Here's the good. Almost nobody parks on the streets here. Cars are kept in driveways or carports, and, in the case of the Southern Manor, in a small area around at the side of the house. This means that I have a clear field of observation for any strange vehicles entering the street or parking there.

Also good. The house is filled with smoke alarms, well placed, and all functioning if those little red lights mean what they say.

Even better. About fifteen years ago a local ordinance was passed here that requires all hotels, nursing homes, and rooming houses to install a direct-wire alarm to the nearest fire station. The alarm here is in the parlor, a red button behind a glass panel. Break the glass, push the button, and the alarm is transmitted over the wire. A number pops up on the dispatcher's board, and he knows where to send the equipment. No delay in dialing 911, or anything else like that. If I need the troops, I can have them here in minutes.

So that's the physical situation. I figure to keep an all-night watch during the time frame, and grab whatever sleep I can during the day. When the job is over, you and I will take about a week off.

After I checked the physical layout, I spent the rest of the day tapping the residents of the Southern Manor. I realize how unlikely it is that Gemstone is one of them, but it had to be done, and how I wish I could have skipped it. Sammy, you and I both know how much like a sewer the human mind can be, which is why every ace I know avoids tapping heads unless it's for business. Or, of course, for love. Okay, sex. But not casually, not for the fun of seeing what someone is thinking, because it isn't worth it. Too much like diving for pearls in a cesspool. But today it was business, and it had to be done. First I checked out the two hired girls who help around the house, nothing there, and then

I went to work on the residents. Sammy, you've got to see this collection yourself to believe it. So far I've got myself one pussycat, a piano-playing psychopath, an elderly grifter, a pair of thieves, and a woman who iced her husband. I tell you, Barney Krill is an angel compared to some of these people. I haven't gotten to Mr. Ramirez yet. He's the Cuban, he's off somewhere in the barrio today, and considering what I've found so far, I can hardly wait to meet him.

Mike Teague is the pussycat, and no matter what Mrs. Costigan says, he really is bedridden. He lies there all day, and his head is filled with memories of punching bags and boxing gloves, the smell of liniment and sweat, and the thud of flesh hitting flesh. Mike was an athletic trainer all his active life, first with teams, then with fighters, and the walls of his room are covered with photos of the people he calls "my boys." Ballplayers of every sort, coaches, managers, but mostly boxers. Mike is one of those people who never met an athlete he didn't like, he's incapable of malice, or envy, or greed. He spends his time writing postcards to his boys, a dozen a day, and he gets that many in return. He never forgets a name or a face, and he can tell you in graphic detail what Willy Pep did to one of his boys that night in Cleveland back in Forty-seven. Sure, he's short-tempered and grouchy, who wouldn't be, tied to a bed that way, but he isn't any junkyard dog. He's a pussycat, and he certainly isn't Gemstone.

I tapped Jeremy Pasco next. He's a slim little guy, about twenty-five, with dark hair that he slicks back, and a mustache that's hardly worth mentioning. Pasco comes from Dallas, but he hasn't been back there in years. He makes a living playing cocktail piano six nights a week at the Flamingo Lounge on Third Street, and he spends most of his days at the track. He's a loser in more ways than one. The ponies don't love him, and the way he sees it, the rest of the world is down on him, too. You know the type. Nobody appreciates him, nobody recognizes his talent, nobody ever gives him a break, and every time he stubs his toe it's because some son of a bitch put a rock in the road. He once had ambitions as a concert pianist, but that's only a dream now. He's past it, he hasn't practiced seriously in years, and he's going to spend the rest of his life playing "Misty" and "Stardust" to the same old bunch of drunks. But there was a time when it could have happened, until somebody put that stone in the road. The guy with the stone was his younger brother, David.

Jeremy and David Pasco were born two years apart, the only children of two musicians. Papa Pasco was a violinist with the Dallas Symphony, Mama taught piano at home, and their boys were raised in a world of music. Both kids were introduced to the piano at an early age, and both took to it with a natural ease. They were good, everyone said so, and by the time that both were in their teens, people were predicting brilliant futures for them. If it had been a horse race, Jeremy would have been the favorite. At that stage in their development, his playing was the more considered, the more sensitive, and his technique was more advanced than his brother's. He was on the way up, and the first rung on the ladder was the All-Texas Youth Competition. Winning the All-Texas would open the right doors, and for two years Jeremy worked with the competition as his goal. He was nineteen when his parents thought he was ready. They entered him and, almost as an afterthought, they entered David, too. They expected little from the younger brother, but they thought that the experience would be valuable for him. Jeremy was the rising star.

It didn't work that way. At nineteen, Jeremy had progressed as far as he ever would, while David had matured into an accomplished artist. Both brothers made it into the final round, but David was the winner, and Jeremy finished out of the money. When the decision was announced, Jeremy threw his arms around his brother and hugged him exuberantly, grinning broadly as if he, himself, had won. It was a family triumph, he told his parents, and hugged his brother again.

The Pasco family went to bed late that night after a champagne supper. Jeremy sat up in his room and waited until he was sure that the others were asleep. He knew exactly what he was going to do. At two in the morning he packed a small bag, looked around his room, and said goodby to his childhood. Then he went down to the parlor, found his mother's sewing box, and took her pinking shears. He went up to his brother's room. David lay on his back, his mouth open, snoring. Jeremy put his pinking shears around his brother's right index finger, and paused. David did not move. Jeremy squeezed. He was surprised at how easily the shears cut through flesh and bone. He cut off David's finger at the second joint, severing it completely. He grabbed his bag, and ran. He went out of the house and down the street with the screaming in his ears. He did not look back. Not then, not ever.

He's been pounding the piano at places like the Flamingo Lounge ever since, and he still feels that he got a bad break. That's Jeremy Pasco. He isn't much, but he isn't Gemstone, either.

Clara Moskowitz is an eighty-five-year-old flim-flam artist who scores off susceptible elderly widowers, a first cousin to the octogenarian lady sharks who cruise Collins Avenue in Miami Beach. Clara prefers to work the provinces, and she does well at it. Nothing spectacular, not a fortune, but every so often she'll meet some poor sap who was married to one woman for fifty years, and who, now that she's gone, does not know how to make it on his own. Clara shows him how. Nothing physical, not at her age or his, just a little hand-holding, lots of sympathy, a commanding presence, and before el sappo knows it, Clara has taken over his life, his checkbook, and his CMA account at Merrill Lynch. Unlike her Miami cousins, she never marries the mark. She's already buried three husbands, and she can't take the strain of those funerals anymore. She just turns the sap upside down, and when there's nothing left to shake loose she sends him back to South Dakota, or Wisconsin, or wherever to live off the reluctant generosity of his children. The way Clara sees it, she gives value for the money, and there must be something to it, because no one has ever filed a complaint. She's a neat little piece of work, our Clara, but she isn't Gemstone.