"Pal," Kelly said, "ten minutes before the show was over, I was on stage, asleep in front of everybody, including your buddy here. And without my donkey head."

"That's true, John," Kelp said. "The fairies took the donkey head away just around then."

"In that case," Dortmunder said, immediately grasping the situation, "it had to be one of the other guys in bib overalls. They weren't all on stage then, were they?"

But Bohker already had his mind made up. "That's right," he said. "That's what you saw, the big-town sharpie, when you came out of this box office right here, with the cash receipts in your pocket, and looked through that door right there in at that stage way back there, and saw Kelly was the only rustic on stage, and the donkey prop was gone, and-"

"The what?" Dortmunder had missed something there.

"The donkey prop!" Bohker cried, getting angrier, pointing at his own head. "The head! It's a prop!"

"Well, you know, Jesse," Kelly said thoughtfully, "in some union productions, you know, they'd call it a costume."

"Whatever it is," Bohker snapped, waving the gnats of showbiz cant away as though he hadn't summoned them up himself, then turning back to Dortmunder: "Whatever it is, you saw it, or didn't see it, when you looked right through there and saw Kelly asleep without his head, and none of the other rustics around, and right then you decided how you were gonna blame somebody else. And I'm here to tell you, it won't work!"

Well, innocence wasn't any help-overrated, as Dortmunder had long suspected-and dignity had proved to be a washout, so what was left? Dortmunder was considering violence, which usually tended at least to clear the air, when Kelp said, "Cuz, let me have a word in private with John, OK?"

"That's all I ever asked," Bohker said, with false reasonableness. "Just talk to your friend here, explain to him how we do things different in the country, how we don't take advantage of the kindness of people who take us in when we're on the run, how when we're away from the city, we behave like decent, Godfearing-"

"Right, cuz, right," Kelp said, taking Dortmunder by the elbow, drawing him away from the ongoing flow, nodding and nodding as though Bohker's claptrap made any sense at all, turning Dortmunder away, walking him back out toward the now

nearly empty parking lot and across it to a big old tree standing there with leaves all over it, and Dortmunder promised himself, if Andy asks me even once did I do it, I'm gonna pop him.

Instead of which, once they'd reached the leafy privacy of the tree, Kelp turned and murmured, "John, we're in a bind here."

Dortmunder sighed, relieved and yet annoyed. "That's right."

"I dunno, the only thing I can think- How much did he say it was?"

"Two something. Something under three grand." And that got Dortmunder steamed in an entirely different way. "To think I'd stoop to grab such a measly amount of-"

"Sure you would, John, if the circumstances were different," Kelp said, cutting through the crap. "The question is, Can we cover it?"

"What do you mean, cover it?"

"Well, Jesse said if we give it back, he'll forget the whole thing, no questions asked."

Now Dortmunder was really outraged. "You mean, let the son of a bitch go on thinking I'm a thief?"

Kelp leaned closer, dropping his voice. "John, you are a thief."

"Not this time!"

"What does it matter, John? You're never gonna convince him, so forget it."

Dortmunder glared at the farmhouse, full now of actors, one of them with nearly three grand extra in his pocket. Probably looking out a window right now, grinning at him. "It's one of those guys," he said. "I can't let him get away with it."

"Why not? And what are you gonna do, play detective? John, we're not cops!"

"We watched cops work often enough."

"That isn't the same. John, how much money you got?"

"On me?" Dortmunder groused, reluctant even to discuss this idea, while out of the corner of his eye, he saw Kelly head-

ing briskly toward the farmhouse. "Why couldn't it be him?" he demanded. "Partners steal from partners all the time."

"He was on stage, John. How much money you got?"

"On me, a couple hundred. In the suitcase, back at your goddamn cousin's house, maybe a grand."

"I could come up with eight, nine hundred," Kelp said. "Let's go see if we can cut a deal."

"I don't like this," Dortmunder said. "I don't go along with making restitution to begin with, and this is even worse."

Running out of patience, Kelp said, "What else are we gonna do, John?"

"Search that farmhouse there. Search the theater. You think some amateur can hide a stash so we can't find it?"

"They wouldn't let us search," Kelp pointed out. "We aren't cops, we don't have any authority, we can't throw any weight around. That's what cops do; they don't detect, you know that. They throw their weight around, and when you say, 'Oof,' you get five to ten in Green Haven. Come on, John, swallow your pride."

"I'm not gonna say I did it," Dortmunder insisted. "You wanna pay him off, we'll pay him off. But I'm not gonna say I did it."

"Fine. Let's go talk to the man."

They walked back to where cousin Bohker waited in the narrow trapezoid of shade beside the barn. "Cuz," said Kelp, "we'd like to offer a deal."

"Admitting nothing," Dortmunder said.

"Two thousand, seven hundred twenty-four dollars," the cousin said. "That's the only deal I know."

"We can't quite come up with that much," Kelp said, "on ac-counta John here didn't actually take your money. But we know how things look and we know what John's reputation is-"

"Hey," Dortmunder said. "What about you?"

"OK, fine. The reputations we both have. So we feel we'll try to make good on what you lost as best we can, even though we didn't do it, and we could probably come up with two thousand. In and around two thousand."

"Two thousand, seven hundred twenty-four dollars," said the cousin, "or I call the troopers."

"Troopers?" Dortmunder stared at Kelp. "He's gonna call in the Army?"

"State troopers, he means." Kelp explained, and turned back to his cousin to say, "That wouldn't be a nice thing to do, cuz. Turn us over to the law and we're really in trouble. Can't you take the two-"

"Two thousand, seven hundred twenty-four dollars," said the cousin.

"Oh, the hell with this guy," Dortmunder abruptly said. "Why don't we just go take a hike?"

"I thought you might come up with that next," the cousin answered. He was smeared all over with smugness. "So that's why I sent Kelly for reinforcements."

Dortmunder turned, and there was Kelly back from the farmhouse, and with him were all the other rustics. Five of them, still in their bib overalls and T-shirts, standing there looking at Dortmunder and Kelp, getting a kick out of being the audience for a change.

It's one of them, Dortmunder thought. He's standing there and I'm standing here, and it's one of them. And I'm stuck.

Kelp said something, and then the cousin said something, and then Kelp said something else, and then Kelly said something; and Dortmunder tuned out. It's one of these five guys, he thought. One of these guys is a little scared to be out here, he doesn't know if he's gonna get away with it or not, he's looking at me and he doesn't know if he's in trouble or not.

Their eyes? No, they're all actors; the guy's gotta know enough to behave like everybody else. But it's one of them.

Well, not the fat one. You look at skinny Kelly there, and you see this fat one, and even with the donkey head on, you'd know it wasn't Kelly, having already seen Kelly in the first half, wearing the donkey head, and knowing what he looked like.