“Who’s he?”

“You.”

“Got it,” Dortmunder said.

“There’ll also be a lawyer on our side there,” A.K.A. told him. “I mean, the side of the guy that’s running this thing. The lawyer isn’t in on what’s going down, by him you are Fred Mullins, from Carrport, Long Island, so he’s just there to see the other side doesn’t stray from the program. And at the end of it, in the elevator, he gives you the envelope.”

“Sounds okay.”

“Easy as falling off a diet,” A.K.A. said, and handed him a manila envelope, which he took home and opened, to find it contained a whole story about one Fredric Albert Mullins and an entire family named Anadarko, all living on Red Tide Street out in Carrport between 1972 and 1985. Dortmunder diligently memorized it all, having his faithful companion May deposition him on the information every evening when she came home from the Safeway supermarket where she was a cashier. And then, on the following Wednesday, the day before his personal private show was to open, Dortmunder got another call from A.K.A., who said, “You know that car I was gonna buy?”

Uh oh. “Yeah?” Dortmunder said. “You were gonna pay five hundred for it, I remember.”

“Turns out, at the last minute,” A.K.A. said, “it’s a real lemon, got unexpected problems. In a word, it won’t run.”

“And the five hundred?”

“Well, you know, John,” A.K.A. said, “I’m not buying the car.”

2

Which was why, that Thursday morning at ten, instead of being in a lawyer’s office in the Graybar Building in midtown Manhattan, just an elevator ride up from Grand Central Station (crossroads of the same four hundred thousand lives every day), talking about the Anadarko family of Carrport, Long Island, Dortmunder was at home, doing his best to clear his brain of all memory of Fred Mullins and his entire neighborhood. Which was why he was there to answer the doorbell when it rang at ten twenty-two that morning, to find a FedEx person standing in the hall there.