Scam

the other hand, if you have money, you can get stuff without paying for it. Which is a sort of corporate, white-collar crime that is not the same as stealing, and no one will say boo.
    As I watched Tommie run around with his new bow, my mind wandered.
    Something was bothering me. No real surprise there—with everything that had happened, something should be bothering me. But more than that. It was like there was something neglected. Something that I’d missed. I don’t know why, but in the back of my mind was the feeling there was something that I’d heard today that was important. I just couldn’t put my finger on it.
    Which again was not surprising. It had been a long day. Filled with revelations. First there was Sandy and the resume photos at Actors’ Equity. Segue into the topless dancer’s boyfriend and his story of stealing the keys. Then wrap it all up and kick it around with MacAullif. Who, in his typical irritating manner, points out it might not be true. And hands me Marty Rothstein as one suspect, and the bartender as the other. Dangles them at me tantalizingly, as if saying, Here they are, pick one.
    And then there’s Alice, who does pick one. The bartender. My least-favorite suspect. And then compounds the insult by arguing something I know isn’t true—that the guy might have framed me with the gun. And then points out with annoying logic that the guy was at the talent agent’s office and at the talent agent’s house. Which would have allowed him to do it if he had done it, only the fact was, he hadn’t done it.
    Yeah: pretty long, exasperating day. Ironically, about the only bright spot was the sign-up Mary/Maggie Mason had given me. And even then I’d had the irritation of the changing name. But the sign-up itself had been a piece of cake. A nice seventy-five-cents-an-hour ride out to Far Rockaway to sign up a woman who had fallen down in Sloan’s. I’d even managed to slip into the offending supermarket and snap off a few location-of-accident photos when no one happened to be looking. The client, one Rosita Velez, had slipped on an icy floor. In a case like that, you don’t expect much, but, sure enough, in the seafood section they had a bunch of fish on ice, and a lot of the cubes had actually fallen on the floor. Of course, they weren’t the same ones that had tripped Rosita Velez, but an ice cube is an ice cube, and I shot ’em for all I was worth.
    I thought all that as I watched my little corporate crook running around slaying monsters with his free bow. And it occurred to me, maybe I was a white-collar criminal myself, photographing ice cubes that had nothing to do with anything.
    It also occurred to me that was one crime they would never convict me of, even though I’d done it. Whereas murder was a crime they might convict me of, even though I had never done it and never would.
    I pushed all such thoughts from my mind, tried to concentrate on Zelda. It was hard, because I still had the feeling I’d missed something.
    Come on. Concentrate. Level Five’s a tough level. We found the hookshot, yeah, the special grappling hook that let us cross chasms too wide to jump, but we still hadn’t found the Nightmare Key. And you can’t get to the big boss without the Nightmare Key.
    The Nightmare Key—was that it? Had someone drugged Cranston Pritchert to get the Nightmare Key? What would be the point? And who was the big boss?
    And what was it that I couldn’t remember that was driving me crazy?
    My mind did a backflip and suddenly I had it.
    Mary/Maggie Mason.

51.
    “I T’S NOT A SNAKE.”
    MacAullif looked up from his desk, frowned. “What?”
    “I know who killed Cranston Pritchert. I know everything.”
    “Oh, you do?”
    “Yes, I do. I know the whole thing, and I think I can prove it. I’m gonna need your help, but it shouldn’t be hard.”
    “Oh, is that so?”
    “Yes, it is. But that’s not important right now.”
    “Not important?”
    “No. The important thing is Belcher. I wanna nail that son of a bitch. Everything else is secondary.”
    MacAullif leaned back in his chair, cocked his head. “I’m not going to interrupt you and ask you to make sense. I’m gonna assume when you get good and ready you’re gonna tell me what this is all about. In the meantime, have your little fun.”
    “This isn’t fun. This has been one of the worst experiences of my life. If you think acting manic is a sign of having fun, I suggest you take a refresher course in