I went back around to the front and was there when she finally opened the door; evidently she had stopped to put away her hairbrush before answering the chimes. Her mouth was sucked in with a tight look of disapproval. She barred the door with her body, a feline redhead with an amoral half-drunk look. What had been a pretty face ten years ago had hardened.

She swept me up and down with a practiced look, and stepped back. “Come in.” She hadn’t asked me who I was or what I wanted—just, “Come in.”

I came in and pushed the door shut, looking around past her. The place was decorated in Miami Modern, expensive but hideous. Had I been in any condition to do so, I might have reflected at some length on the fact that the sole original meaning of the word “luxury,” in Elizabethan times, was “lust.” The house, with its careless, tasteless opulence, and the woman before me would have told me all I ever needed to know about the master of the place, even if I had never met him.

I said, “I’m looking for your husband. I assume he’s your husband.”

“Won’t I do?” She ran her tongue along her lips. “I’m Sylvia.” Heavy-breasted, she twisted her ungirdled hips, wanting sensation. She sat on a Naugahyde couch and plucked a cigarette from a case on the coffee table. She eyed me as if I were a side of beef and said, “Mix me a drink and we’ll talk about my husband. Mix yourself one while you’re at it.”

“Where is he?”

Her shoulders stirred. Her breasts handled the bathrobe seductively. “You’re a lovely man.”

“Where is he?”

“Who knows? There was a phone call. An emergency case, he said. He’s got my car, his is broken down. He’ll probably be gone most of the night, as usual. I don’t think I even want to be bothered to know what her name is. You don’t know, do you? Her name?”

“No,” I said, biting it off. As I looked around the room it occurred to me he might have the loot hidden right here in the house. A good place to start looking—but she, Sylvia, could make it difficult. I said, “I’ll mix drinks, but let me use your bathroom first.”

“Sure.” She smiled and pointed vaguely.

In the bathroom medicine cabinet, as I’d suspected, there was an assortment of medicines. I found the one I sought, dumped six capsules into my palm, flushed the toilet and went back to the living room with the capsules in my closed hand. “Where’s the bar?”

“I’ve got an open bottle in the kitchen. Scotch—I hope it suits you because my husband keeps the bar locked when he’s not home.” She tittered. “Make mine straight, one ice cube.”

As I crossed to the kitchen I saw she had sat back on the couch and adjusted the bathrobe. She had nothing underneath but skin. The lapels were parted, displaying a wealth of pale, soft breast. A lot of men I knew chose their wives with less care than their barbers. In the kitchen I made drinks and emptied the contents of the capsules into hers. I stirred it up and took the drinks into the living room, gave hers to her and was about to retreat to a chair when she patted the couch beside her. “Sit here by me. What’s your name?”

“Simon.”

“That’s nice. It’s—different, you know? Sexy.” She picked up her drink, watching me over the rim of the glass, and slugged down a good big swallow. “The way you came in, I thought you might be the wronged husband of some broad he’s shacking up with. But you said you didn’t know her name.”

“That’s right, I don’t.”

“So you’re not the wronged husband. Who are you?”

“Does it matter?” I said. “You’re sure you don’t know where I might find him?”

She shook her head, giving me a while-the-cat’s-away leer. Her upper body stirred, twisting toward me as she set the drink down; her nipples made hardened dents against the robe. When I didn’t react in keeping with the invitation she pouted with her mouth and looked down at her drink. “I’ll bet he’s keeping one of those cheap Mafia broads—some gangster’s gun moll. He’s thick as thieves with the mobsters, did you know that?”

“Yeah. I know that.”

“Why, I’ll bet you’re one of them.”

“One of what?”

“A hoodlum. Is that what you are?” She seemed more excited and pleased than alarmed. She laughed. “That would just serve him right, wouldn’t it?” Then, quickly, she shifted her seat and tugged at the cloth belt. Her garment came apart; the heavy breasts burst free. She touched her damp palm to my cheek and whispered, “I’m a woman, Simon. I need what every woman needs.”

“Right now,” I stated truthfully, “I feel like having sex about as much as I feel like having a cucumber sandwich.”

“In that case,” she said, undismayed, “I’ll just have to seduce you.” She gripped my shirt collar and pulled me close.

I extricated myself and stood up. She growled a hoarse obscenity and reached for her drink, and upended it defiantly. Her expression didn’t change. She said, “I drink a lot. Do you mind? It helps keep your guts in.” Her tongue was starting to thicken.

I said, “Tell me about him and the Mafia. You said he’s thick as thieves with them.”

“Did I?” Her head was slightly tilted. She put the burning cigarette in the corner of her mouth and it sent a thin slow jet of smoke past her half-shuttered eye. Squinting up at me, she said, “Who the hell are you, anyway?”

“An interested party.”

“You’re one of them. I knew it. A hoodlum. You want to find him so you can kill him.”

“Why should I want to kill him?”

“You know perfectly well.” She was glazed, mumbling in thickening syllables. “He told me he had some kind of—he called it a beef, against the Mafia. He said he had a lot of evidence against them and if he can’t straighten things out with them he’ll release some of it to the newspapers. He says it’s enough to blow the Mafia sky-high, and a lot of politicians with it.”

The stuff I had put in her drink, chloral hydrate from sleeping capsules, wasn’t supposed to act as a truth serum, but it seemed to be having that effect. Either that or the alcohol had entirely wiped out her inhibitions against disclosing dangerous secrets. Or maybe she was just getting revenge on him.

It didn’t matter any more; she crumpled slowly and lay inert. I straightened her out on the couch, tested her pulse, closed the bathrobe around her, and began to subject the house to a painstaking search.

The sun threw a last burst of light along the horizon. I emerged from the house empty-handed except for a key case I’d lifted from Sylvia’s purse. I used it to let myself into the garage, and spent ten minutes climbing rafters and seeking cubbyholes. Nothing. I went back to the house and put the keys back in her bag. Where else? His office, I supposed. Or the car he was driving—her car, she’d said. There was no question in my mind what kind of car it was. I’d never seen it but it had to be a Cadillac and it had to be pink

I left her on the couch, snoring, and let the lock click shut behind me when I went outside. In plum-colored dusk I drove up toward the foothills. I stopped once, to telephone Nancy’s house and talk to Joanne. I told her, in a voice so weary it alarmed her, that I was on a warm trail and would see her soon. “Don’t set fire to your hope chest just yet,” I said lamely, and hung up, and got back in the Jeep to climb the foothill street.

On the way up I paid no attention to the bright neon display on the flats below. It was fully dark by the time I drove across the deserted parking area, past the brightly lit windows of the expensive shops that were closed for the night but lighted against burglars. I didn’t park in front this time; I found the service road and drove around back, out along the narrow asphalt path that hugged the rim of the hill the way the mountain road hugged the cliff where Ed Behrenman had made his plunge. Quite a bit of light flowed up here from the illuminated city below.

The back door of a pharmacy had a neon sign that spattered and fizzed.