husband, Jake Ecstein, might be behind some of these dice communes. Anyway, if I were trying to find Rhinehart I’d question her.’
‘I remember Mrs Ecstein,’ said Larry, frowning. ‘My God, she became the flakiest of them all.’
‘Yeah,’ said Putt. ‘I think you’re right. She’s probably not too reliable.’
‘You know where she is?’
‘Got an address,’ Putt replied, looking down at his file. ‘It’s five or six years old. Might help.’
After Agent Putt had escorted Larry to his door, walking with a big slow lumbering waddle, he closed the door slowly behind him. Then he slammed one fist into another and his eyes blazed. He almost leapt to his desk and punched out a number.
‘Get me Macavoy!!’ he barked. ‘Get him in here!’
While he waited, he phoned to reserve a car for Macavoy and then began pacing back and forth. For fifteen years – ever since he’d been denied a promotion because of his failures on the case – he’d been after this guy Rhinehart and come up blank every time. He’d watched as the man’s influence had waxed and waned, but always spreading pornography, promiscuity, Aids, herpes, dope, violence, unwed mothers and welfare cheats. Now his kid, who must be as nutty as his father but seemed to hide it better, had finally decided to try to find his old man. Itcould well be the break Putt had been looking for all these years.
When Macavoy entered he stood at polite attention until Putt turned to him. Macavoy was a deadly serious young man, an agent for only two years and convinced that two-thirds of being a successful agent lay in being steadily sombre and serious.
‘Rhinehart’s son has decided to try to find his father,’ Putt announced gruffly, his bloodshot eyes blazing.
‘How is this going to help us?’ Macavoy asked.
‘These dicequeers won’t talk to cops or reporters or us,’ Putt answered. ‘But they may be willing to talk to someone whose last name is Rhinehart and happens to be the bastard’s son. Putt stopped pacing and made a facial expression which may have been a smile.
‘I want you to put a loose tail on this kid,’ he went on. ‘Stick with him for as long as he’s going after Rhinehart senior. Stick with him until he leads us to the old madman himself.’
‘You mean Rhinehart senior?’
‘That’s right. Rhinehart. The worst threat to American society since Karl Marx.’ Macavoy nodded soberly.
15
Arlene Ecsiein’s phone number was in the Queens phone book, and it turned out she lived in Hempstead, Long Island, not exactly a bastion of kookiness. Larry was surprised on phoning her to find himself talking to a gentle grandmotherly woman who tended to babble on a bit about ‘dear old Luke’ and ‘your wonderful mother’, and ‘wasn’t it a shame …’ and so on.
He reported his meeting with Putt and his follow-up phone call to Arlene and his memories of her to Honoria and Kim at the Battles’ Upper East Side luxury apartment. Luke’s seduction of Arlene had been his first dice decision, his first step on his ‘downward path to self-destruction’ as Larry put it, or ‘first test of the malleability of the human soul’ as Luke’s followers had since put it. In any case, as Larry explained, Arlene had soon become a fanatic practitioner of the dicelife, blossoming from a frustrated and unfulfilled childless housewife to an earthy mother, career woman and ‘slut’ – the last word being Larry’s interpretation of her subsequent dicelife. Larry hadn’t seen her since he was a boy. At first Honoria had seemed put off by Larry’s recitation, but when Kim seemed eager to meet Arlene, Honoria wisely decided she would go with her fiancé.
It turned out that Arlene lived in one half of a somewhat run-down duplex in a mostly white neighbourhood that looked as if it was struggling to maintain its dignity. The doorbell didn’t work, so Larry had to bang several times on the old wooden door.
When it opened, Larry and a