Bloody River Blues

still able to pay taxes, which I do in great abundance. I’m well known in the assessor’s office and in city hall, too. So, although I sympathize with you and your friend, you don’t really have much leverage. I’d consider ten thousand for each of you.”
    “Nope, that’s not enough.” Pellam took a small cloth square from his pocket and dropped it on the desk. “Take a look.” Lombro unfolded the handkerchief and looked at the business-card case inside. He opened it up, shrugged, and dropped it back on the handkerchief. Pellam scooped the case up and put it in his pocket.
    “And who,” Lombro asked, “is Special Agent Gilbert?”
    “A former FBI agent. He’s the man buried in the foundation of one of the buildings you’re putting up. A project outside of St. Louis. Foxwood. I get a kick out of those names for condominiums. Stonehenge. Windcrest. Do people really—”
    “ What? There’s no one buried in—”
    “And sad to say, he’d been shot with a gun that’s buried in your yard at home.”
    “Impossible. I don’t own a gun.”
    “I didn’t say you own a gun. I just said the gun was buried on your property.”
    “This is nonsense.”
    Lombro’s silver face flushed and his eyes darted. A distinguished man made common. A powerful man, impotent. “Your policeman friend. Is he helping—” Lombro stared at Pellam’s jacket pocket. He whispered, “And I just put my fingerprints on his ID card, didn’t I?”
    “Not to say they’d convict you. But Agent Gilbert was involved in the Gaudia murder. He threatened me and my friend.” Pellam added, “And I’d feel obligated to cooperate, being a personal acquaintance of the U.S. Attorney. I’d feel it was my duty.”
    Philip Lombro looked out the window at the brick of the building across the way. He glanced down, licked his finger, and lifted a fleck of paper or dust off the heel of one of his shoes, black cherry, tasseled Ballys, polished like dark mirrors. Pellam started to speak but didn’t. He paused, staring at the shoes, frowning, as if he’d seen them somewhere before but was unable to remember exactly where.
    TONY SLOAN WAS still not, in general, speaking to Pellam but he made an exception to explain that because the machine guns had been released and the ending of the film was successfully in the can, half of Pellam’s fee would be released. The rest Sloan was retaining to help defray the cost of the delay.
    “You want to play it that way, Tony, then I’ll see you in court.”
    Sloan had shrugged and taken up the vow of silence again, returning to the editing van, whereclose to five hundred thousand feet of film, and an extremely discouraged editor, awaited the arrival of the director’s artistic vision.
    Pellam had gone directly downstairs to the Marriott’s Huck Finn Room to crash the wrap party.
    There he drank Sloan’s champagne and ate the catfish tidbits and hush puppies, while he chatted with the cast and crew, all of them so exhausted from the trials of the final days of shooting that they did not know, or care, if he was still an untouchable.
    He looked over the crowd. He saw the makeup artists in the corner; Nina Sassower was not among them.
    Pellam wandered over to Stace Stacey, as exhausted as anyone but still retaining his unflappable good spirits. Pellam handed over the unused wax bullets and the empty .45 casings Stace had loaned him. Pellam nodded at them. “Wouldn’t mention this.”
    Stace pocketed the munitions and touched his lips with a forefinger.
    Pellam told him about Sloan’s holding back his fee. Now on his third or fourth cuba libre Stace was pretty loose. “Trying to squeeze you, is he? That man is a hundred percent son of a bitch,” the arms master said, using the strongest language Pellam had ever heard him utter.
    “But you’ll work with him again.”
    “Oh, you betcha. And you’ll be in line right behind me.”
    “Probably,” Pellam said.
    A woman appeared in the doorway of the banquet room. Pellam recognized her as one of Sloan’s secretaries. She urgently waved a slip of paper at him.He wondered if Sloan had changed his mind and was reluctantly releasing the rest of the money. Not that it truly mattered. Fifty thousand dollars had just been transferred from Philip Lombro’s investment company into Pellam’s account at a bank in Sherman Oaks.
    “You got this fax, John. It’s from Marty Weller in Budapest.”
    And was apparently just about to be transferred out again, to