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often enough in the past. Meetings usually made him more irritable than usual, especially when there were unpleasant decisions to be made that he wanted to avoid.
    “He looked drunk to me,” Melissa went on. “Smashed. Muttering into the camera. He must’ve set it up on his desk.”
    “What did he say?”
    She made a little shrug. “Most of it was hard to understand. He did a lot of mumbling. But he had that Magnum on his desk and he said something about somebody trying to kill him. ‘The gun’s for protection,’ he said. ‘This gun’s going to save me.’”
    “And?”
    “That’s about it. A lot of it was incomprehensible. Greg says he’s going to get some experts to go over the disk and extract as much from it as they can.”
    “Has he shown it to the police?”
    “Not yet. He just got it himself; it was delivered through the interoffice mail.”
    “It took more than a month to get a videodisk fifty feet down the hall?”
    Melissa almost smiled. “Greg’s been in New York all this time. He just got back yesterday and started going through his mail.”
    “Oh. I see.” Paul looked out the picture window toward the riverfront, then turned back to Melissa. She seemed tense, wary. But not angry, the way she’d been at the board meeting.
    He asked her, “Why are you telling me this?”
    “Figured you ought to know.”
    “You’re not sore at me? About Joanna, I mean?”
    A flicker of something crossed her face, but she regained her self-control almost immediately. “It hurt when you dumped me, Paul.”
    Feeling flustered, he spread his hands and said defensively, “I didn’t exactly dump you, did I?”
    Her voice deathly calm, Melissa replied, “Call it what you want. Soon’s you started after the boss’s wife you didn’t have any time for me.”
    “I fell in love,” Paul said.
    Melissa swept her almond eyes around the big office in a long, exaggerated inspection. “Yeah,” she said finally. “I can see that.”
    Paul wished he could get angry at her, but he was terribly afraid that she was right.
    “Well, anyway, thanks for the news.”
    “Sure.” She got up to leave and for the first time Paul noticed the forest green miniskirt that clung to her hips and her long slim legs encased in patterned green stockings.
    “Who in the hell would want to kill Gregory?” he muttered as she headed for the door.
    Melissa turned back toward him. “Maybe it was the guy who took over his job. And his wife.”
    Paul sagged back in his chair, stunned. “You don’t mean that!”
    She shrugged again. “That’s what Greg thinks. That’s what he’s going to tell the police.”
    *       *       *
    For a long while Paul sat at his desk, staring out the window, looking at nothing. In his mind’s eye he saw Gregory sitting in this same room, with a Smith & Wesson .357 Magnum from his gun collection in the wall cabinet sitting on the desk in front of him and a half-empty decanter of Gentleman Jack beside it.
    He put the gun in his mouth and blew his head off, Paul told himself. Nobody murdered him. The bastard committed suicide, but first he made that pissing disk to leave as much trouble behind him as he could. He knew about Joanna and me. The disk’s his revenge on us.
    But why did Joanna have his body cremated? You can’t exhume a cremated body and look for evidence of murder.
    Paul shook his head, trying to clear the suspicions away. Slowly he got up from his chair and walked to the big window overlooking the riverfront. He glanced at his wristwatch, then looked past the docks and boats, past the river itself, out into the clear blue sky, just starting to darken with twilight.
    And there it was, a bright gleaming star moving rapidly from west to east, cutting across the sky in silent purposefulness. The Rockledge space station. It seemed to beckon Paul like a steady, unwavering hope.
    Tonight, Paul said to himself. I’ll be up there tonight. I’ll leave all this shit behind me and be