Twospot

13

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

I said to him, “I’m going to have a look back there. You stay here, don’t move.”

He gave me a convulsive nod.

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

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

“I couldn’t see much,” I told him. “But it’s over, all right, one way or another.”

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

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

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

“Who is it?”

“Hastings.”

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

“You get him, Frank?”

“Yeah,” he said, “we got him.”

“Alive?”

“Barely. I had to shoot him. I don’t think he’s going to last long enough to answer questions.”

“Christ. Do you know who he is?”

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

“That’s him.”

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

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

“Go on.”

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

“Why you?”

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

“So you agreed to come over here.”

“Right. It seemed the best way to handle it.”

“And you convinced him to give himself up?”

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

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

Outside, on the stairs, there had been more running footfalls, and now somebody else began pounding on the door. Hastings turned and opened it. Past him I saw the other plainclothesman, the one I didn’t know, and a uniformed officer farther back on the landing, standing against the redwood fence. With the door open I could hear the excited babble of rubberneckers up on Greenwich Street, the pulsing wail of approaching sirens.

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

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

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

Alex looked at him in a numb way. “Yes.”

“Would you like an attorney present?”

“No. No, that’s not necessary. I want to cooperate with you.”

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

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

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

“Yes.”

“How did you get inside the garage?”

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

“Did you see anyone else in the vicinity?”

“No. No one.”

“Did you touch anything in the garage?”

“No.”

“Did you go inside the house?”

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

“Do you have any idea who would want him dead?”

Alex shook his head.

“Or why he was murdered?”

“No. No.”

“Do you know a man named Mal Howard?”

“Howard? No, I’ve never heard that name.”

“You’re sure?”

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

“Yes. Have you left this apartment since Friday?”

“No.”

“Not even for a newspaper or groceries?”

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

“Did you call anybody at all?”

Alex looked at me again. “Just him.”

“So no one knew you were here.”

“That’s right. No one.”

“Mal Howard knew it,” Hastings said.

That got him a couple of blinks and another bewildered headshake. “I don’t know how he could have…”

“The woman who lives here — what’s her name?”

“Virginia Davis.”

“How long have you been seeing her?”

“About six months.”

“Is your relationship an open one?”

“Open one?”

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

“Oh, I see,” Alex said. “No, we haven’t kept it a secret. I haven’t taken Virginia to meet my family or anything like that; it’s just a casual thing — you know, a sex thing. But I’ve mentioned her to people.”

“Would you also have mentioned where she lives?”

“I might have. I don’t remember.”

“If you did, it would indicate someone you know fairly well has it in for you, wouldn’t it?”

“I guess so. But it doesn’t make sense. I don’t know why anybody would want me dead. Except Booker, and now he’s dead himself.”

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

“I don’t know,” Alex said again, and there was desperation in his voice now. “I just don’t know.”

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

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

“That’s right.”

“Is that a name or what?”

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

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

“In what way?”

“I’m not sure. I may have heard it once — but I don’t know where.”

“Think about it, Mr. Cappellani.”

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

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

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

“It’s possible,” he answered. “There’s no way of knowing for sure now.”

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

“Howard killed Booker, all right. There’s not much doubt of that.”

I leaned forward. “How do you know, Frank?”

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

Relief had slackened the muscles in Alex’s face. “Christ,” he said, “why didn’t you tell me all of that before? I’ve been half out of my head sitting here, worrying that you still suspected me—”

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

“But I told you—”

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

Alex’s eyes turned plaintive again. “Are you going to arrest me?”

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

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

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

“I don’t think so. I’ll let you know later if we need you to sign a statement.”

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

And damned if one of the cameramen didn’t stand in the middle of the street and film me all the way down to the corner and around it out of sight.

14

I drove straight home to my flat.

On the way the attempted break-in by Mal Howard, Howard’s apparent death, the things Alex Cappellani had told me, and then Hastings, kept replaying in my head. Along with the string of questions centering on this whole business: Who wanted Alex dead, and why? Why hadn’t his attacker killed him outright at the winery on Thursday night, instead of knocking him unconscious and trying to drag him off somewhere else? Why had Booker been killed? How and why had Howard been recruited as triggerman? What did Twospot mean? Was the Cappellani Winery a factor, or did the motive or motives behind the murder of Booker and the two attempts on Alex have to do with something else entirely?

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

Sure I was.

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

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

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

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

A woman’s voice made a question out of my name. When I said yes, it was, she said, “This is Rosa Cappellani. I apologize if I’ve gotten you out of bed but it couldn’t be helped.”

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

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

“I’d like to see you this morning, as soon as possible.”

“About what?”

“I’d rather not discuss it on the telephone.”

“If it has to do with Alex and what happened yesterday, I can’t tell you anything more than you already know by now.”

“I don’t want you to tell my anything,” she said. “I want you to do something for me — something for which you’ll be well paid.”

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

“Well?” she said.

Well. “Where are you?”

“At the winery.”

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

“Fine,” she said, and she sounded relieved. “I’ll expect you then.”

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

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

In the glare of the morning sun the winery buildings had a dusty, ancient look that made them and the surrounding vineyards seem even more turn-of-the-century Italy or France. A few sunhatted grape pickers were spots of color here and there in the curving rows of vines, working with lug boxes; a group of men was doing something with one of the gondolas on the north side of the main cellar. Only the trucks and cars parked or moving in the area spoiled the illusion of things past and far away.

I drove down to where the gated lane branched off the road and led up to the old stone manorhouse. The gate was open; I passed through and pulled my car onto a cleared section beneath several of the shading oaks. There were two other cars parked there — a new silver Lincoln Continental and a Porsche a couple of years old.

A warm, vine-scented breeze fanned over me when I stepped out; you could not smell the fermenting wine at this distance from the cellars. I went up a stone pathway, past an old-fashioned basket wine press set on a kind of stone pedestal, with rose bushes and a dozen or so smaller, unfamiliar plants growing around it in a circle. There was nothing else in the way of decoration or garden, nothing at all except for the heavy old oaks.

I climbed two steps onto a sort of narrow, galleried porch, found a bell-push beside the black-painted door, and pushed it. The walls must have been a foot thick; I did not hear any bells or chimes ring inside, but the door opened after ten seconds and an elderly Chicano woman looked out at me with grave black eyes.

I told her who I was, and she nodded wordlessly and widened the door so I could come inside. The interior was cool and smelled faintly musty, like the inside of an old cedar chest. But there was not anything gloomy about the place, at least not in the foyer or the rooms off it that I could see into. Unshaded windows let in plenty of morning sunlight, and although the walls and ceilings were paneled in heavy dark wood and the floors were of stone, a number of cheerful-looking paintings — Napa Valley landscapes, mostly — and Indian-style rugs and upholstered furniture in whites and blues added a good deal of color.

The Chicano woman led me down a hallway, pointed to a closed door, and went away toward the rear of the house. I wondered pointlessly if she was a mute. Then I shrugged the thought away and knocked on the door, calling out my name.

Rosa Cappellani’s voice told me to come in. When I opened the door and stepped through, I found myself in a den or office filled with books and file cabinets and old furniture and a lot of military-type decoration: sabers cross-mounted on one wall, a glass case jammed with handguns and bayonets, old cavalry and World War II photographs. An American flag in a floor stand flanked one side of a battered oak desk that appeared as if it had been wounded in action on a number of different occasions. It was a man’s office, obviously, not unlike the one in the San Francisco town house; Mrs. Cappellani had no doubt inherited it from her late husband.

She was standing in front of the American flag, wearing a mannish gray suit and a stoic expression. And she wasn’t alone.

I shut the door and crossed to the desk. From where he was sitting sprawled on a creased leather sofa, Alex Cappellani watched me with dullish eyes. He looked as if he had been thrown there — legs splayed out, arms propped up at loose angles on the sofa’s armrest and back. Raggedy Andy. If he had slept much last night, his face belied the fact; the grayish pallor and the ostrich look were worse than they had been yesterday.

Mrs. Cappellani said, “Thank you for coming,” without inflection and without moving.

“Sure.” I looked over at Alex. “When did the police let you go?”

“Late last night,” he said. His voice was as dull as his eyes. “That lieutenant, Hastings, gave me permission to come up here.”

“Have they found out anything new?”

“From me? God, I told you and I told Hastings everything I know yesterday at Virginia’s place.”

“So you still haven’t remembered where you heard the word Twospot before?”

He shook his head loosely.

“And the police haven’t learned anything on their own about Howard or who hired him?”

“No. Howard died in the ambulance on the way to the hospital.”

Mrs. Cappellani came forward a couple of steps and said to me, “How efficient is this man Hastings?”

“Pretty efficient,” I said.

“Then you feel he and his people will find out who is behind Jason’s murder and the attempts on Alex’s life.”

“Eventually, yes.”

“Eventually,” she said. “And in the meantime?”

“Pardon?”

“Someone clearly wants my son dead, for whatever incredible reason. He doesn’t know; I’ve spoken to him at length and I’m convinced of that.” She was talking as if we were the only two people in the room, as if Alex were somewhere else. “That someone has tried twice to kill him or have him killed; it’s reasonable to assume that there will be a third attempt.”

“Maybe,” I said. “And maybe not. Two failures might have scared off whoever it is.”

She was silent. But her eyes said she was worried about a third attempt and she did not want any hollow reassurances from me to the contrary. I glanced at Alex. He was plenty worried about it too, you could see that plainly enough. Fear glistened like pinpoints of light in his pupils.

“Look, Mrs. Cappellani,” I said, “I can understand and I can sympathize with your concern. But if you asked me up here as an investigator, I’m going to have to turn you down. There’s nothing I can do. Even if the San Francisco police would sanction my involvement in a murder case, which they wouldn’t, I don’t have any facilities for—”

She cut me off with an impatient slicing gesture. “I’m well aware of that,” she said, “and I did not bring you here to undertake a private investigation. Nor do I particularly want advice from you.”

“Then why am I here, Mrs. Cappellani?”

“I want to hire you to act as Alex’s bodyguard.”

“Bodyguard,” I said. But sure, it figured.

“I want you to go everywhere he goes, live with him, stay at his side twenty-four hours a day.”

“Uh-huh. For how long?”

“Until the person behind this madness is caught.”

“That might be a long time,” I said, and thought but didn’t add: And it might be never.

“I realize that.”

“It could also cost you a substantial amount of money.”

“I do not give a damn,” she said stiffly, “how much it costs. This is my son’s life we’re discussing here.”

“I wasn’t trying to be insensitive, Mrs. Cappellani; I was only stating a fact.” I shifted my gaze to Alex again. “How do you feel about this?”

“I don’t like it much,” he said. “But I’m scared and I don’t mind admitting it. Good and scared.”

I nodded and said nothing else. The two of them watched me, Alex expectantly, Mrs. Cappellani calculatingly. I swung away from them and walked across to the nearest of the bookshelves and scanned the titles while I did some thinking. Military history, political history, wines and winemaking; no fiction of any kind. There had not been much romanticism in Frank Cappellani’s soul, apparently; the same kind of no-nonsense practicality that his wife exhibited.

Behind me she said, “We’re waiting.”

I turned and came back to them. “I don’t carry a gun,” I said. “I don’t even own one. I don’t like them much.”

“I see. Which means you refuse to carry one even under special circumstances.”

“I’m afraid so.”

“Then perhaps we should find someone else who will.”

Before I could say anything to that, Alex said, “No,” and got abruptly to his feet and came over to me. “Listen, will you take the job if you don’t have to carry a gun?”

I hesitated. The truth was, I did not care for personal bodyguard work. The responsibility was too great; if something happened in spite of my efforts, I would have to shoulder the blame — it would be on my conscience. Still, I was already mixed up in this business, I knew most of the people involved, I was curious about what lay behind it all, and I needed the damned money.

Mrs. Cappellani’s mouth had puckered up as if she were tasting lemons. “He isn’t interested,” she said to Alex, and there was disdain in her voice; now it was me she was talking around. “There’s no point in wasting any more time with him.”

Alex ignored her. To me he said. “I trust you. Christ knows, I need somebody to trust right now. And I watched you in the apartment yesterday, when that Howard character tried to break in. You know how to handle yourself in a tight situation, and you don’t need a gun to do it. Take the job, will you? For God’s sake.”

I let out a breath. He was like a frightened puppy, and how do you turn your back on a frightened puppy? I said, “I’ll have to make a telephone call first.”

“To whom?” From Mrs. Cappellani, acknowledging my presence again. She wanted me as badly as Alex did, I realized — either because he had convinced her earlier that I was the only man for the job, or for reasons of her own.

“You can listen in if you like. May I use your phone? It’s a longdistance call.”

“Of course.”

The thing was anchored on one side of the desk; I went over to it and picked up the handset. One of the two buttons marked “Open Line” was already depressed. I dialed the 415 area code for San Francisco and then the number of the Hall of Justice. Frank Hastings turned out to be in his office, despite the fact that it was Sunday, and he came on the line right away.

I told him where I was and why I was here and what I had been asked to do. “I wanted to check with you before I take the job,” I said. “If you have any objections I’ll back off.”

He thought it over for a couple of seconds. “Just bodyguard work, nothing else?”

“Right. If anything should come up that you’d be interested in, you’ll hear about it right away.”

“Go ahead, then.” He paused. “Just take it easy out in those vineyards this time. No more nighttime wrestling matches.”

I smiled a little. “Not if I can help it. Thanks, Frank.”

“Keep in touch,” he said.

I rang off and turned to look at Alex and Mrs. Cappellani. They were both staring at me, standing side by side.

“All right,” I said. “You’ve hired yourselves a bodyguard.”

15

Twenty minutes later, with money matters settled, Alex took me up to my room on the second floor rear, adjacent to his room. It was spacious but cluttered with the sort of old dark mismatched furniture that people replace individually with more modern fixtures, can’t bear to get rid of for sentimental reasons, and tuck away in guest rooms like this one. The windows overlooked the cellars and the pond and the green-and-brown vineyards beyond. There wasn’t a connecting door between the two rooms, but there was a connecting bathroom that amounted to the same thing.

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

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

“I’d like to get shit-faced drunk,” he said.

“That won’t help any.”

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

“Fest?”

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

“Do you want to go?”

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

“Under the circumstances, I’d think you could bow out gracefully.”

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

“Uh-huh.”

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

“Does Leo feel that way too?”

“He wouldn’t admit it but he listens to her as much as I do.”

“Is he already here?”

“Yeah. He came up last night.”

“Does he know about this bodyguard idea?”

“No. Not yet. Nobody knows but you and me and Rosa.”

“They’ll all have to know eventually.”

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

“Not much, no,” I said.

“Then let’s go down to the cellar. I’ll show you around.”

So we went downstairs again and out into the sunlit morning. On the way I didn’t see any sign of Mrs. Cappellani, who was probably still in her late husband’s office, or of the silent maid. Or of anyone else. But when we walked down the lane and turned onto the road, I saw Leo and Paul Rosten come out from the direction of the nearest small cellar and start toward us.

Beside me Alex said softly, “Here we go.”

I said, “I’ll handle the explanations if you want.”

“Yeah.”

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

“You do get around, don’t you,” Leo said to me. But there was no irony in the words; it was just a statement. He appeared cool and imperturbable, and the image was enhanced by his country-squire-casual outfit: a tailored white short-sleeved bush jacket and the kind of faded denims that cost upward of forty dollars.

“Your mother asked me to come up, Mr. Cappellani.”

“Oh?”

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

“I see.”

Abruptly Alex said, with some challenge, “You don’t mind, do you, Leo?”

“What sort of question is that? Why should I mind?”

“You didn’t like the idea of my hiring a private detective in the first place. You’ve made that plain enough.”

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

“Thanks for your concern.”

“Is that sarcasm, Alex?”

Alex just looked at him.

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

“Private detectives aren’t allowed to work on murder cases,” I said.

“Well, the police don’t seem to be getting anywhere.”

“They will. They just need time.”

Leo said, “Have you had bodyguarding experience?”

“Enough.”

“Good. Then I’ll feel better about things with you watching over my brother.”

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

I nodded to Leo, to Rosten, and went after Alex. When I caught up with him I said, “Take it easy. You won’t do yourself any good if you let things get to you.”

“Yeah,” he said.

“You don’t get along with your brother, is that it?”

“He’s a bastard. He’s just like my mother — thinks he’s superior, thinks I’m a weakling and a fool.”

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

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

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

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

There were at least a hundred people at the Simontacci place, considerably more than I had expected, and the party was already in full swing. Picnic benches had been set out under oak and pepper trees in the side garden of a rambling old brick house — the house and its two outbuildings sat in the middle of several hundred acres of foothill vineyards — and a couple of guys in peasant costume strolled among them, playing Italian polka music on a pair of accordions. Woman in brightly colored skirts and dresses and men in crisp white shirts danced together or talked among themselves; a dozen or so children ran around playing games the way kids do. Two small wine casks sat on chocks to one side, tended by a jovial mustached man, and beyond there were a long brick-sided barbecue pit and two tables overflowing with salads and a dozen different kinds of antipasto. The air was pungent with the smoky aroma of barbecuing chicken.

An elderly type in Neapolitan country garb greeted the Cappellanis; I gathered that he was the head of the Simontacci family. Other people joined them, and there was a lot of handshaking and vocal gaiety that struck me as being a little forced: everyone was aware of the recent events and trying to pretend that they weren’t. Nobody paid any attention to me.

I drifted over to one of the pepper trees and stood watching Alex. He had the sort of half-panicked look on his face a person gets when he wants desperately to be alone somewhere and finds himself instead in the middle of a crowd. In less than a minute he broke away from the group, hurried over to where the wine casks were, and got a large glass of red wine from the bartender. Then he went to one of the empty picnic benches and sat down and worked on the wine, not looking at anybody, withdrawing into himself. It was obvious he did not want company; I stayed where I was under the pepper tree.

More people arrived, among them Paul Rosten and Logan Dockstetter. Dockstetter was alone — I did not see any sign of Philip Brand — and his pinched face was gaunt-eyed and troubled. Lovers’ quarrel? Or was there something else on his mind? He spent a couple of minutes saying hello to Rosa and Leo and a few of the others, and then, like Alex, made for the bartender and the wine casks.

Time passed, and the party got louder and gayer. I did not enjoy it much. I wasn’t here for festive reasons, that was one thing; and another was that these people were all strangers — even the Cappellanis — and I did not belong to their way of life, pleasant as it might have been. It gave me an uncomfortable feeling, as if I were an interloper.

Alex had two more large glasses of wine and his face took on color, and he began to come out of himself a little; he spoke to some of the others, circulated in a hesitant way. But it was the kind of loosening that is sometimes double-edged: you need more and more alcohol to maintain it, and the more you drink the more likely your mood will eventually shift back into an even deeper depression. If he gets drunk, I thought, then what? Do I step in and handle him myself, like a keeper? Or do I let his mother take care of—

A voice at my elbow said, “Well — look who’s here.”

I blinked and turned my head, and it was Shelly.

She was dressed in a flared Mexican skirt and an opennecked white blouse with puffy sleeves, and she had her head cocked to one side, smiling at me in that bold way of hers. Dapples of sunlight made her auburn hair shine with red-gold highlights. Looking at her, I felt a faint stirring of sexual need; my attraction to Shelly Jackson seemed to be sharpening a little more each time I saw her.

She said, “I had a feeling you might be around, after that business with Alex in San Francisco yesterday.”

I smiled back at her. “You know about that, huh?”

“Word gets around. So do you — for somebody who isn’t working for the Cappellanis.”

“You might as well know,” I said. “I’m working for them now.”

“As a bodyguard, maybe?”

“Is that a lucky guess?”

“Educated guess.” She glanced over the crowd and settled her gaze on the wine casks. Alex was there again, waiting for a refill. His face had a damp, glazed look now that had nothing at all to do with the warmth of the afternoon. “Poor Alex,” she said. “He really doesn’t know how to cope with a crisis, does he.”

“It isn’t easy for anybody to cope with two attempts on his life.”

“No, I suppose it isn’t.” Her eyes turned sober. “Do the police have any clues yet?”

“I don’t know.”

“Are you going to watch over Alex for the duration?”

“Maybe; that’s up to him and Mrs. Cappellani.”

“Well, it’ll be nice to have you around for a while.”

“Will it?”

“I think so.” The bold look again. “Weren’t you supposed to call me? It seems to me you said something about that at lunch the other day.”

“I did call you, as a matter of fact,” I said. “Friday night and yesterday morning.”

“I came up here Friday night. What did you have in mind?”

“Dinner, a show. Something like that.”

“Something like that,” she said. “Well, right now you can buy me a glass of wine.”

We walked over to the casks. Alex had drifted away again, but Dockstetter was there for a refill of his own. As we approached, Rosten came up from the opposite direction and jostled Dockstetter’s arm and made him spill some of his wine over the sleeve of his cashmere jacket; it looked like an accident, but Dockstetter wheeled around and gave him a withering glare.

“What do you think you’re doing?” he snapped.

“Sorry,” Rosten said. “It was an accident.”

“Oh — was it?”

Rosten’s eyes narrowed. “You calling me a liar?”

For a moment there was the kind of belligerence in Dockstetter’s face that a man gets when he’s spoiling for a fight. Maybe Rosten was a specific target, or maybe it was something and somebody else bothering Dockstetter and the winemaker was a handy outlet. But then the belligerence faded, and his mouth turned petulant; he held up his stained coat sleeve.

“You’ve ruined this jacket,” he said. “Red wine won’t come out of material like this.”

“That’s too bad,” Rosten said.

“I ought to make you buy me a new one.”

“Yeah, sure.” Rosten turned away to the bartender.

Dockstetter glared at his back for a couple of seconds and then spun the other way, toward where Shelly and I were. He gave Shelly a passing glance, me a slightly longer one, but said nothing to either of us. He disappeared behind us into the crowd.

I said to Shelly, “What’s his problem?”

“Who knows? He had a fight with his boyfriend at the office Friday afternoon, God knows about what, and Brand hasn’t shown up here; maybe that’s it.” She shrugged. “You know how these fags are.”

No, I thought, I don’t. But I said only, “Has there been trouble between Rosten and Dockstetter in the past?”

“Not that I know of. But Brand and Rosten have had words.”

“What about?”

“Winery matters. Brand thinks Rosten is incompetent.”

“Is he?”

“Not according to Leo and Mrs. Cappellani.”

“Does Alex get along with Dockstetter and Brand?”

“He tolerates them and vice versa. You’re not thinking that it could be one of them who’s trying to kill him?”

“I’m not being paid to think anything,” I said, but that was a half-truth. I was thinking about the possibility, all right — not that it got me anywhere. It could be Dockstetter or Brand or both of them, but it could also be Rosten, or Leo, or Shelly herself, or anyone else Alex was acquainted with. Without positive evidence of some kind, it was nothing but a damned lottery.

We got glasses of white wine — Grey Riesling, Shelly said it was — and took them to one of the picnic benches. We talked for a time about nothing much, and I looked around periodically to keep tabs on Alex. He was still belting wine. When I saw him go back to the casks for yet another refill I excused myself from Shelly and went over to him.

“You’d better take it easy with that stuff,” I said.

There was a bleariness in his eyes that made the whites seem curdled. “Why?” he said. “What difference does it make?”

“I thought you decided getting drunk wouldn’t solve anything.”

“Neither will staying sober.”

“I told you earlier that I don’t like bodyguard work much,” I said. “I don’t like it at all if it means looking out for a drunk.”

“All right,” he said, and waved a hand loosely, and the expression on his face became self-pitying. “All right, have it your way.” He banged his empty glass down on the table, left it there, and moved off a little unsteadily.

I rejoined Shelly, and she asked me if I knew how to polka, and I said it had been a long time and I wasn’t much good at it anyway; dancing was the last thing I felt like doing at the moment. We sat talking some more instead, listening to the accordion music. From time to time she touched my hand or my arm, and finally she moved close to me and I could feel the warmth of her hip and thigh against mine. I wondered if she was feeling the same sexual stirrings I was.

At three o’clock the elder Simontacci called lunch. We sat with the Cappellanis and Rosten and ate antipasto and barbecued chicken and garbanzo bean salad and homemade French bread. I had not had anything all day, so I wolfed my portion; Shelly ate with the same gusto. But nobody else seemed to be hungry, and there was little conversation. Leo appeared more interested in the passage of attractive women than in any of us — I wondered briefly where his wife was — and Rosa gave most of her attention to Alex. She did not look at Rosten and Rosten did not look at her; I thought that if Brand had been right in his comment at The Boar’s Head and they had or had had some sort of sexual relationship, it was completely private and secretive. Alex picked listlessly at his food and seemed to be getting more and more restless. And halfway through the meal he got up abruptly, without saying anything, and went off toward the Simontacci house.

He was gone for fifteen minutes. When he came back I knew right away that he had gone after more alcohol in spite of my warning; the color was high in his face and he was walking in that slow, measured pace drunks affect when they don’t want you to know they’ve been drinking: it doesn’t fool anyone but themselves. Well, damn it. I gave him a sharp look as he sat down, but he avoided my eyes.

Beside him Leo said distastefully, “My God, you smell like a fermentation vat. How much have you had to drink?”

“None of your business,” Alex muttered.

“It’s my business if you make a spectacle of yourself.”

“Sure, that’s right. Somebody’s trying to make me dead and all you think about is your public image.”

Rosa said, “Alex, be quiet,” in her imperious voice.

He ignored her. “How’d you feel if you were a target instead of me?” he said to Leo. “Huh? How’d you feel?”

“I wouldn’t get drunk in public,” Leo said.

“You’d be nice and calm and rational, right?”

“Yes.”

“Oh sure,” Alex said. “Big man, big business executive — a goddamn iceberg, that’s what you are. No feelings at all. You don’t give a shit about anything except profit-and-loss statements and Monday-noon projects; you don’t care about anybody except yourself.”

We were all staring at him now, Leo with his face drawn tight and cold. Rosa said in a flat, mother-to-recalcitrant-children tone, “That’s enough, both of you. You’re only making matters worse.”

“Screw it,” Alex said. He shoved away from the bench again, stood up; he seemed to be having trouble keeping his eyes focused.

“Where are you going?”

He did not answer her, but then he didn’t have to: he went off in an unsteady gait toward the wine casks.

The rest of us exchanged glances. I said to Mrs. Cappellani, “Unless you’ve got an important reason to stay on here, I think we ought to get him home.”

She nodded. “Yes, you’re right.”

“Do you want me to tell him?”

“No. I will.”

“You can also tell him that if he keeps on drinking, I won’t go on working for him. I mean that, Mrs. Cappellani; I’m no good with drunks.”

That broke things up. She gave me a long unreadable look but no argument; another nod, short and stiff, and we all stood from the bench. Shelly took my arm, and when Mrs. Cappellani and Leo and Rosten were out of earshot she said, “One big happy family. You’re going to have your hands full if you stay on.”

“Yeah,” I said.

Two accordion players started up with a traditional tune, and the people at the benches began clapping their hands in time to the music. There was laughter, spontaneous singing.

Some fest, I thought wryly. Some celebration.

16

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

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

“He won’t drink any more today,” she said. “He’ll probably just sleep.”

I nodded.

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

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

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

You said it, brother, I thought.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

“Sitting here all alone?” I said.

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

“When did you get back from the fest?”

“A little after five. It was pretty dull after you left. How’s Alex?”

“Still sleeping it off.”

“Looks like you’ve been sleeping yourself. Your hair’s mussed.”

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

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

“I don’t think so. I was going out for some air. How about joining me?”

“I’d love to — as they say in the old movies.”

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

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

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

“Hey,” I said, “take it easy. I’m an old man.”

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

“Where? Your cottage?”

“No. Come on.”

She let go of my shirt, reached down for one of my hands, and pulled me along the shore of the pond. But there was nothing where she was heading except the curving rows of grape vines. I said something to her about that, but she didn’t give me an answer; she just kept moving forward, hurrying, holding tightly to my hand. I had known eager women in the past, and I had been eager myself a few times — I was eager enough right now — yet there seemed to be something just a little odd about the way she was acting.

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

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

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

“Here?”

“Right here, right now. Just like the other night.”

“What?”

“Rough, rough. Make me fight you, hurt me a little.”

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

“What are you waiting for? Come on!”

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

I said, “No. No way.”

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

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

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

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

“Not exactly. But you’ve got the idea.”

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

“I’m sorry.”

“For me? Bullshit. Different strokes for different folks.”

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

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

The other night. Out here in the vineyards.

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

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

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

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

“No. Listen, did you tell anybody?”

“No, I didn’t tell anybody.”

So how did Hastings know?

Unless—

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

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

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

In my room at the house I picked up the extension phone, punched an “Open Line” button, and dialed the number of San Francisco’s Hall of Justice. I did not expect Hastings to be there at this hour on a Sunday night, and he wasn’t. The guy I spoke to on the Homicide Squad said he wasn’t at liberty to give out home telephone numbers or information on where officers could be reached to anyone under any circumstances. I got the switchboard back and asked for my friend Eberhardt, but he was not at the Hall either.

Telephones, I thought. I was getting pretty damned sick of them.

I rang up Eberhardt’s house, found him in, and got him to part with Hastings’s home number. When I tried that number, a woman’s voice answered and wanted to know who was calling and then went away with my name; half a minute after that I heard Hastings’s voice.

“What’s up?” he asked.

“I’m not sure yet,” I said. “Maybe something useful. Do you remember the last thing you said to me this morning — about not having any more nighttime wrestling matches in the vineyards?”

“Vaguely. Why?”

I explained it to him.

“I see what you mean,” he said. “But even if you’re right, it’s hardly conclusive evidence.”

“No, but it’s something worth pursuing. Can you recall who told you about it, Frank?”

“Not offhand. I’ve talked to dozens of people in the past few days. Give me a minute to think.”

I waited. It seemed even danker in the room than before; I could feel my chest tightening up again. I carried the phone over to the window and raised the sash several inches to let in some fresh air.

Hastings said at length, “I think I’ve got it. But when I give you the name, what’re you planning to do?”

“That’s up to you. It’s your baby.”

“Not exactly. The man we’re talking about is probably up there at the winery with you, and the particular attack in question is the jurisdiction of the Napa County Sheriff’s people.”

“We could call them in and let them handle it.”

“We could, but it’s a pretty tenuous thread for any cop to make headway with. At least at this stage.”

“Well, I could talk to the guy myself. He cracked my head too that night, and I’m the one who chased him; I might be able to spook him a little, get him to admit something incriminating. And then I could go to the local police with a little more substantive information.”

He thought that over. “You wouldn’t push it hard enough to get yourself in trouble?”

“No. I know my limits and my obligations.”

“All right then, go ahead. But keep me posted.”

“I will. Who is he, Frank?”

“The winemaker up there,” Hastings said. “Paul Rosten.”

17

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

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

The hell with it. I concentrated on Rosten.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

I came to a standstill two feet from the door. My first thought was that he had company, but then I realized he must have just called someone on the telephone — the bloody telephone again. Unlike the pulp detectives, I don’t make a habit of eavesdropping; but this was a special case. I stayed where I was and listened.

“Do you still want me to go ahead?” Rosten’s voice said.

Pause.

“I just don’t like it, that’s all. What if something else goes wrong?”

Pause.

“I know that. Don’t you think I know that?”

Pause.

“When?”

Pause.

“What about that private detective?”

Pause.

“All right. Yes — I understand.”

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

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

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

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

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

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

Alex was gone.

The first thing I did was to run down the upstairs hall, knocking on doors and throwing them open. But the rooms were all dark, unoccupied. Then I came pounding downstairs again and looked into the family room, the dining room, a parlor. Empty, all of them. I was on my way to the office when the Chicano maid came out of another doorway and peered at me with wide eyes.

I said, “Where’s Alex? Have you seen him?”

She shook her head.

“Mrs. Cappellani?”

One hand came up and pointed at the office door. I ran to there, shoved it open, and went inside by a couple of steps. Rosa was sitting behind the desk with a big ledger book in front of her and a pencil upraised in one hand like a sceptre. And she was alone.

Her expression fluctuated between annoyance at my sudden entrance and concern at what she must have seen in my face. The concern won out when I said sharply, “Have you seen Alex?”

“Isn’t he in his room?”

“He’s not in the house at all.”

“You’re upset. What is it, what’s wrong?”

“I don’t have time to explain now.”

I wheeled around, nearly collided with the maid beyond the doorway, brushed past her, and hustled up to the foyer again. Where the hell was he? And why had he left his room, left the house? A walk to clear his head, maybe — or, Jesus, maybe Rosten had called him and arranged a meeting somewhere on some sort of pretext; I had not even considered that possibility.

There was a cold sweat on my body when I lumbered outside again; I could feet it trickling down from my armpits. My responsibility, goddamn it. If anything happened to Alex tonight, it was my fault, I was supposed to be his goddamn bodyguard…

I ran past my car without even realizing it was there. Where? I was thinking. Down at the cellar? At one of the other buildings? Out in the vineyards? Where? Then I thought about the car, taking the car, but I was already out through the gate and onto the road. I hesitated, took a step back toward the lane — and saw the pick-up truck down in the yard before the nightlit cellar.

The same Ford pick-up I had seen parked alongside Rosten’s cottage.

A sensation like the touch of a cold hand settled on my neck and between my shoulders. The pick-up was backed up near the cellar’s entrance, and its headlights were on, laying an elongation of light across the gravel and across the road beyond; I could just hear the steady rumble of its engine. Nothing moved down there — there was just the truck and the frozen beams of light.

I started to run again.

But I had not gone more than ten yards, into heavy shadow from the bordering oaks, when the shapes of two men appeared through the big brassbound doors, crowded close together, one pushing the other toward the pick-up. I pulled up again, on reflex In the pale shine of the nightlights I could identify both of them, all right — not clearly but clearly enough. I could not identify the object Rosten was holding in one hand, but I knew what that was too. The sensation of coldness deepened and spread; I tasted bile mixed with the brassiness of fear.

I did not know what to do. Neither Rosten nor Alex was looking in my direction, could not have seen me in the shadows if they had been; they were at the passenger door of the pick-up, and Rosten had it open and was pushing Alex inside to the wheel. I couldn’t get to where they were before they were ready to drive off — and if I tried it anyway, or if I yelled to let them know I saw them, Rosten might panic and start shooting. Do something, for Christ’s sake! I backed up, got off the road and into a thicker pocket of blackness. Rosten was inside the pick-up too, now; I heard the engine sound magnify, saw the truck jerk forward and the lights swing around in a left-hand quadrant. They were not coming this way. They were heading back to the east, onto the secondary road that led through the vineyards to the cottages.

I was already moving by then. I raced back to the lane, and just as I got to it Mrs. Cappellani appeared in front of me: she must have followed me down from the house. For the first time she seemed to have lost some of her imperious composure; her face was a white frightened oval in the darkness.

“Call the police,” I yelled at her, “tell them Alex has been kidnapped — tell them it’s Paul Rosten.”

She gaped at me. “Kidnapped? Paul?”

“Do what I told you, call the police!”

I shoved past her and made it to where my car was. My breath had a clogged feel in my chest; sweat fused my shirt to my skin, made the palms of my hands slick. I dragged the door open, slid inside. And kicked the engine to life, jammed the transmission lever into reverse, threw my right arm over the seat back, and laid into the accelerator.

The car bucked backward, picked up speed and began to yaw; I had a death grip on the wheel with my left hand. Through the rear window I saw Mrs. Cappellani scurry out of the way, waving one arm up and down in a gesture that seemed to have no meaning. Then I was past her and through the gate, onto the road in a sliding right-angle turn.

I hit the brakes and got the wheel straightened out and the transmission into Drive. The tires spun in place, smoking, before they caught traction and sent me lurching ahead. I left the headlights off; the last thing I wanted was for Rosten to know right away that I was coming.

When I was abreast of the cellar, still driving too fast and too recklessly, I could see up the secondary road to the line of eucalyptus trees. Empty. No sign of the pick-up.

Where was he taking Alex? His cottage, possibly — but that made no sense; you don’t for God’s sake bring somebody to your house to kill him. For that matter, why hadn’t Rosten just finished him off in the cellar? Questions, questions. And one more, the most important one: what was I going to do to help Alex when I caught up with them?

Cross that bridge when you come to it, I told myself grimly. Find them first, take it one step at a time.

I made a skidding turn onto the secondary road, and I had no choice then but to slow down. The car jounced on the rutted dirt-and-gravel surface, its old springs shrieking in protest; there was the danger of a tire blowing, of losing control. And the night’s heavy blackness shrouded the vineyards, moonless and starless because of the running mass of clouds, so that I could not see more than two hundred feet ahead of me with any clarity.

Working the brakes, I cut my speed to thirty as I climbed to the top of the hill. Once I got into the eucalyptus trees I had to chop it all the way down to ten miles per hour: I could barely make out the roadbed in the dark and almost missed negotiating the curve there as it was. On the far side, where I had a clear look down to the cottages, I gave her more gas and hunched forward to scan the area.

There was no activity around any of the cottages, no automobile lights anywhere in the valley; the road was empty all the way to the next hill. But beyond there I could see a suggestion of light against the inky sky. I had no idea what lay in that direction, where the road went or how far it went — but that was where they were.

The slope on the far side of the second hill turned out to be gradual and to blend into a long rumpled terrain full of little hillocks, all of them coated with grape vines. The road curled away to the left and skirted a narrow but longish section ribbed with outcroppings of limestone. I thought I saw the blood-colored flicker of a taillight over there, just as I topped the hill, but then it was gone; the long rocky section hid the path of the road beyond.

I resisted the impulse for more speed — I was not going to do Alex any good at all if I pushed myself into an accident. The tension had tightened up my chest again, making my breath come in short coughing pants. I sleeved sweat out of my eyes, worked saliva through my dry mouth and into the back of my throat.

It took me a full minute to get to where I could see past the wall of outcroppings. The vineyards ended over there and the land was dry, brown, uncultivated, patterned with bunches of trees growing on hillocks and scattered boulders and rock formations. The road dipped down into a hollow, dipped back up again, and went across another rise. Behind the rise light shimmered again, the kind of up-and-down shimmering that an automobile’s headlamps make on badly eroded road surfaces. The light kept on dancing that way until I cleared the hollow and started up the slope; but then the wavering lessened, became steadier, became just a reflected glow.

The pick-up had slowed and come to a stop.

Instinctively I took my foot off the accelerator and let it rest on the brake pedal. A muscle on my right cheekbone began to jump; I took one hand off the wheel and wiped it dry on my pantleg, did the same with the other hand. Twenty yards to the top of the rise. I realized I was trying to hold my breath and let it out noisily between locked teeth. Fifteen yards, ten — and I was onto the crown, looking down the far side.

At the foot of a hundred yards of gradual slope, the road leveled off for twenty yards and then came to a dead end in front of a sheer, thirty-foot-high limestone bluff. To the left there was a small stream, flowing north to south, and where it passed along the base of the bluff it filled a kind of geological bowl and became a pool. The pool and the bluff were ringed on three sides by madrone and oak and pine, creating one of those backhill spots that families use for picnics and kids use for gameplaying and beer busts. The pick-up was parked twenty feet from the edge of the pool, and its lights reflected off the wrinkled surface of the limestone formation, giving it an eerie look of frozen, rust-colored water.

I saw all of that in the time it took me to bring the car across the short flat top of the rise, nose it down the other side — three or four seconds. And I saw, too, that neither Rosten nor Alex had yet gotten out of the truck. I had a brief mental image of Alex down there inside, arguing, pleading for explanations, begging for his life, and that kept me from hesitating, wasting time. There was no way I could stop the car and get to them on foot; I had no weapon to use anyway against Rosten’s gun. My only option, my only chance, was to use the one thing in my favor: the element of surprise.

I braced myself, held tight to the wheel, and came down hard on the accelerator.

The uneven, chuckholed roadbed made the car bounce crazily up and down as it gathered speed. Through the windshield I watched the pick-up seem to expand in size, watched the doors on both sides because when they heard me coming their first reaction would be to get out of there. When less than thirty yards remained to the bottom of the slope I took my left hand off the wheel long enough to pull the headlight knob. An instant after the lights came on and began throwing weird patterns across the landscape, the passenger door burst open and Rosten started to scramble out with the gun in his hand. The light-glare seemed to blind him; he lost his balance and threw his free hand out to the door to keep himself from falling.

I stood on the brakes.

The car sailed across the bottom of the slope, bounced onto and across the short level stretch. Rosten was just starting to shove away from the passenger door, and Alex had the driver’s door halfway open, when I skidded into the back of the pick-up.

Even though I was braced for it, the impact slammed me forward into the wheel and sent daggers of pain through both arms, through my chest. Metal crumpled with an explosive crunching noise, both headlights shattered, the pick-up’s rear glass shattered; the force of the collision drove the truck forward to the edge of the pool, rocking it like a hobby horse. I had a confused impression of Rosten down on his hands and knees to one side, where the impact must have thrown him, and of Alex’s head and arm thrust through the pick-up’s open side window. Then the fusion of twisted metal separated on the right side, and the Ford’s rear end slewed around to the right and the rear end of my car came around to the left — the same effect as when you snap a stick in the middle. The truck tilted up on two wheels at the edge of the pool, but the rocks there kept it from falling all the way over into the water. The left front tire on my car jolted up against those same rocks; the engine rattled and died.

I had my left hand on the door handle, and soon as the car came to a shuddering rest I threw the door open and staggered out. Alex was struggling free of the pick-up; I heard him yell something at me. But I was already turned and looking across the hood, looking for and then at Rosten.

He was still down on all fours, crawling a little, trying to stand up and not making it, and then crawling again. He did not have the gun anymore, but in the darkness I couldn’t tell where it was or if it was what Rosten was heading after. I swung around the front fender of my car, trying not to stumble on the rocks. Alex shouted something else, and in response I yelled over my shoulder, “Find the gun, get the gun!”

Rosten heard that and heard me coming; his head jerked around and he made another effort to gain his feet, clawing uselessly at the branches of a huckleberry bush for leverage. His left leg would not support his weight: he must have broken a bone or sprained something. He fell back onto his right knee against the bush, with his left leg bent out to the side and one arm coming up to defend himself — but it was too late then, I was on him.

I kicked his left leg just above the ankle, and he made a bleating agonized sound and lunged at me, and I sidestepped that and threw myself down on top of him shoulder first, like a football defender spearing a ball carrier. The breath went out of him; his body jerked wildly beneath my pinning weight. I got him wedged against the base of the huckleberry bush, levered up and managed to set myself for a looping right-hand swing at his head. The blow went past one of his upthrust arms and landed flush on his left temple, snapped his head back and to the right. He made a sighing sound and his body stopped thrashing around under me; I felt him go limp.

And just that quickly, it was over.

I got up in slow, painful movements — stood over him trying to drag air back into my constricted lungs. My chest felt numb, hot; the thin dry cough started up. I ran a hand over my face, took the hand down and peered at it. Steady.

When I looked for Alex I saw him in a flat-footed stance alongside my car, staring over at me; he was holding the gun laxly in one hand. I started toward him, after another couple of seconds, and he moved at the same time — jerkily, as somebody will after a full release of tension. His face was stark and frightened, and his eyes seemed glazed. He looked as sick as a man can look and still be on his feet. I took the gun out of his hand, saw that it was a big plow-handled .357 Magnum, and put it away in my jacket pocket.

“He was going to kill me,” Alex said. The sickness was in his voice too. “He was going to shoot me with that gun.”

“Yeah,” I said.

“He’s the one — it must’ve been Rosten all along. My God. My God, I’ve known him all my life.”

I did not answer him because right then, suddenly, reaction set in — just as I knew it would, just as it always does. The detachment with which I had functioned for the past few minutes vanished, and my hands started to tremble and there was a liquidy feeling in both legs that made me think I was going to fall down. I leaned back against the car and sweated and kept on sweating.

“Why?” Alex was saying. “Why would he want to kill me? Why?”

He was talking to himself as much as to me, and I had no answers for him anyway. I looked at Rosten; he had not moved. Then I looked at my hands and waited for them to quit shaking.

18

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

“No. He didn’t say a word the whole time — not a word.”

“What happened at the cellar?”

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

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

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

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

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

“Get up on your feet, Rosten,” I said.

He stayed where he was, motionless.

“Get up or I’ll put a bullet in you.”

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

He said thickly, “I can’t walk. My ankle’s sprained.”

“You can hobble. Get up.”

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

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

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

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

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

Alex said, “Twospot? You know what it means?”

“No, but Rosten does. And maybe you’ve got some idea.”

He shook his head. “I told you, I can’t remember where I heard it before.”

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

He fixed me with an alarmed stare. “Are you sure Rosten isn’t the only one?”

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

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

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

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

I glanced over at him. “Got what?”

“Twospot. I remember now, I know where I heard it.”

“All right — where?”

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

“Booker? In what context?”

“I can’t remember that. It was after dinner and we were having brandy in the living room. He said something like, ‘How’s the big Twospot project coming? You know, the one a week from Monday at noon.’ ”

“Who was he talking to?”

“I think it was Leo.”

“Who else was there?”

“Rosa. Brand and Dockstetter. But they didn’t hear it. They were on the other side of the room.”

“What was Leo’s reaction?”

“I’m not sure. I was only half paying attention.”

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

“Fest?”

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

“Did I?” He shook his head numbly. “I don’t remember.”

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

“No,” Alex said. “Leo woke me up and asked me to go down. He needed a statistical report prepared on our generic—” He stopped suddenly, as if the rest of the sentence had gotten clogged in his throat. When I glanced over at him again I saw that his face had twisted up and he looked even sicker than before. “Oh my God,” he said. “You don’t think Leo could be—?”

“I don’t think anything yet,” I said, but that was a lie. I was thinking Leo, all right — and something else occurred to me, a possible way to confirm my suspicions against him. It meant stopping at Rosten’s cottage, and unless the county police were already on the scene I would do just that on my own.

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

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

Only Leo isn’t having any of that; the project is too important to him and maybe he doesn’t trust Booker, and in any case he was the kind who would never stand still for blackmail. So he decides Booker has to die — and that Alex has to die too, because he’s afraid that Alex will tip himself to the project and jeopardize it. Which made Leo a sick, coldhearted son of a bitch, plotting the death of his own brother. But there are people like that in the world, too damned many of them; and it could be, too, that his evident dislike for Alex had evolved into a homicidal hatred. Whatever his exact motivations, he marks both Booker and Alex for execution.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

He gave me a blank look. “The phones?”

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

“Yeah. But I don’t—”

“Whose extension number is one sixteen?”

“Mr. Cappellani’s,” Boylan said. “Leo’s. His room over at the main house…”

He was going to say something else, ask me questions, but I pivoted away from him and went back inside. All right, I was thinking, so that confirms it: it was Leo I overheard Rosten talking to. But it wasn’t hard evidence; I had no hard evidence of any kind to give the police when they came. Unless there was something here in Rosten’s effects that would point conclusively to Leo. Or something here that would give me an idea of what the Monday-noon project was.

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

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

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

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

Castro, I thought.

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

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

Twospot and the Monday-noon project.

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

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