On Friday a letter was delivered to the farmhouse, inviting them to submit a bid to a contractor who was building a small housing development for a nearby township, Ashton Wells. Berry-berry learned from Agricola that this contractor was related by marriage to the township’s official inspector and that all the subcontracts would be assigned on the basis of graft payments to the inspector. Agricola had no real talent for skulduggery; he was inclined to ignore the invitation altogether. But Berry-berry, for his part, felt that his underworld experience might stand him in good stead, and these shady details even added a certain spice to his first legitimate venture.

On Saturday at noon, when he arrived on Seminary Street wearing a necktie and a new summer suit, and at the midday meal displayed to the Williamses and Echo O’Brien the advertisement he had clipped from the Record, and read aloud to them his company’s invitation to bid on the Ashton Wells project, Clinton excused himself and went upstairs to make this brief entry in his notebook: “Berry-berry’s whorehouse has folded up!!!!”

But when he went to bed that night, Clinton felt somewhat less inclined to indulge in exclamation points.

[Clinton’s Notebook]

Saturday Night.

Well, every day can’t be perfect. And I’m not complaining either. Nor am I going to sit here and write a lot of vomit. I’ll just tell everything the way it happened.

We roasted weenies in the back yard, the whole five of us, and we played cards and worked jigsaw puzzles on the front porch. We all move around in this wonderful kind of a cluster, like one big person with ten legs and five sets of teeth. All the neighbors were sitting on their porches. They kept glancing over here, and they all looked kind of glum to me. I think they wanted to get in on all this activity we had going on. That big old German woman who’s always sucking her teeth and lives in that weird-looking purple job, the second door from the corner, she walked past here about forty-five times, and each time she slowed down, trying to get an earful. The way I figure her, she’s some kind of a scout they send out in this neighborhood to get information about us. Which I don’t blame anybody. Because if they had these strings of fantastic cars lined up in front of their places, I’d probably go nuts wondering what was going on. So this one time when she went creeping by, I gave her a big smile and said, “How do you do, ma’am?” She glanced at me like somebody caught at the keyhole, and went scooting up the street like a rocket. I actually like the old broad, though. And I wouldn’t mind getting her to fill out a few questionnaires about some of the other odd-balls I’ve seen on this street.

Well, tut-tut.