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to be the bookkeeper and enforcer, somebody everybody agrees on, to see that the skim is honest?"
    "For the last six years, Frank Sprenger. Phoenix. Before that it was Bunny Colder, for years and years. He died of a stroke. I heard that some kinky girlfriend got him smashed and then ran a sharpened piano wire into his brain through the corner of his eye, but nobody ran an autopsy to check it out."
    "What is Sprenger like?"
    "I'll tell you what he's like. He's like exactly the right man for the job. He doesn't use anything, not even booze or tobacco or coffee. He's a body freak. Not muscle building. Conditioning. He lives like a good heavyweight six weeks away from a title shot. Except for women. He takes care of more than his share. He spends a lot of time crosschecking the action. He's found some people clipping off a little as the money went by them, and they are not seen around anymore. I hear the local group has stopped trying to con him, because it isn't safe or healthy."
    "What's his cover?"
    "Investment consultant. He has a second-floor office on Lincoln Road. He's in the yellow pages. He pays his taxes. I think maybe he has some legitimate clients. He's a careful man."
    I waited until I thought of the right kind of hypothetical question. "Willy, I want you to listen to some stuff I am going to make up and tell me if it could happen. Let's say that in the past year and a half Frank Sprenger has been buying important paintings. He has been using an expert and paying a fee for his judgment. Four hundred thousand worth of art. It's been going into a storage warehouse.
    "Possible?"
    "Sure," Willy said. "Especially if it's on a cash basis."
    "Say it is."
    "Money makes more problems every day. You hear how they want banks to report everything over five thousand? Now they are beginning to crack the Swiss and get the numbers. The islands used to be good, but what's going to happen to the Bahamas, the Caymans, Jamaica the next couple of years? It's very hard to set up a corporation and feed cash into it in such a way you can get past an audit. You put cash in a jar in your back yard, it isn't working for you. It's shrinking all the time it's buried. Dry-cleaning money gets more expensive all the time. One way they are using lately is you buy yourself a broker, one who'll fake back records for the sake of the commission and a little present. Then you set up a buy five years ago for something that has gone up like eight hundred percent. Then you have the sale records faked too and pay capital gains, and what you have left is legitimate and you can invest it legitimate. You have to be your own fence, for God's sake. So why not paintings? I like it. He would be handling it for one of the out-of-town groups or individuals. He handles investment money right here. The local group has legal talent he can use. Raw land has been good. Pieces of home-building outfits have been good. In-and-out marinas have been good."
    "How much would he be supervising in a year? I mean, how much would the total skim be, the amount he'd be watching?"
    "McGee, this has to be absolutely horseback. I could be off, way way off."
    "Take a guess."
    "Well… working it backward and saying that the total take for the Florida group in this area is seventy-five million with fifteen million expenses, and maybe twenty-five percent of the net is reimbursed on account of special ownership… Sprenger keeps an eye on maybe fifteen million."
    "And invests that much?"
    "Oh, hell no! The groups mostly have got their own way of handling a cash rebate. It goes back by messenger. Frank might have to find a home down here for one mil, or one and a half, or even two."
    "Okay. Now here is the final suppose. Suppose that right now all those paintings in that bonded warehouse are fake."
    He snapped his head around, eyes wide open for the first time that evening. "You have some weird sense of fun there, McGee."
    "Think out loud."
    "Well… Sprenger wouldn't know it. He wouldn't get