Blogsy Babbles

     The snow crunched under, and into, Matt’s shoes.  Not knowing the protocol of such things, he had gotten out of the cab and sent it away when he was still a goodly distance from the gate.  Seeing an uneasy man approach on foot, the gatekeeper, already disgruntled at being dragged away from Saturday morning cartoons in the gatehouse, had taken a lot of convincing before consenting to call the house to see if the Silberwetters were expecting a Matthew Benz.

     At the door, Matt kicked out as much snow as he could.  His ankles were cold and his toes were wet.  This was good.  If he died of pneumonia, at least Miss Skull wouldn’t get him.

     The doorbell sat in the middle of a pink triangle on a gold circle by the door.  Matt put one finger forward, and then stopped.  Would she have guessed he’d lie to his mother about where he was going?  No one would know where he was if this triggered a trap door to drop him into a dungeon.

     He shook his head.  This was one benefit of being a writer of fantasy.  Loke when Linda Nairn was out of the office for two days in November with no explanation.  Whenever his brain embarked on a fantasy of its own, Matt-the-Writer would be right there to growl, “This plotline will not fly.  Isn’t it a little far-fetched that some ultra-secret slave market would kidnap someone you know and pit her up for sale to some foreign billionaire?  And for you to rescue them, you know, you’d have to know where this subterranean slave market holds its auctions AND pass for a customer to be allowed in.  And how many slave auctions have you attended?  You wouldn’t know what to wear and you’d worry about it.”

     Matt took a deep breath.  Sex slave auctions was not a wise way for the brain to go, not at the Silberwetter household.  He set one finger against the little pink button.

     The door opened almost immediately.  Matt opened his mouth and then shut it, aghast at the sight of what could only be a butler.

     “Mr. Benz?”

     “Er, yeah.”

     “Do come inside.  Allow me to take your coat and I will inquire whether Mrs. Silberwetter is ready to receive you.”

     Whisking the coat away, the butler left Matt in the center of an off-pink vestibule.  The carpet was deep and thick; Matt noted this particularly, knowing his shoes were wet.  He thought about taking them off.  He shook his head again.  No way was he going to do any undressing at the Silberwetters’.  Besides, with his luck, Ada, or more likely Marshall, would come and tell him to go away.  Coatless, shoeless, he’d have to find another cab in this distant, silent street.  And it was a cinch the gatekeeper wouldn’t be in a hurry to help.

     Matt’s stomach reminded him it was there.  It was his usual progress.  First his throat seized up, then his stomach started to hurt, and if the suspense went on building, his palms and the webbing between his thumb and forefinger would start to itch.  He scratched at his palm.

     A grey and white ball of fur sauntered into the room and walked around the intruder.   One circle, two circles: then it walked toward a neutral corner and sat down to regard the tall visitor.  Matt wondered if it would be presumptuous to reach out a hand toward the cat.  Cats had very definite ideas about such things.  The gaze of those eyes was not disapproving, exactly, but they did seem to expect something.

     He was still mulling alternatives when a voice called, “Long time no see!”

     The butler had been dispensed with: a tousled Ada Silberwetter bounced in, wearing fuzzy blue slippers and a blue terry robe with the belt undone and tucked into the pockets.  She showed no sign of any allergy to mornings, as bright and alert, or even more so, as at the party.  The cat yawned and stalked away.

     “Come into the playroom.”  She seized Matt’s hand.  “And remember, I don’t have to give you anything but my name, rank, and serial number.  Unless you say pretty please.”

     Matt hung back a bit until the front of the robe slipped a little and a swath of white assured him that she was also wearing a nightgown.

     “It’s a pity you left when you did last night,” she said, looking back over one shoulder as she tugged him along.  “I thought of some vile things to say to you but you were gone.”  She batted her eyelashes at him.  “So now I shall have to save them for my memoirs.  Here we are.”

     One pink hand flattened against a door.  The other, letting go of Matt, reached in to flip a switch.  Matt stared in open-mouthed shock.

     A worn orange-and-russet carpet covered the floor.  Matt had seen its twin in a dozen doctors’ waiting rooms.  The walls were a kind of dirty beige.  Prim almost-officey furniture was tucked around the place: a plain maple desk, a battered couch, and a little table which held an electric coffee maker and a stack of Styrofoam cups.  Even the paintings on the wall were fluffy mock-Renoir yardart made specially for low-rent office spaces.

     He spun around as a lock clicked behind him, noting as he turned that the ‘playroom’ had no windows.

     Ada, paying no attention to his sudden alarm, strolled past him to the desk, from which she drew a thick manila envelope.  “Why don’t you pour coffee while I prepare the exhibit?”  She plumped down onto the carpet and tucked one foot under her robe.  Matt hurried to the coffee maker, his back to her.  That was not a nightgown.  It was a T-shirt.

     Behind the coffee maker, slightly above the table, hung a row of small framed photographs.  Matt recognized Marshall Silberwetter, while another showed the late Gus Thaxter.  “My husbands,” Ada called from below and behind him.  “Each and every one of them the only man I ever loved.”

     “Mm.”  Matt leaned toward the picture of Marshall.  There seemed to be a crack in the wall…no.  It was a long, even line all the way to the floor.  He glanced back at Ada, who was setting photographs on the floor, murmuring “He loves me, he loves me not” as she let each one drop.  He poked at the wall panel.

     It slid noiselessly.  Behind it stood a chalkboard and, rolled into a niche by the ceiling, a screen like the ones in half his school classrooms.  He set a hand on the panel and slid it shut again.  This all looked more like workrooms than playrooms, but he supposed that was just prejudice.  If Adsa Silberwetter called it a playroom, it was.  He would have expected red velvet on the walls, pillows in the corners, and a mirror on the ceiling, but there might be a lot….

     He checked the ceiling.  Nope.

     Taking two Styrofoam cups, he poured in obviously fresh coffee.  He bit his lip as he turned.  One lock of hair had fallen across her forehead as she concentrated on setting out the evidence.  This was too domestic: she in her robe, he bringing coffee.  It might as well be a TV commercial.

     Carefully averting his eyes, telling himself it was because he shouldn’t look at the photos until she had them in the order she was being precise about, Matt lowered himself to the floor.  From this angle, he could see an old typewriter tucked away behind the table, on a rolling typewriter stand.  He blinked.  Was it all just nostalgia for her old City job?

     “He loves me!” crowed Ada, setting down the final picture with a flourish.  “There!”

     She had set out ne rows of nine pictures each.  Matt took in the first row at a glance and his eyes proposed a leap from their sockets.

     “You know,” said Ada, applauding his expression, “I used to be a proper little girl who wore white gloves every Sunday.”

     The first glimmer of sunlight was a great relief to Matt.  As long as it was dark, he felt rather obliged to stay in bed and try to sleep.  Whenever he dozed off, however, he found himself in the year-end party room full of corpses he had imagined for fictional purposes, except that at THIS party, naked pink women kept jumping on the shoulders of men wearing ski masks, and riding at him, firing guns.  Dream Matt tried to run, but this did no good: skull-faced pipe cleaner dragons twined up his legs.

     It was enough to make a morning person out of anyone.

     After long consideration of his closet, he decided to dress casual-formal, putting on one more from his collection of white shirts with tiny stripes, but with a sweater over it instead of a jacket.  Once his mirror told him he was presentable enough for the Silberwetters, he checked his alarm clock.

     He sat down, slapping his hands on his knees.  Seven was probably too early to go dropping by.

     A stroll to the kitchen for an apple and a can of pop used up a few seconds, but not nearly enough.  He took his breakfast back to the typewriter, setting his back to the clock.  Almost immediately, he checked his watch.  Eight: he would get into action at eight.  Eight would give him time to explain, twice, find a cab, and head out there.  Even if traffic cooperated and the lights were right, he would hardly get there before nine.  Surely anybody who was getting up at all this morning would be up by nine.

     What time would Mother get up?  He leaned a little toward the door.  Then he shook himself and drew out the pages for the current chapter of “Ascent”.  He set these down in front of himself, pushed backward from the desk, and tiptoed over to peek out at the door of the other bedroom.  Really, this was as bad as Christmas morning.

     Glancing at the closet, where he’d hidden the presents, he saw his collection of exhibits from last night’s party.  A pen and an impossibly real gun sat on top of the coat.  Farther bask, on his dresser, the late Gus Thaxter’s bifocals flashed the morning sun at him, completing the grisly exhibit with a mocking memory of the last time murder (and Ad Silberwetter) had come his way.

     Matt walked over to finger the evidence, as he had a dozen times already.  The coat had a label to tell him very little, and nothing to tell him more.  There were no pockets, which meant no chance to be like his mother’s characters, turning up a book of matches with a nightclub’s address outside and the phone number of a sultry brunette inside.  The gun was just a gun to Matt.  He checked the safety again, and looked around again for a safer place to put it.  Was he likely to get into trouble for just having the thing around?

     The pen, he thought, hopefully, might not be a clue at all.  Anybody could carry a novelty pen, not just people from Down.  Anybody could have dropped it, at any time.  Depending on how often that piano got moved, it could have been sitting where he found it for weeks, or months.

     He twisted the pen between his fingers.  Was Miss Skull someone from Down?  Now that the assailant in the coat was not before him, it was impossible to be sure where he had seen that stance, that figure, before.

     The word “figure” inevitably brought Ada Silberwetter to mind.  She MIGHT be quick enough to have been Miss Skull in ski mask and pocketless coat.  She might have known a shortcut to the room with the grand piano.  Why would she want to kill him, though?  For his failure to lunge at her, drooling, when she stepped out of his closet after Thaxter’s demise?  What if he just didn’t keep his date with her this morning?

     He shook his head.  Now was no time to quit.  Miss Skull—who was almost certainly not Ada—would have no way of guessing he’d backed out, and would still come after him.  As long as he was going to be a target anyhow, he might as well go on trying to find out what this was all about.  Kind of his job anyhow: as an Information Specialist, he was meant to sort through chaos and bring it into something useful.

     He set the pen down and touched the gun.  The episode was not a total disaster: Matt felt a little puffed up about getting this gun without also getting shot.  Unpleasant, but anyhow he hadn’t fainted or gone into hysterics.  He had shown a little backbone.

     Euphoria was brief.  Miss Skull was still at large.  She wouldn’t be as easy to fool next time.

     Matt set the gun down.  Nearly dying was the second most upsetting feature of the attack.  (A freelance writer with 7,438 rejection slips had very little to live for, but Matt DID wnt to make it to 7,500.)  The worst feature was that the attempt was his first real indication that anybody besides Ada Silberwetter and his mother thought there was anything to investigate.  Before last night, there was a chance the whole thing might turn out to be a joke.

     Back at the typewriter, once he forced himself back to his chair, the words at his elbow seemed to make very little sense.  But that was normal, and there might be some purpose in retyping them anyhow.

     Between pages or in difficult passages, between paragraphs, his sleeve came back to expose his watch.  Two Minutes.  One Minute.  At 7:59.31, he pushed himself back from the typewriter.  It would take thirty seconds to get his coat out.

     By now, sunlight filled the apartment.  It was a beautiful day not to go to the Silberwetters’.  Even retyping more pages would be a better use of such a nice morning.  He could break off around ten and watch his tape of Maria’s wedding on Sesame Street.

     There was no sound of movement.  Matt sidled down the hall to his mother’s door.  Something rustled beyond him.

     He followed the sound back to a sun-drenched dining room.  All the lights were on, too, but even so, Mrs. Benz had to raise the Miss Skull letters to her nose to read, them while her free hand scribbled something on a legal pad.

     Matt scratched his head: he hadn’t heard her come out at all.  Surely he’d have heard her in the kitchen.

     “Have you had breakfast?”

     Her nose continued to brush the page while her right hand scribbled on.  “Lots of times.”

     He turned around and checked the kitchen.  A breakfast half-built sat in various containers on the counter.  No silverware: that was it.  She could be mighty quiet when she thought he was sleeping late, but to be silent in the silverware drawer called for powers beyond those of ordinary mortals.

     Matt poured and stirred what was required and brought a cup, a glass, and a bowl to the table.  His mother glanced at them and then turned her nose back against the letter she was studying.  “Oh, thank you.  Your friend never mentioned anybody named Skull, did she?  A real name, I mean: Jenny Skull or Lorelei Skull.”

     “Um.  No.  That would be too easy.”

     “Of course.”  She set the letter down.  “The reader spots that and says, ‘Oh, this is way too easy’ and while he’s patting himself on the back, you slip in the mickey.”

     “I see.”  Matt nodded gravely.  “Any new insights on who really did it?”

     “Mm,” she replied.  She set the letter down and brought the legal pad to her nose.  “You want someone who’s good-naturedly wicked.”

     Matt didn’t think he wanted to meet any such people.  “Good natured?  Thise letters?”

     “Well, look.”  She waved the legal pad over the stack of correspondence.  “It’s all overdone.  There’s so much relish in every letter: you can tell Miss Skull thinks she’s the smartest bear in the woods.  She’s having so much fun writing the letters I don’t believe she ever really would kill anybody.”

     Matt had already decided not to tell her about the character in the coat and ski mask.  “You’re just prejudiced in favor of writers.”

     She set the legal pad down, sipped at the orange juice, and grimaced.  “You know it’s all going to turn out to be a big joke.  On New Year’s Eve or April Fool’s Day somebody’s going to admit it and the poor man who died will turn out to be a coincidence.”  She tried the orange juice again and shook her head.  “All very unsatisfactory for my readers.  I’ll need to switch something.”

     Closing her eyes, she drained the orange juice and set the glass as far away from her as she could.  “Now what do I name her?  Carmilla Skull or Camellia Skull?  Where did I put my copy of ‘Starnames For Baby’?”

     She rummaged in the clutter of papers but found no books.  “It must be on the desk. Matt….”

     Her eyes came up, and squinted at the coat on his arm,  “Where are you off to now?”

     Matt shrugged.  “Just a little Christmas shopping.”

     “Is it that late already?  No.  Are the stores open yet?”

     Matt had not considered that detail when formulating a cover story.  “Oh, well, you know…they will be by the time the bus gets there.”

     Mrs. Benz nodded.  “I wish you’d take me one of these times.  I have all those grandchildren to provide for.”

     “Maybe next week.”

     “It takes thought, you know.  Thought and time.”  She picked up the legal pad again, apparently just to shake it at him.  “You have to get a present good enough to keep them from sulking about Grandma’s dumb presents but not SO good that your children send you hate mail.  It’s an art.  You just wait ‘til you have grandchildren of your own.”

     “I can wait.”  Matt thought suddenly of Ada Silberwetter’s step-grandchildren.  “Besides, having grandchildren means you’re o-o-o-old.”

     Her nostrils flared.  “Huh.  It takes all kinds to make a world.”  She reached for her coffee.  “Not YOUR kind, though.”

     “Well, you and Miss Skull have fun,” he said, turning to go.  “Um, don’t let anybody in while I’m gone.  I, er, might not be back in time for lunch.  You know what it’s like out there.”

     She had picked up a letter.  “This is not fair at all,” she said, pushing her nose against the typed words.  “It’s like pictures seen at midnight.”  She looked from the letter into the upturned palm of her other hand, a mannerism she had picked up from her late husband, who had spent years as a waiter with a pad in that hand.  Ever after, when confronted with a thorny problem, Dad would stare at his left hand as though it still contained a piece of paper with all the answers.

     Just in case she had not quite caught the gist of what he’d said, Matt said, “Um, so long.  Don’t let anybody in.”

     “What?”  His mother looked up.  “Where are you going?  Oh, right: Christmas shopping.  Well, look for things for my darling grandchildren.  Look for things for the other ones, too: they won’t all be darling by the twenty-fifth.  Will you be home for lunch, do you think?”

     “Um, no.  Um, you know what it’s like out there.”

     She nodded and picked up another letter.  “Murder.”

      Matt licked his lips.  “Yeah.”

     He paused by his bedroom door, pulling on his coat.  Then he stood very still before walking into the bedroom.  The gun was still there.  It was heavy.  He checked the mirror.  Oh, anybody could tell that pocket was weighted down.  He put the gun back.

     Outside the apartment, he shoved the Down button and waited.  Once he started back for the gun, but then he didn’t.  The elevator arrived and it was too late to change his mind.

     He relaxed.  Now he could worry about more  concrete concerns, like how much to tip the cabbie.

     Opposite the restroom and the janitor’s closet, in the little side corridor, was an open doorway screened for tonight with a large grey cubicle partition on wheels.  At other times, the cozy room beyond might serve to house small gatherings of men and women whose decisions would be blazoned in large black letters in the next day’s newspapers.  Tonight it was a storeroom, holding extraneous potted plants and sidetables which would have gotten in the way of the festivities in the main assembly room.

     The room was lit only by what seeped in from the party.  Matt raised a hand to the wall but found no light switches.  While he was at it, he realized that his other hand was still holding the paper plate he had unconsciously rolled into a tube while watching Ada Silberwetter.  He looked down at it, remembered her face, and then wadded it into a ball.

     His guide, meanwhile, was looking around the room in some confusion.  “I asked him to wait for you here, sir.  Wait one moment, if you please.  I will go find out where he might have gone.”

     Matt nodded and the waiter went out.  Spying a wastebasket, Matt strolled over to toss the balled paper plate away.

     The wastebasket was tucked next to three stacks of chairs and a big tree in a pot that was too small for it.  It needed water, too.  Beyond these, up against sliding doors that led out to the snowy balcony, sat a grand piano.

     Looking around at the other supplies stacked here, Matt spotted a yellow telephone on a small table.  Maybe the message was from Mother, or, worse, some doctor in the emergency room.  He strode over to the table and lifted the receiver.  A dial tone told him the phone was hooked up, so he squatted low enough to read the numbers.

     He had punched in the first two when he heard something move.  Turning and straightening up in one motion, he watched a figure emerge from behind the piano.

     This apparition wore a brown coat that brushed the floor.  It did not coordinate well with the blue and white ski mask that hid all of the face but half-closed eyes.  Matt did not study the eyes; the outfit was accessorized with a large black gun.

     This gun was up where Matt would be sure to see it.  The fingers of the ungunned hand made a gentle caressing downward motion.  Matt understood, and set the phone receiver down, just a little behind where it belonged.  He hoped this phone was like other City phones.

     For Matt’s brain was racing.  Worry always made him freeze up, but a gun was nothing to worry about.  A gun was something to be afraid of.  Fear drove out worry.

     This had to be Miss Skull.  Matt tried to see a skull pattern on the blue and white facemask, and failed.  He did make out the letters LUTH on the forehead, but this meant nothing to him.

     The gun pointed at his stomach.  The empty hand beckoned.  Matt moved forward slowly, raising his hands to shoulder level.  How long was sixty seconds?  Would the waiter come back first?

     Miss Skull was considering that same point.  A thumb on the free hand jerked impatiently at the glass door.  Marr looked outside and then down, as she reached out and slid the door open half a foot.  Then this WAS Miss Skull, and this was murder, not robbery.  Between ice and wind, she might not even need to shoot, though a bullet would make matters certain.

     Matt took a deep breath.  This HAD to be sixty seconds now.  She couldn’t shoot him before he was out on the balcony, or she’d have his body to carry.  And she wasn’t that big.  She was about the same size as….

     “BEEE-up!  BEEE-up!  BEEE-up!”

     Miss Skull jerked toward the phone as it complained about being left off the hook.  Matt pounced, smashing a hip on the keyboard of the piano.  His hands plunged and twisted.  Miss Skull kicked, but whether it was that which nearly tripped him or the foot hitting the piano leg.  But the gun had changed owners.

    Jabbing an elbow against the piano, Matt pushed himself up and back.  Miss Skull obligingly fell back herself, clutching a twisted wrist against the front of the coat.  Rain and ice slashed in at her face mask.  The eyes behind the eyehole were wide.

     Matt, meanwhile, had things to worry about again.  He had the gun: now what?  In five summers as a bouncer at his father’s bar, he had learned to handle guns.  But “handle” meant only “take away so the customer can’t play with it.”

     Here there was no manager calling police.  He couldn’t toss the gun under the bar and go back to work.

     The combatants looked each other over.  The height, the way Miss Skull stood, some fragrance: there was something familiar here.  Matt knew he ought to know.  That hand now resting on the edge of the piano: he’d seen a hand resting that way more than once.  On a desk?  On a file cabinet?  On the buffet?

     Miss Skull blinked, and that hand swept up against stacks of cheap tinfoiled ashtrays.  Matt couldn’t keep track of three things at once.  His main goal was to keep the gun quiet and what attention he could spare from that went into dodging apparently metal projectiles.  When he had attention to spare for Miss Skull she was around the piano and out of the room.

     Matt rushed after her, stumbling as his feet crushed the low-bidder ashtrays.  At the door he pulled up short, remembering the gun.  That would NOT be tolerated at a City party, and there was no sense giving people the wrong idea.  He slid it gently into his jacket pocket.

     One glance at the main assembly told him she hadn’t gone that way.  There would be more excitement, more turned heads, if anyone in a long brown coat and ski mask gone running through.

     There were other possibilities.  Licking his upper lip, he pushed through the door of the Men’s.

     “Ow!  What thif…get outa the way!”

     The man who had been on his way out tried to keep going out, stomping down hard on the big shiny shoes Matt tried to pull out of the way.  This raised a flag.  The last time Matt ran into someone so intent on smashing all his toes, he’d been on the bus and cost him his wallet and checkbook.  He slapped a hand down over his wallet pocket.

     “Why, you big…calling me a pickpocket?”  The little round redfaced man looked a bit like Marshall Silverwetter’s third son, the one who lost the election.  It was hard to be sure: Matt had seen him only on campaign brochures, and you couldn’t expect even the photos on those to be more than approximately truthful.

     The little man’s give him one hand in what was half a shove and half a punch.  Matt sidestepped most of this.  Glancing up, the man aimed a second shot.  He stopped before it could be delivered.

     “Hey, din’t I see you talking to m…Marshall Silberwetter?”

     Matt, hating himself for it, simply smiled.

     “Um.  Stupid of me to be standing right at the door of the john this time of night.”  The little man eased to one side, making himself even smaller.  “Um.  Making a fool of myself.  I…I’ll just go do that somewhere else.”

     If anyone who did not know Mashall Silberwetter met this man in the next ten minutes, there’d be trouble.  Matt felt sorry for somebody, but couldn’t decide who.  So he pushed on into the Men’s.  No coat and ski mask waited there.

     Back in the corridor, he found the waiter, rushing forward with all the desperation of someone who sees a certain tip slipping away.  “I’m afraid I can’t find him, sir.”

     “It was a man, then?”  Matt moved directly in front of him.  “What did he look like?  Was it one of the guests or someone from outside?”

     The waiter tipped back a little as if only now realizing how big Matt was.  “Is there…a problem, sir?”

     Matt shook his head.  “Never mind.  He told you to bring me back here?”

     The waiter took two backward steps.  “He was…not a young man.  More than thirty.  I thought he was a guest, sir, as he had on a suit, but he must have come from outside, or he could have just looked for you at the party.”

     Matt slid a hand into a pocket.  The waiter took another step away, turning  little.  Matt rattled his change in what he hoped was an encouraging way.  “Did he tell you anything about his message?”

     The waiter, face brightening, thought things over.  “Actually, sir, he did not even mention he had a message.  He said there WAS a message for Mr. Matthew Benz, and could I find him.  It may be the messenger came to him, and he came to me.”

     Further questioning brought Matt no ore than that: a man who was elderly (over thirty) in a suit, and maybe no more than a go-between.  Matt felt this level of information merited no more than a quarter, but he raised it to fifty cents and said “If you see him again, find me and let me know.”

     Not waiting to see the waiter’s opinion of a tip that did not fold, he started for the exit and elevators, waiting among the partygoers demanding to know where their hats were and didn’t they check gloves with this, refining his question.  (“Did anybody check a long brown cat that might have had a ski mask in the pocket?”)  He gave up and meandered back through the party: no one was going to remember a brown coat in this mob, and if they did, they would know no more than a ticket number.

     Back in the dim restroom corridor, he tried the janitor’s closet.  It was unlocked, shallow, and a great relief.  Now there was no call for him to barge into the Ladies’ room.

    The mask wasn’t there—that likely went into a pocket—but this certainly was the coat he’d seen.  He started to turn up the collar to check underneath but changed his mind.  Tossing the coat over one arm, he strolled as casually as he could back into the darkened room with the piano and glass doors.

     He crawled around under the piano for a while without much satisfaction.  “Where’s your magnifying glass?” he grumbled.  He stood up before he was quite clear, and banged his head at the same time his knee scrunched something hard and angular.

     Cursing, Matt rubbed his head with one hand and reached down with the other, flopping the coat down across whatever he’d hit.  Pulling the coat away, he cowled at a ballpoint pen with a green fuzzy dragon wrapped around the shaft.  Rising, and now rubbing his knee, he eventually added this doodad to the pocket with the gun.

     The party was thinning when he returned, but far from dead.  Matt studied the crowd of dedicated party animals.  Ada Silberwetter was with her husband and three other appreciative men, deep in an animated discussion about which Matt had no curiosity whatsoever.  Now, she had proven she could change clothes in very little….

     No.  Of course not.  No time.  And the ski mask would have mussed up that hair.  That was it: Linda, Holly, and Maryann should be in the clear as well.  Although perhaps the way Holly’s hair was arranged, it might be hard to tell.  Matt’s expertise in female hair was minimal.  Or would someone who came to a party with a gun and a ski mask have the forethought to also bring a comb and brush?  Or even a wig?

     Matt felt he was missing something vital, but had no idea what to do next.  This was where he needed Felicia Lowe.  What would her detectives, the Changs, be doing now?

     There was…the police.  Matt felt a little faint.  Call the police to this party?  Where his boss was?  And his bosses’ bosses?  And the bosses of the Police Department, come to that?  He shook his head.  Not without knowing what he was up against.

     He shrugged.  He couldn’t wander around the party carrying this coat.  Best to get his own coat and just go home.  He’d had enough party games for this year.

     The line was still long at coat check, long enough for worry.  Why assume Miss Skull had just one gun?  Would she be  waiting just outside?  Maybe he could just check this coat and stay a little longer at the party.  Or would Miss Skull be counting on that?      Somehow he got his coat back and put it on while hanging onto the other.  The elevator was packed; he nearly didn’t get on.  Good place for knife work: nowhere to dodge.  But they were all looking at him, so he squeezed in.  On the first floor, and out on the windswept sidewalk, he stayed with them all, keeping toward the middle of the pack.  He di