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no longer quite steady. `Ìf it's
    about the lease, you'll have to give me a day or two to get squared around. It seems
    my secretary just discovered she had
    pressing business back home in Armpit, Idaho.''
    Landry paid absolutely no attention to this feeble effort on my part to shift the
    focus of the conversation. ``Yes,'' he
    said in a musing tone of voice, `Ì imagine it's been the granddaddy of bad days . . .
    and it's my fault. I'm sorry,
    Clyde--really. Meeting you in person has been . . . well, not what I expected. Not at
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    all. For one thing, I like you quite
    a bit better than I expected to. But there's no going back now.'' And he fetched a
    deep sigh. I didn't like the sound of it
    very much.
    ``What do you mean by that?'' My voice was trembling worse than ever now, and the
    blaze of hope was dying. Lack of
    oxygen inside the cave-in site which had once been my brain seemed to be the cause.
    He didn't answer right away. He leaned over instead, and grasped the handle of the
    slim leather case leaning against the
    front leg of the client's chair. The initials stamped on it were S.D.L., and I deduced
    that my weird visitor had brought it
    in with him. I didn't win the Shamus of the Year Award in 1934 and '35 for nothing,
    you know.
    I had never seen a case quite like it in my life--it was too small and too slim to be
    a briefcase, and it was fastened not
    with buckles and straps but with a zipper. I'd never seen a zipper quite like this
    one, either, now that I thought about it.
    The teeth were extremely tiny, and they hardly looked like metal at all.
    But the oddities only began with Landry's luggage. Even setting aside his uncanny
    older-brother resemblance to me,
    Landry looked like no businessman I'd ever seen in my life, and certainly not one
    prosperous enough to own the
    Fulwider Building. It's not the Ritz, granted, but it is in downtown L.A., and my
    client (if that was what he was) looked
    like an Okie on a good day, one which had included a bath and a shave.
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    He was wearing blue jeans pants, for one thing, and a pair of sneakers on his feet . .
    . except they didn't look like any
    sneakers I'd ever seen before. They were great big clumpy things. What they really
    looked like were the shoes Boris
    Karloff wears as part of his Frankenstein get-up, and if they were made of canvas, I'd
    eat my favorite Fedora. The
    word written up the sides in red script looked like the name of a dish on a Chinese
    carry-out menu: REEBOK.
    I looked down at the blotter which had once been covered with a tangle of telephone
    numbers, and suddenly realized
    that I could no longer remember Mavis Weld's, although I must have called it a billion
    times only this past winter. That
    feeling of dread intensified.
    ``Mister,'' I said, `Ì wish you'd state your business and get out of here. Come to
    think of it, why don't you skip the
    talking and just go right to the getting-out part?''
    He smiled . . . tiredly, I thought. That was the other thing. The face above the plain
    open-collared white shirt looked
    terribly tired. Terribly sad, as well. It said the man who owned it had been through
    things I couldn't even dream of. I
    felt some sympathy for my visitor, but what I mostly felt was fear. And anger. Because
    it was my face, too, and the
    bastard had apparently gone a long way toward wearing it out.
    ``Sorry, Clyde,'' he said. ``No can do.''
    He put his hand on that tiny, cunning zipper, and all at once Landry opening that case
    was the last thing in the world I
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    wanted. To stop him I said, ``Do you always go visiting your tenants dressed like a
    guy who makes his living following
    the cabbage crop? What are you, one of those eccentric millionaires?''
    `Ì'm eccentric, all right,'' he said. `Ànd it