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two years? Even six months, Mitch. Put someone like Ronald Cornell in an asylum for six months? What do you think it would do to him?”
    I said, “There’s no reason to believe I’d succeed, even if I did try.”
    “That’s the worst excuse of all,” she said.
    I looked down at the hole I was digging, the concrete blocks I was putting in place. I didn’t want to leave all this. I didn’t want to expose myself to anybody like Detective Manzoni, I didn’t want to pry into the unhappy world that Ronald Cornell lived in, I didn’t want to go out of this house at all.
    Kate said, “I talked to him about money.”
    I looked up at her in surprise. “Money?”
    “He wouldn’t want you to do it for nothing,” she said. “And we could use more money.”
    Neither of us looked directly at the new stacks of supplies that had just been delivered, but all at once I was almost painfully conscious of them; in the corner of my vision.
    I said, “What kind of money were you talking about?”
    “He told me his store has been averaging a profit of about twenty thousand dollars a year, but they’ve been putting a lot of it back into the business, for a wider stock and redecorating the store and advertising and so on. So they don’t have a lot of money in cash. But now that his partner is dead, Ronald owns the whole business outright, so he offered us a part ownership. Fifteen percent.”
    “Fifteen percent of the store? For how long?”
    “Forever. For as long as the store stays open. If the profit keeps on the same as before, that’s three thousand dollars a year, every year. We could use something like that, Mitch.”
    Of course we could. Who couldn’t use extra income every year, with no work done for it?
    Except at the beginning, of course. Work would have to be done for it at the beginning.
    I said, “To be paid to us if I find the killer?”
    “No. Regardless of what happens, just if you’ll agree to try.”
    I shook my head. “I won’t do it that way. If I don’t succeed, I don’t want any payment.”
    “Well, that would be up to you,” she said, and from the sudden lightening of her expression I saw that she had taken my last statement to mean that I was agreeing to take on the job.
    And what else could I do? I remembered Ronald Cornell in this basement, timid and weak and ineffective, but pushing himself to be more, because his friend had been killed. Taking his coat and boots off before finding out if there was anyone at home or not, because he was determined to wait if the house was empty. It had to have been a strain for him to come to me, to come out of himself, to act. Just as it would be a strain for me.
    Kate was saying, “I told the police I was his aunt, that’s how they let me in. And I said his uncle might be coming to visit him, too.”
    “Did you see Manzoni at all?”
    “No, and I’m glad I didn’t.”
    “Does he have special visiting hours?”
    “Yes. You could see him tonight, if you wanted, between seven-thirty and nine.”
    “All right,” I said. “I’ll go see him tonight.”
    “Thank you, Mitch,” she said.

4
    H E LOOKED LIKE A cartoon in a magazine. He was as swathed in bandages as a mummy, and his right leg, in a hip-to-toe plaster cast, was held up at an angle by a system of weights and cords.
    It was all a cartoon except the face. Lengths of adhesive tape over gauze were crisscrossed over his nose, but other than that, his head and face were clear of bandaging. The frightened, aching expression in his eyes could be read from across the room, and when he opened his mouth to talk—or to breathe—I could see that he was missing several teeth.
    At first I thought the deep grayness around his eyes was the result of strain or tiredness, but then I realized he’d had two black eyes which were slowly fading. The result was to intensify his expression of pain and fear.
    There was a uniformed policeman in a chair out in the hall, but Cornell and I were alone once inside the