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picked up the card and tilted his head back to read it through his bifocals-"Mr. Brandstetter will join us for martinis." 
    "Oh?" She stood in the doorway, a squat glass in each hand. The olives stirred, the ice cubes rattled. "Why?" 
    "I need to find Peter. Maybe you can tell me something that will give me a lead." 
    Her ice-blue eyes watched him for a quarter of a minute, then she gave a shrug and turned away. "I doubt it. But come in." 
    Under friendlier circumstances, snug would have been the word for the back room. Red leather armchairs faced a low golden- oak table where a Tiffany lamp glowed over books, catalogues, a loose stack of letters. The top letter looked like a booklist. He frowned. Where had he seen that elegantly engraved letterhead before? He shook his head. He couldn't remember. 
    On a desk under a window of wired frosted glass an old black L. C. Smith waited between stacked books stuck with slips of paper and a marbled pasteboard box of file cards. The desk was a bar too. Bottles glinted there. Shelves went darkly up all around, weighted by books and supplies. Eve Oats handed Dave a martini in a glass that matched hers and Norwood's but had a chip in its rim. Norwood, still looking pale, waved at a chair. 
    "Thanks." Dave sat and waited for them to sit. He looked at Eve. "Has Peter been to you? Did he come home?" 
    "What for?" She lit a cigarette. Her hands were unsteady. The match flame jittered. She shook it out and said flatly, "When he left home he took everything he owned." She blew smoke away as if it annoyed her, and swallowed a third of her drink. "He decided in his infant wisdom that I'd wronged his precious father and he hated me, couldn't live under the same roof with me another minute." 
    A sour smile tugged a corner of her mouth. 
    " 'All right,' I said, 'go if you want to.' I think it shook him. He'd expected motherly tears and pleadings. The young live by cliche. But he went, grimly. No. I haven't seen him since." She took another long swallow of her drink. On the far side of the table the silent Norwood worked on his like an assignment. "I don't expect to. He was always stubborn. I'll never forget the fight he put up as a baby when the time came for him to begin eating solid food. Let me tell you" — her laugh was like crackling glass — "it was a contest of wills. I very nearly didn't win. He was determined to starve to death rather than eat that repulsive goop." 
    She finished off the drink and reached across the circle of light to collect Norwood's derelict ice cube. Her hand paused over Dave's drink. Her eyebrows queried. But he'd barely nicked it and he shook his head. She got up and rattled glass some more in the shadows around the desk. "I could tell you a boring succession of anecdotes about that child's mulishness." 
    "He was wrong about you and John Oats?" 
    "He had no understanding whatever of how things were." She came back and set Norwood's drink in front of him and dropped into her chair again. "He was far too young. They get the idea that because their arms and legs stretch and they're suddenly as tall as their parents, they're adults. Of course he was wrong." She shook another cigarette from its hardpack. Marlboro. 
    "You didn't walk out on Peter's father when he was fighting for his life?" 
    The hand with the cigarette stopped on its way to her mouth. Her eyes narrowed and glinted dangerously. 
    "He's talked to April," Charles Norwood said. 
    "Ah. Has he." She didn't ask it, she said it. "Well" — she set the cigarette in her mouth, scratched a paper match and talked to Norwood — "I was going to tell him to go to hell with his prying." The match was curling black inside the flame. She touched the flame to her cigarette and dropped the match in the ashtray and leveled a hard look at Dave. "But I think I want to set the record straight. A short time after Miss April came to work here I found her with John in — shall we be elegant about it? — a