I nodded, and went out, where Dutch and Mel were sitting at the long bar having bottles of beer. I conveyed what their boss had told me, then I was returned to the guest bedroom.

I got dressed and walked to the window. I looked out and didn’t see any fishes jumping now. I considered climbing out and jumping myself—two stories wouldn’t kill you. But there was a moat, and I didn’t particularly want to go swimming; and somebody might see me head for the bridge. I had no idea how many other Wortman minions might be here in the castle. And he’d seemed friendly enough, even grateful for what I’d told him. Why run?

Dutch and Mel walked me down to the kitchen and back into the garage, where the Oldsmobile and a Cadillac were parked, and Buster—hands in the pockets of a terrycloth robe, feet rocking in sandals—was waiting.

Dutch said, “What do you want us to do with him, Buster?”

“This breaks my heart,” Buster said, and his right hand came from the robe’s pocket to train the .38 revolver on Downey.

His number two looked astonished. He raised his hands, palms out, nodded at me and glared at his boss. “You’re not going to believe this asshole?”

“About what?”

Buster shot him in the head, and bone, blood and brains spattered the brick wall like a giant bug against a windshield.

“Jesus!” Mel said, wide-eyed, terrified.

“Calm down,” Buster said. “You’re in charge of clean-up.”

Now I was a witness, but before I could do anything about it, Buster dropped the .38 in a pocket of the terrycloth robe. Looking nothing at all like a comic in an old movie, he said, “Nate, I’ll call you a cab.”

“Okay,” I said. “Just don’t make it an Ace.”

CHAPTER SEVENTEEN

By the time I got back to the Coral Court, I figured I’d been up eighteen hours. The only sign of a struggle in the Red Room was my nine millimeter on the carpet where it had been tossed by either Dutch or Mel—their entry had been a blur. I picked the weapon up and placed it on the nightstand by the phone.

I didn’t feel tired—more like overwrought. I took a warm shower, to help come down from that high a guy can get surviving a kidnapping by hoods after his dinner date got killed and two chatty gangsters made him the center of their attention. You’ve had evenings like that I’m sure.

My head still ached from the chloroform dosing and I got a bottle of aspirins out of my shaving kit and shook out five or six. Took them. Pajamas seemed wrong somehow and I just crawled under the cool sheets in my boxers and settled my head into an equally cool pillow and waited for the wings of Morpheus to flap down and carry me off.

They didn’t.

Pieces were floating inside my head like a Dali painting trying to make sense of itself; but after a while the fragments assembled into something more on the Norman Rockwell order, minus the saccharine Americana. I had caught the barest glimpse of the cab driver who’d fired that bullet into Sandy O’Day’s forehead, but he might have been the blond from the Tic Toc alley who’d seemed vaguely familiar to me.