Harry Raines down there iii the fog; it was Harry Raines, saying it to you. So you shot him.”
His expression didn?t change. He blew a thin stream of blue smoke out into the room and watched it
swirl away in the breeze from the windows, and then he laughed in my face.
“Nobody?ll believe that hot air,” he sneered. “You couldn?t get that story into small claims court if
you had Clarence Darrow, John Marshall, and Oliver Wendell Holmes on your side.”
I ignored him. I said, “The irony of all this is that Raines might still be alive if it weren?t for a horse
with a game leg and his croaked owner. It was the death of the horse, the shock of learning that a race
had been fixed and Tagliani knew it, that woke Raines
up.
The phone gave me a breather. Its buzzer startled Donleavy. He snatched it up, said, “Hello,” paused,
and then handed the receiver to me.
“Kilmer,” I said.
It was the Stick. “You were right,” he said. “I dialled the other number.”
“Any other news?”
“Not yet. Baker?s doing his best. You want me to come up now?”
“That sounds good, thanks,” I said. I gave the phone back to Donleavy.
“Now that your course in Psych 101 is over,” Donleavy said, slamming down the phone, “maybe you?
-l like to tell me how I?m supposed to have gotten here from Sea Oat. Did Peter Pan fly me over?”
“You never went home,” I said. “You came straight here from the Thomas cocktail party.”
I took out the card he had given me he night before, the one with his home phone number on it, and
picked up the phone.
One of the dozen or so yellow lights on its base lit up as I dialled the number. When it started to ring,
the light beside it gleamed.
He stared down at it dumbly.
“Pick it up,”! said.
He hesitated for a moment and then lifted the phone.
“It?s called call-forwarding,” I said, the - two of us staring at each other across the desk. “Courtesy of
Ma Bell. If you want to forward your calls to another number, you punch in a code on your home
phone, followed by the new phone number. The calls are forwarded automatically. Obviously you use
it all the time; your home phone?s on it right now. That w your home number I just dialled.”
He wasn?t talking. The muscles under his ear were jerking with every heartbeat. He tapped the ash off
the cigar without taking his eyes off me. I went on:
“When you left the party last night, you came here instead of going home. You knew Raines was in
