payoff Friday night. So Leo sends Mal Howard to keep that appointment � not Rosten because Rosten has already fouled up once with Alex. Gives Howard the slip of paper with the address and the Twospot name typed on it. It would follow that Howard was not supposed to leave Booker�s body in the town house, because of the attention it would call to the Cappellani family; it could be he was to kill Booker and then take the body elsewhere and dump it. Only Booker is on his guard by this time and he�s packing a gun for protection; after a struggle during which he rips Howard�s pocket, Booker manages to wound Howard before Howard can finish him with a blow from the homemade blackjack. And Howard then panics and runs, leaving Booker and the Twospot note on the garage floor.

Leo has to be beside himself by then: two bungled jobs in two nights. But because Howard�s wound is superficial, Leo gives him another chance on Saturday: take care of Alex at Virginia Davis�s apartment on Greenwich Street. It was logical that Leo would be aware of Alex�s girlfriend and where she lived, and reason out that Alex might hole up there.

Now � today. Time is getting short; Monday noon is almost here. After three bungled jobs, maybe Leo doesn�t want to run the risk of ordering yet another try for Alex; too many things have happened already to focus police attention on the Cappellanis, and I�ve been hired to act as Alex�s bodyguard. But then, at the fest, Alex makes his comment about Monday-noon projects, and Leo decides he can�t take the chance of Alex remembering about Twospot and endangering his project. So he orders Rosten to kill Alex tonight; Rosten doesn�t like it, but for whatever reasons he goes along with it. Leo waits until he�s sure I�m out of the way � heading over to Rosten�s place, though he couldn�t have anticipated that � and then goes into Alex�s room and wakes him up and sends him down to the cellar. Which was what he told Rosten on the phone. The idea, again, is for Alex to just disappear: Rosten is supposed to take him to that backhill spot at the end of this road, shoot him, and hide the body somewhere so that there�s not another immediate murder investigation to threaten tomorrow�s project.

It was a pretty good scenario. Whether or not it was wholly accurate was up to the police to find out after I gave him to them.

But the primary question still had no answer: what was this project of Leo�s? What sort of project is big enough, important enough, to trigger a mad chain of murder and secrecy? What sort of project demands a melodramatic code name like Twospot�?

Light shimmered against the sky ahead of us, beyond the second hill from the cottages � another car approaching. The county police? But I did not hear sirens, and the light over there was yellow-white, not the red of dome flashers.

Alex sat forward tensely: he had noticed the lights too. I took the car up to the top of the hill, and from there I could see the outlines of the oncoming car behind the headlamp glare. It was not a sheriff�s cruiser; it was just a car, too far away and too indistinct to be recognizable, traveling at a good clip.

When the driver saw us the car slowed, and I slowed, and we both pulled over to opposite sides of the road and braked alongside each other. The driver was the guy I had talked to earlier, Boylan, and Mrs. Cappellani was leaning across the seat beside him. She called something to Alex with relief in her voice, and Boylan began asking questions, and Alex chattered something about Rosten. I put an end to the confusion by saying, �There�s no sense trying to talk here, follow us to Rosten�s cottage,� and then hitting the accelerator again.

In the rear-vision mirror I watched Boylan�s car swing into an abrupt U-turn and come after us. Then I gave my attention to the road until we were over the next hill and approaching the cottages. There was still no sign of the police. If Mrs. Cappellani had alerted any others besides Boylan, they were not out and around here either; all the cottages except Boylan�s were dark and the area was deserted.

I turned off the road beside Rosten�s place and cut the engine and the lights, and we got out. Boylan parked behind us. I said to Alex, �You take care of the explanations. I�m going inside.�

Without waiting for an answer or for Boylan and Rosa to come up, I left him and went to the cottage and tried the door. It was unlocked. I fumbled around on the wall inside, found a light switch, and flipped it.

As far as I could see in the pale glow of a ceiling globe the place had a living room, a bedroom, a bathroom, and a kitchenette. It was outfitted like a monk�s cell: neat, clean, with no more than five pieces of furniture in the living room and bedroom combined. On the far wall was an open rack that held rifles, a shotgun, and four handguns on wooden mounting pegs. Near the front window was a small table empty except for a portable radio and the telephone.

I made straight for the phone and looked at the row of buttons on its base. One of those buttons was depressed, the one with the numerals 116 below it. The number Dymo-labeled across the dial � Rosten�s number � was 208.

Turning, I crossed back to the doorway and stepped outside again. Alex and his mother were standing close together near my car � about as close together as they had ever been, I thought � and they were talking animatedly. Boylan was off to one side of them, looking bewildered. I caught his eye, gestured for him to come over to where I was.

When he did that I said, �The phones here � how does the intercom system work?�

He gave me a blank look. �The phones?�

�If I want to call your place from here, what do I do? Push the button with your number on it?�

�Yeah. But I don�t��

�Whose extension number is one sixteen?�

�Mr. Cappellani�s,� Boylan said. �Leo�s. His room over at the main house��

He was going to say something else, ask me questions, but I pivoted away from him and went back inside. All right, I was thinking, so that confirms it: it was Leo I overheard Rosten talking to. But it wasn�t hard evidence; I had no hard evidence of any kind to give the police when they came. Unless there was something here in Rosten�s effects that would point conclusively to Leo. Or something here that would give me an idea of what the Monday-noon project was.

I searched the living room first, quickly and easily because of its spartan furnishings. Nothing � no notes, no papers of any kind. Then I went into the bedroom and rummaged around in the dresser. Nothing. The only other thing in there besides the bed was a closet; I opened that up, looked through it.

And that was where I found them, in a box on the upper shelf.

Pamphlets � a dozen of them, all privately printed. Pamphlets with titles like Castro�s Rape of the World and The Cuban Octopus: Tentacles of Destruction and Fidel Castro and the Communist Conspiracy.

I stood there holding them in my hands, and the hackles began to rise on my neck. From outside, finally, I heard the first tentative wail of sirens � an eerie, unreal sound in the stillness that added to the chill forming along my back.

Castro, I thought.

The newspaper article I read last week: Castro was due to arrive in San Francisco on Monday, tomorrow, just another stop on his goodwill tour of American cities. Monday. At noon.

And Rosten had inflammatory right-wing literature in his closet. And Frank Cappellani had been a right-wing reactionary. And if Leo did not take after his mother at all, if he was his father�s son�

Twospot and the Monday-noon project.

The sirens got louder outside. I could wait for the police, but if I did that they might want full explanations before they took action, got in touch with Hastings. Time. It was after eleven now, it was almost Monday. Hastings had to be told and he had to be told immediately. If I was right � Jesus, if I was right � he had less than thirteen hours to find Leo and prevent what could turn into the most devastating political assassination since the murder of John F. Kennedy.

I threw the pamphlets back into the closet and ran out of there to the phone.

Softly swearing, I hung up the phone and looked at the bedside clock. The time was one-twenty A.M. I sank back on my pillow, groaned, and allowed my eyes to close. For a moment I lay motionless. Beside me, Ann stirred drowsily. I heard her murmuring, then felt her drawing close to me, snuggling up.

�Have you got to go out?� Her voice was husky, sleepthickened. As she spoke, I felt her foot touch mine. Now her toes began a slow, sensuous movement up the calf of my leg. If I was weighing a decision, she was trying to tip the balance.

�Hmmm?� Her hand touched the top of my hip, moved slowly across my stomach, then up to my chest. My body was responding, rippling to a slow, erotic pulsing of desire. My genitals were tightening.

I groaned again. �That�s not fair.�

�Hmmm.� Her hand was high on my chest � and now descending.

Quickly I turned to her, kissed her hard, drew the full, warm length of her body close against mine � and pushed her away.

�You�re shameless, you know that?�

�Hmmm.� Lasciviously.

I kissed her again with firm finality, then turned to the phone and reluctantly began dialing.

�Who�re you calling?�

�Friedman. I�ve got to.�

�Oh. Pete.� As she said it, I felt her forefinger on my spine, playfully moving up � then down. Ann and Pete were friends. So she would tease me while I talked to him.

Surprisingly, Friedman answered on the first ring.

�It�s Frank. Sorry.�

He sighed: a long, deeply resigned exhalation. �I just walked in the house. Just this minute.�

�Trouble?�

�With the Secret Service and the FBI and all the other goddamn agencies of the federal government. Not to mention the Cubans. They don�t listen. They�re amiable enough. But they don�t listen.�

�The FBI doesn�t listen, either.�

He snorted. Then: �What�s happened?�

�I�ve got more trouble for you. For Castro, too, maybe.�

�What�re you talking about?�

Detail by detail, as concisely as possible I repeated the conversation I�d just finished with Bill. Friedman was silent for a moment. Then, softly and earnestly, he began to swear. As I listened, I rolled over on my back. Giggling, Ann began kissing my ear. Finally I heard Friedman say:

�You know these people � Leo, and the rest of them. What d�you think?�

�I think we�ve got to take it seriously. We�ve got to find Leo. Fast.�

�I�m glad you said �we,� � he answered dryly. �If that�s an offer to help, I accept.�

�It�s an offer.�

�What about Bill? Do you think he�s got his facts straight?�

�You know him better than I do,� I countered. �What d�you think?�

He sighed again. �I think he�s probably got his facts straight.�

�So what now?�

�Does Leo live in San Francisco?�

�Yes. But I don�t know where. I talked to him in his office.�

�Why don�t you come over here? I�ll find out where he lives. We can go from here.�

�Right.�

�Let�s take that,� Friedman said, pointing to a cruiser parked in his driveway.

�That�s against regulations, taking a cruiser home.�

�Since I�ve only been home for approximately forty minutes, I guess I�m clean.�

I waited until he wedged his two hundred forty pounds beneath the steering wheel before I asked, �Where�s Leo live?�

�Sea Cliff,� Friedman grunted. �Thirty-second Avenue, north of Lake Street.� He backed out of the driveway and turned north, driving smoothly, at a moderate speed. Even in hot pursuit, Friedman never seemed to hurry. But he was usually first on the scene.

I switched on the radio, turning the volume down. �Do you have a codeword for the Castro security thing?� I asked.

�Yes. Counterpunch.�

�That�s pretty catchy. Your idea?�

�Of course.� He yawned.

�You want me to drive? At least I got two hours� sleep. You can close your eyes.�

�Frankly,� Friedman said, �I�d rather have no sleep than two hours� sleep. Besides, as soon as Castro leaves town � tonight, that is, at ten forty-five � I�m going to leave town, too. For three days� fun in the sun. Except that, the way I feel now, we may stay a week.�

�Where�re you going?�

�San Diego. Clara�s aunt has a place there, on the beach. She�s in Europe.�

�Have you got Leo�s house under surveillance?� I asked.

�Naturally.�

�Did you call the FBI?�

�No.�

I looked at him. �Why not?�

�Because, if Leo should happen to be home, playing the part of the innocent industrialist, one of two things might happen. One, he might have an explanation for everything, which would make us look silly, especially if we�d called the FBI, our natural enemies. Or, two, we might get lucky and foil an assassination attempt single-handed. Which would make us heroes. Plus it would also confound the FBI, our natural enemies.�

�I doubt that he�ll give us an explanation. More likely, he�ll refuse to give us an explanation, and start raising hell, and call his lawyer. He�ll try to run over us. That�s his style.�

�A real honcho, eh?�

�Yes.�

We drove for a few moments in silence before Friedman ventured: �It�s too bad that you had to waste Howard. If he�d fingered Leo, we�d have our case, no sweat.�

Remembering the sound of Howard�s head hitting the rocks, I didn�t reply.

�I�m wondering how Howard fits into all of this,� Friedman said.

�I think it�s obvious,� I answered. �He was a hired gun. He was probably hired to kill Castro. Then, when Booker uncovered the assassination plot, Howard was hired to kill Booker. Bill thinks Booker tried to blackmail Leo, threatening to blow the whistle on the plot. From what I know of Booker, I think it�s a pretty good theory.�

�How�d Alex get mixed up in all this?�

�Alex overheard Booker and Leo talking about it � about something Leo and Rosten are �planning� for today. That�s why Leo ordered Alex killed.�

�I wonder whether Leo�s had time to hire another triggerman,� Friedman mused. He turned left on Twenty-fifth Avenue. In ten minutes, we would arrive at Sea Cliff.

�I don�t know,� I answered. �Which is precisely the reason I think you should call the FBI. They should be interrogating Rosten right this minute. He�s the only real leverage we�ve got. We�ve got him dirty. He might talk. And, God knows, we need all the information we can get.�

�It doesn�t sound like Rosten�s much of a talker,� Friedman answered laconically.

�Still, we�ve got to try.� I turned to him, saying heatedly, �You�re just being goddamn foolish, Pete, not calling the FBI. This private feud you�ve got going with them is going to cost you one of these days.�

�Let�s see what happens at Leo�s house.�

�But, Christ, minutes might count.�

Amused, he glanced at me aside. �The older you get, the more you�re developing a talent for turning dramatic phrases, you know that? Some of them are a little trite, maybe. But, altogether, I think it�s a step in the right direction. When I first knew you, I thought you were a little too taciturn.�

�And the older you get, the more stubborn you get.�

�What time does Castro get in town, anyhow?� I asked truculently.

�Eleven A.M.� Grimacing now, Friedman glanced at his watch. �Exactly eight and a half hours from now.�

�What�s his schedule?�

�He�s flying in from Dallas, on a commercial jet. He lands at eleven, like I said. He�ll have a press conference in the VIP lounge, which is supposed to end at eleven-thirty. From there, he drives to City Hall.�

�Will there be a parade?�

�No,� Friedman answered. �Just a motorcade. He�ll get off the Bayshore Freeway at Seventh Street, and travel down Bryant to the Embarcadero. He�ll drive through the Embarcadero Center and the Golden Gateway, and then go south on Montgomery Street, through the financial district. He�ll go west on California, then south on Polk Street. He�ll drive down Polk directly to the City Hall, where his honor will be waiting on the steps. As I understand it, they�ll have the blue carpet out � not the red. That�s because Castro�s a commie, as I get it.�

�Will he have an open car?�

�No. It won�t be a parade situation. He�s scheduled to travel at twenty-five miles an hour, once he gets off the freeway. Beginning at Montgomery and California, the intersections will be held open for him. They don�t anticipate any crowds along the streets, though. Not until he gets to the Civic Center.�

�What�s the rest of his day?�

�The usual. Lunch at the Commonwealth Club, followed by a speech. An appearance at the Press Club, dinner at the Bohemian Club. It�s a pretty tight schedule. He hasn�t even booked rooms at a hotel. At ten forty-five, he leaves for Los Angeles, where he�ll spend the night.� He turned right on Lake Street.

�If he�s going to get killed,� I said, �it�ll probably be on his way from the airport, or at City Hall.�

�Right.� He turned left on Thirty-second Avenue. �My main concern is City Hall. The mayor will say his standard few words on the steps, and Castro will probably say several words. There�ll be a crowd. Maybe an unfriendly crowd. Or, at least, there�ll be protesters. Which will make a confusing situation. Which I don�t like.�

We passed through the two brick pillars that marked the entrance to Sea Cliff, one of the city�s most pretentious subdivisions. Built on the highlands overlooking San Francisco Bay and situated on the seaward side of the Golden Gate narrows, Sea Cliff was a part of the ocean�s shoreline panorama. Here, the nights were always foggy. The fog smelled of salt and water and the pungent odor of marine life.

I pointed to a large two-story brick house, checked the address Friedman had scrawled on an envelope and said, �There it is � Leo�s house.�

Friedman got out of the cruiser and looked balefully at the steep flight of stairs leading up to Lynda Foster�s apartment.

�These goddamn hill dwellers,� he groaned. �For a view, they kill themselves. Us, too.�

Potrero Hill had always been the working man�s Telegraph Hill, overlooking the warehouses and factories and switchyards of San Francisco�s industrial area. Behind a confusion of railroad tracks and corrugated iron buildings towered the enormous cranes and gantries of the city�s shipyards. The Bay was beyond, with the Oakland hills in the background. In recent years the real estate boom had burst over Potrero Hill. The old, tired houses had been bought by speculators, skillfully cut up into tastefully decorated apartments and rented as view property at inflated prices.

�Come on,� I said, leading the way. �It�s three-fifteen, for God�s sake. We�ve got to find him.�

Friedman groaned again, and began heavily climbing the stairs.

�Do you think one of us should be covering the back?� I asked over my shoulder.

�Probably,� Friedman gasped, laboring behind me. �Except that I don�t think there is a back. Not on this hill.�

When I finally reached the upper landing and rang the bell, I was secretly gratified to see Friedman stopped midway up the last flight of stairs. He was holding to the railing, heavily panting and helplessly shaking his head.

�Jesus,� he muttered. �Sweet Jesus.�

As he said it, a light came on inside the apartment. With a peony-printed sheet wrapped around her, a girl was coming quickly toward me down a short, cluttered hallway. She moved easily, eagerly. She was expecting someone � but not the police. I watched her stop short when she saw my stranger�s face, then watched her mouth come open when she saw my badge. She was a tall, slim girl with sharp features and a leggy, lithe figure under the sheet.

�Just a minute,� she called through the door. �Wait a minute.� She quickly retraced her steps, disappearing into a rear room. A moment later she reappeared, this time wrapped in a Japanese kimono. After a brief, noisy struggle with a nightchain and a deadbolt, she wrenched the door open.

�Miss Foster? Lynda Foster?�

�Right.� She nodded decisively, tossing her hair in a loose blond whirl around her face. �What is it? What�s happened?� It was a quick, avid question. She was looking for excitement.

�Nothing�s happened. Are you alone?�

�Sure.� Her dark, lively eyes darted between Friedman and me as she mischievously smiled. �Why?�

I decided to gamble: �But you were expecting Leo Cappellani. Weren�t you?� As I asked the question, I stepped into the hallway, followed by Friedman. With the door closed, the three of us touched the walls as we stood facing each other. My foot struck something that tipped. Glancing down, I saw a shallow pan filled with kitty litter. Most of the litter had spilled on the floor.

�Sorry,� I said.

�That�s all right. It happens all the time,� she said cheerfully. �Are you looking for Leo?�

�Why do you think we�re looking for Leo?� Friedman asked.

�Because that�s what you seem to be doing. Looking for Leo.�

�Is he here?� I asked.

�Nope.�

�Has he been here tonight?�

�Nope.�

�Are you expecting him?�

She shrugged. �Who knows? What time is it, anyhow?�

�About three-thirty.�

�Then I�m probably not expecting him.�

�Do you mind if we look around?�

�Not if you don�t mind telling me why you�re looking,� she answered promptly.

�I�m afraid we do mind, though,� Friedman said, moving past her. �Regulations, you know.�

I helped Lynda Foster clean up the kitty litter while Friedman searched the apartment. Five minutes later we climbed back inside the cruiser. I checked in with Communications while Friedman sat glumly behind the steering wheel, rubbing his eyes.

�What do you think about Lynda?� I asked.

�I think she�s exactly what she seems,� he answered. �She�s an aging flower child who�s getting smart enough to let men with money pay the rent and buy her pretty things.�

�Maybe we should have interrogated her more��

�Interrogations take time,� he answered wearily. �And we don�t have much. I don�t think she can help us. Besides, Leo�s wife convinced me.�

�Convinced you of what?�

�Convinced me that he�s going to try to kill Castro. It all makes sense, when you think about it. Everything adds up. Booker found out about the plan and got himself killed for his trouble. And Alex almost got himself killed for the same reason.� His voice was hoarse with fatigue. Still digging his fingers into his eyes, he sat silently for a moment. Then he said, �I�m beginning to think that Leo might just be as nutty as his nutty wife. Different nutty, of course � like Hitler was nutty, say. But still nutty. And it�s the nuts that do these assassinations. Like Leo and Rosten. They hire a triggerman � Mal Howard � and they�re in business. Or they get someone to do it for love, like Lee Harvey Oswald.� He started the engine, put the car in gear and pulled away from the curb.

�So what now?� I asked.

�So now we find Leo. That silver Lincoln with the black leather top should simplify the problem. But first, we find an all-night gas station.�

�Do you have to go to the bathroom?�

�No. I�ve got to call the FBI. Our natural enemies.�

I�d expected to find Leo Cappellani a different-looking, different-acting man than I�d confronted two days earlier. I was wrong. He was just as impeccably dressed, just as clean-shaven, just as clear-eyed and alert. Wherever he�d been last night, he�d gotten some sleep.

Stressing the �lieutenant,� I introduced Friedman. If Leo was disconcerted, facing two ranking officers, he gave no sign. Instead, he gestured us to chairs, smiling as he resumed his seat behind his rosewood desk. Looking at him closely, I was sure his white shirt was fresh. His sharkskin suit was unwrinkled. His tie was crisply knotted.

�I understand,� he said, �that you � yourself � killed Booker�s murderer, Lieutenant.� As he said it, he smiled at me. It was a wide, affable smile. When he chose, Leo could be charming.

I let a long, deliberate beat pass before I asked, �Who told you that I killed him?� I wanted to throw him off balance � wanted him to wonder whether the details of Howard�s death had been in the papers.

But his answer came easily, plausibly: �Alex told me Saturday night.� As he spoke, Leo�s dark, vivid eyes held my own, as if to encourage my questions. Today, he was on our side.

�What time did you leave the winery last night, Mr. Cappellani?� I asked.

His muscular shoulders rose as he gracefully shrugged. �It was about ten-thirty, I guess. Maybe ten-fifteen.� Now the smile slowly faded, replaced by a friendly, puzzled frown. If he was trying to project an innocent man�s perplexity, his portrayal was flawless. �Why? Why do you want to know? Is something wrong?�

For the first time, Friedman spoke: �I gather that you haven�t talked to anyone at the winery since ten-fifteen last night, then. Your mother or anyone else. Is that right?�

Leo turned to Friedman and took a long, deliberate moment to study him. Then: �That�s right, Lieutenant Friedman. But my question still stands. Why�re you asking?� As he spoke, his voice lowered to a deeper, more purposeful note. Resting before him on the rosewood desk, his fingers tightened into loose fists. His eyes narrowed as he studied us. The smile was gone � permanently. The message was clear: he was a busy man. He�d asked us a question. He expected an answer.

�If something�s wrong,� he said finally, �I want to know about it. I�d assumed that you�d come to give me a progress report on your investigation. But that�s not it, is it? There�s something else.�

�Before I answer that,� Friedman said, �I�d like you to tell us exactly what you did from the time you left the winery last night until you arrived here at this office this morning.�

Instead of responding, Leo turned to look at me, as if to discover how we were trying to trick him. His eyes were hard now, studying me shrewdly. Then, deliberately, he turned again to Friedman. He�d decided how to deal with us.

�And before I answer that, Lieutenant, I�m afraid I�ll have to know exactly why you�re asking.� His voice was tight, dead level. His eyes were cold and hard. Leo was in command.

�Why?� Friedman asked blandly. �I�m not trying to make this a contest. As a matter of fact, you�re exactly right about the reason we�ve come. We�re here to give you some information � some very important information, that�s got nothing to do with Mal Howard. But before we can tell you about it, simply as a matter of police procedure, we�ve got to have an account of your movements last night.� Friedman paused, then added quietly, �If you went home, for instance, all you�ve got to do is tell us.�

�The point is,� Leo said, �that I didn�t go home. Which is the reason I can�t tell you.�

�Where�d you go?�

Slowly and deliberately, still in control, Leo shook his head. �I can�t tell you. Sorry.�

�You�re making a mistake, Mr. Cappellani,� I said. �There was another attempt made on Alex�s life last night. And it looks very much like you�re involved.� I let a moment pass before I added, �Deeply involved.�

�Another�� He looked at me, looked at Friedman, finally looked again at me. �Another �attempt,� you say. What d�you mean, �attempt�?� His voice rose. His dark eyes snapped. The loosely clenched fists were knotted now. �What the hell are you telling me? Is Alex dead? Hurt?�

�Before I answer that, I want you to��

�Goddammit.� Suddenly he reached for the phone. Involuntarily, I moved to stop him, but Friedman quickly shook his head as Leo began dialing. I sank back, listening to Leo harshly command someone to put his mother on the line. Peremptorily, he asked her what happened last night. Listening to the faint buzz of Rosa�s voice, I studied Leo�s face. His expression was inscrutable. After less than a minute, he curtly thanked his mother, told her that he would call her shortly, and hung up.

For a moment, the office was perfectly silent as we stared at Leo and Leo stared straight ahead. Slowly, furiously, his face tightened.

�That son of a bitch,� he said finally. �He tried to kill Alex. Rosten. He � Christ � he owes his whole life to us. Everything. And he tried to kill Alex.�

Catching my eye, Friedman surreptitiously raised his chin to me. He wanted to ask the next question. I nodded. Friedman sat silent for a moment, studying Leo as he still stared straight ahead, plainly struggling to control himself. Finally Friedman cleared his throat, saying, �It didn�t sound like your mother had much information for you.�

Leo ignored him.

�That was probably because the FBI�s still with her,� Friedman said. �They�re interrogating her.�

Slowly � unwillingly � as if his head were being moved by some invisible, inexorable force, Leo turned to stare at Friedman.

�The FBI? Is that what you said?�

Friedman nodded cheerfully. �They�re also interrogating Rosten. They�ve been interrogating him for two or three hours, now. Your mother, too. As I say�� Airily, Friedman waved a casual hand.��As I say, that�s why she couldn�t say much to you, probably. The FBI can be pretty intimidating. As you�ll soon discover.�

�Without realizing it,� I said, �your mother gave us the key. Your father was a right-winger. You�re a right-winger, too. And so is Rosten, isn�t he? The two of you decided to kill Castro. And Alex found out about it.�

�So you ordered Rosten to kill Alex,� Friedman said. �Your own brother.� He spoke softly and regretfully, as if it saddened him to say it.

�How�d you find Mal Howard, Leo?� I asked. �How much did he charge you, for agreeing to kill Castro? That was his job, wasn�t it � his original job?�

�Who�s Howard�s replacement, Leo?� Friedman asked. �Give us a name.�

�You�re crazy,� Leo breathed, looking at each of us in turn. �Coming in here � asking these questions, making these accusations. You must be crazy. You � Christ � you�ll suffer for this. Both of you.�

But now he spoke without the flare of conviction. Without force or anger.

�Who�s �Twospot,� Leo?� I asked.

�It�s you, isn�t it?� Friedman said. �It�s your cover name.� He let a beat pass before he suddenly barked, �Isn�t it?�

Startled, Leo looked quickly at Friedman.

Picking up the remorseless tempo, I said, �Booker was murdered because he found out about the assassination plot. That was it, wasn�t it? Maybe he tried a little blackmail. That�d be his style. So you ordered him killed. Mal Howard carried the address of your town house in his pocket, with �Twospot� signed to the note. You set Booker up. didn�t you � told him to meet you there, at Larkin Street. Then you sent Mal Howard to kill him.�

As we hammered at him, I could see Leo�s arrogant assurance slowly failing him. First he lost control of his mouth, then his hands, finally his dark, bold centurion�s eyes. Now, as if it were again tugged by some invisible force, his head began to sink slowly until he sat bowed over his desk.

Friedman took up the attack. �Mal Howard didn�t die instantly,� Friedman said softly. �He talked before he died. That�s why we�re here, Leo. Because he talked.�

To myself, I nodded approval. In court, the statement would hold up. Howard had died in the ambulance � after mumbling something about a woman named Sophie.

�And Rosten�s talking, too,� Friedman continued. �He�s talking right now, to the FBI. He�s not going to fall for attempted murder. Not alone. Not when he can make a deal, and take you along with him.�

�And not if he can be a hero, Leo,� I said. �That�s the deal the FBI�s offering him, right this minute. He can be a hero. He can be on the FBI�s side. You�d be surprised how attractive that is when you�re in custody.�

�He can blow the whistle on a plot to assassinate a visiting head of state,� Friedman said smoothly. �For that, he�ll get many, many brownie points � which, about now, he needs very badly. He�ll be a hero, like Frank says.�

Slowly, Leo�s head began to shake. This time, though, the volition was Leo�s, not some uncontrollable outside force. We watched him raise his head. His mouth was firmly set, his eyes defiant.

Somehow, for some reason, he�d recovered his arrogance, his self-control. For a few minutes we�d been pummeling him, seemingly scoring with ease. But, suddenly, he�d rallied.

Why?

What had changed? What mistake had we made?

Looking for the answer, I searched his face, his eyes. And then I saw it: a tiny sliver of manic light deep in his eyes � as if someone had opened a darkened door just a crack, to reveal a monstrosity behind.

�Paul won�t be a hero,� he said. �He�s a hireling, that�s all. Just a hireling.�

He spoke very softly. In his eyes the telltale gleam of mad light was gone, extinguished by force of will.

The message was clear: no matter what we did, he intended that Castro should die.

Friedman saw it, too: the quick, secret glint of mad purpose in Leo�s eyes. Saturday, Leo had played the role of the forceful, urbane executive, too busy to talk. A half hour ago, he�d played the same smooth, suave part.

Finally, though � cornered � Leo�s real persona had flashed through: the zealot, the true believer. Blinded to consequences, he saw only his goal: the death of a despot.

Friedman and I exchanged a quick glance, then he looked meaningfully to the office door. We excused ourselves and stepped into the outer office, closing the door behind us. Leo�s secretary was at her desk, watching us with cold eyes. We turned our backs on her, whispering together.

�The son of a bitch really is going to try it,� Friedman said. �He�s going to kill Castro if he can.�

�I know.�

�I�ve got to call Dwyer, and the FBI, and maybe the Commissioner, too, if Dwyer won�t do it. We�ve got to have a change of Castro�s schedule.�

�It�s almost nine o�clock. Two hours isn�t much time.�

�Still,� he answered, �I�ve got to try. Someone�s got to call the mayor, too. For one thing, I want my ass covered. If Castro�s going to swallow a bullet, I�m not going to take the fall alone.� He gestured to Leo�s door. �You go back inside and keep working on him. He�s all we�ve got � him and Rosten. See if you can break him down � find the goddamn triggerman. I�ll get back to you as soon as I can.�

�Maybe I should take him down to the Hall.�

Vehemently, Friedman shook his head. �We don�t have the time, Frank. We��

�Shhh.� I held up my hand, moving a quick step toward Leo�s door. From inside the office I heard the rapid clicking of a telephone dial. �He�s trying to call someone.� I opened the door and entered the office. Holding the telephone to his ear, Leo stood behind his desk. When he saw me, his dark eyes blazed.

�This is a private call, Lieutenant,� he snapped. Then, to cover the flare of temper: �I�ll be with you in a minute.�

�Sorry,� I answered. �I�m afraid you aren�t going to be making any private calls for a while.�

As I approached the desk I heard the phone click and an indistinct voice answer. Instantly, I lunged for the phone, to hear the voice on the other end. But Leo was too quick for me, breaking the connection. As we momentarily confronted each other, fists clenched, breathing hard, I once more saw the zealot�s gleam flicker deep in his eyes.

�Who were you talking to?�

He cradled the phone and sat down behind the desk. Now his eyes were veiled. For a long moment he simply stared at me. His expression was quizzical, almost genial. It was as if we were playing some delightful game, and he�d just scored a difficult point.

But why, then, had he tried so desperately to phone someone?

�Sorry,� he murmured. �I was talking to a lady. The same lady I was with last night. And the lady�s not my wife. So�� He raised both hands from the desk, palms up.

�You�re lying. You were trying to talk to your goddamn triggerman � trying to give him instructions.�

Still the easy, sardonic smile mocked me as he said, �Have it your way, Lieutenant.�

�We know you�re going to make a try for Castro, Cappellani. You might�ve thought you covered your trail. But you didn�t. You�re nothing but a goddamn amateur.�

Staring at me thoughtfully, he slightly inclined his head. It was a condescending nod, as if to indicate that he admired my spirit, but not my technique. With the clock running, he would pursue our delightful little game.

�I�ve been thinking,� he said reflectively, �that you�re really trying to run a bluff on me. I�ve been thinking that if you really had evidence linking me with Booker�s murder, or the attempts on Alex�s life, or � as it turns out now � a plan to kill Castro, I�d be on my way to jail. You may have suspicions, but that�s all. You don�t have anything else. Isn�t that right? Isn�t the fact that we�re sitting here proof that, really, no one�s incriminated me?�

Trying to shake him with a steady stare, I didn�t reply. I wished Friedman would return. A taut silence lengthened. Leo�s eyes held firm � as firm as mine. It had happened to me before. A true believer or a madman can�t be stared down. Finally I pointed to the phone.

�Tell me who you were talking to, if you�ve got nothing to hide. Give me the lady�s name.�

�Try to appreciate my problem,� he said reasonably. �The lady isn�t my wife, and she isn�t my mistress, either. She�s just a�� His sly smile shared a man-of-the-world joke with me. �She�s just a casual friend, I�m afraid.�

�Give me her name.�

�I thought you were investigating an assassination plot, not the state of my love life.�

I moved my head toward the door. �There isn�t going to be any assassination, Leo. Lieutenant Friedman�s taking care of it, right now. Castro�s schedule is being changed.�

The remark seemed to amuse him. �Really? In less than two hours, you�re going to change his schedule?�

Now it was my turn to smile. The next point was mine: �How�d you know when his plane was landing?�

�It was�� He hesitated, but only for an instant. Then: �It was in the paper.�

I shook my head. �Sorry. Try again.�

�It was��

The office door opened. Secretly, I swore. Friedman had returned. At the wrong moment. He spoke to me, saying �It�s all set. No problem.�

But I knew Friedman too well � knew he was bluffing. He couldn�t order Castro�s schedule changed. He could only request, and wait for his superiors to make the decision. And high-level decisions take time.

I watched him stride directly to Leo. Gripping the edge of the rosewood desk with both hands spread wide, Firedman leaned toward Leo. It was a comradely gesture, implying that they were about to share a secret.

�Now,� Friedman said amiably, �we can talk. The reason I had to leave in such a hurry, I�m in charge of municipal security for Castro�s visit. And I had to make, ah, certain arrangements. They�ve been made. So now we can talk, no sweat.� Friedman remained braced against the desk for a moment, staring down at Leo Cappellani. Except for a small, tolerant smile, the other man chose not to respond.

Covertly, I glanced at my watch. The time was nine-twenty. I watched Friedman push himself away from the desk and sink down in an armchair. He sat for a moment in silence, staring at Leo � who readily returned the stare, unintimidated. Finally, in a light, bantering voice, Friedman began to speak.

�The arrangements I�ve made have, ah, de-fanged your plot, Leo, if you�ll excuse the metaphor. There�s no way you can kill Castro. So if I were you, Leo, I think I�d spill the beans. You�re new at lawbreaking, I gather, so maybe I should tell you how the game is played. It�s actually a combination of musical chairs and blindman�s buff. Or maybe it�s steal the bacon. Anyhow, the idea is to save your skin. You do that by copping. That�s what it�s called on the street. Your expensive attorney�ll call it plea bargaining. But the principle�s the same.� Friedman paused for emphasis, then said, �Basically, the one who gets caught, cops. He blows the whistle on his associates, in other words. Whereupon the D. A. recommends that the judge go easy on you � which he does. Now�� Friedman leaned forward, driving home the point: �Now, that�s what Rosten�s done, see. He�s copped � and he�s left you holding the bag, or left you without the bacon, or without a musical chair, or whatever. In other words, you�re stuck. So the best thing you can do is stick the next guy down the line. Or, preferably, up the line. See how it works?�

While Friedman talked, Leo had been studying him. The suspect�s eyes revealed nothing, but occasionally his mouth twitched, as if he were amused. He sat with his chin supported on a judicious steeple of fingers. I noticed that he wore a star sapphire on his left little finger.

Finally he dismantled the finger steeple, to point at me with a languid forefinger.

�I�ve just told Lieutenant Hastings that I think he�s trying to bluff me. And the same applies to you, Lieutenant Friedman. As they say on the street, you�re trying to jive me. Aren�t you?� Gently, Leo smiled.

Projecting an air of utter indifference, Friedman shrugged. �Suit yourself, Leo. I�m giving you a chance to salvage some of your expensive skin. Whether you do it or not, that�s up to you. But I can tell you this: you aren�t going to enjoy prison. A lot of inmates don�t change their underwear often enough, and some of them have terrible table manners.�

�I think I�ll take my chances, Lieutenant.�

�Hmmm.� As Friedman appeared to think it over, he turned to me, slightly shrugging. He seemed to be saying that he�d done his best for Leo, and now it was time for us to get back to work. As he was acting it out, Leo spoke.

�You see,� Leo said, �I have an advantage over you. I know Paul Rosten. And I know that he wouldn�t cop, as you call it.�

Again projecting total indifference, Friedman silently spread his hands.

�As for protecting myself,� Leo said, �I�ve been giving that some thought while you were talking, Lieutenant Friedman. And I�ve got a scenario for you. Would you like to hear it?� His genial glance included us both in the question.

�Let�s hear it,� I said.

�All right.� He paused a moment, as if to arrange his thoughts so as to make the most interesting story for us. �Let�s say, for the sake of argument, that I�m in as much trouble as you suggest � that I�m deeply implicated in a plot to kill Castro. And let�s suppose, also for the sake of argument, that he�s going to be shot between eleven o�clock and noon. Now, if both those premises were correct, then your best move, it seems to me, would be to take me to jail. However, as I�ve already mentioned to Lieutenant Hastings, you apparently don�t have enough evidence to arrest me, despite the fact that it would seem to be your logical move.� He paused to look at us each in turn, then continued: �So what�s my best move? Obviously, if I wanted to establish my innocence, my best move would be to do just what I�m doing now�� His gesture included the three of us, and the game we were playing. �What better alibi could I have than��

�Let�s go back to your �eleven o�clock and noon� statement,� I cut in. �I still want to know how you learned what time Castro�s plane is scheduled to land.�

He smiled. �I�m glad you mentioned that, Lieutenant. Because, when I think about it, I realize that you�re right. I didn�t read it in the newspapers. Perhaps someone told me about it. Except that I can�t remember who, right now. Maybe it�ll come to me.�

As he spoke, I glanced at my watch. In an hour and ten minutes, Castro�s plane would land. I looked at Friedman, wondering what strange game of brinksmanship he was playing. Because if he intended to meet Castro�s plane, he�d have to leave within a half hour.

I watched Friedman rise to his feet. His eyes were cold, his voice harsh: �If you leave this office before one P.M.,� he said, �you�ll be arrested, and taken downtown and booked � and that, Leo, is a solemn promise, from me to you. The same applies if you try to leave town without notifying the police.�

Friedman turned on his heel and walked out of the office, gesturing for me to follow him. I had no choice but to obey.

I followed Friedman through the receptionist�s office and into the hallway outside, where Friedman walked quickly around the nearest corner, at the same time pulling his miniature walkie-talkie from inside his coat.

�What the hell�re you doing?� I demanded. �Christ, he probably phoned an accomplice, the first time we left him. You�re letting him��

�Shhh.� He spoke urgently into the walkie-talkie. �Are you receiving it all right, Canelli?�

�Yessir. Everything came in fine. And a tape recorder finally got here, just this minute. So I can talk to you, no sweat.�

�Are you sure the recorder works? Did you check it?�

�Yessir, I checked. It works fine.�

�What�s he doing now?�

�I think he left the office. Anyhow, I think I heard a door open, after you left. But I don�t think it closed. So� oh, oh. Now it closed. I�m getting footsteps, coming closer. I guess the bug�s a little ways from the door, eh?�

�It�s under the front edge of the desk. Maybe twenty feet from the door.�

�Well, it sure works good, Lieutenant. Those new bugs, they�re really something, you know? Honest to God, I heard every little sound you guys made. It�s too bad I didn�t have the recorder, then.�

�Don�t worry about it, Canelli.� As he spoke, Friedman gestured for me to check Leo�s door. I stepped to the corner of the hallway, and peeped around.

�Stay there,� Friedman said to me. �Keep looking.� And to Canelli he said, �What�s he doing now?�

�He seems to be walking around his office, I�d say.�

�He hasn�t touched the phone? Hasn�t dialed?�

�Not that I heard, Lieutenant. Of course, the recorder probably got more than I got, especially since we�re talking. Want me to play it back? I can��

�No,� Friedman barked. �Don�t fool with the goddamn recorder.�

�Well, jeeze, Lieutenant�� Canelli�s voice trailed off into reproachful silence. His feelings were hurt.

Friedman sighed. �Sorry, Canelli. I��

�Hey. He�s doing it now. Dialing.�

�All right�� Relieved, Friedman exhaled. �Just make sure the recorder�s getting the clicks. That�s the whole purpose of this.�

�Yessir.�

It seemed as if interminable minutes passed, but I knew less than thirty seconds had elapsed before Canelli�s voice crackled:

�I got it, Lieutenant. But it isn�t much. All he said was, �Are you ready?� Then, after a second or so, he said, �I�m out of it now. It�s all up to you.� Something like that. Then he hung up.�

We were already breaking for the elevator as Friedman spoke sharply to Canelli: �Play back the tape and get the clicks. Call the phone company and ask for Supervisor Diane Sobel. Tell her the number�s for me. Tell her we need the location in seconds, not minutes. Got it?�

As I pushed the elevator�s �down� button, I heard Canelli say, �Yessir. Got it.�

�Drop it,� Canelli grated. �Drop the goddamn gun.�

As she slowly straightened I heard a heavy metallic thud as a pistol struck the carpeted floor behind the desk. Now she stood at her full height. Ignoring Canelli, she�d turned to face me. She wore a two-piece tweed dress. Her shoes were alligator, matching her purse. The silk scarf knotted at her throat was green, highlighting her eyes. She could have been dressed for lunch at the Fairmont. A small, ironic smile teased the corners of her provocatively shaped mouth. Her gray-green eyes mocked me with cool, controlled contempt.

�Drop that, too,� Canelli barked, stepping toward her. �Empty your hands. Put them on top of your head. Now.�

Instead, she moved a single step toward the big window behind the desk. She raised her right hand, fingers spread � showing us an empty palm. She rotated the hand, for both of us to see. She was pantomiming a magician�s now-you-see-it-turn.

Then she raised her closed hand to waist height. She took another slow, measured step toward the window. In the closed left hand she held something small and square, the shape and size of a cigarette package.

�If he shoots,� she said to me, �he�ll blow up a lot of innocent people.� She spoke in a cold, flat voice. Her eyes had never left mine. Now she rotated her left hand, allowing me to see what she held. It was an ordinary electronic garage door opener. When she was sure I�d seen it, she half turned away, aiming the opener at the window.

�There are bombs,� she said softly. �There are two bombs. And if you don�t do exactly as you�re told, I�ll explode them. Right now. With this.� She lifted the small plastic garage door opener.

Cautiously moving between Shelly and the desk, with his revolver trained on the girl, Canelli stooped down behind the desk, reappearing with a blued-steel automatic in his hand. At a nod from me, Canelli retreated, holstered his gun and disarmed the automatic. The gun was a 9mm Browning, the best of its type. There�d been a cartridge in the chamber. The small knurled hammer had been cocked. She�d been ready to kill us.

�You may as well put your gun away, too, Lieutenant. You aren�t going to shoot me.� Her eyes moved away from mine as she stared out the window. As she leaned on the window frame, her face was profiled against the glass. Dressed in her expensive brown tweed dress, with the silk scarf at ther throat, her pose was aloof, detached. She lowered the electronic opener until it angled down toward McAllister Street, then rotated it until it lined up on the City Hall steps.

Her purpose was plain. She�d hidden explosive devices somewhere on Castro�s route, either on the street or at the City Hall steps. When Castro appeared, she�d explode the bombs. It was a common terrorist tactic.

There was no rifleman. There�d never been a rifleman.

I realized that I still stood in a muscle-locked, self-defensive crouch. I straightened and holstered my revolver. With my eyes, I gestured for Canelli to step back, giving her room. In the silence, I could hear the sounds of a crowd in the streets below. Shrill voices were shouting in unison: �Castro nunca, Castro nunca.�

�It won�t work, Shelly,� I said. �We know the whole plan. We got it from Leo, an hour ago. We�ve had Castro�s car diverted. He taking another route. There won�t be a speech, either,� I lied.

Still with her face averted, staring down into the street, she smiled. It was a detached smile, eerily serene. Seen in perfect profile, the smile softened her face. She was a beautiful woman.

�Leo didn�t talk,� she said quietly. �Neither did Rosten.�

I looked at my watch. The time was eleven-forty. In twenty minutes, bypassing the building, Castro would have arrived at the City Hall steps.

During those twenty minutes words were my only weapon.

�Why do you think we�re here, if Leo didn�t talk?�

�You probably tricked him,� she answered. She spoke in a calm, reflective voice. �He might have let something slip, but he didn�t talk. Leo�s not really very smart. But he�s dedicated.�

�The perfect tool. Is that it?�

The small, curiously pensive smile returned. She nodded. �That�s it.� There was a short silence. Then, still looking down into the street, she said, �Has the motorcade really been diverted?�

Suddenly I knew why she asked � and suddenly realized that I�d made a terrible mistake, telling her that the route was changed. The electronic opener probably couldn�t operate much beyond a hundred feet. Its signal probably couldn�t carry across the Plaza, to the City Hall steps. The bombs, then, were close by, probably in the street below. So when Castro bypassed the building and reached the City Hall steps, three hundred yards away, it would all be over. She�d be defeated, vulnerable. The advantage would be mine.

But I shouldn�t have forewarned her � shouldn�t have surrendered the vital element of surprise.

�Has it been diverted?� she asked sharply.

�Yes.� Letting my eyes fall, I tried to put a note of duplicity in my voice � tried to make it sound like a desperate lie.

Her face was still in profile. I saw her mouth tighten, and her eyes slightly narrow. Now she turned to face me fully, searching my face for the truth.

�How many policemen are in the building?� she asked quietly. �Besides the FBI men?�

�Just us. Canelli and I.�

The ice-green eyes searched mine for a final moment. She was making her decision. She checked her watch, then again turned to look out the window. All the while, her thumb remained on the opener�s square plastic button.

�We�ll give it ten minutes,� she said finally. �I�m waiting for a call.�

�Who�s going to call you?�

She didn�t reply. But now I could see the first signs of tension working at her face. Her jaw was tightly clenched. Beneath the smooth, creamy skin of her neck, muscles were drawing taut.

�Are you worried about the getaway?� I asked. �Is that what the call�s about?�

She didn�t answer.

�If it�s Leo you�re waiting for,� I pressed, �forget it. He�s in custody. He told you so, on the phone � told you he was out of it.� I let a beat pass before I said, �Didn�t he?�

Still she didn�t answer. Profiled against the window, her face was impassive.

But now a muscle was jumping at the corner of her mouth. Her neck was corded.

I moved a slow, cautious step toward her. I didn�t have a plan. Certainly I couldn�t wrestle the opener away from her before she pushed the button. But I wanted to be closer to her as I began probing for weakness:

�How�d you get into this, Shelly? I can figure Leo. He�s a true believer. He�s the nut � the one with the wild eyes. There�s always one like him in an assassination. But you aren�t a true believer. And you�re certainly not a nut.�

This time, her smile was genuine: a small, smug little smirk of pleasure. �No, I�m not a nut, Lieutenant. I�m a business person. I work for people who�ll pay me a lot of money for this job.�

�Which people? Right-wingers?�

The question amused her. �Right-wingers are amateurs,� she answered contemptuously. �And it�s the amateurs that cost you in this business. I tried to tell them � tried to warn them about Leo. But they wouldn�t listen. Not until he had Howard kill Booker. And then it was too late.�

�Who�re they? Who�s paying you?�

She didn�t answer.

�Is it organized crime? Is that it?�

Again she refused to answer. But the small smile widened almost imperceptibly.

�Organized crime,� I said. �The Mafia. They hired you for the job. You found Leo, who�ll work for free. Then you turned up Mal Howard. He�s always been for sale.�

Still she didn�t respond. But the truth was plain in her face. Years ago, the Mafia had vowed to kill Castro. And the Mafia never forgot. Castro had deprived them of their greatest prize: Cuba, crime capital of the world. For that, they�d promised, Castro would die.

Here. In San Francisco. At the hands of a slim girl in a stylish tweed suit.

Trying to get her talking, to find a wedge, I said, �I should�ve connected you with Mal Howard. You were both in Florida at the same time. Christ, it should�ve been obvious. He has a background in explosive devices, too. It all fits.�

She nodded indifferently. My theorizing didn�t interest her.

�You�re an enforcer,� I said. �A goddamn lady enforcer.�

She glanced at me. Once more, the smile teased the provocative corners of her mouth. Finally she spoke.

�You�re lucky there were two of you,� she said. �I would have shot one. But I couldn�t risk trying for both of you.�

She�d started to talk. I must keep her talking.

�Have you shot many people, Shelly?�

�Not many.� As she spoke, she glanced sharply at ther watch. The time was ten minutes to twelve. She looked at the phone, still silent. The ten minutes she�d allowed herself were gone.

Suddenly she wheeled on Canelli. �Get back against the wall,� she ordered. Her voice was harsh, her manner decisive. She�d made her decision. Instinctively, I knew she�d decide to cut her losses.

�Move, you fat slob.� She gestured with the opener. �Now.�

As he obeyed, Canelli�s soft brown eyes reproached her. Canelli was sensitive about his weight.

She turned to me. �Come here,� she ordered. She pointed to a spot on the floor less than a yard from where she stood. �Stand there. I want to show you something.�

Moving slowly and deliberately, careful not to startle her, I obeyed. She pointed down at the intersection of Polk and McAllister. The intersection was packed with people. During the past fifteen minutes the crowd-control officers had raised their rope barricades. Two mounted officers rode on smartly prancing horses, patrolling the barricades.

�You were right about Mal Howard,� she said. �You were exactly right.�

Staring straight into her eyes, I only nodded.

�Howard made a bomb,� she said. �Two bombs.�

Still I didn�t respond.

�Look down there,� she ordered, pointing with her free right hand. �Do you see those two trash containers on either side of Polk Street? At the corner.�

Following her gesture, I felt my stomach suddenly contract. Two small boys were sitting on one of the big metal canisters. Across the street, a pretty teenage blond girl stood leaning against a matching canister. She held a sandwich in one hand and a pop-top can of Coke in the other. She was squinting as she stared up Polk Street, trying to catch sight of the motorcade.

�Jesus Christ,� I said. �You can�t do that. You�ll never sleep again if you do that.�

Momentarily her eyes blazed. �You son of a bitch,� she whispered. �Shut up. Listen.�

�But they�re children. They��

�Shut up!� Now her eyes were wild. Her free right hand was suddenly shaking violently. �I�m getting a half-million dollars for this. So listen.�

Holding the opener, her left hand was shaking, too.

She forced herself to speak slowly, choosing her words. �Those canisters,� she said huskily, �both contain explosives. The explosives are inside two four-inch steel pipes. The pipes are closed on one end and open on the other. The pipes are packed with dynamite and shrapnel. They�re like two mortars, pointing toward each other. We put the cans there last night, Leo and I. When Castro�s car gets between the canisters, I press the button. Then I��

�Shelly� Jesus. It won�t happen. He�s not coming this way. You��

�If he comes,� she said, speaking now in a low, deadly voice, �it�ll be in the next five minutes. I was going to blow the canisters from here and escape in the mess. Leo was going to pick me up, a block from here. But you changed that, you son of a bitch. So I�m leaving. I�m going to leave this office, and get on the elevator and go down to the street. I�ll blow the canisters from the street. And if you try to stop me any time between now and then, I�ll press the button. I�ll��

�But Castro�s not��

�If you come after me, I�ll press this button. Do you understand? So if anyone dies, it�s your fault. Not mine. You�re the one who�ll kill them. It�s your decision.� Suddenly she stepped away from the desk, moving toward the office door.

�Listen, lady�� Canelli stepped cautiously toward her. �I can tell you that��

�Shut up.� It was a low, half-strangled shriek. �And remember, stay inside, here. Stay in this office. If you don�t they�ll die. All of them, down there � they�ll all die. Because they�re my ticket out of here. Those kids. They�re my insurance.� In front of the door now, green eyes blazing, she looked at me for a last long, terrible moment.

Then, while I watched, she transformed herself before stepping out on stage to play the part of a beautiful young matron, she drew a long, deep breath. She straightened her back, squared her shoulders, lifted her breasts. Magically, her face smoothed. She gave me a last small, smug smile � and stepped out into the hallway. Her shadowed shape lingered a moment on the frosted glass door, then disappeared.

Instantly, I reached for my walkie-talkie-just as Canelli brushed past me, bounding desperately for the desk.

�What�?�

�Get to the door,� Canelli hissed. �Open it a crack. See when she gets on the elevator. Tell me when she�s in it.�

�But��

�Do it, Lieutenant. I was an electrician. Tell me when she�s in the elevator.� At the desk now, he snatched up potted plant and emptied the plant and dirt on the floor.

�Listen, Canelli. You��

�Shut up, Lieutenant. Just do it.� Moving soundlessly, he sprang to the door of the lavatory and jerked it open. Now filling the pot with water, he turned to me, pleading: �Please, Lieutenant. Do like I say. I can stop her. Once she�s in the elevator, the opener won�t work. She�ll be surrounded by steel and concrete. The signal won�t carry three feet. Honest.�

Three strides took me to the office door. One cautious millimeter at a time, I cracked the door until I could see her standing in front of the elevators. Above her head, a white plastic arrow lit up. One of the two elevators was coming up. She glanced impatiently at the arrow, then looked quickly back toward me. I held the door motionless, open just a fraction of an inch. I knew she couldn�t see me watching her.

Behind me, I heard water furiously running � then diminishing, finally stopping. Footsteps approached as Canelli came to stand close beside me.

�What�s happening?� he whispered.

�Nothing. She�s waiting for the elevator.� As I spoke, I saw a red arrow flashing, pointing down. Gripping the opener in her left hand, holding the alligator bag with her right hand, she was tensed for escape. I heard the elevator doors come open. She threw a last glance in my direction, then stepped forward � gone.

�She�s in the elevator.�

Beside me, Canelli drew the office door slowly open. The moment the elevator doors thudded shut, he leaped into the hallway. �Come on, Lieutenant. Quick.� Hugging the planter pot filled with water close to his bulging stomach, with his muffler trailing behind, he was running awkwardly for the two small twin doors: one to the cleaning closet, the other to the electrical panel. Holding the planter pot out to me, he ordered, �Put your finger in the drainage hole.�

Like characters in a comedy sketch, each trying to staunch the flow of water from the bottom of the pot with a clumsy finger, we juggled the planter between us. Finally, with his hands free, Canelli drew his revolver. �Watch the goddamn floor indicator,� he said.

Holding the heavy water-filled pot, I stepped back. Over the elevator she�d taken, numbers were flashing as she descended from the sixth floor to the fifth.

Beside me, a shot crashed. Another. And another. Throwing down his revolver, Canelli was struggling with the door to the electrical panel, his fingers jammed between the door and the frame. I saw blood on his fingernails.

Above the elevator, the number �3� flashed � and remained lit The elevator had stopped for passengers.

The door splintered and came open. Frantically, Canelli grabbed for his pistol, aimed at a locked metal panel inside, fired twice. As the panel door came open, the �3� blinked out.

�The water.� Canelli held out his hands.

Number �2� winked on.

I handed Canelli the planter, saw him throw the water on the exposed bank of switches and relays. Instantly, electricity sizzled, sparks showered down on the floor around us.

The number �2� winked out.

But the �1� was out, too.

The elevator was stopped between the first and second floors.

�Whew.� Shaking his head, Canelli stooped to retrieve his revolver. Still shaking his head � exhaling loudly � he holstered his revolver. Beneath the stocking cap, his face was sweat-streaked.

�I�m sorry I yelled at you, Lieutenant,� he said earnestly. �See, I used to be an electrician, like I said. So I knew that��

�Wait, Canelli.� I raised my hand � and saw my fingers trembling. �Wait. Be quiet. Listen to me.� My voice, I knew, was hardly more than whisper.

Gulping for breath, mopping his face with the end of his stadium-style scarf, he silently nodded.

�You�ve got to get the second-floor elevator door open,� I said. �You�ve got to make sure she doesn�t get out through the escape door in the ceiling of the elevator. And I�ve got to get the bomb squad out here. I�ll send some men to help you. Clear?�

�Yes, sir, Lieutenant. That�s clear.�

As I watched him lumbering toward the stairway door, I wondered whether the bomb squad would find the two small boys still sitting on the trash canister.

At ten past seven that Monday night Frank Hastings and I were sitting in a back booth in Marlowe�s, a tavern on Bryant Street across from the Hall of Justice where cops and police reporters and bail bondsmen congregated. I had been there for fifteen minutes, nursing a beer, and Hastings had just come in.

He ordered a glass of tonic water from the waitress � for reasons of his own he did not drink anything alcoholic � and ran a hand heavily over his stubbled cheeks. He looked about the way I felt: tired, emotionally drained, in need of a dozen hours of uninterrupted sleep. I had spent all of last night and most of this morning answering police and FBI questions at the winery, and even though I had taken a four-hour nap after returning to San Francisco, it was going to be a while before my internal clock was functioning properly again.

�We just finished interrogating Shelly Jackson,� he said.

�She gave us most of the story, on advice from an expensive attorney.� His mouth quirked. �She�s going to cop a plea.�

�That figures,� I said.

�Right. Everybody plea-bargains these days � except for fanatics like Rosten and Leo Cappellani.�

�You didn�t get anything from Leo?�

�Not a word. As soon as we arrested him and told him Shelly was in custody and Castro was safe, he shut up tight. Just name, rank and serial number.�

I nodded.

�But like I said, we got most of the story from Shelly. Apparently both Leo and Rosten have been active in right-wing paramilitary politics for years � quietly and secretly. They were both recruited, if that�s the right word, by Frank Cappellani when he was alive.�

The waitress came back with Hastings�s drink, and while she was setting it out I thought about Rosa. She had told us last night that she suspected Leo had followed in his father�s political footsteps, but that he would never discuss the matter with her; neither would Rosten, who she knew was a disciple of her late husband. Whatever her feelings about Leo�s involvement in the attempted Castro assassination, she had hidden them behind a fresh cloak of imperiousness. But I got the impression that, despite appearances, Alex had always been her favorite son and that she would not stand by Leo; his political fanaticism might be forgiven, his murder of Booker might be forgiven, but the attempts on Alex�s life could never be.

Even with all the adversity I thought she would find a way to salvage her life and the winery both. With Alex�s help, maybe. A man who has faced death three times and survived either learns to be strong or falls apart completely, and last night and today Alex had shown signs of a new maturity in his behavior with the police and the FBI.

When the waitress moved away, Hastings said, �Anyhow, everything with the Cappellanis went down about the way you reasoned it out. If it hadn�t been for Leo�s obsessive hatred for his brother, the whole damned assassination might have gone off as planned. And Castro and Chirst knows how many innocent people would be dead right now.�

�Where does Shelly fit in, exactly?� I asked him. �Is she another zealot that Leo brought in?�

�No. It�s the other way around: she�s the one who recruited Leo, under orders from Miami. She pretended to be a zealot for Leo�s benefit, but actually she�s a mercenary � a Mafia enforcer.�

I stared at him. �Mafia? The Mafia�s behind it all?�

�That�s the way it looks. They�ve had a vendetta against Castro ever since he threw them out of Havana when he took over; he cost them millions in gambling and other illegal revenue.� Hastings sipped some of his tonic water. �Shelly wouldn�t tell us who gave her her orders; she�s too smart for that. She wants to keep on living while she�s in prison and when she finally gets out, and she wouldn�t stand a chance if she started naming names.�

�How would a woman like her get mixed up with the Mafia?�

Hastings shrugged. �She wouldn�t tell us that either. Blood relations in the organization, maybe. There are other ways too, if you�re greedy enough and amoral enough.�

Christ, I thought the Mafia � a Mafia enforcer. And I had liked her and considered having a relationship with her, and all the time she had been setting Castro�s death for the powers behind organized crime. I had been wrong about people before, but never more than I had been about Shelly Jackson. Just thinking about it made me feel cold inside.

�Where the Mafia made their big mistake,� Hastings said, �was in using amateurs for the job instead of people from their own ranks. I suppose they did it to throw the blame on Leo�s right-wing group in case something went wrong � only they didn�t figure on the whole operation coming apart the way it did.� He shook his head. �The next time, if there is a next time, they won�t make the same mistake.�

�You think they�ll go after Castro again?�

�If they want him badly enough. And I think they want him that badly. Someday, somewhere, Castro will leave himself vulnerable again and they�ll put out another contract on him.�

�That�s a nice prospect.�

Hastings said wryly, �I just hope they don�t pick San Francisco again.�

We were silent for a time, thinking our own thoughts. Just a couple of cops, one public and the other private, one in his forties and one just past fifty � working too hard, trying too hard, accomplishing a little but never quite enough. Little cogs in the big system, not unlike the cops and the private eyes in the pulps. Well, in one sense that was exactly what we were: a pulp cop and a pulp private eye. But in another sense we were both in better and in worse shape than those boys.

We could think in much broader terms and we could feel much more deeply � and we knew that when you deal with pain and death and human corruption, there are never any happy endings because there are never really any endings at all.

I watched Bill raise his glass of beer. He drank briefly and returned the glass to the table before him, thoughtfully rotating the glass on the wet formica. Even in the dim light of Marlowe�s, I could see fatigue etched deep in the lines of his face. I wondered how much he�d charged the Cappellanis for risking his life to save Alex. Did his fee schedule include a multiplier for mortal danger? To myself, I wearily smiled. Because I knew there were no guarantees for this big, serious man. If someone caught him with a sucker punch, or a broken bottle laid open his face, there wouldn�t be a partner to help him, or a dozen cars dispatched to run down the assailant. He wouldn�t get hazard pay or sick leave. He�d never get a departmental citation. If he died a gaudy death, the story would make the back pages of the newspapers. But there would be no white-gloved policemen drawn up beside his grave � no volley of shots � no sound of taps.

That, then, was my edge over the private detective. If I got injured in the line of duty, it would be a front-page story. If I got killed, there�d be a parade at the graveyard.

I knew he hadn�t charged the Cappellanis enough. And he knew it, too. Some men had an affinity for money, and a knack for acquiring it.

But not Bill.

And not me, either.

Even as a second-string fullback for the Detroit Lions, I�d made a good money during the four years I�d played professional football. But cars and taxes and a year�s love affair with an heiress had taken most of the money � and a surgeon�s bills for three knee operations had taken the rest. When football was finished with me, I�d make the mistake of marrying the girl � and compounded the mistake by taking a make-work PR job from my father-in-law. The money in the executive suite had been good, but it all went for country club dues I couldn�t afford and interior decorators I didn�t like. So I began spending too much money for too many drinks in too many bars � alone. A divorce lawyer had taken the final share, and I�d escaped to San Francisco, where I was born. A tough, jug-eared captain named Krieger got me into the Police Academy. I�d known Krieger since kindergarten; after our first fight, we�d been friends for life.

I was the oldest rookie in my class at the academy. On the obstacle course, the pain in my knees brought tears to my eyes. I�d felt tired and lonely and defeated. I missed my two children, in Detroit, but I knew I couldn�t exist in the same town with my ex-wife and her father, both my enemies. So, during the days, I learned to be a policeman. At night, by myself in my apartment, I drank. At the end of every month, so my children would remember me kindly, I sent their mother child-support payments she didn�t need. Then I borrowed money to get through the next month.

�You look tired,� Bill was saying.

�So do you.�

He smiled, nodded and sipped the beer. �I�m beginning to think it�s a chronic condition.�

�You, too?�

He nodded again. �Me, too.�

I finished the last of my tonic water and looked reflectively at the empty glass. After I�d made patrolman, Krieger had knocked on my door one night and told me that if I didn�t quit drinking our friendship was finished � and my career, too. He�d stayed in my apartment less than thirty seconds; he hadn�t even bothered to close the door behind him. But, that night, I poured the last of my bourbon down the toilet.

Three years later, Krieger tried to disarm a young longshoreman who�d killed his wife with a deer rifle and was threatening to kill his three small children. The longshoreman had shot Krieger in the throat. After the full-dress funeral, I�d signed up to take the sergeant�s exam.

Across the table, Bill was shaking his head. �Jesus. A lady enforcer. It�s still hard to believe.�

�I know. But she�s as tough and smart and as ruthless as any mobster I�ve ever known. I�ve never interrogated anyone with more brains or guts.�

�In the past few years,� Bill said, �the Mafia�s turning up everywhere. When I was a cop, in the fifties, the Mafia didn�t even have a toehold in California. Now, Christ, they�re everywhere.�

�Back east,� I said, �the Mafia owns the politicians. That�s the real secret of their power. And that�s what they�re trying to do out here. They�re succeeding, too. Especially in Los Angeles. They�ve got crooked politicians and crooked lawyers in their pocket. It�s a hard combination to beat.�

�Does Shelly�s lawyer have mob connections?� he asked.

�I don�t know whether he�s connected or not,� I answered. �I do know, though, that he�s rich, and he�s got a Beverly Hills practice. I asked a friend of mine in Los Angeles to check him out for me. Just for the hell of it.�

�I�ll bet you a lunch that he�s connected.�

�No bet. But lunch is a good idea.� I looked at the clock behind the bar. �I�d better get back to the squad room. Some reporters are waiting for me.�

�And I�d better go home and go to bed.�

We walked out of the bar together, and shook hands on the sidewalk outside. During the last half hour, a light rain had started to fall. The sidewalk glistened; cars threw up plumes of mist as they passed.

�The next time there�s a poker game,� I said, turning up my collar, �I�ll call you. Try to make it.�

�I�ll make it. Thanks.�

We smiled at each other, nodded goodbye and hurried off in different directions, both of us hunched against the rain.