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“Finish off that Gin Rickey,” I said when no answer came to mind.

“I had enough.”

“Suck it down or I will fuckin’ kill you.”

He drained Greta’s glass and then, maybe two minutes later, slumped into a drug-induced slumber.

I wouldn’t have out-and-out murdered Malto Lamming, but if he died drinking what he was poisoning Greta with… well, that would have been natural justice.

I called Rags and he answered on the first ring, “Joe.”

“Where are you?”

“In one’a Grandma B’s guest rooms.”

“Can you come out and play?”

“Sure. She got a full-time nurse. I’ll just tell her I’m goin’. What you need?”

Somewhat less than half an hour later Rags drove his rented junker, an olive-green Dodge, through the gate of the sequestered manor.

I met him at the front door, guided him up to the third level, and showed him the oblivious couple.

“They dead?” was Rags’s first question.

“Uh-uh.”

“What you wanna do?”

“I don’t know.”

“Well,” he surmised, “you’re not plannin’ t’kill him.”

“Why you say that?”

“Because if you were, you wouldn’t’a invited me.”

“Yeah,” I agreed. He was right. My grandmother would never have forgiven me for getting a blood relative implicated in a murder. “I’d like to kill him, but…”

“He does deserve it,” my cousin said. “I guess you could cut off a finger, or somethin’ else.”

“He knows me. You don’t wound a predator, you kill him.”

Nodding sagely, Cousin Rags asked, “The alarm system connected to the police?”

“Looks like it.”

“And the fire department?”

“Yeah.”

“Let’s set ’em both off, then leave the car gate and front door open.”

We carried the drugged pair downstairs, leaving them in the foyer and setting off the alarms; then we waited three blocks away in Rags’ car, until the official sirens filled the night.

After all that excitement I couldn’t sleep. I couldn’t even stay in my suite.

At a little past three in the morning, I went downstairs to what the hotel quaintly calls its living room. It’s a broad space with white couches and padded chairs placed in rows, almost like grave markers set out in the ritzier corner of a cemetery.