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kids in this neighborhood as far as I know."
    "True enough," I said. Ours was primarily a community of retirees. It was always possible, of course, that a roving band of thugs had targeted the apartment. Maybe they figured that any place this crummy looking had to be a cover for something good.
    "Nuts!" Chester said with disgust. "I'm going down and wait for the police. Soon as you two crime experts finish your analysis, you can get the place cleaned up."
    I gave him a look. "I'm not going to
clean
the damn place."
    "I wasn't talking to you," he said. "Bucky, you and Babe get busy."
    "You better wait for the cops," I said.
    He swung around and stared at me. "Why is that?"
    "Because this is a crime scene. The cops might want to dust for prints."
    Chester's face seemed to darken. "This is bullshit. There's something not right about this." He made a motion in my direction. "You can come on down with me."
    I glanced back at Bucky. "I wouldn't touch anything if I were you. You don't want to screw around with evidence."
    "I hear you," he said.
    Chester gestured impatiently for me to pick up the pace.
    On the way down the steps, I glanced at my watch. It was 1:15 and already I was tired of taking crap from this guy. I'll take crap when I'm paid for it, but I don't like doing it without compensation.
    Chester clumped into the kitchen and went straight to the refrigerator, where he jerked open the door. He took out a jar of mayonnaise, mustard, bottled hot sauce, a packet of bologna, and a loaf of Wonder white bread. Had he ordered me to come down here so I could supervise his lunch?
    "I apologize if I was rough, but I don't like what's going on," he said gruffly. He wasn't looking at me, and I was tempted to do a double take to see if there was someone else in the room. He'd dropped the imperious attitude and was talking in a normal tone of voice.
    "You have a theory?"
    "I'll get to that in a bit. Grab a chair."
    At least he had my attention. I took a seat at the kitchen table and watched in fascination as he started his preparations. Somehow in my profession I seem to spend a lot of time in kitchens looking on while men make sandwiches, and I can state categorically, they do it better than women. Men are fearless. They have no interest in nutrition and seldom study the list of chemicals provided on the package. I've never seen a man cut the crusts off the bread or worry about the aesthetics of the "presentation." Forget the sprig of parsley and the radish rosette. With men, it's strictly a grunt-and-munch operation.
    Chester banged a cast-iron skillet on the burner, flipped the gas on, and tossed in a knuckle of butter, which began to sizzle within seconds. "I sent Bucky out to live with his granddad, which turned out to be a mistake. I figured the two of them could look after each other. Next thing I know, Bucky's hooked up with that gal. I got nothing against Babe… she's a dim-wit, but so's he… I just think the two of 'em got no business being married."
    "Johnny didn't warn you?"
    "Hell, he probably encouraged it. Anything to make trouble. He was a sneaky old coot."
    I let that one pass, leaving him to tell the story his way. There was an interval of quiet while he tended to his cooking. The bologna was pale pink, the size of a bread-and-butter plate, a perfect circle of compacted piggie by-products. Chester tossed in the meat without even pausing to remove the rim of plastic casing. While the bologna was frying, he slathered mayonnaise on one slice of bread and mustard on the other. He shook hot sauce across the yellow mustard in perfect red polka dots.
    As a child I was raised with the same kind of white bread, which had the following amazing properties: If you mashed it, it instantly reverted to its unbaked state. A loaf of this bread, inadvertently squished at the bottom of a grocery bag, was permanently injured and made very strange-shaped sandwiches. On the plus side, you could roll it into little pellets and flick them