Watching them go, the Teacher remembered the day, long ago, when he’d gone with his mother to get the last of their belongings from the lousy row house he’d grown up in. His dad had stood in the doorway, drinking a bottle of Miller beer and holding back the Teacher’s little brother, who was crying and straining to go with Mommy.

“No, buddy,” his dad kept saying. “You’re Daddy’s boy now, remember? You’re going to stay with me. It’s okay.”

But it wasn’t okay, was it? the Teacher thought.

He shook his head in disbelief, remembering how he’d just sat there in the cab of the moving truck. At first, he’d been embarrassed that the neighbors would see, until he realized they weren’t his neighbors anymore. After that, he’d actually been happy. He’d had to share a room with his stupid little brother, but now he was going to go with his mom, and he’d have his own room. His brother was a baby, he’d decided.

The Teacher’s cheeks bulged as he let out a long breath.

No, it wasn’t okay, he thought, shaking off the memory. But it was getting there. It would all be as okay as it was ever going to be, very soon.

He looked at himself in the plate-glass reflection. He was clean-shaven this morning, wearing a skintight Armani blazer over his tall, tapered frame, with a white silk shirt open at the throat and crotch-biting Dolce and Gabbana jeans – over-the-top, go-f-yourself, moneyed sex and style. Real Tom Ford.

Screw that stubbly-faced, Unabomber-look-alike picture of him on the covers of the Daily News and the Post, he thought. The only people who’d glanced twice at him on the sidewalks this morning were horny-looking forty-year-old ladies and hornier-looking gay men.

Nothing had changed. He would go over like Rover.

He took out his Treo, double-checked his next target, and adjusted his pistol at the small of his back before stepping out into the sidewalk crush.

This was a real good one coming up – somebody who’d been in dire need of his comeuppance for quite some time.

The Teacher put a little pep in his step as he flowed east with the sheltering crowd.

Within half an hour of our storming the Gladstone mansion, news vans had outnumbered Range Rovers on Lattingtown Ridge Court. Alongside the barricades, I counted at least four newsies, pointing their surface-to-air-missile-like shoulder cams at the house. I felt like calling in air support. We were under siege.

I gladly handed over the master bedroom to the arriving Nassau County Crime Scene guys.

“So, is it true? A trifecta on the Gold Coast?” one of them said with a shake of his head. “I knew that was Dominick Dunne out by the mailbox.”

Downstairs, the law enforcement were standing in clusters, smoking, drinking coffee, and wisecracking like bad guests at the world’s worst cocktail party.

I waded through them and scanned the photographs on the walls in the family room. I took down three that I thought we could use in tracking Gladstone. He looked like a pilot, handsome, flat-bellied, and steely-eyed. Even his grin seemed muscular, that of a man who always got what he wanted.

“Hey there, you sick son of a bitch,” I said to him.

I couldn’t help looking at the rest of the pictures. Little girls at picnics, preteens at the beach, young ladies graduating from high school. The Gladstone daughters had been beautiful, but nothing compared to their mother, Erica. Black-haired and pale-eyed with high cheekbones, she looked like a queen from a fairy tale.

But the grille of her Lincoln Navigator was sticking into the room, thrust through the shattered wall beside her studio-photographed portrait.

Too bad Sophocles had come in at the last minute and written the fairy tale’s ending.

I located the home’s office past some French doors near the front of the house. I used the fax machine to send the pictures to the deputy commissioner of public information so he could get them out to the press, then I sat down at the antique desk and started opening file drawers.

Right off the top, the Amex bills were staggering. Four-hundred-dollar hair appointments here, three-thousand-dollar charges to Bergdorf Goodman there. Mrs. Gladstone paid more for skin care than I had for college tuition. Apparently, being rich was extremely expensive.

After a few minutes more of searching, I finally found what I was looking for – charges to both the 21 Club and the Polo store.

I also found something in the bottom file drawer that, at first, I thought was some kind of contract. Actually, it was. A contract of divorce.

Bingo, I thought. That helped to explain things more. Two factors commonly made people go berserk – divorce and getting fired. Gladstone had experienced both within a short time period.

But what I really needed was something that would tell me where Gladstone might be hiding, and where he might strike next. I kept looking.

It was twenty minutes later when I found a book of press clippings on one of the built-in shelves. It contained mostly local newspaper society clippings. Erica at charity functions, sometimes with, but mostly without, her prince of a husband. The most recent one showed a picture of Erica draped in satin, tulle, and diamonds at a Wall Street AIDS benefit, at Manhattan ’s Customs House.

A silver-haired man was holding her near-naked waist. His name, I read in the caption, was Gary Cargill.

It took me less than a second to make the connection that Cargill was the name at the top of the divorce papers.

Yet another crushing blow to Gladstone ’s ego. His wife had started seeing her divorce attorney.

Suddenly my eyes opened wide. If I was as crazy as Gladstone and I’d been raked over the coals like him, who would I want to take out?

I dropped the book as I spun around and grabbed for the phone.

“What city and listing, please?” asked the phone company information computer in a gratingly calm voice.

Mine was much more frantic.

“ Manhattan!” I yelled. “A lawyer named Cargill!”

“So you’ve decided it’s time for you and your wife to part company,” celebrity divorce attorney Gary Cargill said with all the grave emotion that the statement and his five-hundred-dollar consultation fee deserved.

“But for me and my hedge fund to keep company,” said Mr. Savage, Cargill’s latest client. In his casual, devil-may-care designer outfit, Savage looked loaded, like a real winner. Gary thought he recognized the face from somewhere, but he couldn’t quite place it. Fortune magazine?

Ah, hedge fund, Gary thought. The two sweetest words in modern English.

“That’s why I came to you,” Savage went on. “I’ve heard you’re the best. I don’t care how much it costs, either, so long as that whore doesn’t get one red cent.”

Slowly, ruminatively, Gary leaned back in his cashmere-upholstered office chair. His meticulously designed, oak-paneled office resembled the library of an English country manor, but with extra features. Country manors usually didn’t command floor-to-ceiling forty-story views of the MetLife, Chrysler, and Empire State buildings.

“I can assure you that you’ve come to the right place,” he said.

Then he frowned as the light on his Merlin interoffice phone began to blink. He had explained emphatically to the temp his one cardinal rule – never, ever, ever interrupt him when he was meeting with a client for the first time. With the amount of money these fish spent, you couldn’t even imply you had other clients. Didn’t she understand that he was about to hook a whale here?

The BlackBerry on his belt suddenly vibrated, startling him again. What the hell was going on? He glanced down at it in annoyance.

There was a message from the temp, entitled 911.

“I’m terribly sorry, Mr. Savage,” he said. “I left instructions not to be interrupted.” He rolled his eyes, one wealthy, important man to another, bemoaning the quality of help these days. “If you’ll excuse me for just a second.”