It was one thing to know where I worked, but he’d found out awfully fast that I’d moved. It read:You know whose going to be real interseted in that money of yours is the fBi old J Egdar will get a big laugh out of watching you hung out to dry Also enclosed was a copy print of a more flattering picture of Brunella, in which she smiled endearingly at the photographer—was he my unnamed tormentor?—while brushing her hair over her left ear. I’d come up with a few of her paying admirers in my mind, but I was damned if I had names for any of them. I thought of them as a blur of barely distinguishing features: the balding one, the wall-eyed one, the walking Adam’s apple, the drooler. Whoever he was he seemed to be having trouble making up his mind as to whether he was going to kill me or turn me in or fuck my wife. This one was postmarked St. Louis like the last two, and I wondered what his business was there, and when he’d be done with it. A BOARD MEETING scheduled for later in the month seemed a logical time for the conspirators to launch an attack on the old man, whose normal short-tempered demeanor had been replaced by a glassy, demented calm, whose permanence was punctuated by rages more severe and without apparent cause than usual.
