Jasper Stevens smiled. "I think somebody should be willing to pay handsomely for all the information I've got. And I don't know how to go about it."

Meadows laughed and Stevens winced. "Information? You don't have anything. You've got a few facts and a couple of names and some ideas. But you don't have any evidence. Nothing written down. No reports. Nothing that couldn't be denied by somebody just saying that you're a liar."

Stevens began twisting his gloves again.

"But you believe me, don't you?" He made it seem very important to him.

Meadows thought for a moment. "Yeah, I believe you. I don't know why but I do."

This turned out to be critical because Jasper Stevens had no money with which to pay Zack Meadows for his lime, but the deal they quickly arranged was a fifty-fifty split of anything they got from the Lippincott family. Stevens nodded glumly. He had apparently been expecting a bigger share.

After Stevens had gone, Meadows sat for a long time in his chair, trying to avoid the lumpy tape patches that covered the rips in the chair, which he had found in the street one night several blocks from his ratty office on Twenty-sixth Street. Then he got tired of all that thinking and decided to save himself the bookie's vigorish and went to Belmont where the

Italian-surnamed jockeys in the first and second races ran dead last.

Flossie was lying on her bed, eating chocolates and watching television, when Meadows let himself into her apartment, using an entire ring of keys to get past her battery of anti-burglar locks and bars and alarms. He and Flossie had been "going together" for five years. Meadows spent most nights at her apartment and even though she was the one person in the world he totally trusted, she did not have a key to his apartment farther downtown. Nor had he any plans to give her one.

She looked up as he finally got past the last burglar barrier. She was wearing a pink negligee that was frayed at the edges. On her ample belly were chips of chocolate from the family-sized bar of Nes-tle's Crunch she was eating. Her dyed blonde hair was uncombed.