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Kinko’s receipt in his wallet, which Fred took in order to deep-six it. It was just as well that Clay’s letter wasn’t on the body: soaked with Smykal’s fluids, it would complicate the painting’s provenance more than it would help it.
    Aside from studio and sitting room, the apartment had kitchen, bathroom, and bedroom, everything thick with greasy dust. The bathroom doubled as a darkroom. Tub and sink were full of trays, which had been knocked about, as if the discussion that Smykal had ultimately lost in the studio had started here. The room was fixed with red light and festooned with strings and clips for drying prints.
    Smykal’s bedroom was so filled with offal it was difficult to get into. The papers on and in the desk were in disarray, tending to be bills. Fred went through them, finding nothing—neither the letter he wanted nor any sign of Clay’s payment. The single bed was unmade. A green blind on the room’s only window was nailed down so it could not be lifted to let light in, or air. Dirty clothes bulged in a bag on the painted brown wood floor. Other dirty clothes hung in the closet.
    Fred checked the bureau. The open top drawer held a busted gold watch and chain, collar tabs, stamps, cuff links, a class ring from Boston College, odd things there wouldn’t be names for, knickknacks, and a tin box whose cover showed lavender lozenges. It shook like lozenges. The rest of the drawers held only clothes. Soiled garments were in the upper drawers, clean in the lower. Smykal had a migratory system to eliminate the need for washing machines. Fred realized, looking up from his search, that only the cool glass over the dresser, a mirror that one could tip, was almost clean.
    Smykal’s phone sat on a bedside table. The man evidently had not read in bed but had used a good deal of Kleenex, which he scattered around the room in stiff wads. Smykal had favored khaki blankets and sheets of a compromised gray. There ought to be papers. If the man had been as obsessive-compulsive as all photographers—or pornographers—must be to be successful, he should have kept files of annotated prints and negatives, records in general. On the room’s apparently Oriental rug, next to the dresser, Fred found corner indentations and an oblong shape delineated by a lesser degree of ground filth, suggesting the shape of an absent file cabinet.
    Whoever took the old man out, Fred thought, took out a box also.
    It was the likely place for Clayton’s letter.
    Fred studied the situation. “All this sex,” he muttered. “That and the dope and the smell—everything about him—the guy had a million chances to rub someone the wrong way.
    â€œIt’s not your business, Fred,” he told himself. “At least, so far. Let’s keep it that way.”
    With each moment the possibility of his being discovered increased, and that would complicate things. He must get outside and signal Clayton Reed to maintain that neither of them had been here, until and unless it became impossible to deny.
    Fred looked down once again at Smykal’s grotesque corpse: seedy, shabby, sliding into full decomposition.
    â€œFarewell, then, little one,” he said.
    To get out by the back door, Fred had to pass through the kitchen, whose smell was more intense but different, going colder, heavier. It had settled to waist level, like a fog. Unwashed dishes leered in the sink. Almost-empty cans and jars bulged in crammed garbage bags under the sink: offensive heaps of semi-abstraction without conviction or purpose.
    Fred checked the fridge (sour milk and unused film), the stove, and a bookshelf that served as pantry for cornflakes, mustard, canned peas and corn, and boxed puddings you mix yourself. Bottles of port and sherry lurched on the bottom shelf, jostling against nasty special gilded glasses. No letter, and no sign of Smykal’s supply of sweet white powder, either. Like as