“Well, it’s an odd turn of events,” I said, then sipped the sweet stuff he’d poured me. “I’ll have to look into it.”

The faded blue eyes popped. “By all means! I just…when I heard you were on the premises, I assumed you must have come to see me. To bring me up to speed.”

“If that Ferrari had been up to speed,” I said, “I doubt your son would be alive. Those babies do nearly 200 miles per hour.”

“Disturbing. Disturbing.”

I nodded toward the door. “Where is your son, by the way? I notice he isn’t in his office.”

“Psychiatrist. Every day, for now at least. He had a bad one last night. Blew up at me again.”

“What set him off?”

He flipped a hand. “I suggested he take a leave of absence. Just for a few weeks or at most months…until his psychiatrist and physician give him a clean bill of health.”

Clean bill of mental health.

I finished my brandy. Stood. “Thank you, Mr. Colby. I’m glad to have a chance to touch bases with you…but these are early days.”

He stood, frowning a little. “Will this take days?”

“Figure of speech. But it could take days, yes. My advice is put this out of your mind. Help your son as best you can, and meanwhile I’ll find that Ferrari and its driver for you.”

A smile blossomed under the skimpy mustache. “You do that, Mr. Hammer, and there will be a handsome bonus in it for you!”

“And I’ll accept it.”

We shook hands and I went out.

The brunette with the mannish glasses gave me a smile as I passed, nothing icy about her now, though she still had a certain regal air.

But I already had a good-looking brunette in my life for a secretary. And being greedy only got a guy in trouble.

* * *

Lower Manhattan was home to plenty of desolate, half-dead business districts like this, rife with crumbling, neglected buildings waiting for gentrification to catch up with them, the street-level storefronts housing dingy shops dealing in junk, out-of-date crap or surplus goods.

I’d been to this particular stretch of small business purgatory before, just a few months ago. The tire-recapping place continued to ooze its bouquet of Butyl rubber into the atmosphere, an open-back truck piled with used casings parked out front, unattended. The tool-and-die shop still wore a CLOSED sign that could mean for the moment but more likely forever, the plate-glass shop had somehow managed to stay above water, and that tune-up and auto repair garage that had just opened for business on my last visit remained a beacon of optimism among a graveyard of empty storefronts.

What the hell would a Ferrari F40 be doing down here?

The wind fluttered the bottom of my trenchcoat and my hat needed to be well-snugged or it would fly away on me. I’d parked half a block down from the address I was checking out—I didn’t care to leave my heap too far away, not being as trusting as the tire-recapping boys.