Twospot

1

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.

2

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.

3

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.

4

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 Napa Valley is some seventy-five miles northeast of San Francisco, a good two-hour drive, and it was eleven o’clock by the time I came across the Golden Gate Bridge. The weather had been warm and clear in St. Helena, but in the city it was cold and foggy — one of those thick, wind-blown fogs that blanket the hills and drift like wisps of smoke through the streets. I drove straight downtown, left my car in the parking lot on the corner of Taylor and Eddy, and hurried over to the tired old Victorian building on the fringe of the Tenderloin where I have my office.

There was nobody in the dark lobby. One of the other tenants, a guy who ran a mail-order business, had gotten mugged in there six months ago — the Tenderloin has one of the highest crime rates in the city — and ever since then I make it a point to look around when I come in. I opened up my mailbox and pulled out three days’ accumulation of mail: two letters and two pieces of junk advertisement. A sign on the elevator grill said that the elevator was out of order. Again. So I climbed the stairs to the third floor, and there weren’t any muggers up there either.

The office was just a single room, with a little alcove off of it that contained a sink and some storage shelves; if you needed the toilet, there was one down at the end of the hall with a broken seat and a paper dispenser that never had any paper in it. A low rail divider separated the room into two halves. My desk was behind it, in front of the windows facing Taylor Street, and there were a couple of client chairs over there, and a filing cabinet with a hotplate on top of it. On this side of the divider was an old leather couch and another chair and a table with some magazines that had never been read. Except for the poster I had had made during the summer and tacked up on one of the walls, it was pretty much the same arrangement and the same decor I had opened business with after leaving the San Francisco cops fourteen years ago.

The poster was a blow-up of the cover of a 1932 issue of Black Mask and depicted a guy holding a couple of guns and standing in front of a suit of armor; it also featured a story by one of my favorite pulp writers, Paul Cain. It looked a little gaudy up there, and was probably inappropriate for a business office; but what the hell, everybody has a hobby and pulp magazines — reading them and collecting them — are mine. I have been fascinated by the pulps ever since I was a kid, and it was that fascination that led me into police work, led me eventually to become a private investigator: I wanted to be a detective just like the ones I read about in the pulps. Up until this summer, when my outlook on so many things had begun to change, that fact had nagged at me — that I had built my whole life as an emulation of the fictional private eye, made myself into a kind of functional cliché. Now, it did not seem to matter. It was my life and I enjoyed what I was doing. What difference did it make how or why I had become what I was? And if I were to lose a client because I collected pulps and had a Black Mask cover on my office wall, then I was better off without that kind of client.

The steam radiator was clanking away and it was warm in there, but a little musty from being closed up for three days. I unlatched the window and raised the sash a few inches. Then I put fresh water into the coffeepot, the pot on the hotplate, and sat down at my desk to look at my mail.

A fifty-dollar check from a furniture store that had hired me to do a skip-trace on one of their clients, and a letter from a guy who said he was the vice-president of the Northern California Chapter of the Mystery Writers of America and wanted to know if I would be a speaker at one of their monthly meetings. I put the check into my wallet and the letter into my basket until I had time to answer it; the idea of speaking to a group of mystery writers appealed to me.

I called my answering service, and there were a couple of messages. The one that interested me most was from Leo Cappellani, who had called at nine-forty this morning and who wanted me to get in touch with him at the winery’s San Francisco office as soon as I came in.

I frowned a little as I put down the phone. How had Leo found out I was a private detective? From Alex, maybe? I lifted the receiver again, started to dial the number the answering service girl had given me.

And the office door opened and Leo Cappellani walked in.

I blinked at him, cradled the handset and got up on my feet. He glanced around the office, took in the Black Mask poster on the wall; but there was nothing in his face to show what he thought about any of it. He was wearing a conservative brown business suit today, and he looked crisp and successful and a little imposing, like a banker or a corporation lawyer. I noticed as he came up to the rail divider that his eyes were sharp and peremptory — as his mother’s were, but nothing at all like Alex’s mild expressive brown eyes.

“Good morning, Mr. Cappellani,” I said. “I just came in, just got your message. I was about to call you.”

“Yes,” he said. “Well, I was on my way to an early lunch and I thought I’d stop by on the chance you’d returned.”

I invited him to have a chair, and he came in and took the one in front of my desk. I said then, “How is Alex?”

“Not seriously hurt. He has a scalp wound and a mild concussion.”

“Then he was able to talk to the police?”

“Yes. But he had nothing to tell them about the man who assaulted him. He was sitting at the desk with his back to the door, and the door was open. He heard a sound just before he was hit, but he didn’t get so much as a glimpse of the man.”

“He doesn’t have any idea who it could have been?”

“None.”

“Was anything taken from the office?”

“No. Nothing at all.” Leo crossed his legs and watched me with those sharp black eyes. “Now you can relieve my curiosity, if you don’t mind.”

“About what, Mr. Cappellani?”

“About why you didn’t tell any of us last night that you’re a private detective.”

“It didn’t seem to be relevant,” I said.

“That remains to be seen. Are you working for my brother?”

“Did he tell you I was?”

“No.”

“Was he the one who told you I’m a detective?”

“No. One of the sheriff’s deputies let that slip to Shelly after you’d gone. The deputy didn’t say you were working for Alex, but the implication was that you are and that you told the police why he hired you. I’d like to have that same information.”

“Why?”

“Because my brother is headstrong and inclined to act at times without good judgment.”

“And you think hiring a private detective is a lack of good judgment?”

“If his reason involves family matters, yes.”

“What sort of family matters?”

“Any sort. Alex may not value our privacy, but my mother and I do. If he has hired you to poke around in our affairs, we have the right to know about it.”

Sure, I thought, and you’re going to know about it pretty soon. But not from me. “Look, Mr. Cappellani,” I said carefully, “I’m sorry, but if I am working for your brother, and he didn’t want to discuss the matter with anyone, then I’m afraid I can’t discuss it either. You value your privacy and I value the ethics of my profession; I can’t breach a confidence.”

His mouth tightened a little. “You’ve already breached confidence, it seems, by talking to the police.”

“That’s not quite the same thing. Whatever I might have said to the police, it was in the interest of helping to get to the bottom of the attack.”

“Are you saying whatever Alex hired you to do has a bearing on what happened last night?”

“No, sir, that’s not what I’m saying. I don’t know what has a bearing on the attack last night. I’m bound by law to inform the police of anything, anything at all, that might be related to a felonious act; but I’m not bound to inform anybody else without the consent of my clients. I don’t mean that to sound tough and unsympathetic to your feelings. It’s just that I have to run my business my way, as you have to run your business your way.”

He kept looking at me, frowning, and it got pretty quiet in there. But then, abruptly, his mouth loosened and his face smoothed, and he said, “All right, you’ve made your position clear.” He stood up, turned toward the divider.

I said, relenting a little, “Mr. Cappellani?”

He pivoted to face me again.

“I wouldn’t worry too much about your brother’s motives,” I said. “And I don’t think it’ll be long, either, before he decides to confide in your and your mother.”

That got me another long, searching look. “I’ll accept that,” he said finally. And then he gave me a faint smile. “You’re an interesting man. It’s not often you meet someone with convictions these days.”

There was nothing I could say to that.

Leo said, “I didn’t intend to come on like a hardnose, or to seem ungrateful for all you did at the winery, and I apologize. The past fourteen hours have been bewildering, is all.”

“Sure. I understand.”

He nodded, and turned again, and went across the office and out through the door.

I thought as he closed it after him: you’re a pretty interesting man yourself, brother. The difference between him and Alex was like night and day. Leo was one of these complex types you can never quite get a handle on, with hidden qualities and changeable moods and what seemed to be a strong sense of family pride and of personal conviction; and Alex was easygoing, extroverted, not particularly proud, not particularly dogmatic. I wondered if Alex favored his father, as Leo appeared to favor his mother.

The coffee water had come to a boil. I made a cup of instant and then dragged my old portable typewriter in front of me and began to type up my report on Jason Booker. I was half through it, hunting and pecking with my forefingers, when the telephone rang.

I hauled up the receiver and identified myself, and a woman’s voice said, “This is Shelly Jackson.”

Neither the name nor the voice registered immediately. “Shelly Jackson?” I said.

“How soon they forget. Last night, at the winery.”

“Oh— Shelly. Excuse the blank reaction; I never did get your last name. Are you still up in the Valley?”

“No. I’m back here at the winery offices. So you’re a private detective, huh?”

“Yeah,” I said.

“I’ve never met a private eye before,” she said. “How about getting together for lunch today?”

“Sure, all right. But I thought you didn’t lik cops.”

“I don’t. You know The Boar’s Head, on Vallejo?”

“I know it.”

“One o’clock okay with you?”

“Fine.”

“See you then, big man.”

I replaced the handset. Well, I thought — and wondered why she wanted to have lunch with me. Because she was curious, as Leo was, why a private detective had been up at the winery to see Alex? Probably. But then again, maybe she had something else on her mind.

I locked up the office and went to find out.

5

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.

6

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.”

The house on the corner of Chestnut and Larkin was a big white neo-colonial set a little way back from the sidewalks behind shrubbery and a five-foot brick-and-wrought-iron fence. There was a driveway on the downhill Larkin side, leading to an attached garage, and in the driveway was the dusty station wagon that Jason Booker had been driving last night. Through a shifting curtain of fog, I could see blurred light beneath the closed garage door and in one of the side windows; the rest of the house appeared dark.

I found a parking spot near the driveway. On a clear day you would have some view from up there: the broad sweep of the Bay, the Golden Gate Bridge, Alcatraz and Angel islands, the Marin hills, part of the East Bay. Which was the main reason why Russian Hill was one of San Francisco’s moneyed neighborhoods; panoramic views do not come cheap. But tonight, about all you could make out down below were the vague misty lights that marked Fisherman’s Wharf and Aquatic Park and the Presidio.

There were other cars parked in the area, but all of them were dark and nobody got out of any of them to approach me. So I stepped out myself after a moment, into the icy wind and the wet brackish-smelling fog, and walked up to Chestnut and down the sidewalk in front of the Cappellani house. More cars parked there, and all of them deserted too.

Where was Alex? It had been a good thirty minutes since he called me, and he had said he was in a service station on Lombard Street; it should not have taken him much more than ten minutes — fifteen, maximum — to get from there to Russian Hill. Unless he had stopped somewhere on the way, for some reason.

I came back to the corner and stood next to a lamppost there, hunching my shoulders against the wind. A pair of headlights appeared behind me, but they drifted on past, went down to where Larkin hooks into Francisco, and disappeared. Out on the Bay, a foghorn echoed in its mournful way; and over on Hyde, a cable car bell clanged tinnily. Otherwise the night held a kind of eerie stillness, the way it does in one of San Francisco’s heavy blanketing fogs.

Five minutes went by without another car showing up, without any sign of life on the streets. Then there were two sets of fuzzy headlights on Chestnut and another set on Larkin, each of which vanished again without slowing as they passed me. I was getting damned cold, standing there, and not a little irritated. Where the hell was he?

It occurred to me then that maybe he was already here. I did not know what kind of car he was driving; it could be any one of those parked nearby. And in spite of our agreement he could have gone into the house without waiting for me to show up. But was he that impulsive, that foolish? It would have defeated the whole purpose of getting me up here.

I gave it another two minutes. Nothing, no other car. All right, damn it, I thought — and I went over to the front gate, through it and up the front walk to the house’s pillared entranceway. There was a doorbell button set into a recessed niche beside the door, and I pushed that and heard the distant peal of chimes inside. But I did not hear anything else in there: no one came to open the door.

I began to feel uneasy, as I had up at the winery cellar — an intimation that something was wrong. Booker was supposed to be here, should be here; that was unmistakably his station wagon over in the driveway, and there were those lights showing in the garage and in the side window. But if he was here, why hadn’t he answered the door chimes? And where was Alex, if not inside the house?

Maybe the two of them went off in Alex’s car, I thought. Only that did not make much sense. There didn’t seem to be any reason for either of them to have wanted to do that; and Alex couldn’t have gotten here more than fifteen minutes before me, which was little enough time for him or Booker to decide to go for a ride.

I pressed the doorbell button again, listened to more chimes echo and then fade into unbroken silence. On impulse I reached down and tried the doorknob. Locked.

The uneasiness took me away from the door, around the corner, and down to the driveway. A car came uphill through the fog, and I turned to watch it whisper past; it slowed at the top of the hill, but then it continued along Larkin and its taillights were swallowed by the mist. I went into the driveway, stopped beside the station wagon and glanced inside. It was empty. When I put my hand on the hood the metal turned out to be cold: it had been some time since the car was last driven.

I stepped off into the shrubbery and went up to the lighted window. Past thin curtains I could see that the room there was a study, with a desk and some leather chairs and a leather sofa and wall shelves holding books and military-type curios. Like the car, it was empty — but draped over the sofa was a man’s shearling coat, and on the desk was a man’s tweed hat.

Turning, I moved back to the driveway, walked along it to the closed garage door. No handle on its surface, which meant that it was probably remote-controlled. To the left, I saw then, away from the house, was a narrow concrete walk that led between a wooden property fence and the side wall of the garage. I went over there, onto the walk. It ended three-quarters of the way back at a raised wooden platform on which were two metal garbage cans; but halfway along was a side door set into the garage wall.

The door was unlatched: a tiny strip of light shone between its edge and the jamb.

I came to a standstill, and there was a clenching sensation in my stomach. Something wrong here, all right — the same kind of something, maybe, that had been wrong at the winery. I listened again, tensely. Silence, except for the wind rustling the shrubbery.

Get it over with, I thought. And went up to the door, hesitated again, and then put my palm flat against the panel and shoved it wide.

Worse than last night, much worse.

Because the first thing I saw was the dead man lying on his side on the concrete floor.

I said “Jesus” under my breath, went in there a couple of paces. He was sprawled out in front of an open door into the house, with one arm extended beyond his head. In that hand was a .32 caliber blued-steel automatic. But he had not been shot; the side of his head had been brutally caved in.

Jason Booker.

To one side of him was what looked to be a homemade black jack — a man’s sock filled with something like sand or buckshot — and it was matted with blood and hair: the murder weapon. Spatters and ribbons of blood stained Booker’s face, the back of his sports shirt, the floor around him. It had congealed, but still glistened wetly; he could not have been dead much more than half an hour.

Alex, I thought. Alex?

I started to take another step toward the body, stopped abruptly when I realized there was still more blood, a small puddle of it, down near my right shoe. Booker’s too? But the puddle was a good twenty feet from where he lay. I stared at the gun in his hand, and sniffed the air, and thought I could smell the faint lingering odor of cordite. Had Booker managed to shoot his assailant? before he died, or before a final death blow was struck?

There were plenty of signs of a struggle. Firewood had been knocked from a stack along the wall to the left of the open house door, tools had been dislodged and scattered from a workbench to the right of the door. Half a dozen coins were strewn among the dislodged tools: two nickels, two dimes, a quarter and a penny. There were also a matchbook and a nearly empty package of Camels — and a piece of paper that looked as if it had been part of a 5x7 notepad, center-folded and resting tented on the fold.

I could make out typeprint on the paper, and I detoured around the puddle of drying blood and went over to it and sat on my haunches. Without touching the paper, I leaned down to look at the words. They were in elite type, and they spelled out the address of this house. That was all, except for a single word in capital letters at the bottom, like a signature, that meant nothing to me at all.

The word was Twospot.

I straightened up, frowning. You could put together some of what had happened here, but there were other things that did not seem to add up. If Alex had murdered Booker, what was the sense in the piece of notepaper? He would have had no conceivable reason for carrying around the address of his own family’s house. It could belong to Booker, but the same thing applied: he would not have needed an oddly signed paper to tell him where the house was situated.

But if Alex was not the murderer, then why had Booker been killed? And by whom? And why hadn’t Alex kept his rendezvous with me?

You’re wasting time, I told myself. Get the police out here, leave the speculating to them. I went to the open house door, entered a small storage pantry, passed through it into a central hallway. The house was deeply hushed, contained an almost palpable aura of emptiness. Light from the study I had seen from outside spilled into the hall, creating pockets of heavy shadow; I located a wall switch, flicked it with the back of my hand to keep from smearing any fingerprints that might be on it, and turned into the study.

A telephone sat on one corner of the desk. I took out my handkerchief, wrapped it around my hand. Then I lifted the receiver and dialed the number of the Hall of Justice.

When the switchboard operator came on I asked him if Lieutenant Eberhardt was on duty; Eberhardt was a close friend of mine, had been ever since we had gone through the Police Academy together after World War II. But he said no, Eb was gone for the day — did I want to talk to anyone else? I knew several other detectives, one of whom was a Homicide Lieutenant and a casual acquaintance I had played poker with on a number of occasions. I asked if he was on night watch, and the operator said he was and transferred the call.

An unfamiliar voice said, “Homicide, Canelli speaking. Can I help you?”

“Yeah,” I said. “Let me talk to Frank Hastings.”