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me, right?" Ronnie tapped his chest with his thumb.
    Red swallowed hard. "You did exactly the right thing. You just made the big time. I'm proud of you, little brother. Your old Red buddy is proud."
    Ronnie smiled broadly. "It really worked, just like you said it would."
    Red patted his arm. "And the best part is that there isn't going to be any heat from the cops. When the cops find a stiff in a motel room, the first thing they do is run fingerprints. When they do that, they see that the dude has an arrest sheet. The first thing the cops figure is that it was nothing but a thieves' argument and they close the case. That's as far as they go. See, I know how the pigs think. I used to have a lot of 'em drinking in my place in Long Beach in the old days. I used to hear 'em talk when they didn't think nobody was listening. You see, they actually like to find a dead thief. They get off on that kind of shit. And that's no lie. That's how they are. To them a dead thief is just less work."
    Ronnie nodded his head without speaking, an athlete listening to the coach after competition.
    Red continued. "I want you to take the sawed-off and stash it like I explained, and then enjoy yourself for a couple of days. Go see your old girlfriend like you been talking about. Why don't you meet me here day after tomorrow and I'll fill you in on stage two. As soon as we have enough capital, we'll be able to pull one big con and we'll be set for life, partner." The words flowed easily for Red. It was the same thing he had been telling Ronnie in stir for years, though Red knew that the last thing he would ever do would be to get involved in a confidence caper again. He was well known by the Feds and bunco cops from Hollywood to Fort Lauderdale. Christ, how many confidence men had red hair?
    Red was too old to get his own hands dirty and end up doing another stretch.
    ****
    FIVE
    On the way to the hotel Red Diamond drove past the glass-and-steel high-rise buildings in L.A.'s Century City: twenty-story condominium structures and plushly carpeted office suites for rent or lease. This is where I belong, thought Red. My milieu. He knew that with a few bucks he could rent an office in one of the high-rises again. He could start putting people on "hold" by pushing the lighted buttons on the phone. "Hold, please, for Mr. Diamond," the secretary had said. The high-rise world was a mystery to the pussy-headed group counselors at Terminal Island. "Inflated self-image," one had called it. "Don't you think your schemes could relate to your childhood conflicts?" the counselor had asked him.
    Red remembered how he had slowly, carefully, over the period of a full year of tedious prison-counseling sessions, faked coming around to the counselor's point of view. It had been sort of a challenge, not to mention that there was nothing else to do. The pussy-headed dollar-an-hour dumb bastard finally bought his rehabilitation act and at the end of the year gave him a progress rating high enough for parole consideration. The counselor had taken the hook and swallowed it because he was like every other sucker in the world-prone to accept his own fantasy and susceptible to flattery. Red's credo proved true again.
    Imagine, Red thought, a two-bit Department of Prisons civil servant with two semesters of psychology writing a report on the behavior of Mr. Rudolph Diamond, former president of Gold Futures Unlimited, Sun King Recreational Properties Corporation, and the International Investment Bank of Nassau, in the Bahamas, whose buxom young secretary used to blow him as he leaned back on the Danish modern sofa in his office at the Century Building.
    Red pulled up in front of the multistoried hotel and handed the car keys to a doorman dressed like a caballero.
    He took a deep breath and knocked on the suite door. He was conscious of dampness in his armpits.
    The door was opened quickly, chain still on, by a husky man in a flowered shirt. Red noticed a gun bulge at the man's