David drove, following my directions. As he neatly maneuvered his Corvette along the curving blacktop leading to the lake, I gave him - with the proviso, "... off the record right now. Everything! I've got to think!" - the whole story about taking Mrs. Arriloa to see Roland Smith the morning after Jarvis' murder.

When I had finished, David whistled soundlessly. "You know what this could mean, Daisy?"

I knew several things it could mean - none of them good.

"It could mean," David continued, "that Smith figured out something after you two left. You said that he hadn't heard about Jarvis' murder then?"

I shook my head, feeling like everything was getting beyond me - fast. Assume nothing ... "Well, I supposed he hadn't because he didn't say anything about it ... and surely he'd have been curious."

"Well, there you are. Later, when he did hear, he put two and two together some way and ... Was he the sort of person who might have tried blackmail?"

The possibility had occurred to me, naturally. I said slowly, thinking out loud: "I wouldn't be too surprised. I didn't know him very well but he was definitely a prying, mixing-in sort of person. That's one reason nobody at the Compound liked him much ... Look here, if he had told the police about us coming out, would your sources at the department tell you?"

David was sure of himself. "I'd know."

"Blackmail would explain why he kept quiet about our visit, then."

David gave a quick, heartfelt groan. "Right, whatever Smith knew, he was keeping to himself - or selling to someone. He wouldn't want the police digging for it, too - not and ruin his market. When you stop to think about it, a blackmailer is the last person to want his victim arrested."

There was just one problem with David's theory. I hadn't really told Smith anything that morning. "Old Irish recipe for rabbit stew," I quoted Jonathan. "First catch your rabbit."

"Huh?" David responded.

"It's an elegant theory," I explained, "but, for Smith to have put two and two together, he have had to have caught one of the two's from us ... Oh, never mind." I'd been very careful not to tell Roland anything - whatever he had, he hadn't gotten it from us.

We turned at the corner past the wrecking yard, onto the narrow gravel road leading to Smith's trailer. Whoever had called the Gazette had called everybody else too. Before we reached the trailer, the road suddenly became a Houston freeway ... at rush hour - a bumper to bumper parking lot. David pulled onto the narrow shoulder and stopped. "I guess we walk from here."

I swung the door on my side open - pushing masses of weeds out of the way. If the sea-cane had extended any further, that feat would have been impossible. The impromptu parking lot was filled with vans from the three television stations, cars from several of the radio stations, an ambulance, several police cars and one fire engine. I didn't see any signs of a fire.

It would have been a capacity crowd in Smith's trailer - if anyone had been able to enter the trailer. A photographer in police uniform recognized David with a wave that only briefly interrupted his picture-taking. Another photographer, female in civilian clothes, stopped her activity and came over to confer with David. "Not exactly Pulitzer material," she greeted us, "but I should be able to sell them to the tabloids - write it up good and we'll split. Okay?"

"Sure thing, Jo," David responded without making introductions. "What's the scoop? Call said that Roland Smith was dead. Any confirmation?"

The chainlink fence surrounding the salvage yard was torn and sagging under the weight of the trailer which lay partly supported by the fence and partly on its side. Beyond the fence, the huge electromagnetic crane stood like a mechanical mourner holding a grave-side death-watch at the demise of some distant relative. "The trailer ..." I mused aloud, "or Roland?"

Then I had to explain the simile to David who was unaware either of Roland Smith's avocation or his 'pacemaker'.

A ladder was leaning against the side of the trailer and the end of a second protruded from where the door must be. That explained the fire truck's presence. As I watched, several uniformed men were lifting a long canvas bag through the misplaced opening. "Body bag," David was muttering. "Excuse me, Daisy. I've got to ask some questions."

I had quite a few of my own. The cinderblock foundation which had supported the trailer was scattered like a child's building blocks. The entire area was well soaked and a small stream of water ran down to the edge of the road and off in the direction of the lake. The source was a copper pipe which one of the firemen was crimping with a huge pair of pliers in an attempt to stem the flood.

Three firemen, two holding portable extinguishers and a third working, were gathered around a huge propane tank. The overall air of confusion was generating quite a bit of noise - people talking, police radios uttering their Delphian prognostications into the silence ... That was it - despite the noise, it was quiet.

Something was missing.

It took me a moment to realize what was lacking. Two days earlier when I'd been here, the monster electromagnet, now standing silent, had maintained its own audible sovereignty over the area - not just the bang and clatter of the scrap material which it had been shifting but a deep throated hum overlaid with a higher pitched whine. Engine and generator, I thought, satisfied to have pinned down the missing pieces.

A burly man, clad in tan work clothes topped with a florescent orange vest/ life-preserver and a shapeless yellow hat festooned with fishing lures was being interviewed by a policeman - "... rattled his cage, that's what!" the burly man was saying excitedly. "That's what I told the girl at the paper and that the truth! I saw the whole thing. I wuz in my boat fishing, right down there on that lake."

David was taking notes. He had halted at just the right social distance, close enough to hear but not close enough to intrude.

"Down there fishing," the man was repeating, pushing his cap back emphatically and pointing in the direction of the lake beyond the wedge-shaped promontory. "Right down there! And I heard that old crane start up and I thought to myself, 'Now, what's that thing doing a'going on a Saturday afternoon?' So I looked up and I seen it."

The lieutenant replied with something indistinguishable but in a patient tone of voice.

"I sure did," the man nodded. "I seen the whole thing. That old crane, it came a trundling over this way and, whoever was running it, I'll tell you this for a fact, they didn't know diddly-squat about driving it neither. Kept running into stuff and backing off and running into something else ... And, all the time, that old magnet up there was just a jerking and jumping around like ... the end of my fishing rod!"

Both David and the officer made notes.

"And ..." the man gestured, "I'll tell you what else." He pointed through the chainlink fence at the crane and an old carbody. "That crane, it stopped right there and it picked that wreck up and it dropped it. Just picked it up - all jerky, it was - and dropped it and then picked it up again and then dropped it again, just like it was for some kind of practice."

I was getting a funny feeling in the pit of my stomach.

The burly man pushed his hat back again to the point of instability, then firmed it back in place on the top of his head. "And then I'll tell you what, durned if that old booger didn't move on over to where it is now and it lowered that big old magnet down square on top of that old trailer with a bang and it just started pulling it loose. Kind of twisting it, like. Them power lines come loose and that water started spewing all over the place and them gas lines busted and darned if that crane didn't just pick the whole thing up and shake it, like ... like a dog shaking a rag!"

The policeman asked something - the only words I could catch were "... how long?"

The fisherman pulled his hat down in front and scratched the back of his neck. "Well, I couldn't say about that. I was just a sittin there kinda flabbergasted. It weren't more than a couple of minutes. Whoever was in that crane, he didn't wanta just tear that trailer loose, he wanted to shake it. He made it bounce! Rattled it! I swear I never saw ..."

"... do then?"

He stared at the lieutenant incredulously. "Well, I watched. What would you a done? Then I started up my motor and come over to the bank but when I got up here, the son-of-a-bitch was gone." He stared at the overturned trailer again as though still unable to believe what he'd seen. "I clumb up there an got that door open and that old Smith feller, he's all crumpled over in a corner dead." He shook his head. "Ain't never seen nothing like it. Rattled his cage, that's what they did!"

The policeman consulted his notes. "And you're sure that you can't give us a description of the person who was driving the crane?"

"I done told you - he was gone when I got up here. Didn't never see him at all. But he sure rattled that cage, he did!"

The officer closed his notebook. "Thank you very much, sir. We'll appreciate it if you'll come by the station and make a formal statement."

The burly man was pondering deeply, "Never seen nothing ... But," he concluded, "I'll tell you what. What we got to have out at this lake is some better tie-down regulations for them trailers. Like it is, they just ain't safe!"

Both the trailer and crane were swarming with policemen. David and his photographer-companion were allowed reluctant entry. I returned to wait in David's car until he'd finished.

The witness' hat had been adorned with an oval badge reading 'Fishermen don't lie about it'.

Part of me was wondering if this fad for combining apparel and social advertisement was becoming universal. Would the next policeman I saw have a shield that proclaimed 'Coppers do it with force'? Maybe, I thought, for politicians, one reading 'Hot air goes further'? What about 'Batikers do it till they dye' or 'Jewelers do it in gold'?

How long, I wondered, before 'it' became a four-letter-word?

"Smith's dead, all right," David interrupted my speculations. "But you may have been wrong about the motive. It won't be official until the autopsy but the M.E. said it looked like a coronary."

"Did you mention his pacemaker?" I didn't know much about them but I was thinking of the giant electromagnet. "Isn't there some kind of connection with microwave ovens?"

"It will all," David replied with unintentional black humor, "come out at the autopsy but, for the moment, they're calling it 'death by misadventure', not homicide. Jo's on her way back," he changed the subject, "to develop her prints. If you'd like to ride with her, I've got another stop to make. Got to talk to the manager of the wrecking yard."

I stuck with David.

A quarter of an hour later, we were sitting on a couch whose condition was only one step removed from the salvage heaps outside. The manager of the wrecking yard faced us from behind a desk in not much better condition than the couch. He had slightly more to tell than the eyewitness. He had, he informed us, been summoned by the police after the fact. "Me, I was home watching the Cowboys," he informed us phlegmatically. "Yard shuts down Saturday afternoons. Y'all don't happen to know how the game turned out, do you?"

We had to admit that we did not.

The manager shrugged. "Well, can't win 'em all ..." Then, in response to a question, "Hell no, we don't have any kind of tight security on this place, just a padlock on the front gates. Way I see it, who's going to steal junk? Looks like somebody popped it loose with a tire iron."

Obligingly, he led us out between piles of old autos, heaps of rusted pipes and assorted junk to examine the crane itself. "Police are through with it now," he assured us. "I asked them if I could take it back where it belonged and they okayed it." He shook his head as if feeling some trifling irritation. "I just don't like the look of it hanging out over that fence ... Hell no, it ain't hard to operate." He looked at me with a male chauvinist grin. "You like to take it home for me, M'am?"

I jumped at the chance. "Are you sure the police are finished with it?"

"Sure but, uh ..." Male chauvinists never expect you to take them up on it. "But maybe you'd better not try right by this fence, M'am. This is a pretty valuable fence here. Rest of it's junk," he chucked at his joke while he climbed into the cab and expertly maneuvered the crane to an open area, then climbed back down. "Now, you really want to try it?"

David was suppressing delight - and, I suspected, regretting that his photographer had gone back to town. "Don't tell me how," I insisted, "I want to figure it out."

It took a little climbing up - the steps were designed for long-legged people - and a bit of figuring but the manager was right. The big machine wasn't hard to operate at all. The crane was new, most of the factory paint still fresh under the dust, and the little printed labels by each of the hydraulic levers were still readable.

The main problem, I found, was that the control levers moved too easily. It was like a single-control water faucet, any little movement produced results out of all proportion. While I was getting the hang of it, David disappeared - running for safety, I assumed.

I fooled around with the crane for a half an hour before I noticed David had returned and was taking pictures with his own camera. I was going to come out of this looking like a terrible publicity hound but better me on the back page of Section A than Mrs. Arriola ...

"The trouble is," I told David as we drove back to town, "I don't see how I can tell the police that Smith's death is ... may be connected to Jarvis' without telling them the whole story and bringing Mrs. Arriola into it."

David nodded. "That's the one thing they don't know about her, right? The ... current voices, so to speak. That and the connection with Jarvis ..." We shared a moment of silent respect for David's suppressed scoop. Then he continued: "Wonder if you could get them interested from some other angle? If Smith was a bit of a snoop ... I could always tell them that I'd had a tip that Smith had some dirt on one of the Compound tenants from way back when he was renting there ..."

But if, for whatever reason, the police did start looking for a connection, I was afraid that the first thing they'd turn up would be Mrs. Arriola's and my visit - how I didn't know but ... "Oh, I don't know," I said tiredly, leaning back against the headrest. "I've got to think!"

Because something was tickling in the back of my mind. Magnets ... Iron filings arranging themselves into patterns when a magnet is held under a piece of cardboard ... I couldn't put any words to it yet but some idea in the back of my mind was trying to shape itself into a new pattern.

Back in town, I had David drop me off in front of Lucy's apartment house. "If she heard about Smith on the news," I explained, "she'll be anxious for details. And thanks for everything, David," I said as I got out and turned back to close the car door. "I'll try to have your on-the-record story real soon."

"You'd better," David replied with cheerful fatalism. "Uncle Jonathan's floors don't really get dirty fast enough. One point though ..." he leaned across the seat to cock an eyebrow at me. "At least this murder they can't blame on Mrs. Arriola!"

I grinned and waved him away. As I climbed the newly-varnished stairs, I was feeling almost cheerful myself. He was right, of course. Anybody who could suspect that near-English-illiterate old woman of climbing up in a crane and figuring out those labels ... much less of knowing what an electromagnet might do to a pacemaker ... would have to be out of their mind.

At the top of the stairs, I tapped on Lucy's door and called softly, "It's me. Daisy."

There was the sound of hurried footsteps, then a frantic-looking Lucy Jarvis opened the door and pulled me inside.

Mrs. Arriola, her hair sticking out wildly and her dress disleveled, was kneeling in the center of the white shag carpet, muttering and crossing herself. I caught fragments of "... Sante Maria, Madre de Dios ..."

Suddenly, as if goaded past endurance, the old woman arched over and began pounding her fists on the floor. "Basta! Basta, ya! Aye, Madre de Dios, esto es insoportable!"

Lucy whispered to me, half-sobbing: "Oh, Mrs. Carson! Grandmother's voices are back! But now she says they're talking crazy!"