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chuckled.
    “Just a typical American home, Mr. Stanislaus,” I said. “I guess it doesn’t get any more valuable than that.”
    “Oh, please.” He looked pained.
    I said, “You wouldn’t know anything about where the old man went that used to live in the house across the street. He was there at the time of the shooting.”
    Mayk said, “He’s dead or in a home. Got to be.”
    “Old Stash?” Stanislaus was looking at me. “Hell, he’s still there. They’ll have to peel him off the big iron ball.”
    “Christ, he must be ninety.” Mayk’s tone was hushed.
    “Nearer a hundred. But you better watch him if you’re going over there. That old man’s crazy.”

5
    I T WAS A COOL NIGHT. A low ceiling had rolled in and the lights of the city rinsed the clouds’ bellies in cold pale light. A horn sounded out Woodward way like a lone goose on the water. The rushing sound underneath might have been wind through pines, but it was Goodyear rubber on damp asphalt. Our shoes slithered through the overgrown grass in Stanislaus’s yard. The crickets had gone back to bed. My winter suit was at the cleaner’s being scraped and damp air found its way through my imitation seersucker without any detours. Mayk seemed comfortable enough in just his sweatshirt and jeans. He was big enough to provide his own heat.
    “Think your wife will mind my borrowing you a little longer?” I asked him when we reached the street. With barricades at both ends we stood in the middle like idiot dogs.
    “She can wait. She’s the one wanted the part-time job.”
    We went on across the street and up a narrow walk that was going back to jungle. Senile weeds hung in clumps like old men’s chins over the edges, obliterating the bread-colored concrete in places and slobbering on our pantslegs as we walked through them. The house had been painted white once with red trim, but the red was curling away from the door and window casings in long slashes and the white was rubbed down to leaden-hued board beneath. The gutters had begun to secede from the cornices and the city light reflecting down off the clouds showed through the rust-perforated iron. Up close some of the window panes were fresh naked plywood. Blunt advice of a scatological nature decorated the front of the house in spray-painted loops. The paint still smelled.
    We mounted the porch. A rake and a garden spade caked with orange rust and dusty Coke bottles left over from the days of the two-cent deposit lay on the seat of a long wicker bench there. No young lovers or anyone else had sat on it in a long time. The name S. LEPOSAVA was embossed in white letters on a strip of cracked blue tape on the mailbox.
    “This was a nice place nineteen years ago,” Mayk said.
    “Everything was nicer nineteen years ago.” I pushed the button. It made a grating sound in its scabbed socket but there was no answering ring or buzz from inside. I put my knuckles to work.
    A brief pause, and then a loud flat bang and a silvery tinkle from the back of the house.
    Mayk was already off the porch, tugging his Python out of his belt. “You take the front,” he barked.
    I tried the knob. It wasn’t interested in turning today. But the lock was strictly Calvin Coolidge and I shattered it in two kicks. The door sprang inward and I hit the floor.
    No one shot at me. I was crouched in starting position on a thin rug from which most of the leaf pattern and all of the color had been trodden years ago, with feathery balls of dust darting about in the current of air stirred by the open door. In front of me were the claw foot and heavy turned leg of a massive oak table, and in the electric light leaking from another room a ring of dark paintings in swollen gilt frames of bearded faces so hostile-looking they had to belong to saints glared down at me from the walls. It was a brown room with tired umber paper on the walls and ceiling and bronze-colored curtains without luster over the windows and dirty beige baseboards