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ceiling and two men in shorts and sneakers chasing after a hard black rubber ball with racquets in their hands.
    I leave the economics to you. Take a finger of land surrounded on all sides by water and figure out what it would cost to build a regulation squash court in your basement. All I can say is that InterDiehl Holding must have been one hell of an investment if you could have bought the stock, which you couldn’t at the time.
    One of the players was my aztec’s double, and it took me quite a while to separate them into Gomez and Garcia. Whereas Garcia’s opponent, naturally, was Twink Beydon.
    He looked like what you’d expect. Six foot three about, and big and chesty, but no paunch in sight. Maybe there was some gray in his hair, but it’s hard to tell with us blonds. His eyes were that clear California blue, and the only thing, maybe, that gave away his age was that his face was beef red and dripping sweat. The kind of perennial jock, in sum, who’s always cleaning up the trophies in the fifty-and-over meets, and everybody says it’s not fair except those of us who compete in the thirties and forties.
    They’d just finished a point when we came in, the ball slamming into the tin below the line, and Beydon waved up at me.
    â€œHi there! Are you Cage?”
    â€œThat’s right.”
    Motioning with his racquet: “Do you play?”
    I shook my head. As it happens I do, but I’m not much for customer games.
    â€œO.K. Be with you in a minute.”
    From the look of it, Garcia was playing a little customer squash himself. Or boss squash, particularly when you think of jai-alai, where any aztec can look good losing if the price is right. Beydon served, and he backed Garcia to the wall and kept him there through a couple of volleys. You could see the slice coming, so could Garcia, and there it came neatly, just above the line in the corner. Garcia just made the return by the skin of his teeth, and Beydon put the point away with a slam we could all admire. I thought it was a hell of a way for a man to work off his grief, but to each his own.
    A couple of more points and the set was over.
    â€œI’ll meet you in the bar,” Beydon called up with a grin, and the silent Gomez led me back the way we’d come. We went through The Gallery, up some more steps and into what looked like a ship’s lounge, with comfortable chairs and a broad picture-window view of the lawn and the dock and the channel behind it. The bar was a real one too, with stools in front and Michelob on tap. Gomez disappeared, and I walked around behind and drew myself a glass, and watched about a thirty-footer making its way slowly up the channel. A few minutes later Beydon showed up again, in a gray sweatsuit, a towel wrapped around his neck, his hair wet and slicked down.
    We sat in two of the chairs by the window, and after a few pleasantries about keeping in shape he got down to what I was doing there.
    I’ll say this for the Twink Beydons of this world, they like to lay it all out for you. Don’t get me wrong. Behind those larger-than-life meat faces, those broad big-jawed grins, those clear innocent eyes and bushy blond brows and all the gladhanded I’m-just-a-country-boy-at-heart man-to-man palaver that goes along with it, they’re as crooked as the next guy and maybe a little tougher—hell, they didn’t get there washing blackboards for the teacher—but at least when they let you have it you know it’s going to be between the eyes and not slipped up between your cheeks like a suppository. Or so I used to think, when I was an innocent young blackboardwasher myself. But in any case my way of dealing with them has always been to let them say their piece, and with an ego like Twink’s, listening was no problem.
    â€œWhatever George told you,” he said, pointing his index finger at me, “forget it. He’s a great lawyer, George is, the greatest,