little seedy at collar and cuffs and bottom edge, was sprawled across the armchair in a debonair manner. Tiftus had divested himself of these two things and gone right on down to Parker's room.
Parker went over and dumped Tiftus on his back on the bed. He heard a sound just as he let Tiftus go, and turned. The connecting door to the next room had opened. A woman was standing there in the doorway, wearing a white hotel robe on her left forearm and pink, puffy slippers on her feet and nothing else. She was yellow above, black below, and she'd been out in the sun for a tan while wearing a two-piece bathing suit. She was built heavy but not fat; firm flesh well padded over a big-boned frame. Her face would have been beautiful except that she had the eyes of a pickpocket and the mouth of a whore.
She said, 'What the hell are you doing?'
So Tiftus had left three things behind before coming to see Parker; bag, coat, and bag. The other bag had been stashed in an adjoining room to take itself a shower. Parker said, 'Go back in there and keep your mouth shut.'
'Says you. What happened to my man?'
'Your what?'
'Never mind, you. He's little but he's wiry.' And about twice her age, if she was the thirty she looked.
Parker said, 'I'm the one he had business with. Beat it.'
As an afterthought, she held the towel up in front of herself. Now she looked like a calendar in a firehouse. She said, 'Not till I find out what happened to poor Adolph.'
'He fell over an ambition.'
'Is that supposed to be funny?'
Parker walked over and put his hand on the middle of the towel and pushed. He shut the connecting door and threw the bolt lock, then went back over to the bed. The woman rapped on the door a few times, but quit when Parker ignored her. He knew she'd have more sense than to holler for the law or anything like that; connected up with Tiftus, she'd have to know that much.
He took Tiftus' suitcase off the bed, out from under one of Tiftus' sprawled legs, and put it on top of the dresser and opened it. He threw clothing out piece by piece, it all piling up on the floor beside him, but when he was done all he had was an empty suitcase and a lot of junk lying around on the floor. Clothing, toothpaste and toothbrush, tube of zinc ointment, tube of some sort of cream for piles, more obscene photographs of the same bored Chinese couple, box of cartridges for the automatic, hair oil, three astrology magazines. Still nothing to let him know Tiftus' game.
Ask the woman? No, even Tiftus should know enough to keep his business to himself. The woman would be along for after work, not during.
Then wait around for Tiftus to come out of it, and ask him direct? No, the hell of it for now. There wasn't much time, and Tiftus shouldn't be allowed to find out how little Parker knew.
Parker dropped the room key in the empty suitcase and went over to the door. He stopped there to look back, but Tiftus was still out. There was no sound from the woman in the next room. Parker left, closing the door carefully behind himself.
Down to the right were the elevator and the stairs he'd come up just now, but there ought to be a fire exit the other way, one that wouldn't lead to the lobby or any part of the front of the building. Parker went off in that direction and found it right around the first turn, a broad wooden door with FIRE EXIT on it in red letters. It opened rustily, reluctantly. Parker came out on to an exterior staircase running down the clapboard back of the building, an old, wide, wooden fire escape with age-warped banisters. He went down it to a little concrete alley lined with green doors and garbage cans. At the end of it was the street.
Parker stood looking out at the street for a minute before leaving the alley. He didn't see Captain Younger, nor anybody who looked offhand as though he might be working for Captain Younger. Nor anybody who looked as though he might be linked up with Tiftus; though on that score Parker was pretty sure Tiftus was working alone. If there were a second man with him, anyone besides the woman, Parker would have seen some sort of evidence of him by now.
He left the alley and started down the street towards a drugstore on the next corner. He remembered the name from the obituary; in the drugstore he'd get the address and the directions for getting there.
TWO
THE room stank of flowers and death. Orange light bulbs shaped like wrinkled mosques shone dimly in wall fixtures on the left, gleaming on the tangled pattern of the wallpaper, muting and deadening in the thick maroon rug and the heavy dark draperies around the doorways. To the right, rotting flowers in green wicker baskets stood around a coffinless bier; a few white rose petals had fallen on to the flat table-top of the bier and were slowly browning and curling into tiny fists.
Parker stood in the main entrance a minute, getting used to the dimness after the bright sunshine of the street. The room was hollow, muffled, empty of people, with no one standing next to the door near the podium containing the book for visitors to sign, and no one sitting on the maroon mohair sofas in the corner alcoves.
Parker shut the front door and started across the room, his passage making no sound at all on the thick carpet.
Going through the curtained doorway at the far end of the room was like time travel, like leaping across the years out of the muffled darkness of the Victorian era and into the plane geometry of the age of IBM. The walls of this corridor, painted grey, looked like some sort of spackled plastic in a poor imitation of stucco; the ceiling was a grid-work of white sound-proofing panels with small black holes in rows; and the floor was black composition that deadened the sound of Parker's feet almost as much as the maroon rug had in the other room.
Midway along the corridor two white doors faced one another. Parker tried the one on the left and saw a flight of stairs leading down to darkness. The door on the right was better; it led to a small office done in the same IBM style as the corridor, but with old-fashioned glass-fronted bookcases flanking the window.
The office, too, was empty. Parker stepped through the doorway and looked around. There was no paper in the electric typewriter on the side desk, nothing disrupting the bare neatness of the main desk, no coat or
