Winter slept its sleep. Warlock’s spirit went under the ground with the tubers, roots, the stones that have never seen daylight and never will. In fact, his spirit stayed below any conceivable room temperature. April came, the piper at the gates of dawn. Fog rose from the melting drifts. Fox tracks spread. He cast a cold eye with a disarming friendliness. Certainly Diana and Rabun did not suspect the trap being set. He only read children’s books to keep his mind cruel and simple. His mind slipped back into prehistory, enacting out of racial memory the true relationship between hunted and hunter, how the predator husbands his prey. It was not that he was a leopard playing with mating mice. He had learned, in defiance of John Calvin, that life did not usually offer up any sweetmeats of vindication, but that life’s little specialties were blurred peripheries, out of focus elongated moments, shrill nights where one slept on piles of cold, dreamless coal, or fell down uncapped oil wells, dreams of funerals and headless roosters. He flew to New York and buried himself in expense account decadence like a soprano cuckoo. He returned and hiked in circles in melting snowdrifts. He cleaned his shotgun over and over. He became lost in an April storm and was chased by a low flying cloud the size of a Greyhound bus. To say that Warlock was getting ready to make his move would be a ludicrous euphemism: he was intractable, foreordained, predestined, implacable as an ICBM sent earthwards from a galactic platform; the lever has already been pulled, the red button pushed. In a way Warlock was better than an ICBM; he was a man with a heart and brain full of hatred and he could hit a moving target. It was only a matter of time.

When Ted and Warlock had reached Palm Beach that grim but sunny mid-December day, they’d made Gloria cancel a tennis date, a luncheon, a hair appointment, a massage, a cocktail party, a dinner, a ball at the Seminole Club and a postball party at the Bath and Tennis Club. They locked themselves in Gloria’s den, unplugged the phone and had a long mixture of a skull session and war party, with a coffee table strewn with the paper intricacies of Ted and Gloria’s ravaged portfolios and forged trust papers. The total swindle amounted to a little over three million. Warlock drew up an airtight performance contract entitling him to a ten percent recovery fee, plus expenses. Like nearly all rich people they were not stupid and tried to nitpick the percentage downward.

“He’s sixty-eight,” Warlock said. “He could die any moment from the excitement of fucking my wife. Then you’d lose the whole three mil. I’ve seen the will.” The last was a fib; rather, an outright lie.

“Well, maybe my lawyers should be here….” Gloria wrung her hands in doubt.