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we were waiting for his credit-card imprint, he said suddenly, “There is one funny thing.”
    I took a deep swallow of the cooling coffee, then I sat up straight, wishing I hadn’t had the final brandy. Something was coming.
    “It’s not a secret,” he said seriously—to himself more than to me, I thought. “There’s no reason you shouldn’t know about it.”
    He paused to add in the tip and scribble his name. I didn’t even breathe. “It’s just this woman,” he said. “She came into the office a month or two ago. Irene Madigan. From Beaumont, Texas, I think, only she was staying at that women’s hotel downtown—the Martha Washington, is it? God knows if she’s still there. And she didn’t belong in our department at all. She just came in off the street and somebody got rid of her by shooing her onto me.”
    He paused to put the pen back in his pocket, then remembered it was Restaurant Associates’ pen and dropped it on the plate. He sighed. “This is just between us, Nolly?” 
    “Promise.”
    “The last thing I want to do is get the company into some embarrassing situation. Well, what it is, her cousin had some kind of deal with Mr. Davidson-Jones. And the cousin disappeared, too.”

 
CHAPTER

3
     
     
    T here have been times when I missed my little old office with the kind of despairing passion a former grand duke might have held for the droshkies and white nights of old St. Petersburg. Whatever else it was, it was sane and, not counting such times as the 14th of April, never scary.
    The firm of L. Knollwood Stennis and Associates comprised altogether six people, counting me and the receptionist. The other person who really mattered was Marlene Abramson. In ways I did not like to admit, she was more important to the firm than I was.
    When Marlene was nineteen years old she married a brilliant young medical student. For the next seven years she spent her time bearing three of his kids, supporting them all while he finished school, keeping up her own studies on the side, and providing an impeccably kosher house.
    Then, one night, the medical student, now a gynecologist, took her out to an expensive dinner in the kind of place where you can’t make a scene and told her about the physiotherapist who was about to make him the kind of attentive, loving, sharing wife he had always dreamed of.
    Marlene was a wonder. She didn’t even tie up his assets for the next thousand years. She only told her lawyer to make sure the kids got all there was for them to get, and philosophically walked away from Central Park South to see what the world had to offer to a divorcee with kids. Whatever else it had had, it hadn’t provided another man.
    By the time I got Marlene, the last of the kids was starting college. Marlene was “over thirty”—had to be well past forty-five, I calculated—and her principal interests were dieting, fussing over the incompetent, and waiting for the grandchildren. L. Knollwood Stennis and Associates suited her perfectly; there were plenty of unworldly incompetents among our clientele. And she suited them better than I would have believed possible when I hired her.
    Marlene was a creative and smart bookkeeper, who didn’t like to admit that she was also a CPA. She could have walked out of my office any day and taken half the accounts with her. She didn’t because she had no reason to. She had as much vacation time as I did, which was almost all the time there was when either of us could be spared, and on the first business day of every year she would tell me how big a raise she wanted. I would give it to her. We never argued about it. She knew what the cash flow was as well as I did. She wasn’t greedy, and neither was I.
    She was also my good friend, so she was the one I told about the missing cousin of this Irene Madigan. I had, of course, told her about Woody Calderon long since. She listened attentively. Then she whistled. It wasn’t a very successful whistle, because this