LIKE A MIGHTY QUONKER, Chapter 25

     He wanted to call a cab, but this was not allowed.  “We do have a car or two around the place,” Ada pointed out.  Within seconds of her summons, one of the numerous Silberwetter relatives/employees brought around a modest brown vehicle probably used only for driving past taxpayers.

     Still in slippers and robe, Ada waved farewell to her Watson from the front door.  “Don’t forget to write if you find work!” she called, as Matt crunched through snow to the car.  “Oh, and one other thing!”

     She didn’t say what the thing was.  Matt turned around.  His head rocked back as the world exploded.

     Whipping off his glasses to shake away the snowball, he could see Ada bent nearly double with laughter, one hand pressed against her robe to hold it sort of shut.  The glasses were jammed into a coat pocket and Matt’s free hand scooped up ammunition.

     “Yaaaaah!” she jeered.  “You couldn’t hit the barn side of a broad!”

     Nonetheless, she shrieked and fled inside as the snowball flew and landed well wide.  Matt wasn’t watching it; he had already bent to scoop and pack a good snowball, one a man could control.  The front door was closed, but Ada was certainly just inside, peering through a window, or a spyhole in the door.  He reached for his glasses.

     Ada didn’t show.  The chauffeur, in the driveway, cleared his throat.  Matt’s feet were cold, and the hand filled with snow was colder.  He turned toward the car.

     But when his ear caught the click of a door, he spun and fired.  With a decent snowball, and a clear view of the target, his throw was a dead bullseye.

     Matt was still new to the detective business.  But he needed only two clues—the sight of Ada clinging to the doorframe, vibrating with mirth, and the brown leather slippers of whoever he had just pasted, to bring him the proper deduction and send him diving through the open rear door of the waiting automobile.  Five solid snowballs hit the side of the car as it rolled out of the driveway.

     The chauffeur made no comment whatsoever, and, after giving it long serious thought, Matt got up off the floor and settled into the back seat.  He wiped off his hands and then looked the chauffeur over for any hint to his fate.  He knew the man slightly, one of Marshall’s more muscular grandsons, generally used as an escort if reporters crowded too gregariously around the office, but on occasion sent out to hint away anyone Marshall Silberwetter felt was too interested in Mrs. Marshall Silberwetter.

     If the man also recognized Matt from that cautionary ride over the summer he did not say so.  In fact, he said nothing at all until the car was sailing swiftly along the weekend-quick expressway to the city limits.

     Then he said in a voice lacking any curiosity or interest at all, “What’s going on?”

     “Going on?” Matt inquired, voice a little too high.

     The chauffeur nodded as if he had expected exactly that reply.  ‘Don’t get me wrong.  This isn’t orders or anything, and I’m not paid to spy on anybody.  It’s just that if Mrs. Silberwetter is planning anything bigger than, say, a surprise party, Mr. Silberwetter’s going to want to know what it is and maybe it’s worth my time to be the one to tell him.”

     Matt shrugged.  Too fast, much too fast.  He swallowed before he spoke, and forced his voice into the bass register.  “Well, she wanted some information.”

     “What kind?”  The voice held complete disinterest now, absolute apathy.

     Government work had left its mark on Matt: you never told a lie when a tiny bit of truth would do the same job.  ‘She’s curious about who killed Jerry Silberwetter.”

     The chauffeur glanced in the rearview; his face now showed interest.  “Uncle Geegee?  What for?  That was years ago, and she never liked him much, as far as I knew.”

     Just as well, Matt thought, with a profound desire to share that ignorance.  “Oh, you know.  She gets bored.”

     “Oh.”  The man nodded.  “Figures.”

     Matt nodded back.  “Some people need a project to keep them going in winter.  They should try working for a living.”

     The driver smiled.  It was none of his job to insult the boss’s wife, but he was disinclined to correct anybody else who did.

     Having thrown himself waistdeep into trouble already, Matt felt he might as well wade in farther.  “You knew him?  Got a couple of fiendish suspects you want to add to her list?”

     This was taken in the spirit intended.  “I don’t hand out with a lot of fiends.”  The man at the steering wheel raised a hand from it to wave at the ceiling.  “Uncle Geegee made a t of bad friends—you do that if you try to get somewhere in politics—but nobody knew that until he was dead.  But they never proved anything on any of them…or Aunt Liz, who got all his money and stuff.”

     Matt nodded.  The man had more to say, but he didn’t want to spoil his air of amused disinterest by asking questions.  He could always get Ada to explain “Aunt Liz”.

      “And she…is this where you said?”

     Matt, looking around, realized a whole new crisis had sneaked in while he was conducting a highly professional investigative interview.  How much did you tip the grandson of a politician who made more in a week than you did in a decade?  Particularly if the driver was also related to, oh, two or three people who might have recently tried to kill you?

     He did not look at the bill he slipped from his wallet pocket and passed it over the seat.  The chauffeur also did not look at it before putting it away.  “Thank you, sir.”  Matt mumbled something and moved out and up toward the glass doors of the library.

     Tombstone research seemed the less likely gambit, and also the quickest.  What he really wanted to consult were the microfilm copies of back issues of the newspapers.  Concrete data was needed here, and everything about Ada Silberwetter was too slippery to….

     Matt shook several thoughts from his head and moved toward the card catalog.

     Minutes later, he was seething.  He always seethed in the Public Library building, which was an insult to his professional training and his personal feet: there was so far to walk to find nothing.  He hadn’t expected a million books on tombstones, but he also hadn’t expected a conspiracy to hide what there was.  The use of two different systems of classification numbers, a general lack of accurate labels, and a building whose form demanded that function follow at a respectful distance all worked in league against anybody trying to resolve a murder.

     So tombstones were a dead loss.  (He paused.  He jotted that down.)  In the Microforms Department, things were held in little cardboard boxes in little rows, all with nice labels.  In a very little time, he was settled into a tiny cubicle with all the newspapers of approximately the right vintage.

     On the way, he had picked up a publicity flier called “Under the Picasso” in case he needed more paper for notes.  At the top of this, in bold curlicued numbers, he put the date of the newspaper that first mentioned the demise of Gerald G. “Jerry” Silberwetter.  He smiled at this date: not only was it a solid fact, but it also suggested, from what he recalled of the story, that Ada Silberwetter was older than he was.  Though she didn’t look it.  He put a hand toward his ever expanding bald spot.  Then, returning to the microfilm, he scrolled on.

     By the time he was finished, he had covered both sides of the Picasso flyer with notes, but he had to admit he was none the wiser.  He had followed the story from headlines to brief mentions on the editorial page.  (His experience over the summer following accounts of Gus Thacter’s murder and Richard Watanabe’s death had taught him how it worked) but no clues had popped off the page.

     The city government was always, at least in the papers, being struck by crisis after crisis: the murder of Jerry Silberwetter was big enough to hold a spot for three days before the arrest of Carleton Nairn for being “less than candid” to investigators from the latest fraud-and-waste committee.  But it sprang back into large type with the Shoebox Papers.  A shoebox found by police in Silberwetter’s closet has disgorged documents incriminating a score of civil servants with previously spotless reputations.  Matt jotted down the names: MacTaggart, Westhoff, Hosier, Zimmerman, Medina, Underwood, Herrig, Hunnicutt….  The papers were overwhelmed to think that this tireless undercover investigator had been killed by one of the fiends he sought to expose.

     They showed not a hint that Silberwetter might not have intended these papers for a grand jury.  Matt had heard the stories of some of these people when he started, but not much: “Out of office, out of mind”.  He should probably look into some and try to estimate how much the “martyr detective” was into them for.

     He was drawing little stars next to their names when his eye fell upon the name MacTaggart for perhaps the sixth time and he finally made the connection.

     That reel of microfilm was out of the box and scrolled into view in no time.  MacTaggart: Wilson MacTaggart.  “Thank God I’m beautiful,” he muttered, “I’ll never make it on brains.”  One editorial was especially proud of Jerry Silberwetter for that: the man had selflessly investigated even his own brother-in-law, the husband of his sister Elisabeth.

     In the time it took him to find a clean space to scribble “Aunt Liz?”, Holly had moved to the top of his suspect list and fallen back down again.  Revenge was a nice motive in a book, but how far did it go in real life?  Wilson MacTaggart hadn’t gone to prison; he hadn’t even lost his job.  The Shoebox papers had not produced anything hot enough to bring anyone to trial, even, except for Zimmerman and Underwood, whom he’d never heard of.  There had been a few reprimands, but MacTaggart was not among those reported as receiving one.  Anyway, considering her remarks about her parents, Holly Luya MacTaggart made an unlikely angel of vengeance.

     Still, it was something to think about, something to report to Ada to show he could do detecting on his own.

     He returned all the reels of film to the front desk and sauntered along the hallways to the exit.  On the way out, he paused at a display of cheap little literary magazines stacked for passersby to carry off.  One was a title he’d read in market listings, though he’d never actually seen the magazine.

     He chuckled as he picked it up.  If this were one of his mother’s books, Barbara Chang would see some chance item which would make the whole mystery clear.

     The name “Jinx Bottym” caught his eye on the Contributors age.  THAT was how he knew the name of the magazine.  He flipped to her contribution.

                HEARTBEAT OF HYSTERIA

          Reading poltergeists at 3 A.M.

          It’s dark.

         He looks around quick.

          Just a branch against the screen:

          Nothing to Worry About.

          He sets down his book

          And takes a long look around the room.

          He has just decided there is

          NOTHING TO FEAR

          When the hand reaches from under his pillow.

     A passing patron dropped a book.  Matt leapt two feet into the air.  Then, licking his lips, he set the little magazine into a coat pocket.  The poem made one thing clear, certainly.

     He never should have given up that job at the bar.

FICTION FRIDAY: Holiday Good

     “Ah, Heinrich!  I’m glad you’ve arrived.”

     “It sounded urgent, Vincent.  You have located your creature?”

     “The reports must be about him: eight feet tall, wearing a lab coat too small for him, and still dragging one of the electrodes that was attached when he broke out of my lab.”

     “So we have a chance of ending his reign of terror.”

     “Yes.  And it must be today.”

     “So.  We have until midnight.”

     “Well, at least until five.”

     “I thought you were too much of a scientist to put faith in the alignments of the stars.”

     It’s not the stars…well, it’s kind of the calendar.  This is, after all, Labor Day.”

     “Tell me about it.  What I had to pay for a ticket here on a Holiday weekend….”

     “I assembled him from bits and pieces in the cemetery of company town.  But I had to time which parts of him I borrowed with when I could fit them in AND when suitable people died to provide fresh….”

     “Yes, yes.  But what does that have to do with our timing?”

     “Well, both his arms and one leg came from working stiffs, so they won’t be working today.”

     “I see.  So we can take him while he’s on holiday.  What about his eyes and ears?”

     “I believe those belonged to someone from Security, so they’ll be open.”

     “He’ll see us coming.”

     “Yes, but he won’t know what to do.”

     “Ah.  His brain is from a laborer as well?”

     “No, it was actually from the old CEO’s son, the one he left the company to.  That brain never worked at all.”

     “I wondered why he broke into the Reptile House at the zoo.”

     “Yep.  Wanted new Crocs.  Let’s go.”

Dogs By Themselves

     If you have been following along, and why would you not, you will recall we have recently looked over the lives of dogs in postcards.  We spent one column looking over recent additions to inventory which covered the relation between dogs and their pet humans, and then another on the number one activity of dogs on postcards, which is, as noted, “number one”.  But we have not yet considered what dogs do with their lives when not accompanied by a biped or a call of nature.

     Dogs have rich, full lives, with or without us.  Some postcard publishers have attempted to use them as an example to the rest of us, showing that opportunities are all around us if we greet the morning properly.

     The everyday world is filled with fun and exercise if we simply look around us.  Everythng around us is to play with….

      And everyone is a potential playmate.

     HOWEVER, dogs do not buy postcards.  (It’s one of their few social flaws…along with that every place is a potential potty business.)  So unhappy dogs are a major theme in the world of postcard art as well.  The mournful expression of a dog missing a human companion animal has always been a big seller.

     When humans want to express the sorrow of a loved one’s absence, a dog is the obvious choice.  Nobody and nothing is sadder than a sad puppy.

     When you tie this to a dog’s well-known loyalty (isn’t that a scene in the Odyssey?) those puppy eyes make an excellent substitute for the “Wish You Were Here” postcard cliché.

     Could YOU resist a card like this?  Well, shame on you.  (We are still taking explanations for the abbreviation the sender added to the lower right corner of this message.  “Sealed With a Hot and Heavy Kiss” is running highest in the voting, but it does seem a little…powerful for 1909.)

     Still, a happy dog is what people want to see (that is, of course, why the poor, depressed doggies create such an “Awww!”.)  So they have been used to express hope for a new location, and…what?  No, of course not.  This is about the excitement of being in a new place and enjoying the chance to make it all your own by…well, yeah, by marking out your territory.  But, as they say, “Doggies is as doggies do.”  (Wait.  No, let’s move on.  Next time we’ll do something more tasteful, like, say, all those cards about stray cats having sex on the back fence.)

LIKE A MIGHTY QUONKER, Chapter 24

     There were still things Matt wanted clarified: tombstones and skulls tumbled in his brain among automatic cameras and the deplorable results in candid photography as a hobby.  He picked up a picture he had examined three times by now: Ada, her blackmailer, and a small square wooden stool.

      The front told him nothing new, so he flipped it over.  A large black X had been drawn in one corner.  Remembering something, he replaced the picture, face down, and started to flip over the others.

     “Censor,” noted Ada, leaning forward.

     A pattern of Xs began to appear: about half the pictures had one.  Matt flipped each of these up, and then back down.  Then he checked the ones without any X.

     Ada watched all this with interest.  “Are you detecting, Hercule, or are you just picking your favorites?”

     Matt did not reply before he had flipped, flopped, and reflipped every flip-flopping picture in the display.  Then he sat back, rolled his shoulders to relieve the muscles, and sighed, “You’re right.”

     Ada accepted this.  “I always am.  About what?”

     Matt pointed to the bottom row and let his hand drop to his knee.  “There’s an X on the back of every picture where you can see his face.”

     She reached past him to check for herself, and he went on, “So this has got to be his personal file.  Nobody else would care.  YOUR blackmailer could send them all, but Jerry Siberwetter wouldn’t bank on his stepfather being a good sport.  If this was a file he had on deposit with a go-between, he’d have given that person only the ones without the X.  The tombstone pictures each have two Xs: that was to separate them completely.”

     “Well!” said Ada, sitting back.  “You may get somewhere in the detective business yet.  My guess about the tombstones was that he took some other pictures on the roll first and they just got mixed in.  Very nice.”  She pointed. “Look: even Miss Skull gets covered up in some.”

     Matt nodded.  So the “Miss Skull” who wrote the letters had two murders on her record: two and a half counting last night’s attempt.  His eyes moved across the pictures, inventorying the skulls.  Then he glanced beyond them to the manila envelope Ada had used for storage.

     As one who had sent out many envelopes, and seen most of them come back, Matt had an experience with brown envelopes, in transit and repose.  This one did not repose just right.

     He leaned down to peer into the open end.  “Is there still something in there?”

     Ada scooped it up.  “Oh, yes.  The letters.  The real ones, I mean.”

     “Real….”  Matt wilted a little.

     Her shrug slid the robe clear off one shoulder.  “I figured your mom could deduce something right away from the envelopes and the tombstones, so why bother her with all the details?”

     “The real….”  He took the papers she handed him.  “What does he really ask for?”

     Her sigh was heavy with regret.  “Only money.”

     Matt remembered the drooping b typed on the envelopes; these letters showed the same birthmark.  There wasn’t much in common with the other letters, save for the pseudonym Miss Skull and an interest in the Personals column of the Reader.  Dispensing with baroque vituperation, they cut right to the bone.  Miss Skull knew the target well enough to skip any idea that she would be afraid of scandal; Miss Skull went right for a threat to Marshall.

     “What happens to your mealticket if new evidence comes out?  But maybe his kids will set up a trust fund for you.”  Matt bit his lip.  This style was familiar from hundreds of memos at Down.

     The suggested text for a reply in the Personals was the same as in the bogus letters, though Miss skull was a bit more explicit about what Ada could expect, especially in Letter B, with “Let’s see those teeth.”  If Ada needed further proof that Miss Skull had the driver’s seat, a negative—“the one where you are apparently playing round-up”—could be swapped for a small amount of cash.  Dire things would befall if a trap was set.

     That was the most recent message.  As Matt set it down, his partner noted, “I liked my letters better.”

     Matt nodded absently.  “Why has Miss Skull waited so long?  If she’s had the prints and negatives since Jerry Silberwetter died?”

     “Maybe she wanted to let the death investigation cool off,” Ad suggested, leaning way forward to straighten the bottom row of photos.  “Or maybe she salted them away like an IRA and didn’t need the money until this stock market unpleasantness.”

     Matt picked up the letters again.  Something was missing besides such coined words as “fornify”.  He looked over the first letter again.

     “There’s no threat to kill somebody.”

     “No.’  She sat back and the robe slipped some more.  “He missed out on a good thing there.”

     He rattled the pages at her.  “But what about…what was the name, who fell dead in his soup at Thanksgiving?”

     Ada set the tips of both index fingers on his knee.  “We didn’t serve soup.”  Her head tipped to one side.  “He could have dropped dead in the Buffalo wings.”

     Matt sat way back, his mouth open.  “Yes,” she went on, “I should have had him fall facefirst into the Buffalo wings.”

     She glanced up at Matt, and her smile spread wide.  “You’re thinking something very nasty, aren’t you?  I can tell.”

     “Why,” said Matt, choosing his word carefully and letting them cool before release, “Did you go to all this trouble?  Fake letters, fake murder story….”

     Ada hitched up the shoulder of her robe and wriggled a little more securely inside.  “Well, I had to have some excuse.  You wouldn’t want me to take all these pictures to your mother.”

     Matt blinked.  He had not expected her to have decency left.

     “After all, with her eyesight, it would have been terribly frustrating.”

     “Funny.”  Matt dropped the letters on the floor.  “Get Bing Crosby and we’ll call the movie Road to Ruin.”

     Ada tossed her hair back.  Matt slapped one hand down on the letters.  “How do I know you didn’t write these letters too?”

     She stared at him.  “Why would I do something like that?”

     Matt gazed at her apparently genuine expression of puzzlement.  “Maybe you wanted an excuse to show off your portfolio?”

     Ada looked into his face a moment longer and then bounced forward on her knees, dislodging all the adjustments she’d made to her robe.  “Oh, I KNEW you’d be fun to detect with!”

     Matt tried to slide back about a mile and a half, and failed.  “They are rather good of me, most of them,” she went on, scanning the bottom rows.  A delicate finger arched out.  “I can’t say that one shows my BEST side.”

     He declined to see which one.  “Well?”

     Pink lips gathered into another pout.  “Well, I didn’t.  Miss Skull really means it and really wants my money, just when I need every penny for Christmas shopping.  Though I guess I could save what it would cost to have a picture taken for the family Christmas card.”  She bent over to pick something from the gallery.

     Matt still refused to look either at the pictures or the borders of her robe.  “I suppose that left you nothing to hire a real detective.”

     The robe billowed as she sat back on her haunches.  “Oh, but Marshall would have found out about that in no time!  And he’d have worried, poor lamb.  I couldn’t get help from any of his aides, either: they’d run to him right away.  That’ll be my extra present for him: I’m going to do it completely pro bono.  But I do need some helper outside our circle.”

     “So you picked on me.”

     Her smile dimpled up again.  “I couldn’t much farther outside than that.”

     As Matt growled, she rubbed her hands together.  “Now, then.  Shall we all start behaving like mature adult detectives now?  Who do you like as Geegee’s murderer?  Practically everybody at the City knew about Miss Skulll, and he probably had pictures of at least half of them.”

     The other hands in the room were clenched into fists.  “Listen.  There’s….”  Matt stopped to think; blood rushed to his face and ears.

     Interested, Ada leaned in.  Matt took two breaths.  “You mean that to keep this from Marshall you walked my mother all around City Center talking about Miss Skull so the entire municipal government knew what you were doing?”

     She held her hands out toward him.  “I told you why.  Besides, if it isn’t someone with the city there’s no problem.”

     “It could…be an outsider.”  Matt-the-Writer was fighting to get past Matt-the-Wronged.

     “I don’t see how,” she replied cheerfully.  “Now what do you know about our dear little Walter Prince?”

     Matt considered it.  “The only other person at Down from those days is Linda Szarkowski.  I could ask….”

     “I didn’t know her very well.”  Ada shook her head, perhaps with regret.  “But any woman who worked with Geegee was probably photographed at some point.  He was oversexed.  So many of the Silberwetters are.”

     She reached out and slid a picture toward Matt.  Matt had lost interest in the photographs.  “But if he was just a stepson, he…never mind.  What about Holly?  Did he ever make a pass at her?”

     “Who?”  One tiny wrinkle appeared in her forehead.

     “Holly MacTaggart?  She’s your granddaughter.  You must have met her at some point.”

     One pink hand shot into the air.  “Her!  Geegee had taste!”  Matt glanced involuntarily toward the photos.  “Anyhow, in those days she’d only have been about…well, she would have been away at college.”

     Matt felt this violated the timeline of the story, but excused it on humanitarian grounds.  Ada lowered her eyebrows at him and went on, “But we’ll get a look at Miss Skull when he delivers the negative.  You’d recognize Walter Prince, right?  Even in disguise?”

     The room seemed to waver. Matt was facing a gun in the hands of a familiar figure again.  He stared at it until fingers snapped next to his left ear.

     “Yoo hoo!  Anyone home?  You’re awfully absent-minded, even for a Watson.”

     “Pardon me!” Matt snapped, as the room came back into focus.  “I’m not used to having people try to kill me!”

     Ada folded her arms; the pout reappeared.  “I haven’t done a thing to you!  So far.”

     “You weren’t even there.”  Matt folded his own arms, close to his chest.  “Disasters do happen sometimes without you.”

     He had intended to hang onto this story until he was sure Ada Silberwetter had nothing to do with the gun and the ski mask, but her expression was that of a small child demanding a story before bed.  By the time he’d finished, sweat was beading on his forehead and Ada was positively panting.

     “Such fun!  And I missed it!  You should have come to me right away!  You probably botched the whole thing: what do you know about searching a woman’s coat?  And you didn’t even bring the gun to show me.  Some Watson!  Well, I have to take what I can get, I suppose.  Did you recognize him?”

     “I don’t know.”

     “It was Walter Prince, wasn’t it?”

      Matt threw his hands forward.  “I thought I recognized the way they were standing.  But I just don’t know who it was.”

     “Oh, you do so!”

     “It could have been Prince.  But it could have been Carleton Nairn, or Holly.  I think Linda might be a little too….”  He realized what shape his hands were making, and pulled them down.

     “Probably too much Thanksgiving dinner.”  Ada nodded.  “And under a coat, too.  So it could really have been any of the four.”

     “Or none,” Matt pointed out.  “It could…I ran into Harry Silberwetter just after that.  I think.”

     He explained this other violent encounter, but Ada was not as pleased.  “Oh, I don’t like that at all!”  She shook her head.  “Not at all.  I don’t loke Harry either, but….  And that little vinyl piece of bone is his favorite niece, too.  They could have been in on it together and he was blocking your investigation with his noise.  But they LIKED Geegee.  It was Walter Prince.  Take my word.”

     Leaning toward Matt, she set three fingers on his nearer knee.  He ignored these.  “It still could have been Linda.  Or Holly, under that coat.  Or Harry.  Or Nairn.”

     “I think Carleton was in the jug by that time.  When Geegee was moved on, I mean.”

     “And Holly could….”

     Ada rocked back.  “If it was that flimsy little butter piecrust tart I will just spit.  No, no: my heart is set on Walter Prince.  You will send me a thank you note, won’t you, when they take him away and you wind up  with his cubicle and desk?  Or shall I come over and throw a housewarming?”

     Matt was busy with other possibilities.  Holly MacTaggart might have no motive for killing her Uncle Geegee but had every motive for annoying her stepgrandmother.  Or perhaps Marshall had killed his stepson after all, only Harry and Holly had found the photos tucked away somewhere.  But no: Marshall would surely have found and destroyed the pictures.  Unless he happened to like them.  Or Harry and Holly could be working on Marshall’s orders, as part of some massive plan Ada had no knowledge of.  Marshall could be listening in right now, ovr some hidden intercom.  That’s what this room looked like: the guidance counsellor’s office at his high school, with its secret tape recorders.

     He took out the thumbnail he’d been chewing on and wiped it on his sweater.  “Um, why don’t we think all this over and talk about it somewhere tomorrow?  We could, you know, make lists of suspects and motives and things.  And there might still be a clue in the tombstones: I can check the tombstone books at the library.  Maybe those were blackmail for somebody else, or he belonged to a genealogy club and we’ll find leads there.”

    He stood up.  “After lunch tomorrow, maybe.  Then….”

     Ada gazed up at him from where she was.  “You’re not leaving already!”

     “Well, I have errands and stuff.”  Matt threw a longing glance at the door.  “I, er, need to get to the bank before it closes.”

     Ada checked the clock on the wall.  “It’s barely ten-thirty!”

     “There could be a line!”  He strode to the door as she laughed and looked for the lock.  “And there are the tombstone books to find and…Christmas shopping to do!”

     “Have you measured me for size?”  She reached out and pulled the pictures into a stack.  “Something in silver lame would be nice.  Do you know I have never owned a silver lame anything?  What have those TV stars like Iris Chacon got that I haven’t got?”

     Matt was not prepared to answer that.

Dogs Resting

     One of the things which has aroused distaste among some observers and amused jealousy among others is the things dogs can get away with doing right out there in public.  Yes, other domesticated animals do the same things, but few people walk through the streets with their cows or ferrets or reindeer.

     The most popular of biological necessities among postcard cartoonists was the way dogs mark their territory.  One reason for this is that they can leave much of the gag in the mind of the viewer.  No need to draw urination in process and risk the censure of postal authorities.  All you need to do is show a dog in close proximity to a post or street sign and the reader does the rest.

     Experts agree that this is one of the best ways to sell a gag.  Your audience enjoys figuring out the punchline.  The artist here, of course, has done the wise thing and hedged the bet by giving us a dog in an anxious pose many of us are familiar with.

     As has this one.  Note that the gag in both cases relies partly on the pole standing in a vast area devoid of trees, which is NOT generally the way this works.  (And should there be concerns about this mixture of sacred and profane, there ARE postcards showing dogs watering tombstones and statues of saints.  THESE dogs are at least worried about it.)

     But even more obvious to the city viewer than the tree gag is the one about the dog and the fire hydrant.  This, of course, gave us the time-honored joke (sometimes seen on postcards) about the reporter who rushes into the newsroom to tell a bored editor he has the scoop of the decade.  The editor, not easily impressed, yawns, “What?  Man bites dog?”  “No,” the reporter replies, “But a fire hydrant sprayed one!”

     As a retired dog walker, I need to observe that no dog I ever walked was ever all that interested in hydrants.  This may simply be because the city where I did my pooch perambulations puts its hydrants on street corners, where the path is often obstructed by high grass, high ground, and/or broken concrete.  We kept ourselves to safer ground.  (Unless one of us spotted a squirrel.)

     The thing is that everyone sees the joke at once.  Dog?  Fire hydrant?  It’s a peeing gag.  Smile, chuckle, snort, as suits you, and then move on.  Quick and to the point.

     Even those who don’t walk dogs know a hydrant is just like the restroom at work, where news is spread and bladder pressure is relieved.

     In fact, I wonder if THIS cartoonist has not sabotaged the gag the man is making by including a dog and a hydrant in the scene.  Is the puppy here just an unfortunate choice for a bystander beast, as mentioned last week, something to fill space?  Or, seeing as how the young lady’s skirt is flying up, are we assumed to have a knowledge of the equally classic “Ladies first” joke?  If so, the puppy moves from Bystander Beast to secondary punch….  No, don’t pretend you don’t know that one.  I’ve seen what videos you watch on that phone.

Dogs and Their Pets

     As mentioned in our last thrilling episode, I have been checking through the new arrivals to the inventory, looking over the adventures of dogs.  Here it was that I discovered the existence of the Bystander Beast, animals whose conduct in a postcard is minor.  But there are plenty of postcards where the dog is at the center of activity, usually accompanied by a small boy.  (I have no idea what game they’re playing here; they may be making it up as they go along.)

     Ideally, a dog will get a new pet when it is very young, so the small boy can be trained up properly.

     This way, boy and dog can be equal partners, not to say accomplices, in any fun that is waiting around to be had.

     Otherwise, the small boy may get involved in less mutually joyful pastimes.  (Yes, I KNOW it is the kid who is wailing, blaming it all on the dog, who seems to be gloating.  But tying cans and other metal objects to a dog’s tail was no particular fun for the dog, who went running and howling around because it was frightened by the noise the tin cans made.  You don’t see this much nowadays, not because small boys are more considerate but because they can’t get the tin any more.)

     In fact, the postcard companies were well aware that the relationship between a dog and its pet is not guaranteed to run smooth.

     And yes, there ARE plenty of postcards about dogs with pet girls.  (Although artists were quick to suggest that the female pet can be fickle.)

     There are also examples of family dogs, though if the family is large, there’s a good chance the dog will become just a bystander beast watching the play of its pet family.  (In this case, however, the dog is doing its best to contribute to the general chaos.)

     Then there’s the working dog, which may have pets, of course, but which also has a serious job to tend to.  This one, for example, gives diligent attention to its primary responsibility: providing puns.

     While this racing dog is intent on making sure visiting pets enjoy their vacation.  (Remember the motto of resorts and convention organizers: “If you have any money left, you are not having a good time.”)

     I THINK Scottie here has a job in HR.  If that were his secretary, his supervision of whether she’s obeying the dress code would be questionable.

     And THIS lad is in Quality Assurance, making sure that the cream in the saucer is suitable for EVERY member of the family.  You may question why he has a pet cat in addition to his other responsibilities, but dogged effort will overcome the most stubborn prejudices.

LIKE A MIGHTY QUONKER, Chapter 23

     Matt had seen a lot of these poses before, of course.  The third of three boys in the family, he could hardly have grown up ignorant of certain pictorial journals.  But it was different when they were all performed by the same person, not to mention a person you knew.  AND a person who was just behind you, whispering technical details in which you had expressed no interest.

     Calm, he told himself.  Always stay calm.  He reached out to the nearest picture.  It had the same feel as the tombstone pictures and must be about the same vintage.  It also showed Ada holding something between her teeth.  Matt set the picture back down in exactly the same spot from which he had taken it.

     He let his eyes run along the columns, fearing sudden blindness at every photo.  Ada on a swing, Ada jumping through a hoop, Ada rolling over, Ada playing dead, Ada risking permanent spinal injury on a heart-shaped cushion.

     She looked smaller in black and white, he thought, particularly against the tan body of a man who must have been just an inch or so shorter than Matt.  In height, anyhow.

     The face was what gave him shudders: that eternal expression of exuberance, of good cheer, of enthusiasm even in positions where he would have expected…well, anything else.  Although the pictures had been taken at one time, over a period of Matt didn’t want to know how long, when the camera showed Ada’s face it never failed to show sheer amusement.

     Whereas the man’s expression varied.  Matt could tell her partner was older than she.  His hairline had retreated, but in good order, and the hair had not started to fade.  Lines bordered his features, but venerable lines, lines of experience.  The camera seemed to be catching some senior clergyman unawares: it was THAT kind of face.  The body was spare, well-muscled.  But by the time you arrived at the third line of photos, the face showed a man who was working.  By the fiftieth picture, the strain was really starting to show.

     The blush faded from Matt’s features as Matt-the-Writer took control of his brain.  House, coffee, playroom, even the three-dimensional (at least) Ada Silberwetter receded, leaving only Matt-the-Writer, looking over a series of pictures in quest of plot material.  That face: the man was forcing his smile, but not in the way of a man who he didn’t want to be here.  This was a man performing a smile because he knew there was a camera pointed at him.

     Matt’s eyes ran across the disreputable rows again.  The pictures had all been taken from the same angle, the fixed distance of the camera preventing the obscuring detail of professional photography.  A couple of shots had even missed the main action entirely, catching only a blur that might have been an arm or leg moving past the heroine of the series.  What Matt could see now and again of the room behind all this intricate sweat-swapping was too tidy, just a tad too photogenic.  The square, neat unfulfilled bed was just set dressing, with neither headboard nor footboard, and tiny, square pillows unfit for sleeping.  The pillows especially said motel, very cheap motel, if nothing worse.

      As Matt-the-Writer concentrated on clues in the background, he noticed something most cheap motels did NOT provide.  A skull grinned out from about half the photos.

     “Miss Skull!”

     “Sure!”

     Reality rushed back around him; his senses revealed again the woman offering perfumed warmth not far away.  Holding one photo before him like a shield, he demanded, “That’s the same skull in that other picture, right?”

     Ada Silberwetter’s underlip slid out.  “Sure,” she said, her shrug showing mock peevishness that he had even noticed the macabre prop.  “He took it everywhere with him: it was his lucky charm.  He named it Miss Skull himself.  But I haven’t seen it in years.”

     Matt set the picture back among the others.  He wondered if he really wanted to ask.  He asked.  “Who is he?”

     Ada wriggled her shoulders, jeopardizing the feeble hold her robe had on them.  “He was a wrong number and he sounded cute.  I didn’t actually find out his name until the eight or ninth….”

     Matt’s face stiffened.  “I didn’t ask for steamy details.  What’s his name?”

     She stuck her tongue out at him.  Matt winced: he had seen it a lot in a lot of the pictures.  “Well, it was Jerry.”

     Her laugh bubbled through Matt’s long sigh.  “Well, Jerry Silberwetter,, then.”

     She laughed again as his glasses slid to the end of his nose.  He glared over them, hoping to catch sight of any humor in this.  “Jerry Silberwetter.”

     Ada was fighting to keep her face steady.  “Name rings a bell, does it?”

     “Marshall Silberwetter’s son, the first head of Dow…my department?”  He reached for his coffee in hopes of some support.

     “Down wasn’t your department in those days.  And, anyway, he’s only a stepson, something Marshall picked up in one of his early, ill-advised marriages.”  One hand waved all previous Mrs. Silberwetters to perdition.  “And I hadn’t so much as met Marshall at the time.”

     “The son that’s dead?”

     “One hopes so.  They buried him.”

     Matt set the coffee cup back down.  He wished it had gotten even colder than it was; the air suddenly seemed hot in here.  Choosing one of the less frenzied photos, he raised it to study the man’s face again.  Ada came up on her knees to look around his arm.

     “You know, I can still get both my feet….”

     “Where were these taken?”

     She sat back.  “A little place called the Hot Shots’ Motel.  Less a motel, really, than a convenience store.”

     Matt licked his lips.  Was it hot in here, or was it just her?  “They didn’t mind someone bringing in a camera?”

     “Oh, lots of people brought cameras.”  She slid her feet under her thighs.  Matt moved his eyes back to the photos, which were at least just black and white.  “As long as you kept everything to your room, they wouldn’t have blinked if you brought in a horse.”

     Matt glared at her over his glasses again.  She had to turn aside to stifle a laugh.  “What we liked especially was the discount for city employees.  For services rendered after you got back to the office, understand. It couldn’t last forever: the owner lost his friends and got washed away in a purge years…a while back.  Somebody else owns it now and they redecorated, or we could have gone clue hunting there.”

     Matt saw that there were a FEW bright spots in this story.  The Hot Shots’ Motel sounded like the last place he wanted to visit.  Ada reached around him and grabbed a photo from the bottom row.  She looked it up and down.  “I think he hid the camera somewhere near the smoke alarm.”

     “Who?”  Matt frowned at the picture now.  “He took these himself?  Did you know about it at…the time?”

     She set the picture back in line.  “Well, why else would someone keep pulling me back into the same part of the room?  I kind of expected video, but I suppose it was easier for him to make copies this way.  Remember, this was a couple years ago.”

     Matt glanced back at the pictures and decided it was more than that, but he was aguest in this house, after all.  “You knew all along?”

     Ada leaned back, threw her shoulders to one side, and put her hands behind her head.  “Geegee—we called him Geegee—Geegee was really into little automatic cameras.  He told me he was going to make his fortune with them once, while he was tinkering…with a camera, I mean.  I thought he meant he’d invent a better one, but he had something quicker in mind.  They sat around wherever he was—in the office, in the apartment—and people forgot they were there, and that they might be taking pictures.”

      Matt reached one finger to his right ear.  Sweat was gathering under the bow of his glasses.  “It wasn’t just you he, er, caught?”

      She smiled.  “Oh, Geegee had lots of pictures.  But he had such a nice, light touch.  Everyone told him, you know, that the City didn’t need a central information office, that the little department libraries did the job.  So he built the whole department on pictures: he’d swap one for staffing, or he’d swap one for a little better budget.  Honest with it, too: he always gave up the photo AND the negative as soon as he got what he wanted.  Everybody trusted Geegee.”

     Matt’s collar felt tight.  “Until somebody killed him.”

     Ada leaned back a little farther than Matt thought prudent, and sighed.  “I guess blackmail’s like any other bad habit. If you go on with it long enough, it’s bad for your health no matter how careful you are.”

     The pictures seemed to ripple before his eyes.  Matt took his glasses off and wiped his nose.  “Why so many?  I mean, if you weren’t married to Marshall yet, what did he think he could get?”  That he wasn’t already getting, Matt decided not to add.

     She blinked and folded her hands coyly just above the waistline of the robe.  “Maybe he decided I was meant for great things.  Or maybe it was force of habit.  Or he liked a souvenir: all work and no play, you know.”

      Matt’s throat clogged a little with horror, somewhat about the story he was hearing but more because she seemed so unhorrified by it.  “So you weren’t married to Marshall yet.  But did Marshall…know about this?”  He waved his hand at the display.

     She shrugged.  “Once I WAS married to the Lamb, his stepson sent ME a couple of pictures, suggesting maybe Marshall wouldn’t like them.  And then he died.  A burglar broke in, they said, and stole all his cameras.  I difured all his papers and pictures got thrown away in the fuss.”

     Her face changed and she leaned forward, nostrils flaring.  “It makes me so mad.”  She flung a hand toward the rows of photos.  “It’s one thing to be blackmailed by Geegee, who had the guts to take the pictures.  But I don’t have to take it from some little wart who just swiped them off a dead man!”

     She sat back again, heaped now like an infuriated beanbag chair.  Matt was painfully aware that she was breathing hard.

     “Now, let me get the whos and whens straight.”  Matt focused  in bits of carpet between the model and her eighty-one glossies.  “You didn’t know Marhsall yet.  Jerry Silberwetter took all these pictures.  After you married Marshall, Jerry started offering to sell you some.  Did Marshall know Jerry was contacting you?”

     “Probably.  He’s very clever.”  Her eyes locked onto Matt’s; there was no smile in them.  “I do like him the best of all my husbands so far.  I wouldn’t like to have anything very bad happen to him.”

     Matt would have let this pass but her eyes told him it had importance.  He thought it over and then asked, “Did he do it?”

     Her head jerked down and to one side.  “Well, it….”

     Both Matt’s hands came up, frantically erasing the words.  “Sorry,” he said.  “Stupid question.”

     “I believe that,” she replied, raising a pair of soft eyebrows.  “But why?”

     “He’d have made sure he got all the pictures.”

     Ada’s face came ablaze with teeth and dimples.  “Why, of course!”  She clapped her hands.  “Anyone would be that smart!  If you killed Geegee because of the pictures, you’d naturally…and there were so many!  You’d have to take them all!  My!  Now we are getting somewhere!”

     She sat back again, looking Matt up and down with admiration.  He was glad to have done something so wonderful, whatever it was.  “Why?” he demanded.

     “Don’t you see?” she demanded.  “If we find the little wart who stole the pictures, we find the murderer.  E-excellent!”

     If you want to meet murderers, thought Matt.

Bystander Beasts

      I was checking through the new inventory, searching for bloggable data and found, as usual, that there are plenty of outhouse cards, fishing cards, and dog cards.  What this says about the priorities of our ancestors I am hesitant to declare.  In any case, the dogs are busy with all the usual dog activities: deciding where to pee, guarding property, deciding where to pee, comforting their owners, deciding where to pee, chasing rabbits, deciding where to…and then I observed one class of dog activity I hadn’t particularly noticed before.

     These are dogs which are simple bystanders.  They are just standing around in the cartoon.  An artist might have a term for this: maybe they give perspective, maybe they are just an interesting filler for space that would otherwise be unoccupied.  The joke does not depend on them.  They’re in the picture just to react to what’s going on.

     Dog bystanders were something of a staple with Ray Walters, producing his vignettes of Middle America at the Curt Teich Company.  Whatever is happening, the scene will generally be witnessed by a scruffy brown terrier type.

     Who is not always just a passive witness.

     Mind you, dogs are not the only species of bystander beast, even in the works of Walters.  If a squirrel balanced the picture better, a squirrel would be his witness.

     Bob Perley, meanwhile, was nearly as famous for the jackrabbit who was generally looking on (and sometimes adding reinforcement) to his gags of the wild, wild west.

     This must have something to do with filling out the eye’s expectations.  Here we have two bystander beats, presumably because we had empty space on each side of the outhouse.

     Birds made excellent bystanders as well, as they might fly or wander into any old scene in the natural scheme of things.

     As noted with Bob Petley’s impudent hare, the bystander beast is allowed to take part in the humor of the situation, as long as it isn’t the source of the MAIN gag.  This fish, for example, doesn’t have much to do with the pun about lines.  He’s simply drawing your attention to the fact (if you happened to miss it) that the primary purpose of this cartoon was as a pinup.

     Ray Walters was able to add this kind of bystander as well.  Here his bystander piles a little extra joke on top of the main one.  After all, this mascot’s uniform fits perfectly.

Rolling Right

     The question of how to install the roll of toilet paper is, I am told, one of the most hotly-debated questions of the past century or so.  Only the fact that the roll takes a while to be used up is apparently the only thing that keeps it from being as large an issue in the average marriage as resetting the thermostat or the proper position for the toilet seat.  Articles have been written in which reporters asked assorted celebrities whether THEIR toilet paper is dispensed over or under the roll.  (I don’t recall which celebrities were which, nor whether opposing sides married each other, but I DO remember which ones added that they used up toilet paper faster than other people because, fearing bristle damage from toothbrushes, they just rubbed their teeth with a sheet of toilet paper after each meal.  Yeah, that’s the kind of thing that moves into my brain and ignores eviction notices.)

     From here, of course, writers frequently move on to the history of the product.  They MUST refer to the breakthrough research of this century, when one clever little rabbit decided to look up the original patent application.  Yes, the inventor shows the roll loaded so the paper is delivered over the top of the roll.  As if THAT solved anything.

     More enterprising authors will rummage up an online photo of one of the rare toilet paper books our more genteel ancestors used before the roll came along.  This was a bound volume of tissue paper pages of assorted colors which could be torn out as required.  The photo automatically leads to a consideration of the similar use to which the Sears Roebuck catalog was put.

     It’s not a thing I brag about, but I AM old enough to have known people who could reminisce about those difficult days when they reached for the catalog only to discover that other family members had used all the black and white pages.  The catalog would not be replaced with another until all the pages were gone, and those slick colored leaves showing summer hats were NOT optimized for this secondary function.  I am even old enough to have had a teacher who begged our pardon while responding to a complaint with “Well, that’s rough as a cob.”  He was unaware that not a person in the room understood the apology, being too young to recall when corncobs took the place of Sears’s home convenience.

      Another thing I don’t brag about is that I realized at an early age that as long as the toilet paper was around when needed, I didn’t especially notice whether it came to me over or under the roll.  The reason I don’t brag about this is that it usually leads to That Look.  I should be used to it by now, I suppose.  Maybe it’s not the Look but that little half step backward.

      I THINK I usually install a new roll so the paper comes out over the roll, but I cannot vouch for my consistency in this matter.  I plead in my defense only that I DID live for years in an apartment where the toilet paper roll hung to the left of the throne, which is naturally going to throw off the routines of a righthanded user.

     Moving past the obvious conclusion we should be arriving at from all of this–that writers short on things to write about can always get a page or so writing about potty paper—we observe that, unlike outhouses, rolls of toilet paper get almost no representation on postcards of the past.  Of course, the outdoor toilet prompted both chuckles and nostalgia, whereas jokes about toilet PAPER risked reopening the argument about proper display.  (You will note, by the way, that  two of the three postcards which show the roll hanging up have the paper descending over the top of the roll.  This may just be anecdotal data to you low rollers, but the evidence is right there on the paper.)

LIKE A MIGHTY QUONKER, Chapter 22

     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.”