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what?
    After her departure, after his own shower, he paced back and forth trying to sort it all out. In the few hours since his arrival in Martingale, he’d slept with a woman who turned out to be the loving daughter of the target and, in all likelihood, the unloving wife of the client.
    Well, maybe not. Lyman Crowder was a rich man, lived north of town on a good-sized ranch that he ran pretty much as a hobby. He’d made his real money in oil, and nobody ever made a small amount of money that way. You either went broke or got rich. Rich men had enemies. People they’d crossed in business, people who stood to profit from their death.
    But it figured that Yarnell was the client. There was a kind of poetic inevitability about it. She picks him up in the lounge, it’s not enough that she’s the target’s daughter. She also ought to be the client’s wife. Round things out, tie up all the loose ends.
    The thing to do . . . well, he knew the thing to do. The thing to do was get a few hours’ sleep and then, bright and early, reverse the usual order of affairs by riding off into the sunrise. Get on a plane, get off in New York, and write off Martingale as a happy little romantic adventure. Men, after all, had been known to travel farther than that in the hope of getting laid.
    He’d tell the man in White Plains to find somebody else. Sometimes you had to do that. No blame attached, as long as you didn’t make a habit of it. He’d say he was blown.
    Which, come to think of it, he was. Quite expertly, as a matter of fact.
    In the morning he got up and packed his carry-on. He’d call White Plains from the airport, or wait until he was back in New York. He didn’t want to phone from the room. When the real Dale Whitlock had a fit and called American Express, they’d look over things like the Holiday Inn statement. No sense leaving anything that led anywhere.
    He thought about June, and the memory made him playful. He checked the time. Eight o’clock, two hours later in the East, not an uncivil time to call.
    He called Whitlock’s home in Rowayton, Connecticut. A woman answered. He identified himself as a representative of a political polling organization, using a name she would recognize. By asking questions that encouraged lengthy responses, he had no trouble keeping her on the phone. “Well, thank you very much,” he said at length. “And have a nice day.”
    Now let Whitlock explain that one to American Express. He finished packing and was almost out the door when his eye caught the paperback western. Take it along? Leave it for the maid? What?
    He picked it up, read the cover line, sighed. Was this what Randolph Scott would do? Or John Wayne, or Clint Eastwood? How about Jack Elam?
    No, of course not.
    Because then there’d be no movie. A man rides into town, starts to have a look at the situation, meets a woman, gets it on with her, then just backs out and rides off? You put something like that on the screen, it wouldn’t even play in the art houses.
    Still, this wasn’t a movie.
    Still . . .
    He looked at the book and wanted to heave it across the room. But all he heaved was a sigh. Then he unpacked.
    He was having a cup of coffee in town when a pickup pulled up across the street and two men got out of it. One of them was Lyman Crowder. The other, not quite as tall, was twenty pounds lighter and twenty years younger. Crowder’s son, by the looks of him.
    His son-in-law, as it turned out. Keller followed the two men into a store where the fellow behind the counter greeted them as Lyman and Hobie. Crowder had a lengthy shopping list composed largely of items Keller would have been hard put to find a use for.
    While the owner filled the order, Keller had a look at the display of hand-tooled boots. The pointed toes would be handy in New York, he thought, for killing cockroaches in corners. The heels would add better than an inch to his height. He wondered if he’d feel awkward in the boots, like a teenager in her