“Do you have any idea what the attack was about?” I asked gently. Greer was clearly fragile, and I didn’t want to push her too hard. “Was it random?”

Greer shook her head. “I think Alex paid him to kill me,” she said. A tear slipped, unnoticed, down her right cheek. “God, Mojo, you can’t imagine how scared I was.”

“I think she can,” Jolie told her quietly. “Her psycho brother was going to filet her like a side of beef, right here in this living room.”

Greer’s gaze found its way to me, unsteady and a little blank. “Oh,” she said. “Yeah.”

“We know what happened with Geoff,” Jolie said, watching me. “Tell us about last night.”

I described my graveyard adventure.

“Why would you go to the cemetery in your bathrobe?” Greer asked, when I’d shared every heart-stopping detail.

“She really does need tea,” I told Jolie.

“She needs whiskey,” Jolie replied.

“I want to go home,” Greer said.

Jolie and I nodded. I packed a trash bag, and Jolie and I loaded Lillian’s boxes into the back of her Pathfinder while Greer sat in docile silence in the front passenger seat.

“I am really worried about her,” Jolie confided, after I’d locked the apartment and joined her in the parking lot. “And not just because of the broken arm.”

I nodded. “Do you think the guy with the van was really working for Alex? He’s three kinds of a bastard, but I can’t imagine him siccing somebody like that on Greer.”

“I don’t know,” Jolie said. “Maybe it was connected to the blackmail.”

“Did she tell you anything more about that?”

Jolie shook her head. Looked up at the apartment, and shuddered visibly. “Let’s get out of here,” she said. “This place gives me the creeps.”

“Tell me about it,” I replied.

We stopped off at a supermarket on the way back to Greer’s and made her go inside with us, so we could run interference if another sicko came out of the woodwork and tried to nab her.

The three of us stocked up on wine, French bread, various cheeses and every other decadent thing we could think of, and then went on to Pennington Palace.

As promised, Alex had vacated the premises.

His car was gone.

Most of his clothes were gone.

His Rolex was gone.

Fine by me.

I stashed my trash bag in the guesthouse, which was half the size of the one at Clive and Barbara Larimer’s place, but still equipped with a plasma TV and all the modern kitchen appliances. There was even an alarm system, and I made a mental note to change the code and check under the bed for a hole in the floor.