Free Hush Money by Peter Israel Page B

no sign of it over the phone. Nor did the story of his daughter’s grand tour seem to faze him. Nor did my aching head. I told him I was going to see the Diehls, and he told me to report in again that night.
    So I drove my beat-up Mustang back to civilization, meaning Diehl civilization, meaning what used to be the home for ailing Diehls and is now for ailing friends of the Diehls, two- and four-legged. Bryce Diehl had gone there to die, and, in memoriam you could say, the old bay-windowed building, sprawling over almost an acre of Diehl hill land, plus later improvements (like a modern double-winged inn), had become the clubhouse and bingo parlor for a retirement community of rich and aged. Almost at the front door is the first tee of an eighteen-hole golf course good enough to distract the pros one weekend every February. The houses of the inmates begin on either side of the first hole, and probably they never stop till the course runs out of green. There are no stairs of course, they ride around the paths on those little golf carts, their meals are catered at the clubhouse and delivered to the door, there’s a fulltime M.D. on the staff, and so on.
    I guess it beats Mrs. Cage’s Nursing Home at that, although the food mightn’t be as good.
    But the extra added attraction, and what brought the Diehl brothers there (who after all weren’t quite ready for the men in the white coats) was out the back door, where you happened onto the prettiest little horse farm this side of Lexington, Kentucky. Little, I should say, by Santa Anita standards. They’ve got a half-mile training track with a grass course as well as dirt, barns for over half a hundred bangtails, even a show-jumping layout. The Diehls have always kept their stock there when they’re not out winning their oats, but lately it’s become a moneymaker, on account of Doc Al Yuster and his miracle cures for broken-down Native Divers. If you follow the horses at all, you’ll have heard of him. Time was that when a nag with a little breeding in his blood busted his sesamoid running down the homestretch, they shot him through the brain and called for the meat wagon—for humane reasons. Nowadays they take him to Doc Al Yuster—because it’s more humane, they say, but the Doc has had enough luck bringing them back to the races that there must be more to it than soft hearts and sentiment.
    In all of this, of course, you could see the smooth hand of Twink Beydon, turning the watering holes of the rich into profitmakers for InterDiehl Holding. My two Diehls, Bryce Jr. and Andrew, gave me the million-dollar tour. Why I didn’t know, any more than I knew where the missing brother was. By that time of day, with the sun almost gone and the hills turning purple, there were no horses on the track, but I got to meet the great veterinarian in one of the barns.
    The Diehls had a lot of cordiality and they turned it all on for yours truly. They were good-looking men in the California model, and the wear-and-tear of living off their fortune had left no marks. They were appropriately distressed about having lost their niece, no more no less, and they saved their grief for Twink in a way that made you wonder. As to the whereabouts of their brother Boyd, while we were sitting in the bar swapping horse stories and admiring the sunset, a phone call came through from him in New York City. Bryce Jr. took it. Though they talked the better part of ten minutes, all I could deduce from it was that Brother Boyd had spent that day, or several, in conference with a group of Wall Street underwriters. It only occurred to me later that Bryce Jr. could easily have disguised that part too if he’d felt like it.
    To me, an underwriter is a guy who brings the grabbers together, the one to sell what he’s going to grab before he’s grabbed it, the other to give up his cash for a piece of it, the whole deal sanctified by the issue of fancy pieces of