“Will they find anything?”

I said, “No.”

“Are you sure?”

“I guarantee they won’t.”

“How did you do it?” Elizabeth asked. Maddie looked, too, really wanting to find out.

“Do it? I didn’t do anything,” I said, trying to sound like it was a double bluff. That I was being disingenuous, devious, and dishonest, trying to cover it up, and failing so badly that they could see through it. “It was an accident.”

“Oh, really,” Elizabeth said, tones of disbelief.

“Really,” I said.

“Then we needn’t pay you,” she said.

CHAPTER TWENTY-TWO

A SHORT STORY

IT’S A BUTTON. ELECTRIC ZAP. Red as rage, green as the Hulk. Primal as a thirteen-year-old at Sands Jr. High, down by the Brooklyn Navy Yard, some kid who thinks he’s tougher says, “Gimme your lunch money.” Fight or pay every day. Toxic male violence, motherfucker! But I’ve had better than six decades to slowly learn some control and how to put on a show, so in spite of the blood going boomlay, boomlay, boomlay, boom, inside my skull like the drums of doom, I went all abstract and literary on them. I said, “Beinhart’s favorite writer is Dashiell Hammett. Did you know that?”

Madelaine said, “Oh, I think I knew that.”

Elizabeth didn’t say anything. Her look was a clear what-the-fuck?

“There was a collection of short stories.” I spoke softly, like we were at the library. “One of them was The Looting of…a place with a strange name, I forget it…an island off the coast of California. There’s this massive robbery of the whole island, with fistfights, handguns, machine guns, a murder or two, and they get the bank, the jewelry story, and the wedding gifts at a mansion.

“A detective from the Continental Detective Agency is there. In the middle of all the turmoil, he twists his ankle. He’s sees a one-legged newsboy, and, to keep going after the bad guys, he takes the newsie’s crutch.”

Madelaine had a look of polite interest. It came from long practice. Like a really good toupee, it was impossible to tell if it was real or false. Elizabeth was impatient to know what the point was and said, “Yes, so?”

“At the end of the story,” I said, taking my time, “the Op realizes that the beautiful woman he’s been with is one of the leaders and probably a murderer. He’s got his gun on her. She’s not impressed. She says, ‘You pretend you’ll shoot me, but I don’t believe you.’

“Hey, it’s 1925, men didn’t shoot women, not that they’re not in love with, so it’s reasonable for her to think he won’t. She starts to walk away. He shoots. He hits her in the leg. She’s shocked. So is he, for that matter. He’d never shot a woman before.