call. Anybody could see from Palermo’s shirt what they’d done to his throat. The shirt had once been white. But there wasn’t any hurry, really. She couldn’t foresee any reason to hurry again. And out here the doctor probably doubled as the coroner anyway. The police would know. 47507Y. A blue license plate. Nevada.
It was just midnight when the sky above the black horizon began to glow pink, as though somewhere beyond this dark emptiness a city were burning. He was still twenty miles out when beneath the glow the impossible lights surfaced in a shimmering smear of white and blue and yellow and red.
His instincts resisted as the jumping, wavering apparition rose over the lip of the earth and began to resolve itself into the straight lines of bright streets and monolithic buildings bathed in color. He felt a strong urge to stay out here in the dark, empty desert, but he had to penetrate that eye of light. He had to have the name. Without it he could never be safe, because that man wanted him dead. The man wasn’t to be distracted or fooled or misled by feints and sudden shifts because he wasn’t even paying attention. He had signified the wish, and he was someone the others knew had the power to reward and punish at will, so it would remain a standing priority in a thousand minds until it was accomplished. That meant the name had to belong to one of fifteen or twenty men. That wasn’t many, but each of them was like a celebrity or a petty monarch surrounded by retainers and sycophants and guards. There was no way to reach all of them, and each wrong guess would strengthen the one who wanted him dead. He had to have the name.
He avoided the exit ramp that led onto the Strip and its nearest neighbor. He took the third exit and moved up Flamingo Road across the Strip toward the complex of lesser streets beyond the lights. He had few choices. Little Norman knew, but there was no way to make him reveal the name. He had existed far too long by working for everyone and appearing to know nothing about anyone. If he caught Little Norman alone the best he could hope for was to kill him. Little Norman was a professional. Orloff had known the name. Orloff was dead, but there was still Orloff’s office, the place where they’d killed him. Fieldston Growth Enterprises.
He drove around the neighborhood, carefully covering the streets for three blocks on each side. If there were a competent team of watchers in the vicinity, they would have cars at the most likely points of access to the major highways, out of sight of the building itself. There might even be a building nearby with a dim light in an upper window that faced away from FGE.
When he had satisfied himself that there were no watchers he drove up the street toward FGE. The street was quiet. All of the buildings in the area were closed, their darkened windows reflecting only the lights of his car as he passed. He parked on the street behind, and set off on foot toward FGE. He carried Maureen’s pistol with the silencer in his coat pocket. He hoped that a small building like FGE that consisted only of offices would just have a burglar alarm. If the place contained the kind of information he needed, there would be no night watchman—they wouldn’t want to seem excessively worried about security.
He approached the building from the rear, prepared to look for the most likely window. But there were lights on inside. Damn, he thought. A watchman. He’d have to find the watchman first. And it would be nothing like he wanted, a quiet visit that nobody knew had ever taken place. Whatever Orloff had that would give him the name would be hidden in a place where only Orloff could find it. Nobody would have missed it. But now there would be a dead watchman.
He started to make a circuit of the building, looking for the window that would give him the best view of the watchman. At the parking lot he stopped. There were two cars there, parked side by side. He approached the cars, and looked inside the first one. It had to belong to the security guard service, he thought. It had a radio under the dashboard, just like the ones the police used. He moved to the other car. Small letters of a decal on the trunk said, “This car carries only bookkeeping material.” He thought for a moment. The first car had to be the watchman. What was the other? He moved to the building and looked in the window.
Inside, there were three men in shirtsleeves, working at desks. One seemed to be scanning files and putting folders in a cardboard box and the others were going through the drawers of the desks. All three were wearing guns in shoulder holsters. He moved away from the lighted window and returned to the cars. This time he looked at the license plates. They were both white and said
He kept himself in the shadows as he moved toward his car. He needed time to think. They had to be the FBI. Of course. Whenever there was a pretext, some possibility that one of these killings involved the crossing of state lines, the FBI moved in. But whatever they’d been doing in that office, it wasn’t investigating Orloff’s shooting. And the decal on the car had said something about bookkeeping. They were going through the files. What did they know?
He felt a sudden wave of panic, a surge of adrenaline. But the fear cleared his mind and subsided. No, it was all right. What Orloff had known about him was a post office box number. There would be a reference to him somewhere, but it would do him no harm. But the rest of it was disturbing. They knew that FGE was a blind. He hadn’t counted on that. So now they were as likely to find the name as he was. But they were still looking, working through the night. And they were reading business files. Bookkeeping material, the car had said.
He smiled. There was hope. They were looking for the name, but they didn’t know Orloff. They might figure out that Orloff was moving money, and they might find out where some of it went. Unless they found Orloff’s private ledger they wouldn’t find out where it came from. Not the name. They were looking at whatever Orloff had prepared to throw off the auditors and the tax men, not what he’d prepared to keep track of the real transactions. Because there had to be a ledger: Orloff wouldn’t have taken the chance that he’d make a mistake. They were looking in desk drawers and filing cabinets, not tapping floors and walls for hollow places. They’d walk out with their files and maybe they’d figure it out eventually. But by then he might have the name, and they’d be wasting their time.
He was concentrating now. FBI men in Orloff’s office. They didn’t know what they were looking for. Maybe they didn’t even know yet what Orloff was. If they didn’t, would they have searched his house? He’d never been to Orloff’s house although he assumed there must be one. It had never occurred to him to wonder where Orloff lived until he’d hired the Cruiser to watch him. He had little interest in the brokers and middlemen. He knew and accepted the fact that he wasn’t the sort of man they’d want to spend time with, even if it hadn’t been dangerous. And if Orloff had invited him there he would have been insulted. He did the work and took the money, but he would have resented any presumption that he cared who gave it to him, or took any interest in the problems and personalities that provided him with a market for his services. Orloff had been a pig. He had noted it, as he noted whatever came within the range of his consciousness, because it might present a problem or a solution, but it evoked no emotional response. But now Orloff was important to him because Orloff had known the name.
He contemplated Orloff as he searched for the address in the telephone book. Orloff had been greedy. So the house would be large and opulent. He memorized the address and returned to the car. But Orloff had been nervous and frightened most of the time, his greed conflicting with his natural cowardice to keep his fat body sweating beneath the custom-made silk shirts in fits of excitement and terror. So the house would be difficult to break into, no doubt protected electronically from whatever phantoms Orloff’s brain conjured up when it contemplated the possibilities of the night outside the windows. That part presented no problem, because Orloff was dead, and unless he had a family still living there, there would be no one to turn on the equipment.
When he neared Orloff’s house, he followed the same procedure he’d used at FGE. He circled the block searching for signs that the house might be under surveillance. He saw nothing that was questionable, so he drove past the house. There were no cars at all in the driveway. Orloff’s car had probably been impounded by the police in the investigation, he thought. Maybe because it caught some of the slugs from the shotgun, although there must have been more than enough in Orloff’s body for any practical purpose.
He saw no lights in the windows. It was the sort of house he’d imagined. The low, T-shaped structure gave an impression of careless, sprawling expanse, the two wings sheltering gardens of close-cropped yew and juniper, and yucca. Another eye would not have noticed that anyone approaching either of the two doors in the wings could be observed from behind through opposite windows in what must be the same room.
He parked the car around the corner and walked to the house. The windows were all tightly latched and bolted, so he contented himself for the moment with examining them to see if he could discern the contact wires or the glow of an electric eye that would show him how to disengage the burglar alarms. He peered through each of the windows, seeing only the dark shapes of the furniture. It took some searching, but at the rear of the house
