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wasn’t really sure I liked to. But I did it. I arranged to meet her at four o’clock in front of the Grand Casino.
    There was no problem about getting there. The Nice airport was a five-minute walk away from the hotel, and there was a direct bus. At half past three I was standing in front of the plaque the Société des Bains de Mer had put up to Sergei Diaghilev, wondering how I would recognize Irene Madigan when I saw her, when she came up behind me. “Please tell me you’re Knollwood Stennis,” she said, “because I don’t want to be arrested for soliciting strange men in Monaco.”
    “They don’t arrest you here for that. They might tax you,” I said, shaking her hand. “I’m Nolly.”
    She looked at me with a kind of good-natured surprise. “I was afraid—I mean, I thought you might be more like, you know, an accountant instead of, well, I mean, with muscles and all.”
    I gave her a neutral smile. (Or should I say a “neuter” smile, meaning let’s don’t go so fast into any boy-girl thing.) I said, “Do you mind telling me what you’re doing here?”
    The pretty smile left her face; what was left was stubbornness. That went with her hair, which was red, but the face was still pretty. She said, “I’ll go wherever he goes, and he’s somewhere around here. See that big white yacht by the breakwater? That’s his. Only he isn’t on it, I think.”
    “You think?”
    She unslung a pair of field glasses from around her neck and thrust them at me. “See for yourself.”
    Without much interest I followed orders. The yacht was certainly a beauty, easily a hundred-footer. A couple of small, Oriental-looking sailors were touching up the varnish on the railings, but no one else was in sight.
    “How about your cousin?” I asked.
    “I haven’t seen Tricia, either. Don’t you think I would have told you if I had? All I did see was—well, I don’t know, but 1 think it was a little old man. He came on deck this morning. One of the crew came running over and made him go back below—he could have been another kidnap victim.” 
    “He could have been Henry Davidson-Jones’s father.” 
    “I don’t think so, Nolly. He was an awfully ugly little old man. But,” she said, resigning herself to my dogged skepticism, “you’re right, he could have been anybody at all. There’s only one way to find out.”
    That had a sound I didn’t like. I took time to think that over, looking at her. Irene Madigan was worth looking at. About my age, almost my height, wearing white slacks and a silk blouse. I observed that she had C6te d’Azur eyes that were almost the same color as the sea. “Why did you come here, Irene? Why didn’t you just go to see Davidson-Jones in New York?”
    “He won’t see me in New York. Last time I tried I was thrown right out of the World Trade Center,” she said grimly, and then lightened. “Listen, I owe you. Can I buy you a drink or something? Maybe lunch? I’d actually rather lunch, if it’s all the same to you, because I’ve been hanging around watching that yacht all day and I haven’t had anything to eat.”
    So we found a place on top of that garish American hotel they’ve cut into the rock in front of the Grand Casino, and she told me the story of her life.
    Her missing cousin, Tricia, was from the poor side of the family. Still, they’d grown up close. Then Tricia went off to start her own life, the big ambition of which was to be a Dallas Cowgirl and make it with every player on the Rams.
    Then she discovered baton-twirling. That looked like the first, best step to her goal. “Only,” Irene said, “she got kind of mixed up with some guy. Then she got into the Hare Krishnas. Then we lost touch for a while.” Meanwhile Irene herself had married young, moved to California, divorced almost as young, and spent five years trying to make it in the movies. I could see that she might come very close. She had; but never a really decent part. And the rich side of the