She had been steamed since eight P.M. when the boys finally got back to the hotel with an envelope they'd retrieved from the pay locker at the Rendell

Road Terminal. The envelope had contained a letter that read:

My dearest Priscilla:

In the event of my death, you will have been this locker where you will find a great deal

I have been saving this money for you all these years never touching it, living only on my welfare eh, and whatever small amounts still come in on company royalties.

It is my wish that the cash will enable you to your career as a concert pianist.

I have always loved you

Your grandmother,

Svetlana

In the envelope, there was five thousand dollars hundred-dollar bills.

"Five thousand?." Priscilla had yelled. "This is great deal of cash?"

"It ain't peanuts," Georgie suggested.

"This is supposed to take care of me?"

"Five grand is actually a lot of money," Georgie said.

Which it was.

Though not as much as the ninety-five they'd stolen from the locker.

"Five thousand is supposed to buy a career as a fucking concert pianist?"

She still couldn't get over it.

Sitting here at ten minutes to one in the morning, drinking the twenty-year-old Scotch the bartender had brought to her table, courtesy of the house, Priscilla kept shaking her head over and over again. The boys sympathized with her. Priscilla looked at her watch. "You know what I think?" she asked.

Georgie was afraid to hear what she was thinking. He didn't want her to be thinking that they'd opened that envelope and stolen ninety-five thousand dollars from it. Priscilla didn't notice, but his knuckles went white around his whiskey glass.

He waited breathlessly.

"I think whoever delivered that key went to the locker first," she said.

"I'll bet," Georgie said at once.

"And cleaned it out," she said.

"Left just enough to make it look good," Tony said, nodding.

"Exactly," Georgie said.

"Made it look like the old lady was senile or something," Tony said.

"Leaving you five grand as if it's a fortune."

"Just what she did," Priscilla said.

"Well, it is sort of a for{tfune," Georgie said. Priscilla was getting angrier by the minute. The very thought of some blond thief who couldn't even speak English cleaning out the locker before delivering the

key to her! Tony kept fueling the anger. Georgie listening to him in stunned amazement.

"Who knows how much cash could've been in the locker?" he said.

"Well, after all, five grand is quite a lot," Georgie said, and shot Tony a look.

"Could've been twenty thousand in that envelope Tony suggested.

"More," Priscilla said. "She told me I'd be taken care of when she died."

"Could've been even fifty thousand in that

Tony amended.

"There was five, don't forget," Georgie said. "Even a hundred, there could've been," Tony said which Georgie thought was getting a little too close for comfort.

Priscilla looked at her watch again.

"Let's go find the son of a bitch," she said, and graciously. Flashing a dazzling smile at the seven eight people sitting in the room, she strode ele into the lobby, the boys following her.

They found Clotilde Prouteau at one A.M. Monday, sitting at the bar of a little French smoking. Nobody understood the city's

Code prohibiting smoking in public places, but it generally agreed that you could smoke in a restaurant with fewer than thirty-five patrons. Le Canard met this criterion. Moreover, even in restaurants larger than this, smoking was permitted at any bar serviced by a bartender. There was no bartender on duty at the moment, but Clotilde was covered by the

size limitation, and so she was smoking her brains out. Besides, they weren't here to bust her for smoking in public. Nor for practicing voodoo, either.

A fifty-two-year-old Haitian woman with a marked French accent and a complexion the color of oak, she sat with a red cigarette holder in her right hand, courteously blowing smoke away from the detectives. Her eyes were a pale greenish-grey, accentuated with blue liner and thick mascara. Her truly voluptuous mouth was painted an outrageously bright red. She wore a patterned silk caftan that flowed liquidly over ample hips, buttocks and breasts. Enameled red earrings dangled from her ears. An enameled red pendant necklace hung at her throat. Outside a snowstorm was raging and the temperature was eight degrees Fahrenheit.

But here in this small smoky bistro a CD player oozed plaintive Piaf, and Clotilde Prouteatt looked exotically tropical and flagrantly French.

"Voodoo is not illegal, you know that, eh?" she asked.

"We know it."

"It is a religion," she said.

"We know. ,

"And here in America, we can still practice whatever religion we choose, eh?"

The Four Freedoms speech, Carella thought, and wondered if she had a green card.