Harold Calesian stepped from the plane at Tyler National Airport just before one o’clock. The sun beat down from a cloudless sky, and not a breath of wind moved anywhere in the flat expanse of land all around the airport. Calesian walked through the heat to his dark green Buick Le Sabre, unlocked the door, and put his attache case on the back seat. The interior of the car was an oven, from sitting here in this shadeless spot since before eight o’clock this morning, but the air-conditioning cooled the air by the time the car reached the highway.
Calesian was separated but not divorced, his wife and three daughters remaining in the family home in the suburb of Northglen while Calesian had a four-and-a-half-room apartment in an urban renewal section near downtown. The whole downtown section was between the airport and his home, so it was faster to take the Belt Highway around and wind up coming to the apartment from the opposite direction.
The building had tenant parking in the basement. Calesian drove in, took the attache case from the back seat, locked up the car, and rode the elevator up to his top-floor apartment nine stories up. His terrace had a view toward downtown—dull by day, but interesting with neon by night. He unlocked his front door and entered an apartment that was a lot warmer and stuffier than it should have been. Frowning, he closed the door behind himself, and still carrying the attache case, went from the foyer into the living room. Was something wrong with the air- conditioning?
No. The double doors to the terrace were standing open, letting in more heat than the air-conditioning could handle. Walking across the large room to close the doors again, he tried to remember the last time he’d gone out there. Not this morning, certainly; he’d left the apartment first thing this morning, in order to catch that eight a.m. plane. Hadn’t the doors been closed then? But maybe they hadn’t been latched properly, and a breeze had opened them.
What breeze?
Calesian paused midway across the room, and looked around. A professional decorator from Aldenberg’s Department Store had done the apartment for him, the living room in blues and grays with chrome accents, low but heavy pieces, modern yet masculine. Nothing looked different, nothing out of place. That feeling of tension in the air was surely no more than the unexpected heat from outside; he was used to this room maintaining a cool dry atmosphere.
There might have been a morning breeze that opened the doors. There was no reason for anything to be wrong, so it followed that there was nothing wrong. Nevertheless, Calesian gripped the attache case more firmly as he moved the rest of the way across the room and started to close one of the terrace doors.
Al Lozini was outside there, leaning on the rail facing the doorway, eyes squinting slightly in the sunlight. “Hello, Harold,” he said.
Startled, Calesian didn’t say or do anything for just a second. Lozini’s behavior was as strange as the fact of his presence here; he wasn’t being tough or hurried or showing any of his normal feistiness. Instead he was just sitting there, one leg swinging slightly while the other supported him on the wrought-iron railing. His manner was calm, emotionless. The harsh sunlight showed his age clearly in his face, but picked out no emotion there.
Lozini said, “Come on out in the sun. Good for you.”
Calesian stepped through the doorway, cautious and uncertain. He still held the attache case. He said, “You surprised me, Al.”
“I was a burglar when I was a boy,” Lozini said. “That lock of yours is butter. I could back up a truck and strip every television set out of this building in forty-five minutes.”
Calesian had a receding forehead, his black hair thinning badly on top, so that he felt the sun at once. He frowned as much because of that as because of the strangeness of Lozini. “I guess some things we never forget,” he said. “Like getting through locks.”
“Some things you do forget,” Lozini told him. “Like not trusting anybody.”
“I don’t follow,” Calesian said, while thinking.
“Sit down, Harold,” Lozini said, and nodded at the chaise longue to Calesian’s left.
Calesian hesitated. It entered his mind that with one fast step forward, one shove with both hands, he could topple Lozini over the railing. Nine stories straight down to cement sidewalk.
But there’d be no way to answer the questions that would follow such a death, to protect himself against the investigation. And there would definitely be an investigation; not even Calesian swung enough weight in the Police Department to stifle an inquiry into a death like that. Particularly not with the body right in front of his own building.
And even while he was thinking those things, it seemed to him he saw the thoughts echoed in Lozini’s eyes; as though Lozini had known it would occur to him he might push, and had further known he would realize it was too dangerous to push.
“Go ahead, Harold. Sit down.”
Calesian sat sideways on the chaise longue, keeping both feet on the floor. He put the attache case on his lap, rested his forearms on the case. He tried to be as casual and unemotional as Lozini. “I guess you want to talk to me about something,” he said.
Lozini was silent. He considered Calesian as though trying to decide whether or not to buy him. Calesian waited, keeping a blanket over his tension, and finally Lozini nodded slowly and turned his head to look out toward downtown. “None of those buildings were there when I first moved here,” he said. “The tall ones.”
“There’ve been a lot of changes,” Calesian agreed.
Lozini nodded some more, still looking out away from the terrace. Then he turned his head to gaze at Calesian again. “This building right here wasn’t here,” he said.
“Three years old,” Calesian said. He knew because he was one of the original tenants.
“Sitting here,” Lozini said, “waiting for you, I spent a lot of time thinking about the past. The way things used to be. The way I used to be.”
“Well, everything changes, I guess.” Calesian was listening hard, trying to think ahead of the conversation, waiting for Lozini to touch ground, get to the point.
“I’m about finished,” Lozini said. “Hard to think about it that way, you know? I look in the mirror, I see an old man, I get surprised. Somebody tells me I forgot a thing I always knew, I can’t figure out how it happened. Be like
