Programmed for Peril

professionally curious Lieutenant Stanley on her side. She thanked Dino again and led him to the outside door. On Michelle’s desk was a small white box. He picked it up and pressed it into her hands. “A couple tarts for your bambina. What’s her name? Melody huh?”
    She kissed his cheek. “Get out of here, Santa Claus.” Rocco arrived two hours later. The cigar stuck in the middle of his mustached mouth was the same. So was its ascending twist of bitter smoke. What was missing was his earlier inscrutability. Trish remembered she had tried so hard to read the man and had failed. The way he fidgeted today made it clear he was... nervous. Afraid might be more like it. Sensing that, she was more easily able to compose herself, put on her business face. He thanked her for seeing him. He said he was more interested than ever in buying her out. He ran an index finger around his neck’s gold chains. “I think it over. I talk about it with my uncle. I talk to my shyster and my banker. I want to buy all you got. I keep your people on, ’cause they’re better than mine.” He named a figure, one far more generous than his previous offer. She was startled.
    “Now I have a problem,” she said.
    “What problem?” Rocco’s mouth sagged with disappointment. The tops of his small, tobacco-stained teeth showed. “Not enough dough?”
    “No. Not at all. The problem is now I have to take your offer seriously. Not like before, when you underpriced PC-Pros.”
    “Sure! It’s a better offer. You understand that. That’s good. Why you got a problem?”
    “Because earlier you offered so little I didn’t have to really think about selling. Now I have to.”
    Rocco knocked a long ash loose. “My shyster’s working n the sale agreement. Get yours to call him. Let them work it all out.”
    Trish shook her head slowly. “I’m not sure I want to sell just now. I might wait till after my wedding in September.” She read disappointment in the shift of his cigar. Behind it lay other emotions, more elusive, possibly more primal. She leaned forward. “Don’t be upset. I’m just telling you what I think at the moment. I’m having more of the... problems I thought you caused. Now I know it wasn’t you. But I don’t know who it is. I might be forced to change my mind and sell before September.”
    He nodded eagerly. “Sell now!”
    She laughed. “You’re such a strange man, Rocco! Why the sudden generosity? What happened to your subtle Sicilian ways of doing business?”
    His face sagged slightly as though it was a ruddy balloon from which air had leaked. “Your friend,” he said.
    “Dino? I asked him to talk to you the first time. The second time he went on his own. What about him?” Rocco’s lips twisted toward a snarl. “These Nam vets! They shoulda never let them back in the country. They shoulda put them on an island somewhere and let them kill each other off. Instead they come back here, dopeheads and crazies. And they can kill you in the fifty ways they remember out of the hundred they knew before their brains rotted.”
    “Dino isn’t like that!”
    “The hell he isn’t! He’s as crazy as any of them. Crazier, Maybe.”
    “Did he threaten you?”
    “Never mind what he did! He was in Nam, and he’ll never he right again. They took all the nice guy out of his head. And put in rules of the jungles he used to crawl around in.” He snatched the cigar out of his mouth and crushed it out savagely on her desktop. “Don’t send him around to me no more!” He jumped up. “He asks you, tell him I made a fair offer to you. A generous offer. If you don’t want to sell, you tell him that. Tell him it’s not Rocco’s fault!” He rushed out of the cubicle. She heard Michelle’s “Good-bye, Mr. DeVita” cut short by the outer door slamming.
    She stood up, found herself smiling. No problem figuring out what Rocco feared—who, rather.
    Dino Castelli was going to be a more potent ally then even she had hoped.
    She called her attorney and explained what lay behind the threatened Kandinsky Klein and Corman suit. The rest of the afternoon she intended to spend running some budget numbers for the third quarter. She stared at the screen spread sheet. Instead of thinking about accounts payable her mind swung as relentlessly as a compass toward the pole of the threatening caller.
    Cancel the wedding!
    She had at last abandoned her diehard suspicions that either Rocco or Lois was behind the threats. That left