“You haven’t by any chance, Miss Caroline,” said Morris as we decided on what to do next, “ever found that secret panel in the library your grandmother in the diary, she talks about?”

“No,” she said. “I never heard of it before.”

“It would be helpful, maybe, if you could spend some time, just like she did, and try to find it. Inside, I think, maybe there is something interesting, don’t you think?”

“I’ll do what I can,” said Caroline.

“But don’t tell anybody what you’re doing,” I said. “No one should know what we’re digging into. What about the numbers on the three-by-five card we found?”

“A banker friend I know,” said Morris, “very upstanding now but he got his start funding Irgun when such was not allowed and had to be done in secrecy. This was many years ago, just after the war, but not too far removed from the time of those papers you found. I’ll take them to him. He might know.”

Morris also agreed he would try to discover what had happened to the Poole daughter, who had disappeared, pregnant, just days after her mother’s death. I took for myself certain of the photographs, and the strangely retained receipt from the doctor. I also took the key out of the envelope entitled “Letters” and slipped it into my wallet.

That was what we had done about the box, but I still knew the likelihood was greatest that whoever had paid off Cressi to kill Jacqueline Shaw had done it not as an avenging ghost of the past but for the most basic of all reasons, for the motive that underlies most all of our crimes, for the money. Which was why tonight I was seeing Oleanna, the guiding light of the Church of the New Life, named beneficiary in the five-million-dollar insurance policy taken out on Jacqueline Shaw’s life. And it was why I had asked Caroline to set up a meeting for me that very afternoon with her brother Eddie, the worst gambler in the world, who had somehow, suddenly, upon the untimely murder of his sister, paid off his debt to Jimmy Vigs. In my short career I had discovered that to find a crook you follow the money. But first there was that message from the good Reverend Custer.

“Hello.”

“Can I talk to your mommy, please?”

“She’s in the bafroom.”

“Yes, sweetheart, can I talk to her please? I’m looking for a Reverend Custer and I was given this number.”

“She told me to say she’s not in. Do we owe you money?”

“Not that I know of.”

“Mommy says we owe a lot of money.”

“You know, sweetheart,” I said, “I think I may just have the wrong number.”

I hung up and stared at Ellie’s hieroglyphs for a little while and watched as they rearranged themselves before my eyes. Then a thought slipped through the fog of my mind and I felt myself start to sweat.

“I’m exhausted,” I told Ellie as I stepped out of my office, the phone slip in my pocket. “I’m going to get some coffee. You want anything?”

“Diet soda,” she said, and she started fiddling in her purse before I told her it was on me. Then I thought better of my generosity and took her four bits. I needed change for the phone.

I guess he assumed my line was tapped or my messages somehow not secure, and I couldn’t really blame him. Whoever was coming after him had the audacity to try to make the hit in the middle of the Schuylkill Expressway. To someone that brazen it wouldn’t be a thing to slap a wire on a phone or rifle through a pack of pink slips looking for a number to trace. “You are my scout,” had said Enrico Raffaello. “Like in the old cavalry movies, every general needs a scout to find the savages.” And what beleaguered general was ever more in need of a ferret-eyed scout than George Armstrong Custer. I just wish Raffaello had picked a less-ominous example. He wasn’t at the number I had dialed because that number was absolutely wrong. I took the Rev. literally and reversed the numbers when I made the call in the phone booth. This time it wasn’t a little girl who answered.

“This is a private line,” came a voice over the phone, a dark voice and slow.

“I’m looking for Reverend Custer,” I said.

“Boy, do you ever have the wrong number,” said the voice and then the line went dead.

I puzzled that for a moment, thoroughly confused about everything. When the hell was Calvi going to get off his boat and tell me what to do? Until he did I had no choice but to fake it. I took the second of Ellie’s quarters and dialed again.

“I said this was a private line,” said the same voice.

“I’m calling from a pay phone and this is my last quarter and if you hang up on me it will be your ass in a sling. Tell the man it’s his scout calling. Tell him I need to speak to him now.”

There was a quiet on the line as if my request was being considered by a higher authority and then I heard the scrape of chairs and a rap of knuckles on wood in the distance.

“What do you have for me?” came the familiar voice.

“How are you? How seriously are you hurt?”

There was a grunt.

“Where are you?” I asked.

There was a dangerous pause where I realized I had asked exactly the wrong question. “Tell me what you’ve learned,” he said finally.

“Our friend with the guns, I know how he got the money now. Murder for hire. One of his victims was an heiress name of Shaw.”

“Who paid him?”

“I’m not sure yet, but it’s nothing to do with you. For our friend it was just a way to finance the war. But he got a little sloppy and there was a witness and that is what’s so damn interesting. Under pressure, the witness changed his story, taking the heat off our guy.”

“Who applied the pressure?”

“Our little buddy who’s moved up so fast, the pawnbroker. He’s in on it, I know it.”

“Is there any other connection between the two of them?”

“Other than your friend was all too happy to get me into the car with you before our incident?”

“Other than that, yes.”

“No. But it’s him.”

“If it is him, or another, it no longer matters,” he said, and then he sighed. “You’re a good friend. You’ve been very loyal. I will remember this after it is over. I have one last favor to ask.”

“I want out.”

“I know that is what you want and I now want the same. I’m tired of it, and these animals have no restraint. It was bad enough going after me, but what they did to Dominic, who was already out, and then to Jimmy Bones was too much. They’ll go after my daughter, I know it, and then I will have no choice but to enter a war in which no one will win and everyone will end up dead. I could send my men out hunting right now, but it won’t solve the problem, and with every murder, every attempt, the case the feds are building grows stronger and more of our own will feel marked and turn. I’m a tired man, I don’t want to spend the last years of my life hiding or in jail or dead. I want to paint. I want to spend a whole month reading one poem. I want to dance naked in the moonlight by the sea.”

“You sound like a personal ad.”

“I’m a romantic at heart.”

“The bastards tried to kill us.”

“I was never a man of war. It was forced upon me once, I won’t let it be forced upon me again. You will be approached about a meeting.”

“Why would they approach me?”

“You were in the line of fire. You were the last neutral to see me. You will be approached. That is the way these animals work.”

“What do I tell them?”

“You are to tell them that I want peace. Tell them that I will meet them to accept their terms. Tell them if they can guarantee my security and the security of my family then it is over. Tell them we will meet to arrange a truce and then the trophy will be theirs.”