“Well, that’s another little irony. The guy without whose approval nothing happens in upstate New York—in other words, the snake who either ordered the hit on Carl or at least okayed it—that snake was in our house on three occasions. I could’ve popped him on any one of those occasions. In fact, I came very close to it the third time. You know what? If I’d done it then, when I had the urge, Carl wouldn’t be dead now, and I wouldn’t be sitting here. You get the picture? I was convicted for a murder I didn’t commit—because of a murder I should have committed but didn’t.”

“What’s his name?”

“Who?”

“The snake you should have killed.”

“Donny Angel. Also known as the Greek. Also known as Adonis Angelidis. Three times I had a chance to take him out. Three times I let it go by.”

This narrative direction, Gurney noted, had illuminated another piece of Kay Spalter. Inside the smart, striking, fine-boned creature, there was something very icy.

“Back up for a minute,” said Gurney, wanting a clearer sense of the world the Spalters lived in. “Tell me more about Carl’s business.”

“I can only tell you what I know. Tip of the iceberg.”

Over the next half hour Kay covered not only Carl’s business and its strange corporate structure, but his strange family as well.

His father, Joe Spalter, had inherited a real estate holding company from his father. Spalter Realty ended up owning a huge chunk of upstate New York’s inventory of rental properties, including half the apartment houses in Long Falls—all of this by the time that Joe, close to death, transferred the company to his two sons, Carl and Jonah.

Carl took after Joe, had his ambition and money-hunger, squared. Jonah took after his mother, Mary, an aggressive pursuer of many hopeless causes. Jonah was a utopian dreamer, a charismatic New Age spiritualist. As Kay put it, “Carl wanted to own the world, and Jonah wanted to save it.”

The way their father saw it, Carl had what it took to “go all the way”—to be the richest man in America, or maybe the world. The problem was, Carl was as uncontrolled as he was ruthless. There was nothing he wouldn’t do to get what he wanted. As a child he’d once set fire to a neighbor’s dog as a distraction so he could steal a video game. And that wasn’t a one-time instance of craziness. Things like that happened regularly.