DeAngelo’s left hand reached the table beside him and gripped its edge. He didn’t speak.

To Madonna, I said, “Nobody likes to think himself a poor judge of human nature, and you probably don’t want to buy this, especially since Pete’s an old friend and I’m just a troublesome outsider. But think about this. The other night when I phoned you to ask you about the pink Cadillac, DeAngelo answered the phone. He sounded out of breath. I’m willing to bet he had just come in after planting Mike Farrell’s body.

“DeAngelo had learned one vital fact, either from Mike Farrell or from my telephone call here. The pink Cadillac. He knew, or he made it his business to find out, who owned that car. It’s my guess he had to do some detective work to find out, because otherwise he’d have gone after Brawley sooner than he did.

“In the meantime, yesterday morning, I went to Brawley’s to ask him who owned a pink Cadillac. Brawley’s own car was a Jaguar, and that threw me off. He sent me off on a wild goose chase to the boondocks. I was coming back from that when Ed Behrenman tried to run me off the highway over a cliff. Behrenman ended up dead at the bottom of the cliff. There was only one way Behrenman could have known where to find me. Brawley was the only man alive who knew where I’d gone, and I already knew there was a connection between Brawley and Behrenman. So then I knew who’d killed Aiello and taken the loot. I searched Brawley’s house but it wasn’t there, so I went straight to his office. DeAngelo knows what I found when I got there, because DeAngelo got there ahead of me. DeAngelo probably waited out back of the office until the last of Brawley’s patients and employees left for the night. Then, when Brawley came out the back door, DeAngelo shot him. He had a silencer on his gun and he knew nobody was likely to hear the shot. He was so sure he’d find the loot in Brawley’s office he didn’t even bother to keep Brawley alive long enough to make sure. The pink Cadillac was parked right there and that was all DeAngelo wanted to know. He put Brawley’s body in the car, jimmied the door and went inside. He was working on Brawley’s safe when I got there. That’s how he got that hole in his arm, in case he’s told you something to the contrary. We had a little shoot-out and DeAngelo went out the window. He didn’t stay long enough to find out what was in Brawley’s safe, but I can answer it if he’s still interested. There wasn’t anything interesting in the wall safe except a gun. It was a Walther nine millimeter and I suspect it was the gun that killed Aiello.”

“That’s fine,” Madonna murmured. “Only where’s the money?”

“It was right where it’d been all the time. In the trunk of the pink Cadillac. Brawley had a suitcase and a coat in the back seat. He was ready to take off for good when DeAngelo found him. Too bad DeAngelo didn’t keep him alive long enough to ask him a question. Incidentally, by now I’m sure you know they found not only Brawley’s corpse but Joe Cutter’s. I think DeAngelo must have shot Cutter, too.”

DeAngelo shot erect in the chair. “That’s a goddamn lie,” he rasped. It was the first reaction I’d had out of him.

Madonna told him to shut up and said to me, “Where’s the money now?”

I heard the raspy growl in DeAngelo’s throat before I saw him start to move with the corner of my eye. He had a gun under the loose tail of his sport shirt and he was hauling it out. Big Freddie, slow to react, was taking a surprised backward step when I shot my arm out, extracted the gun from Freddie’s shoulder holster, and snapped it downward just as DeAngelo’s gun leveled on Madonna’s belly.

The report of the gun was startling in that enclosed space. Bone fragments and blood sprayed from DeAngelo’s head. His bodily functions instantly lost their control; his sphincter relaxed and there was immediately the stink of human urine and manure.

Chickens will suspend their pecking order whenever one of their number gets sick. They all turn on the weak chicken and peck it to death. Ed Baker and Tony Senna had their guns in their fists before the echo died, but they were pointed at DeAngelo, not at me. DeAngelo’s actions, and the expression of his face, had been all the admission of guilt any of them would ever need to see. Before the body even began to slump in the chair, Senna and Baker had put bullets into it.

Tony Senna and Freddie herded us outside to the pool; the stink inside was offensive. Baker was doing something about the body. Madonna came outside behind us and we all stood ranged around the poolside furniture. Nobody wanted to sit down. Joanne trembled violently and clung to my arm. She said to Madonna, “Nobody double-crosses you, do they?”

“Not more than once,” he said with a grimace. “You have to understand the rules of the game, honey. The winner is the last one left alive.” He said it with a straight face.

I set the briefcase on a round metal umbrella table and opened the hasp with a key. Senna tugged out his gun and trained it on me but I only glanced at him, and upended the open briefcase to dump its contents on the table. Folded documents, photos and two packages of recording tape tumbled across the table in a littered heap.

I said, “That’s a sample, mainly to prove to you that I really do have the stuff. You can do whatever you want with this. Most of it’s worthless now. The blackmail evidence against Doctor Brawley is somewhere in here, and quite a bit of stuff that would have nailed Aiello for tax fraud if he were still alive. Now, of course, it’s useless. The film you had on Joanne has been destroyed. The evidence on Frank Colclough and Stanley Raiford has already been mailed to the FBI, so I doubt those two will get very far with their primary election campaign before they’re indicted.”

Madonna gave me a hooded glare. “That’ll buy you a ticket to the graveyard. You know that.”

“No. The rest of the documents from Aiello’s safe are still under my control. They’ll be turned over to the appropriate federal agencies if my contact doesn’t hear from me regularly. I’ve got you over a barrel. You know as well as I do what’s in that collection. If it’s released, some prominent noses are going to bleed, yours included. It’ll crack the whole state open like an oyster—it’ll blow your whole stinking mess of an organization ten miles in the air.”

“Then why don’t you release it?”

“Because it’s my life insurance. Mine and Mrs. Farrell’s.”

“You’re a pretty smart son of a bitch, aren’t you? What about the cash?”

“It comes to three million, one hundred and eighty-five thousand dollars, in unmarked, untraceable bills.”

“That’s not what I asked and you know it.”

“It’s in a safe place,” I said. “You don’t need it. And I can’t think of anybody it ought to be turned over to. If it went to the law it’d just end up lining some crooked politician’s pocket. So I’ll tell you what’s going to happen to the money. Mrs. Farrell and I plan to honeymoon in Las Vegas a few weeks from now. I plan to win one hell of a lot of money when I’m there. Say a quarter of a million dollars, this trip, and I’ll repeat it every year or so until I’ve won three million, one hundred and eighty-five thousand dollars across the roulette tables. I’ll declare it as income and pay taxes on it. I leave it to you to make the arrangements and see to it that Las Vegas comes across. Any slip-ups and a few pieces of warm information will start to dribble into the FBI’s hands until you straighten out.”

I grinned a tight grin at him. “Any questions?”

He said in a low growl, “What the hell do you need all that money for?”

“I want to buy my kid brother an operation so he can play the trumpet again.”

I took Joanne’s arm and walked her around the pool to the back gate. Madonna said something behind us, and Tony Senna was there with the key by the time we reached the gate. He opened it and let us through. I heard the gate click shut behind us, and the snap of the lock. We walked around the end of the house, across the lawn, and got into the car. Joanne gave me a long slow smile. I started the car and pulled out of the driveway. I looked in the rear-view mirror, but nobody was following us.