“I’ll give you a cashier’s check.”

Withers shook his head.

“No?” Scarpelli asked.

“No,” Withers answered. “Women like Ms. Paget are childlike. They lack the patience for delayed gratification. They understand cash.”

As does Sammy Black. The last time I tried to give him a check, he made me eat it and tell him what rubber tasted like.

“Let me get this straight,” Scarpelli said. “You want me to give you a bundle of cash to carry around in case you find Polly Paget? Is that it?”

“That’s it. Fifty thousand would probably get her attention.”

Maybe thirty would, too. Minus the vig.

“Fifty thousand dollars in cash,” Scarpelli said. “What do I look like to you?”

Here it is, Withers thought. The job on the line, right here.

“A good businessman, Mr. Scarpelli,” he said.

Scarpelli smiled. Ms. Haber smiled. Withers smiled.

Scarpelli got up from behind his big glass top desk and opened the door to a walk-in closet that had about fifty suits hanging in it, twenty or thirty pairs of shoes-treed and on racks, and a few dozen shirts on wire-rack shelves. He pushed aside a gray silk double-breasted, flipped open a panel on the wall, and dialed the combination. A minute later, he came out with five packets of cash, which he tossed on Withers’s lap.

“Call me Ron,” Scarpelli said.

Call me a cab, Withers thought.

“Where is she?” Peter Hathaway asked with the air of a man about to be let in on a wonderful practical joke.

Ed Levine turned to Ethan Kitteredge, who almost imperceptibly shook his head.

“Do you really need to know?” Ed asked Hathaway.

Peter Hathaway kept the smile on his face but it tightened up a little. Peter Hathaway was used to getting answers, and they were usually the answers he wanted. That was one of the reasons he owned a significant portion of a television network at the age of thirty-seven. One of the other reasons was his family’s wealth, and their connections. All of which had helped to bring him to this very private office in the back of an old bank in Providence, Rhode Island.