LITMIR.BIZ

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same choice, and had come close to moving out of the Northern California office where he’d worked before his move to Denver. It wasn’t strange that Berry had preferred the privacy and independence of a separate office.

      But why a bed and a microwave oven? Why a TV? Why a closet full of clothing? Had Berry been leading a double life?

      Lindsey had unpacked his flight bag and hung his suits in the closet along with Berry’s. If there were any clues in the office, Lindsey would have to find them. If the police hadn’t bothered to seal it off, there was no way they were going to send a forensics squad in to look for evidence.

      What was Cletus Berry doing on Eleventh Avenue in the middle of the night, in the company of a petty mobster?

      It didn’t make sense.

      Lindsey closed his eyes and tried to get a feeling for the case. It was early on, he didn’t have much to work with, but sometimes you walked into a puzzle like this and you got a feeling for it.

      Not this time.

      * * * *

      He had half a dream just as he was waking up. He was swimming in cold water. It was dirty and gray and he didn’t like it and it kept getting deeper the more he struggled. Then something was holding his arms and legs so he couldn’t swim and he started to get cold water in his nose and mouth.

      Then he woke up fully and discovered that it wasn’t the water but the sunlight that was cold and gray. He climbed out of the futon and pulled on a sweater and a pair of pants. He padded across the carpeted floor and looked outside. The thoroughfares were filled with traffic. The accumulated sleet had already been shoved to the sides of the street, making shin-high gray-black berms along the curbs.

      He looked at his watch. It was seven o’clock. He’d had less than three hours sleep. He cleaned up, using Cletus Berry’s little shower stall. Berry had left behind a plastic bottle of shampoo, and a razor on the sink. The only thing Lindsey had to provide for himself was a toothbrush.

      He dressed in a gray woolen suit and overcoat and left the office. He rode down in the elevator and passed a couple of business-people in the lobby and nodded. They ignored him.

      A different guard sat at the battered wooden desk in the front lobby. He looked up at Lindsey and frowned, clearly disturbed to see a stranger coming out of the elevator and leaving the building so early in the morning.

      Lindsey told the guard his name, told him he worked for International Surety and would be using the rented office for an indefinite time.

      The guard looked more puzzled than ever. Like Rigo Bermúdez, he wore a gray uniform with a Sam Browne belt. There was even a holster bucked to the belt; Lindsey wondered whether there was really a weapon in it, or if it was just for show. The guard was easily thirty years Bermúdez’ senior and his uniform sleeve showed blue sergeant’s chevrons. The plastic name tag attached to his uniform jacket said, Halter. He wore half-glasses on the end of his nose and he’d been reading the Daily News. He had reddish, mottled skin and a bushy white mustache and white hair that stuck out from under his uniform cap. He looked a lot like Wilfred Brimley.

      The guard frowned. “Linsley, is it?”

      “Lindsey.”

      “I know. That’s what Mike Quill called the mayor. Linsley. Name was Lindsey. Did it just to irk him. Great man, he was.”

      “Mayor Lindsey? I’ve heard of him. I don’t think we’re related.”

      “Not Linsley. Mike Quill was the great man. Ran the transit union. Great man.” He laid down the newspaper and said, “International Surety, hey? Who’s that? Sounds like some kind of insurance outfit.”

      Lindsey said, “It is. Cletus Berry worked for us.”

      “Oh.” Daylight broke across the old man’s face. “Sure, Mr. Berry. Nice man. Pity, what happened. Pity.”

      Lindsey said, “How did you find out about it? Has anybody been here investigating?”

      The guard laid his Daily News flat on his desk, turned it so Lindsey could see the front page. A huge headline announced, BLOOD AND ICE! Beneath it, in smaller type, Santa Rubs Out Duo in West Side Alley.

      A stark black-and-white photograph filled most of the lower half of the page. It showed two bodies lying on an icy sidewalk, a couple of corrugated metal garbage cans and some cardboard boxes behind them. The face of one corpse was thin, middle-aged, unshaven. The man wore what looked like a badly frayed, too-thin coat, and the splotches on it had to be blood.

      The second corpse was better dressed, but the angle of the photo showed little of its face. That shortcoming was offset by a smaller photo, framed in an oval and inset in what would have been the right-hand third of the larger photo. It was the face of a black man. He wore a white shirt and a dark necktie. You could see the edge of his suit inside his overcoat. His eyes were open and staring; they had the filmed-over look of the grisly post-mortem photos taken to celebrate nineteenth century hangings.

      There was a perfect black dot above and between the eyes. On a Hindu, it might have been a caste mark. But on Cletus Berry’s dark, African American face, Lindsey knew that the dot was a bullet hole. He knew that inside the cranium behind that small, neat hole, Cletus Berry’s brain had been scrambled like a pan of eggs.

      “So you’re from the insurance company,” the guard said. “You come to pay off on a policy?”

      Lindsey said, “No. I’m here to find out who killed Cletus Berry.”

      The guard opened his newspaper again. He grinned up at Lindsey. Come to think of it, he looked more like Edmund Gwenn than Wilfred Brimley. He’d need to grow a beard, of course. Then he could play Santa Claus in the next remake of Miracle on 34th Street.

      “So, you going to be using Mr. Berry’s office now?” Halter asked.

      Lindsey nodded. “For a while.”

      The guard said, “I hope you can do some good. Cops sure won’t. Too busy with politics and graft. Same as ever.”

      Lindsey said, “Sergeant Halter—” He reached for his wallet. He had a discretionary fund, and this looked like a good time to be discreet. He extracted a couple of medium-large bills from his wallet. “Mr. Halter—”

      “Just call me Lou.” The bills disappeared. David Copperfield would have been proud. “Anything I can do to help.”

      “Isn’t a little bit unusual for a tenant to have his office furnished the way Cletus Berry’s was?”

      Halter frowned. “How’s that?”

      “Well, it looks as if he might have lived there sometimes.”

      “Never in there. I wouldn’t know.”

      “But is it even legal?” Lindsey persisted.

      Halter frowned, concentrating. “Building’s zoned commercial, not residential. But I guess anybody can put a couch in his office, don’t you think? And maybe a little kitchenette, and nuke a cup of soup if he feels like it? And if he’s working late and he decides he wants to catch forty winks.… I don’t think it’s nobody’s business. Nobody’s. Do you?”

      “No.”

      The lobby behind Lindsey was getting busy. People were arriving, the elevator was humming. Clearly, there were more tenants than the elevator could handle, and the ones who had to wait shuffled their feet and watched the indicator as the car creaked up and back down.

      It was Christmas, though, so at least the small talk was friendly. “I was wondering, Sergeant—ah, Lou.”

      Halter looked at Lindsey over the tops of his glasses.

      “What goes on in this building? It isn’t exactly, well, the latest in posh surroundings, is it?”

      Halter grinned crookedly. “Sure ain’t. Probably get pulled down one of these days. But for now, it’s a great address

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