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apologize. How is your health, dear?”
    “I am alive,” she said, “and so my health is excellent. And you? Your family?”
    “All in the pink,” I assured her. “Doctor, when may I see you?”
    “Personal?”
    “Not me,” I protested. “I’m the most normal and well-adjusted of men.”
    She coughed a laugh. “Let’s just say you’ve come to terms with your madness. So it’s professional?”
    “Yes. One of my discreet inquiries. To be billed to McNally and Son. Can you fit me in?”
    “I have a cancellation this morning at noon. You can make it?”
    “Of course I can and shall with great pleasure. The couch won’t be necessary.”
    She laughed again in her rattly voice. “Don’t be so sure, bubeleh. Remember: The older the violin, the sweeter the music.”
    I had plenty of time to stop at a gourmet bakery and buy a pound of raspberry rugalach, which I knew Dr. Gussie dearly loved. Then I pointed the Miata’s nose southward. It was a day designed for convertibles, for the sky was unblemished and a ten-knot breeze smelled faintly of salt. I don’t remember singing but if I did, it was probably “It’s a Most Unusual Day.” Or it might have been “I’ve Got a Lovely Bunch of Coconuts.”
    The psychiatrist’s office in Lantana always reminded me of the New York aphorism: “If I had my life to live over again, I’d like to live it over a delicatessen.” Not that Dr. Pearlberg worked over a deli, but her second-floor office was atop an antique shop. Rather fitting, wouldn’t you say, since they were both dealing with the past.
    In fact, her office might have been furnished by her downstairs neighbor. It was all flocked wallpaper, dusty velvet drapes, lumpy brown furniture, and a couch covered with what appeared to be crackled black horse-hide. Dim diplomas hung on the walls and there were chipped plaster busts of Freud, Beethoven, and one I could not identify but which looked unaccountably like Zero Mostel.
    The entire chamber resembled a photo of a Viennese psychiatrist’s consulting room of the 1920s. Adding to this illusion was the light, for no matter what time of day I visited, the office seemed suffused with a sepia tone, everything gently faded. That room deserved to be preserved in an album, the way things were in the bygone.
    “Bubeleh!” Dr. Pearlberg said, and, as was her wont, kissed the tip of a forefinger and pressed it against my cheek. “What a delight to see you again. How handsome you look!”
    I proffered the box of pastries. She ripped it open immediately and popped one into her mouth, groaning with contentment. “Thank you, thank you, thank you,” she said. “What a treat for a relic like me.”
    “Nonsense,” I said. “Dr. Gussie, you’re getting younger as I get older. Do you think that’s fair?”
    “What a scamp you are,” she said, “fooling a fat bobbeh. Now sit down and light a cigarette so I can have one.”
    I did as she directed. I sat in a sagging armchair alongside her elephantine desk. We both lighted up, blowing plumes of smoke toward the stained ceiling.
    “So?” she said. “What’s the problem?”
    “A client, who shall be nameless, thinks his life is being threatened. I believe his fear is justified.”
    I then described the three untoward acts to which Hiram Gottschalk had been subjected: the slashed photo, the mass card, the strangled bird. Dr. Pearlberg listened to my recital intently. She finished her cigarette and lighted another from the butt of the first.
    She was a squatty woman, almost as broad as she was tall. Pillowy face. Her wig was a virulent orange and she did have a hazy but discernible mustache, neither of which bothered her or anyone else who knew and admired her. She may have looked like a granny but she had a mental prowess that made the rest of us feel like village idiots.
    When I had concluded, she said, “I don’t like it.”
    “Nor do I,” I said, and told her that although I had only started my investigation I had