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had gone brown already, in big, deep, caked puddles. It was a great deal of blood, as if he’d danced before he dropped. It spread to splashes and stains on walls and furniture as well.
    The windows were boarded with painted plywood. In addition to the overhead socket, where a dim bulb burned, large photographic lights were placed on stands around the walls. They had been turned off but still cast vestigial warmth to a hand held near them. Along one wall of the room, a shelf held three or four Nikons. We supply the equipment. The furniture consisted of one double-bed mattress covered with once-white sheets and a loveseat in pink plush. One wall sported a large mirror.
    Roses on the dirty wallpaper in the stricken room—the same wallpaper as in the front room—carried the color of Smykal’s blood onto the wall, where their cousins, splotches of actual blood, joined them. Cardboard coffee cups stood or lay on the floor, some used as ashtrays. Pot was among the smells, its rancid reek striving against that of Smykal’s emptied bowels. Although the man had apparently been filming when Fred was here earlier, there was no immediate sign of his work, nor of who had been here with him.
    Decisions must be made, Fred knew. The important thing was to keep himself and Clayton out of this. With the man dead and Fred caught unexpectedly with his cooling meat and listening for company, the first thing he did was to remind himself of the large horizontal stain of comparative cleanliness on the wall in the front room, where the newly exposed roses were pinker and more hopeful, marking the place from which Clayton’s purchase had come the afternoon before. In Molly’s house, at this minute, was a painting Fred had brought from here. Anyone with half an eye would see that something was missing.
    â€œBeautiful,” Fred said.
    Unless more fruitful lines of inquiry opened, the cops were going to put together the beaten corpse and the absence on Smykal’s wall, which would match a painting on Clayton’s, in case unhappy future accident should tie Clay to his alias, and lead a team of inquiry to his doorstep. Fred rearranged some of the larger crotch-art photos so that the painting’s former home was covered by Smykal’s crasser, more direct, more vulgar predilection.
    *   *   *
    Cambridge is a city. People go in and out of buildings all the time. Nobody notices, maybe. But Fred had been at or near Smykal’s apartment three times in less than twelve hours, and he’d just not ten minutes ago held the downstairs door open for a smiling young man and his bicycle. He’d asked for Smykal’s stuff, using his name, at Kinko’s—and Smykal’s name was about to be a household word. For all the normal inattention of the human witness, Fred tended to stand out. He looked like something Max Beckman had painted, Molly said, walking into a Glackens picnic: a large, hard-looking, crew-cut man whom someone must have seen, more than once, entering the building—most recently at about the time Smykal passed over.
    Fred looked at the terrain and listened. The body had been dead for over an hour, in his judgment; if sirens had been alerted, they would have been here already.
    He’d come for a letter, and he might as well take a look, since there was not going to be another opportunity.
    I’ll give it seven minutes, Fred thought. After that, Clay’s on his own.
    Fred moved with practiced silence, touching nothing with his skin, using his handkerchief to shift anything he had to move. The pockets of Smykal’s clothing were explored first, since Smykal lay on his back and his coat had fallen open. The limbs moved easily, not yet acknowledging the diligent messengers of death that tell you, Stiffen up. The meat sighed involuntarily when moved, as new-made bodies do. Smykal had nothing Fred wanted in his suit coat or in his other pockets, except for the