Grofield was depressed. Standing there on the cold floor, on that one little patch of it slightly warmed by his feet, his arms wrapped around himself for whatever warmth that might give, surrounded by emptiness and dim light, he felt very very sorry for himself.

  He knew the feeling was at least partly irrational, the result of physical discomfort. Keeping their victims chilly and underfed and underslept had long been one of the most potent weapons of the brainwashers, inducing depression and self-pity and eventually despair. But though he might be cold and uncomfortable, he was hardly underfed, and if he was underslept in the short run his body was definitely resilient enough to take an interrupted night’s sleep in stride.

  No, it was the clamminess. Plus, of course, the inaction, the inability to do anything or think constructively about anything or plan anything. And also there was the undeniable extra little problem that he might be shot very soon.

  They were waiting for the employees of Belle Danamato’s husband. Harry was one of them himself and apparently had a way to contact the others. And what would he tell them on arrival? “The boss’s wife is dead, and I got the killer in the cellar.”

  Wonderful.

  And what would the reaction of the others be? Well, they would probably get in touch with B.G. Danamato himself first and tell him the situation. And B.G. would surely answer, “Execute.”

  Magnificent.

  It was rare for Grofield to be the innocent bystander, and he didn’t much like it. When he was guilty, as he frequently was, he was exclusively guilty of well-planned and well-executed major robberies with a cast of perhaps five or six, where most of the details and most of the potential results were already counted on within the plan. If the plan were to go sour—as sometimes even the best-laid plans did—it would nevertheless do so within a perimeter of the known. Grofield would know how to act. More important, he would know how to react.

  But here he was in the middle of somebody else’s story. To take a simile from his second profession, he had been miscast. Not only that, he’d been thrust onstage without knowing his lines.

  All right. If that door over there should ever open, Grofield was prepared to ad-lib with the best of them, hoping for the best. In the meantime, there was nothing to do but stand here and shiver and be gloomy and depressed and sorry for himself and bored.

  No. Come to think of it, there was one other thing he could do. He could go over the story till now, he could try to familiarize himself with the material, so that when the door finally did open—assuming they didn’t merely intend to leave him down here forever, à la “Cask of Amontillado”—his ad libs would have some weight and point.

  For instance. George Milford had told him something of the situation here, but had he told all? Hardly. There were holes in his story you could drive a 747 through. So, go over what Milford had said and see if anything could be figured out about what Milford hadn’t said.

  Milford had said: Belle Danamato was separated from her husband, getting a divorce from him. She was afraid he was going to kill her. The divorce was uncontested, but the settlement was complicated. She had Harry for her bodyguard at home, but he wouldn’t do for public appearances, so she was looking for someone to escort her in the outside world.

  Fine. Question: If the divorce was uncontested and the settlement—though complicated—was at least in the process of being settled, why was Belle Danamato afraid her husband was going to kill her? Answer: Milford was lying. Either the divorce was contested, or the settlement was too complicated to be worked out. Of the two, Grofield leaned toward the second, on the theory that a man doesn’t kill his wife to keep her from leaving him. It would be the settlement. Money.

  Grofield smiled, in the small cold room, under the small dim light. He smiled because he was pleased with himself, and he was pleased with himself because he’d worked it out. If husband Danamato was a big-time racketeer, as claimed, he undoubtedly had income-tax problems. If he had income-tax problems, he undoubtedly had an accountant. And if he had an accountant—and listened to the accountant—a lot of his holdings were undoubtedly in his wife’s name.

  Sure. She could divorce him if she wanted, but he was damned if she’d walk away with half his goods. So then the situation became obvious: He must have let her know that she would either sign all that stuff back over to him or he’d arrange to inherit from her.

  So down came Belle Danamato to Puerto Rico, with her lawyer and a few friends, prepared to lock herself out of sight until her husband gave up or the divorce proceedings became final.

  So had B.G. Danamato made good on his threat? Had his wife been right in her fears, and had he gotten to her despite her precautions?

  No. Not if Harry was actually working for the husband, as he’d said he was. Belle Danamato could have been killed at any time. No reason to wait until now.

  Unless . . .

  Grofield stopped smiling and hugged himself tighter. Unless, he thought, they didn’t want to make a move until a patsy showed up.

  Would that make sense? A man can’t legally inherit as a result of a felony he committed. If Belle Danamato were murdered there’d be no suspect around but her husband, or at least one of her husband’s employees. The police would surely do their best to shake up Danamato’s organization until a stool pigeon fell out, and a man can never be sure that every last one of his employees is 100 per cent trustworthy and true. Not with a lot of police pressure on them.

  But what if there’s another murderer, a wanderer, a drifter, just drifted in, had an argument with Mrs. Danamato, actually threatened her with a gun at the dinner table? Why should the law look any farther, why should there be any shake-up of Danamato’s organization?

  Was George Milford in on it? He hadn’t acted surprised when Harry told him his true affiliation, but on the other hand Harry had apparently felt the need to tell him. So Milford hadn’t actually known that Harry was in the house really as the husband’s employee, but he had suspected it. Confirmation had come as no surprise.

  Whose side was Milford on? If he’d suspected Harry to be disloyal, why hadn’t he told Mrs. Danamato? Or was he maintaining an Olympian dispassion, a grand neutrality, planning to ride the coattails of whoever came out on top?

  And what about the others? Roy Chelm was obviously what Belle Danamato was getting her divorce for, and his sister Patricia was either here on vacation or to protect her from any overflow revenge of B.G.’s. The same for Milford’s wife, the tense Eva. As to Onum Marba, the poker-faced African, his role in all this was pure bafflement.

  Another question finally occurred to Grofield. Assuming he was wrong about Harry having done the killing—an assumption he would be delighted to make—who else was likely? The brother and sister Chelm seemed both to be in a position to gain a lot more from keeping Belle Danamato alive. George Milford didn’t seem to have any motive for switching from observer to participant, and neither did his wife. Onum Marba? First you’d have to know what he was there for. Still, poker faces are usually worn by poker players, so whatever he was doing here it was unlikely Marba included murder on the agenda.

  Which left Harry, damn it. Good old Harry.

  Speak of the devil. The door creaked open, and there was Harry in the doorway, automatic in hand. This time he had two friends with him, one the pistol packer from the Mercedes, the other a new face. They both had guns in their hands, too.

  What did they think he was—Rasputin?

  “Come on, bo,” said Harry. “Let’s take a walk.”

  8

  THE sun was up. Amazing. How many hours had he shivered down there, for Pete’s sake?

  In any case, the sun was a welcome warmth on his face when he walked out of the house, following Harry, the other two behind him, and the sun-warmed flagstones were heaven on his feet.

  This was the central courtyard again, the pocket jungle. They’d brought him upstairs and through a confusing series of rooms and out a set of French doors, and here was the court. Harry set off toward the middle of it on the curving flagstone path.

  What were they going to do, murder him and bury the body in the middle of the court?

  Nonsense. They wanted him around to show to the law, to be accused of murder, to take the rap for B.G. and his boys.

  Nevertheless, Grofield hesitated just a second before following Harry. A gun was immediately poked into his back, and a voice said, “Move along, chum.”

  He moved along.

  Once again there was that brief instant when the jungle growth was all that could be seen in any direction, when the house ceased to exist and the mind began to jitter with the irrational shakes, but one step more and there was the clearing, slate-floored, with its table and chairs.

  And B.G. Danamato.

  It couldn’t be anybody else. A big heavy-set man, dressed in a lightweight business suit and sprawled broadly on one of the flimsy ice-cream chairs, he was puffing away on a cigar as though to illustrate his contempt of clichés. As Grofield approached, Danamato took the cigar from his mouth and studied him like a slave auctioneer appraising the day’s goods.

  Grofield came to a stop on the other side of the table. “Lee J. Cobb, I presume,” he said.

  “Danamato,” corrected Danamato. “B.G. Danamato.”

  “Grofield,” Grofield said. “A.J. Grofield.”

  Danamato pointed his cigar. “Sit down.”

  Grofield sat down. “Are we having breakfast?” By the slant of the sun, he assumed it was around nine in the morning.

  “Don’t worry about breakfast,” Danamato told him. “You won’t be alive long enough to miss it.”

  “That’s a relief,” said Grofield. “You sure this frame is going to stick?”

  Danamato lowered an eyebrow at him. “What are you talking about?”

  “You turn me over to the law,” Grofield said, “I might manage to put a little doubt in somebody’s mind. You turn me over dead, shot trying to escape, that’ll put doubt in somebody’s mind.”

  Danamato shook his head in irritated confusion. “Turn you over to the law? You crazy?”

  It was Grofield’s turn to lower an eyebrow. “This isn’t a setup?”

  They studied each other with equal incomprehension for a minute, and then Danamato slapped the table and said, “Oh, is that it! You been framed!”

  “That’s what it looks like,” said Grofield, though he wasn’t entirely sure of it any more.

  “Depends where you’re looking from,” Danamato said. “Who’s supposed to’ve worked this frame?”

  “You,” Grofield told him.

  Danamato was a) surprised and b) angry. “What? How you gonna con me into that? Don’t you think I know if—what are you trying to pull?”

  “Harry is your boy.”

  “Sure he is.”

  “He waited till a patsy showed up,” Grofield said. “Me.”

  “For what?”

  “To follow out your orders,” Grofield said. “To kill your wife and pin it on me. So there wouldn’t be any embarrassing questions.”

  Danamato looked at him blank-faced for a long minute, then shook his head slowly and with an air of controlled rage threw his cigar away. Without the cigar it was a finger he had to point at Grofield. “I wanted to see you first,” he said. “I wanted to ask you why you done it. I wanted to try and figure you out. But you surprise me.”

  “I’m glad,” Grofield said.

  “You come out here,” Danamato said, “pushin for an insanity plea. You out of your mind?”

  “No,” said Grofield.

  “Then why you trying to make me angry?”

  “I didn’t know I was.”

  “I loved my wife!” Danamato spread his hands wide, glared up at the sky. “Belle!” he shouted. The echoes died, he kept his hands spread out, he looked at Grofield and calmly he said, “Every married couple has their misunderstandings.”

  Grofield wasn’t sure what was what. Would Danamato really try to convince him of his innocence if he was guilty? What would be the point? He said, “Your wife thought you wanted to kill her. Was that a misunderstanding?”

  “Belle exaggerated,” he said. “She’d always exaggerate, Belle, she’d make a federal case out of everything.”

  “She was going to hire me as bodyguard,” Grofield said. “Public bodyguard, because Harry isn’t pretty enough.” The stir behind Grofield had to be Harry shifting his feet and glaring at the back of Grofield’s neck. The other two were back there, too.

  “I know about that,” Danamato said. “You on horse or something?”

  “Nothing,” Grofield said.

  “Arms.”

  Grofield held out his arms. The T-shirt left the arms almost completely bare, and Danamato would be able to see there were no needle marks there.

  Danamato frowned. “You acted like a junkie,” he said. “You pull a gun at the dinner table, Belle has to ask you please don’t shoot her.”

  “I pulled Harry’s gun on her,” Grofield pointed out. “Harry had it in my back at the time. I’d been mistreated, and I was upset.”

  “You were upset.”

  “Your wife was very arrogant with me,” Grofield said.

  “My wife is dead,” Danamato pointed out.

  “That’s right,” Grofield said. “And you know you didn’t kill her, and I know I didn’t kill her.”

  “The hell you didn’t.”

  Grofield said, “Think about it. It doesn’t make any sense. I never saw the woman before yesterday afternoon. I was going to be leaving this morning and never see her again. Why should I kill her?”

  “That’s why I think you’re a hophead,” Danamato said. “Let me see your legs.”

  “My legs are clean,” Grofield said. “And if there’s any marks on my behind, they’re from penicillin. Start talking sense, B.G.”

  “Who told you you could call me by name?”

  “I’m not calling you by name, I’m calling you by initial. You’ve had my bag searched by now, haven’t you? Anything in it? A needle, a packet, anything?”

  “Maybe you’re on LSD.”

  “Maybe you are,” Grofield told him. “You’re confused between reality and illusion.”

  Danamato sat back in his chair, frowning hard. The fingertips of his left hand drummed on the tabletop. From the way his cheeks were moving, he was biting them on the inside. He watched his fingertips tapping, he bit his cheeks, and he apparently did some hard thinking.

  Grofield waited, watching him and doing some hard thinking of his own, Danamato hadn’t ordered the killing of his wife—that seemed sure. Had Harry done it anyway, thinking it would please the boss, and was he now clamming up about it, seeing how the boss was taking it? Or was it one of the others here, after all, one of the quintet he’d already rejected earlier? Or one of the servants, teed off for some reason?

  Danamato’s thoughts had been taking the same route, it seemed, because finally he said, “If you didn’t do it, who did?”

  “You mean if I didn’t and you didn’t.”

  Danamato flushed with anger. Leaning forward, his tapping hand turning into a fist, he said, “I loved my wife! Dammit, I told you that already. Why do you think I sent Harry down?”

  “Why does Harry think you sent him down?” Grofield asked.

  Danamato didn’t get it. He squinted at Grofield and said, “Hah?”

  Grofield said, “Harry was around your wife all the time. She kept telling him how happy you’d be to see her dead. All the financial problems straightened out and all. So maybe after a while Harry began to think maybe she was right, maybe you’d appreciate it if he did—”

  Grofield ducked, and Harry’s swing missed his head, the barrel of the Colt gouging his flesh high on the left shoulder. He rolled off the chair, turning, kicking upward, kicking the chair into Harry, who was trying to come after him for another swing. Danamato was shouting Harry Harry but Harry wasn’t listening, he was after Grofield.

  Grofield rolled again across the slates, came up on his knees beside another of the frail-looking wrought-iron ice-cream chairs, and flung it at Harry. That gave him time to get on his feet, come inside Harry’s next sweeping swing with the gun, and chop the side of his hand upward against the bottom of Harry’s nose.

  Harry said, “Ehhh!” He took a step back, his eyes starting to water and his nose starting to bleed, and he dropped the automatic onto the slates.

  Grofield started to bend for it, but Danamato’s voice cut through to him: “Stop!”

  He stopped, half bent, reaching down. The other two had guns pointed at him. Danamato was on his feet, one arm extended all the way out, and he hadn’t been shouting stop at Grofield; he’d been shouting stop at the other two.

  Harry, both hands to his face, backed up another step, stumbled, and sat down hard on the slate. He was making a funny high-pitched noise.

  Grofield straightened. He showed the other two his empty palms. They relaxed slightly, but they kept their guns in their hands.

  Danamato, still standing, leaned both hands on the table, looked at Grofield and shook his head. “Not Harry,” he said. “Harry was almost as fond of my wife as me. That’s why I told him go with her. I told him tell her he’s not working for me any more he wants to work for her. Because Harry knows me, and he knows Belle, and he knows I couldn’t want that woman dead no matter what!”

  “Not even Roy Chelm?” Grofield asked.

  Danamato jutted out his jaw. “You’re pushing, you,” he said. “You keep pushing.”

  “What have I got to lose, B.G.?”

  Danamato seemed to think about that for a second, then he nodded jerkily and said, “All right. Even Roy Chelm. You think he was the first one? Or the last?”

  “The last, yes,” Grofield said.

  Danamato winced. “Except for what happened,” he said.

  “That’s what I mean,” said Grofield. “Maybe Roy Chelm was one too many.”

  “For me?”

  “Maybe you. Maybe Harry. Maybe Harry thought it was one too many for you. Maybe you said something that—”

  “Forget Harry!”