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“Of course.”

You need anybody shot, Brewster? Somebody stiffing you on a fee, needs to have his legs broken? Just say the word. Vincenzo Savarese told me to tell you he owes you a big one.

“Thank you. And there is one other thing about which I would be grateful for your advice, Mr. Giacomo.”

“I’m at your service.”

“Could you recommend a good, and by good I mean both highly competent and very discreet, private investigator?”

A private investigator? Now what?

“I don’t think I quite understand,” Giacomo said.

“I need someone to make some discreet inquiries for me.”

“Well, there’s a lot of people in that business, Mr. Savarese. I use half a dozen different ones myself. Good people. It depends, of course, on the nature of the information you want.”

There was a perceptible pause, long enough for Armando C. Giacomo to decide Savarese was carefully deciding how much, if anything, he was going to tell him.

“What I had in mind, Mr. Giacomo, was to look around my granddaughter’s environment, so to speak, and see if I couldn’t come up with some hint about what has so greatly disturbed her.”

“I don’t think I would do anything like that until I’d spoken with Dr. Payne,” Giacomo said quickly.

“All this information would be for Dr. Payne, of course.”

Unless it turns out that the girl was raped or something—which might damned well be the case—in which case the cops would have an unlawful death by castration to deal with.

“I just don’t see where any of the people who work for me would be any good at that sort of investigation. I could ask—”

“That won’t be necessary, thank you just the same, Mr. Giacomo. And thank you for returning my call. I’m grateful to you.”

“I’m glad things seem to be working out for your granddaughter,” Giacomo said.

“Thank you. I very much appreciate your interest,” Vincenzo Savarese said, and hung up.

He looked at Pietro Cassandro.

“Mr. Giacomo does not seem to feel that any of the investigators with whom he has experience would be useful,” he said.

Cassandro did not know how to interpret the remark. He responded as he usually did in similar circumstances. He held up both hands, palms upward, and shrugged.

When Vincenzo Savarese’s daughter had told him how kind Dr. Payne was, even calling to tell her to bring Cynthia’s makeup and decent nightclothes to her in the hospital, she also said that Cynthia had told her that Dr. Payne had told her she was not to tell her mother, or her father, for that matter, anything that made her uncomfortable to relate.

Savarese hadn’t said anything to his daughter, but he’d thought that while that might be—and probably was—good medical practice, it also suggested that there was something that Cynthia would be uncomfortable telling her mother about. He was naturally curious about what that might be.

There was something else Savarese thought odd. The young man Cynthia had been seeing a lot of—his name was Ronald Ketcham, and all Savarese knew about him was that he was neither Italian nor Catholic, and Cynthia’s mother hoped their relationship wasn’t getting too serious—had not been around since Cynthia had started having her emotional trouble.

“Tell Paulo to put the retired cop to work,” Mr. Savarese ordered.

Paulo Cassandro, Pietro’s older and even larger brother, was president of Classic Livery, Inc., in which Mr. Savarese had the controlling—if off the books—interest.

“Right, Mr. S.,” Pietro Cassandro said. “What do you want me to do with the cognac?”

“Send it back to the restaurant,” Mr. Savarese said, making reference to Ristorante Alfredo, one of Philadelphia’s most elegant establishments, and in which he also had the controlling—if off the books—interest.

“Right, Mr. S. I’ll do that on my way home.”

Mr. Savarese changed his mind.