"Pam."

"I instruct in the dance."

"Ah."

"You perhaps," he said, with his fox smile, "already know the dance."

"Perhaps," she said, with her own carnivore's smile, and turned away to eat a dainty morsel of her own salad, during which Alan, on her right, said, as though there'd been no break in the conversation, "You know what's the most wonderful thing about the atmosphere of this place? The absolute openness. Guests and staff eating together, for instance, everybody sharing this beautiful place. It really is one big happy family."

"That's why I'm here," she said.

"And the best of it," he told her, "is the lack of money. Only beads. Do you realize how democratic that is?"

"Democratic?" She affected friendly bewilderment. "I just thought it was kind of cute."

"Well, it is. But besides that. Everywhere else you go in the world, you can tell in one second the rich people from the rest of us. But here, everybody blends in."

"That's true," she said. "When you point it out."

He gestured at the roomful of diners. "Look how we're all alike. And yet, would you believe it, there is a multimillionaire in this very room."

She showed a gently skeptical smile. "Oh, really?"

"I've gotten to know him here," Alan said, "and he's just like everybody else. At home, of course, he's the center of the world. His world." Smiling, he gestured again, encompassing all the tables, all the diners, all the grand egalitarian world. "Can you guess which one?"

"Of course not," she said. "Everybody's the same here."

"Exactly what I'm saying." With a wink, he said, "I'll give you a hint."

"All right."

Smiling at her while he nodded his head rightward in the general direction of Preston Fareweather, he said, "He's one of the people at that table over there."

"With the man in the red-and-white-striped shirt?"

Alan had to look. "Yes, that's the table."

"But that's not your millionaire."

Alan's smile broadened. "No, no," he said, "that's an operator of the glass-bottom boat. He's French."

"There are French millionaires."

"Not working at Club Med."

"No, I don't suppose so." She looked at that table over there, let her glance pass over Preston Fareweather, who was thoroughly engaged in his own conversation among his tablemates, and said, "I can't guess."

"In the dark blue shirt," Alan told her. "Now he's drinking wine. See?"

"Oh, him." Roselle smiled, as though made happy by the look of the fellow over there. "He just looks like a very nice man," she said.

"He is," Alan assured her, and then, as though the thought had just that instant popped into his head. "Would you like to meet him?"

So that's how it's done, Roselle thought. "I'd love to," she said.

21

TURNED OUT CORAL ACRES, Florida, Otto Medrick's waiting room for departure, was about as far north in Florida as you could go and still be in Florida; but on the other hand, you were still in Florida. The way to go there was to fly Continental from Newark to Jacksonville, and then Coral Acres was on an estuary off St. John's River south of the city, between the river and the ocean.

The trouble was to get there. At first, because everything about air travel is so revolting, from the food to the security to the crowding to the simple fact of being thirty thousand feet in the sky, Dortmunder thought maybe it would be more restful to take the train from Penn Station, but unfortunately that would be a little too restful: two and a half hours by air, seventeen hours by rail.

Still, there had to be an overnight in it. There were no flights north in the late afternoon, and he'd have to give himself time to find the town, find the guy, and tell him the story. So it looked as though he had to fly down from Newark at nine Sunday morning and then come back from Jacksonville starting at nine the next day.

Fortunately, if that word could be used for any part of this experience, once it became clear to everyone that Dortmunder really meant to go ahead and find the O.J.'s former owner way down there in Florida, he got various kinds of help. J. C. Taylor, for instance, went on the Web and got him bargain rates for the airfare and a motel out by the airport and a rental car. Murch's Mom offered to drive him to the airport and back without throwing the meter, but her son Stan said he could find a much more comfortable car than a New York City hack, so he'd do the driving.

Other help. Kelp, also a dab hand with the computer, got him printout maps showing exactly how to get from JAX, the airport, to 131-58 Elfin Drive, Coral Acres. May got him up early Sunday morning and gave him his favorite breakfast — Wheaties and milk and sugar, in a ratio of 1/1/1 — and then there was nothing to do but take the damn trip.

"Otto Medrick?"

"Maybe."

"The O.J.'s going out of business."

Not a sound from the man under the black cloth. Dortmunder watched, and the black cloth seemed to tremble a little, but that was all. The guy must have heard; Dortmunder decided to wait him out.

What was he doing under that black cloth anyway, him and that wooden tripod standing under there with him? Dortmunder, having driven through mile after mile of suburban landscape among low flat-roofed houses full of glass — although what view did they have, except of each other? — had found 131-58 Elfin Drive with far less difficulty than he'd expected, thanks to the Web maps Kelp had conjured for him. He'd parked the little yellow Nissan Pixie on the shiny black driveway in front of the little avocado-and-pink house, identical except in color scheme to every other house in Coral Acres, had scrunched up the crushed-clamshell walk to the front door, and been just about to ring a doorbell when he'd realized he was looking completely through the house, through the living-dining room, through plate glass doors at the back there, and out to the parched backyard, where a bent-kneed man in gray work pants crouched next to a tall tripod under a black cloth draped over his head and upper body. So Dortmunder had walked around the house, delivered his news, and now waited for a response.

Which at last arrived: "Gimme a minute," snarled the man under the cloth.

"Sure."

Dortmunder waited some more, and something said click under the black cloth, and then at last it was lifted and the man beneath came out from under.

He was short; that was the first thing. He was short and gristly, with wiry gray arms extruded from an ancient gray sweatshirt — YWHA, ASTORIA — with its sleeves cut off. His head was beaked, with Brillo hair and a pointy pepper-and-salt goatee that looked sharp enough to do damage, so that all in all, he mostly resembled a pocket Lenin. Or maybe a collectible Lenin doll for your whatnot shelf, except that he also wore heavy, dark-framed eyeglasses jammed up onto his forehead.

Now he glared at Dortmunder, wriggled his brows, and those glasses dropped down to his nose, so he could see through them as he said, "And who the hell are you?"

"I'm a guy goes to the O.J. sometimes," Dortmunder said, "and I thought you oughta know what's happening there."

"I'm here," Otto Medrick told him, "so I don't hafta know what's happening there, I got family looking after it."

"No, you don't," Dortmunder said. "Your nephew Raphael, I have to tell you the truth, I met him, and I don't think he could look after a pet rock."

"Yeah, you met him all right," Medrick agreed. "But there's the rest of the family, his mother, cousins by the dozens."

"Nobody," Dortmunder said. "Whatever they're supposed to be doing, they're busy doing something else."

"By God, that sounds like those useless sonsabitches," Medrick said, and peered all at once more closely into Dortmunder's face. "I bet," he said, "you're one a them back-room crooks."